Vol. 1 no. 2

AW: How did you get to meet Oscar?

WD: To begin with, both our fathers worked on the railroad. Our fathers knew each other; his father was always telling my father about him. My father would talk about me, but I was in the classical world, and he was in the jazz world. In 1948 or 1949 I went to Europe, and he had just had his big hit "Tenderly." I ran into Lester Young one day, and although I didn't really know him, I tried to hang out with him. We ended up at a Jazz At The Philharmonic concert, and there was Oscar. I looked at him, and he looked at me and said, "Do we know each other?" and I said, "Not unless we know each other's Dad." And so we met then. He told me when I got to Montreal, I should look him up. I stayed in Europe for a while, and I'd keep seeing him and Ray Brown every time there was a European JATP tour. After the concerts, Oscar and Ray and his big bass would get in a cab, looking for sessions. They'd try to play every night all night long, and I was right there with them. I used to hear this great stuff, and I'd go home and try and analyze and learn what I could.

When I got to Montreal, I looked him up. I was living off Decarie and he lived about three blocks away. Whenever he got to town, he'd call me over for a lesson, and I'd get free lessons. Then he moved to Toronto, and I moved to Toronto, and I'd go up to Scarborough for lessons. Later on he opened up a jazz school, and so I went there. Ray Brown and Ed Thigpen and Butch Watanabe and Phil Nimmons were there, too. After the school closed, I still kept in touch.

For a while Dave Young used to go to Oscar's place, learn some charts, and then later I'd go to Dave's and learn them from him and rehearse the music for Dave. Consequently, I know a lot of his arrangements, and knowing them forces me to look for other things as well as playing that music. There's a lot you can do on your own if you don't put walls around yourself.

The piano's a percussion instrument, but there's no reason why you can't try to phrase on the piano. It's true you can't bend the notes, but because you can't bend the note with your fingers doesn't mean that you can't bend the note in your head. Your approach will be different if you think differently, the application of technique will be different if you hear it first. You can come pretty close.

I remember the first time I played with Clark Terry; I just about physically died. We had this job at the Sutton Place Hotel with Peter Appleyard's quartet. Every Friday and Saturday for three years we had a guest; this particular weekend we had Clark Terry. He said, "I'm going to play a song, but I'm going to play the first eight bars by myself." As any good musician would, as he played, I was breathing with him, except that he didn't take a breath! I started to cough. When the set was over, I went up to him and said, "What did you do? I've never heard anyone play a line that long." He told me it was circular breathing, and told me a little bit about it.

One day many years later, I got a call from him; he wanted me to go on the road with him. I went and stayed at his house. It was then that he showed me more about how to take the back pressure out of your mouth. Because of that, it's helped me to play longer lines myself. If I'm trying to emulate a trumpet or sax solo, I have to think about breathing. I can tell whether a piano player breathes or not. A piano player has to breathe. If I tape something, I can tell whether I'm breathing right or not once I listen back to it.

AW: Do you find it helpful to tape yourself?

WD: Sometimes. It really takes a great deal of effort to be one hundred percent aware of listening while you're playing. You can't be complete in both areas. You can get close but it's a task.

AW: Is there anything you'd like to do musically that you haven't done?

WD: Oh yeah, sure. I don't know whether I'll have a chance to do it or not. I keep wishing I could win the lottery. I'd like to play with two drummers and two bass players as a quintet. One drummer would lay down the time and one bassist would provide the foundation, and the others would decorate. They would alternate functions, and it would have to be fairly seamless, because I think a song has to go from one place to another place. I'd like to try other combinations, french horn, bassoon or oboe.

AW: What about two pianos? Have you ever done a two-piano concert?

WD: No I haven't. I did do a recording in Halifax where I overdubbed piano, bass, drums and vibes, and I played all the instruments. The technology wasn't really advanced enough then, and they had a hard time playing back what I had played. I had heard a recording of Victor Feldman playing all the instruments. He plays everything! The whole LP is just him alone- it is fantastic.

In Halifax, they thought I was from Mars. I was constantly beating up bass players; nobody wanted to play with me. They weren't afraid of the music, they were afraid of me physically. I got so pissed off, I used to write all the notes out for the bass lines, five choruses, and I'd say, "These are the notes you'll play," without realizing after a while that that put me in a corner too. I had to make sure my solos went where they were. It was hard to retain what I had done, after I had played the solo. I couldn't be too tricky, I had to leave space for the other tracks. Then I would fill in. I just wanted to see if I could do it. I really didn't know what I was in for. I'd be able to handle it better now.

AW: What are your feelings about drugs and alchohol?

WD: I don't care if you're throwing up and you're dead sick, up until it's time to play. At five minutes to nine, be dressed, be proper, be clean, and play. Two seconds after one o'clock, I don't care if you drop dead. Keep it out of my house, just do the gig. I've seen too many guys die. A couple of guys in Toronto were messing around, one of them thought he could fly, walked right off the roof of a building.

Unfortunately I have burned myself with a match, but even as a kid I knew you could get burned, I didn't have to do it to find out. I wasn't about to do that stuff when I saw what other people were going through. When I'm working I know how much I can drink, because it affects my fingers. If I want to play at that high level, I have to take care of my fingers. I'm too much of a thinker; I have to be in my own head.

I got really really drunk as a young man in Paris. I was working with that dance troupe, and they were shooting a picture. When they finished shooting this scene, there was all this booze around. I was three thousand miles away, dancers all over me. I went out with this Swiss couple to an all night restaurant, and I decided to have bacon and eggs sunny side up. The waiter comes and puts the eggs down; it looked like a face on a plate. I ran outside and emptied the contents of my stomach onto the street.

AW: What do you listen to?

WD: It depends. I don't always listen to jazz. Sometimes classical, because it's soothing; it isn't that I always know where it's going to go. I like some of it because when there are transitions, they're much more subtle than just about anything I've heard in the jazz world to date. Especially Rachmaninov, and some Cesar Frank and Saint-Saens. I'm thinking of something in particular...if you take a triad in first inversion and double the second note, leaving the fifth and the root the same, you move the third between major and minor, and the root to the major seventh. It's a different kind of harmonic movement.

That's why I like Oscar's approach; there is more organization, more harmonic experimentation.