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A Conversation with Doug Hammond: Coming Back to Detroit |
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Friday, 10 February 2006 10:29 |
Coming Back to Detroit
A Conversation with Doug Hammond
By John Sinclair
Percussionist/composer Doug Hammond recently returned to Detroit from a long European sojourn in order to renew his musical roots and form an ensemble of adventurous Motor City creative musicians to perform his ever-growing book of original compositions.
Doug and I sat down with a tape recorder one day last March and renewed our acquaintance, which had begun almost 25 years ago at the Detroit Artists Workshop. A second session was held just before Doug returned to Germany in early September for a season of teaching and performing in Europe.
He'll be back in Detroit again in the spring to continue working and recording with his new quartet, Mo' Folks, comprising violinist Regina Carter, guitarist Patrick LaNier and bassist Jeribu Shahid. The tape of our conversations was painstakingly transcribed by Perri Giovannucci and begins when I asked Doug about his origins and how he happened to settle in Detroit in 1965:
Doug Hammond: I'm originally from Tampa, Florida. While I was in high school, I used to go from Tampa to Miami on the weekends to jam--eight hours on the bus! I'd leave after school let out and get to Miami about 10:00 o'clock at night--everything started around 10:00 and went until 4:00 am.
I was a young, shy guy. I think I had been with a woman once in my life or something like that, I was so shy. But I could play drums. And guys in Florida always said, if you're gonna go to New York, first go to Detroit because that's the training ground.
In the South I worked with Little Johnnie Taylor, Earl Hooker, Sonny Boy Williamson. I loved the blues, and jazz also. I was the regular drummer with Earl Hooker. I played with Barney "Google" Lewis, who was B.B. King's baritone saxophone player for about 20 years. He had a big band in Tampa with hip arrangements by Henry Boozier. I always had gigs, even when I was in high school.
I looked at playing as craftsmanship--first I had to get my craft together to work, and I figured as I got better at my craft then I could decide what I really wanted to do with it.
My father and mother turned me on to jazz, and they would do, like, a salsa dance--they were the best dancers in Tampa. I would hear Charlie Parker when I was a child, on the strip. All up and down the strip there was music. One day I was listening to Billy Eckstine or somebody, and I asked my father, "What's that?" And he said, "Now, if you don't like it, just listen to it. Listen before you open your mouth." But I was stunned, thinking it was fantastic.
My band director in school was a composer and trumpet player--he was known nationally as a composer of marches. He said, "Look, if you're gonna play music, the first thing is, don't get married too soon. The next thing is, don't make choices about what you want to play. Play music. Play music for a living until you develop your craft so good that people will come to you. And then you'll be with those musicians who're as good as you are. Then, try to get with the ones who are better than you, and keep going." I've never forgotten that.
So when I went to Miami I had already prepared by playing with all these people--Barney Google and them. After that I went back to Tampa and worked around with the guys there. A year later, I was traveling in the South to Savannah, Georgia, and the group was doing some kind of funky gig. I had this uncle in Detroit. I'd never met the guy, he was a funeral director, a very conservative guy, but I called him and said, Look, Uncle, I want to come to Detroit, and I want you to send me some money so I can get there. I want to live in Detroit.
And he said, "Okay, son," just like that. When I got here I got a job as an upholsterer, but then I went around to different clubs and started working. I would work with the different Motown artists on their gigs, as their drummer. Also I would sit in with different people around town, and my name got around.
The first job I had in Detroit was at Odom's Cave with Malvin McCray, and then I started working with Harold McKinney and James Hankins, the bass player. I worked with people like Donald Byrd and Betty Carter and Spanky Wilson. I had a regular gig at the Playboy Club for two months a year--the one that's not there any more. I played the London Chop House with Bob Pierson. I was on the gig when they opened the Pontchartrain for the jazz series there, with Kirk Lightsey and Gino Biondo.
Then I went on the road with Smokey Robinson. Kirk Lightsey was working with O.C. Smith, and we were on the road together. He was in Baltimore and I was in Washington, DC, and he called me and said, "Look, my drummer split and I want you to do a gig." He took me out of Detroit completely, and I went to California for about six months, worked six months with Smokey and six months with O.C. Smith.
When I first came to Detroit, one of the most interesting things that happened tome was affiliating with the Detroit Artists Workshop, in terms of, as a musician, sitting there being quiet and listening to these great drummers like Danny Spencer and Ronnie Johnson. The 1 first week I got here, somebody took me to the Artists' Workshop, so l would always go to the Workshop after that.
I began to hang out there a bit, and after a while I worked with Charles Moore and Kirk Lightsey. We did some things with a double quartet--the other piano player was Stanley Cowell, Ronnie Johnson and myself on drums, Ron Brooks and another bass player, I think it was John Dana, and Joseph Jarman on reeds. That was one of the most vibrant periods in that whole scene.
I sought out the Artists Workshop because even when l was in Florida doing all those blues things, some of my favorites were--I loved Coltrane, I loved Miles, but my favorites were Sonny Rollins, Eric Dolphy, Monk and Mingus. So I sought out that element. I would be playing rhythm & blues, and blues gigs, and bebop at Odom's Cave--I didn't align myself with any one set but would be playing everything.
l worked with Little Sonny and James Jamerson at that time, and I also worked with a great bass player, Ernie Farrow. He was one of my teachers in terms of timing--perfect timing. He would tell me, "Never get too excited." I always listened to him as a bass player, and to Will Austin, and also [pianist] BooBoo Turner. These were the cats who trained me.
I came here to study, and when I came here I wanted to extend my studies privately. I studied with Clarence Sherrill. We made some kind of agreement--he was teaching at the Metro-Arts Complex on Selden and I was in the program there, so I agreed to be in his workshop playing stock arrangements if he would teach me some basic harmony. I had done some studying in harmony already, but I wanted to extend it.
I studied with [saxophonist] Leon Henderson. I studied with [pianist] Stanley Cowell--Stanley would come in from the U of M in Ann Arbor and deal with all these African rhythms. I said, "Look, Stanley, can I get in on some of that?" And he said, "Why not? Come on." Boom.
So I studied with him. I studied with David Durrah. And some things I studied with Charles Moore--not so much music, but like, something that would make me go past my thoughts. He introduced me to some things I didn't know about. And I actually studied with these people.
One of the high points of my career in Detroit was in a cooperative group called Focus Novi. Some of the music I did with Focus Novi, I've never gotten to that complete of a level anywhere else. Focus Novi was Patrick LaNier [trombone & guitar], William Wiggins [reeds], John Dana [bass], James "Blood" Ulmer [electric guitar], and myself on drums.
I heard Patrick LaNier one day at Kirk Lightsey's house when Pat was 18 and going into the Army, and I waited for him to come out. Blood and I was doing something together, and John Dana committed himself to that. This was after CJQ [the Contemporary Jazz Quintet, a pioneering modern cooperative group based in Detroit that made two albums for Blue Note Records and then developed the Strata Records/Gallery collaborative], and we decided that we needed another good group in town because there was too much weight on the CJQ.
It was a great experience. We rehearsed for six months, five days a week, before we did our first gig. Patrick LaNier came up with the name, Focus Novi. 8ecause it was not just a group, it was kind of a form of theatre. I had always been a poet--when I was 15 I was doing poetry for the newspapers in Tampa. I was a little shy about performing and speaking in public, but Patrick brought me out of all that. He said, "Man, don't deny any of your talents." So we started doing, like, staged presentations with art, and producing our own concerts.
We founded a base of operations called DCMA--Detroit Creative Musicians Association. When we started we had Rosetta Hines [WCHD--now WJZZ jazz radio personality], [tenor saxophonist] Hank Hence and [drummer] James Brown. This organization was like a collective of musicians and supporters of the music.
We started the DCMA in 1967 on 12th Street, just after the riots, in a little storefront joint that was the only place on 12th Street that white folks would come to. When we were doing our programs there it'd be about half Black and half white. We moved from there and made an agreement with Bruce Millan at the Detroit Repertory Theatre on Woodrow Wilson, and we started doing our concert series there every two weeks for quite a while.
In 1968 we got a place at 285 East Ferry in the Cultural Center, where we would hire two groups a night, two nights a week for about a year. We had enough people coming there to support both groups, and never sold any alcohol--we had a little wine, but we gave it away mostly.
Focus Novi always seemed to make money. Focus Novi played all kinds of styles to accomodate gigs, but we always played originals. We played at Cranbrook, the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, we produced concerts at Community Arts Auditorium at Wayne State and produced and made our own posters--Bruce Millan had shown us how to make our posters. We worked very closely with Bruce Millan--he was very nice. We started doing these festivals--all the bigger things we could do, we would, and sometimes with the CJQ.
Thinking about it now, it was 1965 when I came here, so I was here about five years. Seemed like 10! At that time, when the groups from New York would come through Detroit, they would attend some of our concerts at the DCMA and at 285 East Ferry, especially when the CJQ or Focus Novi would be playing.
But whatever the program was, they were amazed at what was going on, because New York at that time was going through kind of a down period. They said this was the most interesting thing that was happening on the whole scene. And amazingly, it never really got any press.
So I used Detroit as a study, in a sense, to prepare to go to New York City. I had prepared so much that when I got to New York it got to be a problem, because I could do so much--I had already developed a style. So, having developed a style, l couldn't come through the ranks.
When I first went to New York in 1968, I was there a week and started playing with Sonny Rollins, because he wanted to play free and I was one of the guys who could play free. He eventually fired me because all the drummers were there saying, "What you doin' with this young guy?"
So I left New York and came back to Detroit. That was still in 1968. Then I joined O.C. Smith, went to California, quit O.C., got married and stayed in California about six months. I went back to New York in 1970 and worked a steady gig at Minton's Playhouse in Harlem with Blood Ulmer and John Dana--six days a week for five months. We would hire George Adams, Tyrone Washington, Kiane Zawadi, a few other guys. And then that ended one night after about five months. 0ne night I went in to work and they said, lt's over."
So I left New York again and went back to California, where David Durrah got me a grant at this college in Oakland where all the so-called revolutionaries were at. While I was there I produced my first record, Reflections in the Sea of Nurnen, with David Durrah and a bunch of guys from the Bay Area.
I stayed in Oakland for about five months, and then I got an NEA grant for percussion ensemble composition. That took me back to New York, and after I was there for about three months, Charles Mingus hired me for his band. He never saw me play--the trumpet player, Ronald Hampton, recommended me. He was staying at my house, and I was rehearsing a 10-piece ensemble that was playing my music, and I asked him if he would play the trumpet part one day. He did, and he said, "Man, I like that! You should have a gig! I'm gonna talk to Mingus right away. And the next week I was on the gig.
I came in and never even did a rehearsal with the band--I played the book, and Mingus said he'd never had anyone play the book like that. But I already knew all his music, just from listening to it. It was the same way with Sonny Rollins. So I worked with Mingus for five months in 1973, and for the next two years, whenever Danny Richmond didn't want to come up from where he was staying down South to make the gigs with Mingus, I would work them in New York or Boston. I was the auxiliary drum.
After that I worked with Arthur Blythe and Sonny Fortune and Lonnie Liston Smith--there were so many people I was working with that it's all a little blurry now. We had a percussion ensemble, Ed Blackwell and Roger Blank [former Sun Ra drummer] and [bassist] Ronnie Boykins. We formed a little organization and did some concerts at the Village Gate, where we had a jazz group and also an ensemble that played music I had been composing that wasn't improvised at all. John Blake, Akua Dixon, Maxine Roach, Eddie Henderson, John Stubblefield, Ray Anderson, Ronnie Boykins, and Stanley Cowell were on that. Plus there was another group with Sonny Fortune, Marvin Blackmon, l don't remember all the people in that group, but there were three [groups] in all, and the concerts sold out completely.
When I was working with Mingus I had a l0-piece thing happening at Sam Rivers' studio, and Mingus heard a tape of that one day while we were on the road and said, "Man! What was that music I heard? That was some bad stuff!" And I said, "Well, that's my ensemble." All the older cats--Rahsaan, Tommy Flanagan, Mingus, Max Roach--they always encouraged me.
I did a concert at Amherst College once, where Max was teaching, with a group which I had written a lot of music for. And Max said, "Wow! This is great! This was when Max was teaching and not playing really, and Max said, "You know what, seeing a young composer like this, a drummer doing his thing, doing so much writing, is so inspiring.... Seeing a young guy doing this stuff--I think I'm gonna start playing again." And that's when he started.
Shortly after that I started making records again and putting them out on the Idibib label. I did a duet record with Karen Joseph, and the second record we did was the one that introduced Angela Bofill, with Cecil McBee on bass, Alex Foster, Karen Joseph, Hubert Eaves.
Then I had a group to record with [alto saxophonist] Steve Coleman, Muneer Abdul Fataah on cello, and quite a few other people. When I was in New York I would always work gigs and then use my money to produce records and put them out. That was always very important to me, plus it was a way to help keep the flow of money happening in order to pay my musicians. Sometimes what I would make on the records I would supplement the gig money with so the group could keep working and building an audience for our music.
Around this time I went to Europe with Howard Johnson and a group he called Substructure--tuba, guitar, bass and drums. When we got there he had an assignment at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland to be the musical director for Etta James's band, and then he got me the job to play with the band backing up the package that toured around Europe--Etta James, Lowell Fulson and Marian Williams. I got exposed to a lot of different situations and met a lot of people who became good friends and also made quite a few good business contacts in Europe.
After that I worked around Europe with [clarinetist] Tony Scott and a trio, and I did some things with a Dutch flute player who had this big assignment with a group doing a television broadcast with a symphony orchestra. [Saxophonist] Charlie Mariano was part of that project too. I lived in Germany for quite some time, and I taught for a while in the Jazz Center in Denmark, where I had the opportunity to be teaching with Thad Jones.
I taught in some of the music schools in Germany, and then I got an assignment at the Center for New Music in Cologne, where we had a percussion ensemble that was pretty popular.
During all this time I was writing a lot of music and trying to get it played. I started getting some assignments as a composer, to write music for different ensembles, theatre projects, string groups, and also was playing solo concerts of my own music and doing workshops.
I've got now over 1000 compositions I've been writing, and I started publishing them in little books that I can sell to raise money and get my music out where it can be performed. But I found that when I was in Europe, I could be there and work there, but I couldn't produce any records like I can here--the price is too high, and there's the legal ramifications. I did these books because I can print 2000 of them and bring them back and forth over the different borders legally.
The beauty of being in Europe is that I had the peace of mind to do stuff I had wanted to do, but working in Europe, I couldn't find the musicians who could continuously deal with the culture of this country and make the music continuously progress. There was always a level of halt. They understand the music of today, but to implement it takes some years and also requires exposure to the cultural conditions that produce the music. Because musicians don't write about something in their heads--they write about what's around them.
I was always frustrated there in terms of getting musicians who could deal with the music. I worked with Steve Coleman when I could get him to come to Europe, but then last year I heard Geri Allen's group on their European tour and I said, Wow! What a group!" Just seeing this young, talented group from Detroit made me decide to move back to the States, and to come back to Detroit.
I thought, "Why should I go back to New York? With what I've gone through just trying to survive in New York? I could bring talent from Detroit--rather than them going to New York and take the beatings, they could get some international recognition this way, and I would have people to play my music who would inspire me and really make it happen."
So now that I've done all that, I feel like l've got one of the best groups I could possibly have. Basically the plan for the group is to take our record--which we did this summer at Wendell Harrison's studio, a record titled We People--take it over there with me when I go back to teach this fall so they can hear what this group is about.
Then, to tour Europe, to play in the States, and even to enlarge the group and bring in some young talent from New York, even some of the older guys I've worked with who are open to doing some new things, and do some special projects like that.
I'd like to compose things for different members and also do multi-media projects with poetry, dance, so-called classical musicians. In Detroit we have this stronghold of talent that is almost sitting dormant, and we're in a perfect position for an exchange between our local talent and young musicians in New York, Canada and Europe. Because everybody needs it.
I've got enough different things happening in Germany and Switzerland now to where I can go over there six months of the year and teach, do workshops, get my music performed, publish my compositions and continue to develop an audience for my music. Then I'll be able to bring the group from Detroit over there and put the music out properly, the way it's supposed to be heard, and get them some exposure in Europe too. They need to hear this music over there!
--Detroit
March 1989
(c) 1989, 2006 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.
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