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Most of what had happened up until this time in small group playing had come down from Louis Armstrong through Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins to Dizzy and Bird, and bebop had basically come from that. What everybody was playing in 1958 had mostly come out of bebop. Birth of the Cool had gone somewhat in another direction, but it had mainly come out of what Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn had already done; it just made the music "whiter," so that white people could digest it better. And then the other records I made, like "Walkin' " and "Blue 'n' Boogie"—which the critics called hard bop—had only gone back to the blues and some of the things that Bird and Dizzy had done. It was great music, well played and everything, but the musical ideas and concepts had mostly been already done; it just had a little more space in it.

Of all the stuff I had done with a small group, what we did on Modern Jazz Giants came closest to what I wanted to do now, that kind of stretched-out sound we got there on "Bags' Groove," "The Man I Love," "Swing Spring." Now, in bebop, the music had a lot of notes in it. Diz and Bird played a lot of real fast notes and chord changes because that's the way they heard everything; that's the way their voices were: fast, up in the upper register. Their concept of music was more rather than less.

I personally wanted to cut the notes down, because I've always felt that most musicians play way too much for too long (although I put up with it with Trane because he played so good and I used to just love hearing him play). But I didn't

hear music like that. I heard it in the middle and tower registers, and so did Coltrane. We had to do something suited for what we did best, for our own voices.

I wanted the music this new group would play to be freer, more modal, more African or Eastern, and less Western. I wanted them to go beyond themselves. See, if you put a musician in a place where he has to do something different from what he does all the time, then he can do that—but he's got to think differently in order to do it. He has to use his imagination, be more creative, more innovative; he's got to take more risks. He's got to play above what he knows—far above it—and what that might lead to might take him above the place where he's been playing all along, to the new place where he finds himself right now—and to the next place he's going and even above that! So then he'll be freer, will expect things differently, will anticipate and know something different is coming down. I've always told the musicians in my band to play what they know and then play above that. Because then anything can happen, and that's where great art and music happens.

Another thing you have to remember is that this was December 1957, not December 1944, and things were different, sounds were different, people didn't hear things the same as they heard it back then. It's always been that way; every time has its own style, and what Bird and Diz did was the style for that time—and it was great. But now it was time for something different.

If any group was going to change the concept of music and take it someplace altogether different, a new place, forward and fresh, then I felt this group was it. I couldn't wait for us to start playing together so we could get used to what each musician would bring to the mix, get used to listening to each other's voices in that mix, know each other's strengths and weaknesses. It always takes a while for everybody to get used to one another—that's why I've always taken a new band out on the road for a while before I take them into the studio.

The idea I had for this working sextet was to keep what we already had going with Trane, Red, Joe, Paul, and myself and add the blues voice of Cannonball Adderley into this mixture and then to stretch everything out. I felt that Cannonball's blues-rooted alto sax up against Trane's harmonic, chordal way of playing, his more free-form approach, would create a new kind of feeling, a new kind of sound, because Coltrane's voice was already going in a new direction. And then I wanted to give that musical mixture more space, using the concepts I had picked up from what Ahmad Jamal did. I heard my trumpet voice kind of floating over and cutting through all of this mixture, and I felt that if we could do it right, the music would have all the tension up in it.

In this group, everybody had played together for over two years, except for Cannonball. But one voice can change the entire way a band hears itself, can change the whole rhythm, the whole timing of a band, even if everyone else had been playing together forever. It's a whole new thing when you add or take away a voice.

CANNONBALL

We went out on tour in late December 1957, around Christmas time, starting at the Sutherland Lounge in Chicago. I've always tried to be in Chicago around Christmas so I can get together with my family. My brother Vernon comes up from East St. Louis, and my children, who live in St. Louis, all get together at my sister Dorothy's house in Chicago, along with some guys I grew up with who live in Chicago.

We'd all get together and drink and eat for a week or so. You know, have a ball. When we first opened with the sextet at the Sutherland, my old high school friend Darnell, who used to play piano, drove his city bus all the way from Peoria, Illinois, and parked it outside our hotel for three days! Every time we would play Chicago he would come on up. My friend Boonie used to get me the best barbecue in town, because being from East St. Louis, which is a barbecue town, I've always been a freak for good barbecue and chit-lings, too. I really love great black cooking, collard greens and can-died yams and cornbread and black-eyed peas and southern fried chicken—all of it—and with some bad hot sauce off to the side.

Right from the beginning the tour was just a motherfucker. BANG! We hit and tore up the fucking place and that's when I knew it was going to be something else. That first night in Chicago, we started off playing the blues, and Cannonball was just standing there with his mouth open, listening to Trane playing this way-out shit on a blues. He asked me what we were playing and I told him, "the blues."

He says, "Well, I ain't never heard no blues played like that!" See, no matter how many times he played a tune, Trane would always find ways to play it different every night. I told Trane after the set to take Cannonball in the kitchen and

show him what he was doing. He did, but we had substituted so many things in the twelve-bar mode that if you weren't listening when it started off, where the soloist began, then when you did start to pay attention, you might not know what had happened. Cannonball had told me that what Trane was playing sounded like the blues, but that it really wasn't, it was something else altogether. That just fucked him up because Cannonball was a blues player.

But Cannonball caught on quick, just like snapping your fingers, that's how fast he picked things up. He was like a sponge; he just absorbed everything. With the blues thing, I should have told him that was just the way Trane played—

far out—because Cannonball was the only one in the group who hadn't played with him. But once Cannonball caught on to what was happening, he was right in there, playing his ass off. He and Trane were very different players, but both of them were great. When Cannonball first joined the band, everyone liked him right away because he was this big, jovial guy, always laughing and real nice, a gentleman, and smart as they come.

COLTRANE

After he'd been with us a while and then after Trane came back, the sound of the band just kept getting thicker and thicker, almost like when a woman uses too much makeup. Because of the chemistry and the way people were playing off each other, everybody started playing above what they knew almost from the beginning. Trane would play some weird, great shit, and Cannonball would take it in the other direction, and I would put my sound right down the middle or float over it, or whatever. And then I might play real fast, or buzzzzz, like Freddie Webster. This would take Trane someplace else, and he would come back with other different shit and so would Cannonball. And then Paul's anchoring all this creative tension between the horns, and Red's laying down his light, hip shit, and Philly Joe pushing everything with that hip shit he was playing and then sending us all off again with them hip-de-dip, slick rim shots that were so bad, them "Philly licks." Man, that was too hip and bad. Everybody was laying all kinds of slick shit on everyone. And I was telling them things like, "Don't leave that F until the last beat. You'll be able to play the mode five beats more than you would if you would leave it in like four beats. You leave it on the last bar, you know, and you accent the bar." And they would listen. It would be slicker than slick.

Trane was the loudest, fastest saxophonist I've ever heard. He could play real fast and real loud at the same time and that's very difficult to do. Because when most players play loud, they lock themselves. I've seen many saxophonists get messed up trying to play like that. But Trane could do it and he was phenomenal. It was like he was possessed when he put that horn in his mouth. He was so passionate—fierce—and yet so quiet and gentle when he wasn't playing. A sweet guy.

He scared me one time while we were in California when he wanted to go to the dentist to get a tooth put in. Trane could play two notes all at once and I thought his missing tooth was the cause of it. I thought it gave him his sound. So when he told me he was going to the dentist to get the tooth put in, I almost panicked. I told him that I had called a rehearsal for the same time that he was going. I asked him if he could postpone his dental appointment. "Naw," he said, "naw, man, I can't make the rehearsal; I'm going to the dentist." I asked him what kind of replacement he was going to get and he says,

"A permanent one." So I try to talk him into getting a removable one that he can take out every night before he plays. He looks at me like I'm crazy. He goes to the dentist and comes back looking like a piano, he was grinning so much. At the gig that night —I think it was at the Blackhawk—I play my first solo and go back by Philly Joe and wait for Trane to play, almost in tears because I know he's fucked himself up. But when he ripped off them runs like he always did, man, talk about a motherfucker being relieved!

Trane never wrote anything down when he was with my band. All he did was just start off playing. We used to talk a lot about music at rehearsals and on the way to gigs. I would show him a lot of shit, and he would always listen and do it. I'd say, "Trane, here are some chords, but don't play them like they are all the time, you know? Start in the middle

sometimes and don't forget that you can play them up in thirds. So that means you got eighteen, nineteen different things to play in two bars." He would sit there, his eyes wide open, soaking up everything. Trane was an innovator, and you have to say the right thing to people like that. That's why I'd tell him to begin in the middle, because that's the way his head worked anyway. He was looking to be challenged, and if you brought the shit to him wrong he wasn't going to listen. But Trane was the only player who could play those chords I gave him without them sounding like chords.

After the gig he would go back to his hotel room and practice while everybody else was hanging out. He would practice for hours after he had just got through playing three sets. And later in 1960, after I gave him a soprano saxophone that I got from a woman I knew in Paris, an antique dealer, it had an effect on his tenor playing. Before he got that soprano, he was still playing like Dexter Gordon, Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis, Sonny Stitt, and Bird. After he got that horn, his style

changed. After that, he didn't sound like nobody but himself. He found out that he could play lighter and faster on the soprano than he could on the tenor. And this really turned him on, because he couldn't do the things on tenor that he could on alto, because a soprano is a straight horn, and since he liked the lower register, he found he could also think and hear better with the soprano than he could with the tenor. When he played the soprano, after a while, it sounded almost like a human voice, wailing.

But as much as I liked Trane we didn't hang out much once we left the bandstand because we had different styles. Before, it was because he was deep into heroin, and I had just come out of that. Now, he was clean and didn't hardly ever hang out, but would go back to his hotel room to practice. He had always been serious about music and always practiced a lot.

But now it was almost like he was on some kind of mission. He used to tell me that he had messed up enough, had wasted too much time and not given enough attention to his own personal life, his family, and, most of all, to his playing.

So he was only really concerned about playing his music and growing as a musician. That's all he thought about. He couldn't be seduced by a woman's beauty because he had already been seduced by the beauty of music, and he was loyal to his wife. Whereas for me, after the music was through, I was out the door seeing what pretty lady I was going to be with that night. Cannonball and I would sit and talk and hang out sometimes when I wasn't with some woman. Philly and I were still friends, but he was always running down that dope, him and Paul and Red. But we were all close and

everybody got along real good together.

MILESTONES

Back in New York, Cannonball, who had signed a deal to do a record for Blue Note, asked me to play on the date, which I did as a favor. The record was called "Something Else" and was very nice. I wanted to get my group into the studio, and in April, we recorded "Billy Boy," "Straight, No Chaser," "Milestones," "Two Bass Hit," "Sid's Ahead," and "Dr. Jackle"

(listed as "Dr. Jekyll") for the album Milestones on Columbia. I played piano on "Sid's Ahead" because Red got mad at me when I was trying to tell him something and left. But I loved the way the band sounded on this record and I knew that we had something special. Trane and Cannon were really playing their asses off and by then were really used to each other.

This was the first record where I started to really write in the modal form and on "Milestones," the title track, I really used that form. Modal music is seven notes off each scale, each note. It's a scale off each note, you know, a minor note.

The composer-arranger George Russell used to say that in modal music C is where F should be. He says that the whole piano starts at F. What I had learned about the modal form is that when you play this way, go in this direction, you can go on forever. You don't have to worry about changes and shit like that. You can do more with the musical line. The

challenge here, when you work in the modal way, is to see how inventive you can become melodically. It's not like when you base stuff on chords, and you know at the end of thirty-two bars that the chords have run out and there's nothing to do but repeat what you've done with variations. I was moving away from that and into more melodic ways of doing things. And in the modal way I saw all kinds of possibilities.

MOE

After Red Garland walked out on me, I found a new piano player named Bill Evans. I wasn't mad at Red, but I had moved past the point where he could contribute what I wanted in the sound of the band. I needed a piano player who was into the modal thing, and Bill Evans was. I met Bill Evans through George Russell, whom Bill had studied with. I knew George from the days back at Gil's house on 55th Street. As I was getting deeper into the modal thing, I asked George if he knew a piano player who could play the kinds of things I wanted, and he recommended Bill.

I had gotten into the modal thing from watching a performance by the Ballet Africaine from Guinea. I was seeing Frances Taylor again; she was living in New York now and dancing in a show. I had run into her on 52nd Street and was real happy to see her. She went to all the dance performances, and I would go with her. Anyway, we went to this

performance by the Ballet Africaine and it just fucked tne up what they was doing, the steps and all them flying leaps and shit. And when I first heard them play the finger piano that night and sing this song with this other guy dancing, man, that was some powerful stuff. It was beautiful. And their rhythm! The rhythm of the dancers was something. I was counting

performance by the Ballet Africaine and it just fucked tne up what they was doing, the steps and all them flying leaps and shit. And when I first heard them play the finger piano that night and sing this song with this other guy dancing, man, that was some powerful stuff. It was beautiful. And their rhythm! The rhythm of the dancers was something. I was counting