The Interview
Matt Glaser
By John Koch, Boston Globe
The new CD sounds like an interesting experiment.
I was sick a couple of years ago and got a little taste of my own mortality. I'm fine, but it was scary. I thought I better get off my behind and try to make whatever music is in me come out. I felt I had something to say musically that I hadn't said. There have been a lot of attempts in the last few years to fuse bluegrass, but they missed the central point: the high lonesome sound of bluegrass and the urgent spiritual quality of the songs about death, God, and relationships. Something essential about jazz is the low lonesome sound, the sound of Billie Holiday, of late-night jazz ballads, of Lester Young, Miles Davis, Art Farmer, people who can create a tremendous sense of intimacy. Something that was not yet accomplished was fusing the high lonesome sound with the late-night sound of jazz ballads.
How did you get the Ken Burns gig?
My association with him is probably the most fruitful association I've had with anyone since being a musician. I met him when he was making The Brooklyn Bridge, and I and a number of other musicians were hired to play on the soundtrack. I got to be friends with Ken and have played on the soundtracks of almost all of his films. The last one was Lewis and Clark, which resulted in a visit to the White House. Clinton asked Ken to show it there, and they asked the musicians to come along.
Did you play the fiddle for the president?
We played for Clinton personally, and he talked to us for a long time. This guy likes to hang around with musicians. His knowledge about jazz was mind-boggling. I asked him who his favorite tenor saxophone players were, and he said, "I love Sonny Rollins, and, of course, Coltrane is a genius, but Stan Getz is my favorite, because he's so melodic." I said, "How is this possible, that you're president of the United States and you know this much about jazz?" He said, "I haven't learned anything about jazz in 30 years, but I used to be a fanatic." He had thought he'd become a professional musician.
But back to you and Jazz.
At around this time, Burns was beginning to work on the jazz documentary. I would talk to him about stuff, and he would say, "I like the way you told that story," and he finally said, "Let's do it." I talked about a wide range of topics of interest to me, but Ken ended up using the things about Louis Armstrong because this documentary follows two people throughout their entire lives - Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington.
You consider Armstrong a musical revolutionary.
Absolutely. There's the revolutionary who shoots people and is arrested or the revolutionary who engages you in great debate, smiling and laughing while slipping a hallucinogenic drug into your beverage, and Louis was that kind of guy. Because he communicated joy and happiness, he's been disregarded as a source of artistic depth. There are rhythmic and existential lessons in early Louis Armstrong that have still not been absorbed by contemporary musicians.
What are your goals as a violinist?
I would love to be able to play on a violin as well as any of a thousand saxophone players I can think of. It's extremely difficult to play jazz on a violin. Violin players playing jazz always have an inferiority complex, for good reason - they are inferior to horn players in playing jazz. But we've seen an amazing sea change in the world of the violin. Twenty years ago, it was possible to know all the people who were interested in playing improvisational music on string instruments. But now, the violin is perceived as a malleable instrument that can play compelling music in any contemporary idiom, and the string department at Berklee has grown exponentially.
What few recordings would you take to the proverbial desert island?
Something swinging - like Count Basie with Lester Young, playing Jive at Five. And also some Bach; maybe the cello suites or Glenn Gould playing The Well-Tempered Clavier.
How about sheet music?
Definitely the Bach unaccompanied violin sonatas. I'm not a classical violinist, but that music belongs to everybody, and there is a transcendent quality to Bach's music that is meant to save everybody's soul. And as a jazz musician, those sonatas are great to improvise on.
How do you teach musical values while being hardheaded about the marketplace?
The most important way to straddle those two things is to help students stay in love with music and find their voice. They're not going to stay in music if they don't love it. The best thing any teacher ever said to me was "Make sure you play something every day on the violin that you love." If you continue that relationship of passionate love with music, it will sustain you through everything, I believe. If you don't have that relationship of love to music, why are you doing it? As long as students have that love, they can work hard on technique and manipulating their sound to fit whatever context they have to be in but can always come home at the end of the day and play a tune in the privacy of their home that they love. They can do that the day they die. That lifelong spiritual relationship with music is really the most valuable thing.
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