As much as I love Thad Jones, he did everything right except leaving the band in a healthy way.
There are times when you are a trombone player and there are other times when you are the trombonist.
The kind of dirt and dust that’s created from polishing things is not conducive to a good marriage.
If it weren’t for trumpet players, I’d be flipping burgers someplace.
Just being in New York and playing music is successful.
That was the night Woody started calling me Too Tall John. Someone said if he makes up a nickname for you . . . it means you’re on the band!
The personnel manager turned his computer screen around and it said Riccardo Muti is named new music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. I sat down and cried like a baby.
Having real musicians and real orchestras is part of bringing the human experience to the theater. You want to go to a baseball game and see a pitching machine that can be turned up fast enough to strike everybody out? What kind of human experience is that?? It’s NOTHING!
We started playing brass instruments very young. I think it was mostly from our curiosity of the shiny metal objects in the forbidden room.
It would not surprise me if in the next hundred years a future John Coltrane is a trombone player.
