Vol. 1 no. 1

The Guitar

After awhile I got a little busier, and I started listening to other people. I put Ed on hold, and I discovered Bill Evans. Another great sea opened up. I went out to hear him, borrowed every recording I could, I wanted to be Bill Evans. But I wanted to be Bill Evans on the guitar. I'd go out and hear Lenny(Breau) and I'd hear a lot of Bill in his playing, but I never found Lenny to be a really strong jazz player, a great improviser. He had all the harmonics happening, musical devices, an ability to play two things at once. But when he played lines it was pretty stock stuff. I think there were certain things that he lacked in his playing. As innovative as he was, he wasn't purely a jazz player.

AW: It's almost as if he didn't want to play jazz, he wanted to play guitar.

LL: Right, he played guitar music. He played guitaristically. And then I realized, ah, I get it. It's kind of an interesting idea if you listen to people who play other instruments, because you can borrow things and adapt them to your instrument. Let it filter through. I play a little bit of drums and that influences my rhythmic thing. I never really got into Lenny's sound; it was too bright for me. My sound is much brighter than it used to be. Bob McLaren and I used to get into arguments about how dark my sound was. I listened to Ed, and he had a dark sound back then too. And Jim Hall; he would play clusters with a super dark sound.

I lifted a couple of Bill Evans' solos, that one called The Opener, and others. I heard that, and I thought, that's some of the most ingenious playing I've heard. I'd been thinking about some of this, playing the passing tones on the beat instead of off, different rhythmic things. I had all these things I was thinking about, I thought, here's what you need to be a decent improviser, but I couldn't figure out how to put it all together. Then I learned that solo. Bill was a master of motivic development; everything he played made perfect sense.

I met up with this guy Terry King; he played me some Lennie Tristano. Unbelievable! I listened to that like breathing, and I started to play with Kirk MacDonald. Kirk is totally into Lennie and Lee Konitz; I tried to play with him as much as I could to let some of that stuff rub off on me. I didn't have a formulaic way where I could rationalize things, sort of get a working knowledge of how to use that stuff on other tunes.

This was mid-80's and I got a Canada Council grant to study in New York with Lee Konitz. We worked on trying to play more melodically, how to try and make what you play sing. To really try to play what you hear, which is hard to do, because a lot of the time, you are going for broke, you're seeing shapes on whatever instrument you are playing.

I was starting to get more gigs, trying to play like Bill would on the guitar, taking from Lenny Breau, from Tristano. Shelly Berger and I would play Giant Steps right through the keys, and it got to the point where it was like weightlifting; we'd play it at warp nine.

AW: Did you work mostly with or without piano players at this time?

LL: I tried to mostly work without pianists, because I wanted to force myself to fill it in. Then I got to the point in '87 where I was asked to play solo guitar.I said, oh I'll do it, but it was intimidating. Instead of doing it like Joe Pass, I wanted to try to play like Bill would. I felt so compelled to play wall-to-wall notes. I thought it would fall apart otherwise. I didn't realize that time and space go hand in hand. One way I learned that was to listen to a lot of Bill's solo work. I've listened so much to that kind of playing that I've absorbed it. To play that way on the guitar with moving lines the way Bill plays is very difficult. I can now pretty much improvise that way but on the guitar if you are holding a note, you've got three fingers left. You have to be fairly adept, and that's why around the late 80's, I decided to go right back to square one because I never did it when I was eleven, and went back to the Conservatory to study with this fantastic teacher Robert 'Bob' Hamilton. I use the same book I used when I was eleven, working on the musculature, working on mundane stuff, sitting out in the back yard catching some rays. Roddy Elias told me about this book which is Bach Lute music transcribed for the guitar. I thought, there's no way I could ever play this, but my friend had a record of John Williams playing three quarters of this stuff. I taped it and I listened to it, and I did the same thing I did with Clapton and Ed and Bill Evans.

AW: Do you find it's changed the way you view playing?

LL: It helps a lot with two moving voices. I started realizing that I have to have a combination of pad and nail, and my sound on the electric has changed.

AW: Have you always played the solid body?

LL: Yeah; I'm not comfortable playing the standard jazz guitars. I appreciate it when other people play them, but I'd just as soon play a solid body. People get really surprised when they hear my sound.

AW: What about the other guitar players?

LL: I've listened to them all and I have to say that I'm not into listening to guitar. I used to hear those guys all the time. Barney and Herb and Joe Pass, they were all great, but after I'd heard them four or five times, it began to sound more and more similar. After awhile, it just didn't move me.

AW: What about what's happening now?

LL: I like Scofield, both rhythmically and harmonically, but I don't like his sound very much, and I must confess, I don't go out and buy those records either. I heard Metheny; he can really play, but it didn't move me.

AW: What about Wes?

LL: I've checked out Wes; I've got one record. But those guys are always playing guitar music, that's why I don't listen to it.

AW: So your focus is on playing better jazz?

LL: I don't think anyone should be involved in playing music that is associated with their instrument. They should play music, grabbing from here and there. The only reason I learned about bass was because there was no one to play with and I learned how bass fits into the musical picture. I'm at the point now where I look at the guitar as if it is just another instrument. I love the challenge of taking piano things and transferring to the guitar. This is something that Ed is an absolute master at. The trick is to find the essential quality of the chord. On the piano you need more notes to have the same aural impact as on the guitar. If I play a triad on the piano, it sounds dumb. On the guitar it's full. Piano is a doubling instrument. The other thing is in terms of range. The guitar is much more limited that way. Open string voicings sound much larger than they are because of this.

AW: You just want to keep playing and doing what you are doing?

LL: Yeah; I'm into having fun. You don't want it to be so serious that you can't push for something. If we're so serious that we are doing up our collars, we might as well still be working on those Louis Armstrong records. I don't understand why people at this stage of the game aren't bringing more of their own musical personality into the music. I feel sorry for those guys who are always mimicking. It's like going around having the same replies to the same questions. It's the musical equivalent of small talk.

I think it's very important for anyone having some kind of artistic endeavour, whether it's dance, pottery, photography, painting, music, to always move forward. I don't mean necessarily to be different all the time, because there are some people into free music who buy an instrument and think they are doing something different; granted, it's different but it doesn't sound that good. You are at point A and then you strive to get to point B based on the foundation that you already have for point A. It's sort of like being in this underground parking lot that goes down about fifteen floors; you're in the basement, and you want to make it to the main floor. Finally you realize that the top floor you get to is sitting on this foundation of stuff that is already there. In music there are scales, II V's, neighbor notes, diatonic triads; all these things are just tools.

AW: And you have to find a new way to put those together...

LL: Right. Sometimes I ask my students to look at something, say a doghouse, and they see a rectangle with a circle where the dogs go in. If I give them a hammer, a saw, some nails, and some wood, and I point to the doghouse, and I say, "build that," okay. But what if I show them the hammer, saw, nails, and wood, and tell them, "here is what each tool does. Here's a nail; you take the hammer and you put the nail into wood..." If I say, "okay, build me something." Two different mindsets. One person might build something completely different. Music has to be thought-provoking. It's not enough for music to swing and have a nice feel. For me that's not enough. There has to be something else there, not just intellectually, not just, "well, that was really nice when he took that Dorian voicing with the third on top.." I'm talking about an overall thought-provoking experience. I can't remember the last time I went out and heard a band and couldn't wait to get home, so I could practice. I remember that feeling; it used to happen all the time. As I got more knowledgeable, my ears got better, and my tastes changed. Now I think I'd like to hear more of this, more of that. That is such a special feeling when it happens. That's one of the reasons why I don't get out as much as I used to, cause I don't get that feeling very much. I don't listen to a whole lot of music at home either. Now I'm trying to further what I do, not trying to keep going over the same thing.

AW: How about the Toronto scene? There is from what I hear a sense of some of the best musicians being down on each other. It's a little different than in Montreal, maybe because of the competition?

LL: I think it is more competitive. In any walk of life there are always different schools of thought, different camps. There are people here into bebop, into out music etc, and they are into those things exclusively. I don't think that's a good approach. Maybe it's because there are so many good players and so little work, and that makes those players whether they care to admit it or not jealous and bitter. I'd be lying if I said I never did that. I get tired of seeing the same guys playing at the Senator and George's. I play as good as some of those guys and better than some of the younger ones, and I can't get arrested in my home town! And yet Oscar wants to take me to Europe. I want to be able to have a chance to play every once in a while, that's all.

AW: What about the idea of Canadian Jazz? The Toronto sound has been associated with Don Thompson, Terry Clarke, Ed Bickert, Jerry Fuller, Neil Swainson, and Rob McConnell.

LL: I think three of the most influential guitarists are from Canada; Ed Bickert, Lenny Breau, and Sonny Greenwich. They are all radically different players. You take Barney Kessel, Herb Ellis, and Joe Pass; not much difference. The only reason that Lenny and Sonny aren't as well known is simply because of the media and because they were underrecorded.

AW: Did Ed Bickert ever "take you under his wing, " or did he let you do your own thing?

LL: A strange thing happened on a gig we did together about four years ago in Washington, D.C. With Ed, less is more, in conversation and playing. Ed and I played a duo at the Canadian Embassy, and then a couple of nights with a local rhythm section. At that point it was sort of when I realized that I was becoming more of me and less of Ed. The first record we did together, I couldn't tell where he finished and I began, and it bugged me. It was a necessary stage, but I started to feel myself moving away away from that style. That's not unique to me; every musician goes through that. On the second record I sounded different, and I was glad. Not better, just different. I finally started to feel like I was developing my own voice. Ed and I talked in Washington; I asked him one time, "Does it bother you when I sort of go off in a different direction, stretch out a little bit?" Not to quote verbatim, but he said he wasn't sure what to do, where it was going. Everybody has their own way of doing things. We went to Spain last year; I had a great time. I thought, Ed's going to play like Ed, Lorne's going to play like Lorne. He complimented me, he said, "Gee you're really sounding good." For Ed to say something like that, it really means something. But since then, we haven't worked together.

AW: And now you're going to work with Oscar Peterson. How did that happen?

LL: He was the Chancellor at York University and they decided to give him a big party because he was stepping down. So they hired a York Alumni Band. They had a piano there and they wanted to get a piano player but for some reason they couldn't get a grand piano into the ballroom. So they hired me because I'm Alumni. He came over and said, "Sounds nice." I said thank you, you know...smalltalk, and he says, "I'd like to hear you with Niels and Marty. I'm going to Europe next month. Do you want to come?" I said, "In a minute. Call me." His secretary called a couple of days after; she needed my passport fast, etc. and I'm going! Every two days after that, when the phone would ring, I'd think, "Oh oh, he's not doing it now or it's cancelled, but it looks like it's going to happen. I went to his house for a rehearsal which consisted of him giving me six or seven CDs. He said, "Here's a list of the originals I'm doing; why don't you just go home and learn them from the CD?"

A couple of days ago I got the Cleo Laine book for a festival gig here, so between learning the Oscar tunes, and working on the Cleo Laine book, plus wanting to practice, it's been hard to stay relaxed. The Oscar thing is easier, because I get to close my eyes and use my ears and play, instead of looking at these massive arrangements, with piano voicings written out and arrows going everywhere. Hieroglyphics! It doesn't get any better; a European tour, I'm going to be heard by lots of people. I figure maybe, if I happen to meet some promoters, maybe something will come of it. I was 20, and I started getting into jazz. Now I'm 40, and I'm going on tour.