Lou Donaldson Interview

Lou Donaldson helped invent two major jazz movements. In 1952, he led a Blue Note recording that became one of the earliest hard bop sessions. The date included Blue Mitchell, Horace Silver, Percy Heath and Art Blakey. Seven months later he recorded with trumpeter Clifford Brown. Then in 1957, Lou began recording a series of albums with organist Jimmy Smith that popularized the sax and organ trio sound. Throughout the 1960s, Lou's merging of the hard bop feel and r&b groove resulted in a long string of successful albums for Blue Note that were built on catchy sax-organ riffs. The formula revived jazz as popular music in the country's vast network of urban clubs and bars, and the sound remains the major bridge between jazz and soul.

Today Lou is still going strong and playing to sold-out crowds in the U.S. and abroad. Yesterday, Lou told me about fans' exuberant reaction to him during a recent trip to the Netherlands. Lou went on to say that he experienced the same crowd excitement in San Francisco last week. Which makes perfect sense: Only a handful of artists who graced the covers of Blue Note albums in the 1950s are still on the scene today.

In Part 1 of my three-part interview with Lou, 83, the Charlie Parker-influenced alto saxophonist talks about North Carolina, learning to play the clarinet, graduating early from high school, attending college at age 15, joining the Navy and taking up the saxophone:

JazzWax: You grew up in Badin, N.C. What was that like?

Lou Donaldson: It was alright. Segregation was a drag, and there wasn’t any jazz on the radio down there, just country and western music. Eventually, my family had a shortwave radio that could pick up the New York stations and the big bands led by people like Benny Goodman, Harry James and Xavier Cugat, and sometimes Duke Ellington and Count Basie from the Cotton Club.

JW: Where is Badin?

LD: Toward the center of North Carolina, about an hour south of Greensboro. I went to school in Greensboro, which is where the bands played that came through the state, in the city's dance halls. I saw Buddy Johnson, Erskine Hawkins, Andy Kirk, Lionel Hampton, Jay McShann—all of them. Every so often the Basie band came through, and Duke played there once. All the originals were in Duke's band at the time, like Johnny Hodges, Harry Carney and Jimmy Hamilton.

JW: Did you meet the Ellington band?

LD: Later, when I was in college. They came by the Mombassie Club where I was playing in Greensboro and complimented me when I was done. That was exciting.

JW: Did you start playing the alto sax right away?

LD: I started on the clarinet when I was 9 or 10 years old. There was an Alcoa Aluminum plant in my hometown and the company had a band, which, of course, was all white. My mother went over to the bandleader and spoke to him. I have no idea what my mother said but he gave her a clarinet to give to me.

JW: Did your mother know him or have any connection to the plant?

LD: From time to time the Alcoa band would have some tough music to play. They’d call my mother, who could play anything on the piano. She was a music teacher Donald in town. When her students missed notes, she’d have a switch to encourage them to make the notes the next time [laughs]. That’s why I was the only one in my family who didn’t play piano. I didn’t want to get whacked with that switch [laughs].

JW: Did you have a large family?

LD: Two sisters and one brother. I’m the second oldest. They were excellent pianists. I studied hard and finished high school early, starting college at age 15. I was the valedictorian of my high school class. I also was an All-State baseball player. But back then, if you were black, you couldn’t play professional baseball. You couldn’t even go in the ballpark. We had to peep thorough the holes in the fence.

JW: Where did you go to college?

LD: I was admitted to North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro. At the time, they didn’t have a music degree or a band. I was there for two years and then joined the Navy in 1944.

JW: You were in a Navy band with Willie Smith, Clark Terry and Ernie Wilkins?

LD: And Major Holley, Jimmy Nottingham, Wendell Culley and Luther Henderson. We were all at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station near Chicago. That band was a great education for me. I didn’t take any lessons. When I went up there, they gave us these intelligence tests. Naturally having been in college, I could do all the math. So at first they assigned me to the radar school—where I became the first black specialist. Before that, blacks at Great Lakes were bakers, stewards and cooks.

JW: Did you stick with radar?

LD: I loved it. I was beginning to go to radar school. Then one day I passed by the base’s band room and heard a clarinet squeaking. I stuck my head in to see who was making the noise.

JW: What did you see?

LD: The bandmaster was giving a guy a lesson. The guy was playing Barnum and Bailey’s Favorite, a march. So I went in. Eventually the bandmaster saw me and asked if I could play. I told him I could. He gave me a clarinet, put music up on the stand and asked me to read it. I did. He put up another song. I read that down, too. No matter what he put up, I played it flawlessly.

JW: What did the bandmaster say?

LD: He said, “You are the best clarinet player I’ve heard around here. Do you want to join the band? Do you play the saxophone, too?” I had never touched the saxophone up to that point. I said I’d love to join the band and would be happy to play the saxophone. So he issued me an alto sax and clarinet.

JW: What did you do with the sax?

LD: I took it to the barracks. Two weeks later I knew the instrument cold and joined the band.

JW: Why didn't you audition for the band from the start?

JW: Was there one big band at the base?

LD: No, at Great Lakes you had an "A" band, a "B" band and a "C" band. I wound up initially in the C band, which was made up of young guys. The musicians in the different bands used to get together and hold jam sessions. I'd sit in and learn stuff. That’s where I met Clark Terry.

JW: How long were you in the Navy?

LD: For 11 months. I joined in 1944, the war ended in the summer of 1945, and I was discharged in September.

JW: What did you do when you got out?

LD: I went back to college. Then I heard Charlie Parker and my whole approach to the saxophone changed. I got what he was doing instantly. I had seen him a few years earlier in Chicago, when I was on leave, when he was with Billy Eckstine’s band. Parker was so messed up he could hardly play anything. The suit he wore looked like he had been wearing it for six months. At first I thought he was a bum [laughs]. Then someone told me he was the guy I liked so much on the Jay McShann records [laughs].

JW: Which early record of Parker's did you listen to most at the time?

LD: I still remember it: The Jumpin' Blues with Jay McShann in 1942, which had Sepian Stomp on the other side. I played that record until you could see the aluminum in the disc [laughs]. Parker was the only one playing that way even then, and all of us were trying to figure out what he was doing.

Jazz writers aren't in complete agreement about the first hard-bop recording. Many point to Miles Davis' Walkin' performed at the first Newport Jazz Festival in 1954. Others choose recordings from slightly later. I'd have to say that the first hard-bop date—where the trumpet and saxophone operate in unison with an R&B feel, backed by big steady, swinging beat—would have to be a Blue Note session of June 9, 1953. On this date, Lou Donaldson co-led a group that featured Clifford Brown, pianist Elmo Hope, bassist Percy Heath and drummer Philly Joe Jones.

The first track recorded that day was Hope's Bellarosa, a hard-bop anthem if ever there was one. Today, this session can be found on a CD called The Clifford Brown Memorial Album, and it still sizzles with a singular freshness. Which brings me to my next point: For too long, Lou has been categorized as an r&b or funk player. Both grossly underestimate Lou's significance and the deep scope of his playing and ideas. Lou is a hard-bop Founding Father, which means he forged the foot-tapping qualities of r&b while retaining the daring and ferocity of bebop. And Lou is still on the scene today!

In Part 2 of my three-part interview with Lou, the alto saxophonist talks about moving to New York in 1950, playing clubs and starting hard bop with Clifford Brown:

JazzWax: How did you wind up in New York in 1950?

Lou Donaldson: I had played semi-pro baseball in North Carolina for two years after I returned from the Navy. I played third base for the Badin Tigers. I thought I was the best third baseman in the world, and I wasn't too far off. I was hitting over .400. Then one day I picked up a ground ball barehanded and hurt my pinky. Those fields we played on had more rocks than soil.

JW: What did you do?

LD: I stopped playing ball. Then Illinois Jacquet came through town with his band. I had learned Jacquet’s Flying Home on my alto saxophone, so I went up on stage and played it with him. After I finished, he said, “Man, you should be in New York.” My girlfriend, Maker Turner, had already left for New York to work in a wealthy person’s home. I followed her to New York in 1950 and soon afterward married her. We were married for 56 years before she passed away in 2006. We lived in Harlem, on Sugar Hill.

JW: what was happening in New York in 1950?

LD: A lot. There were clubs on every block. I attended the Darrow Institute of Music on the GI Bill and I lived with my brother-in-law for a while, which meant I didn’t have to pay rent and could save. Soon I moved in with Maker. But I didn’t have time to finish with school. I was too busy with gigs. When I first came to New York, they said I had to learn to play tenor. They said that in the clubs, all the hot musicians play tenor.

JW: Why?

LD: Audiences didn’t like the alto sound as much.

JW: What did you do?

LD: I went around to about 15 or 16 clubs in Harlem and worked them all on alto. What I figured out is that most of the guys then couldn’t play the melody to songs. They could riff on the blues and things they knew but they didn’t have a deep song vocabulary. Fortunately, I did. Also I was always clean. I’m an asthmatic so I never smoked, did drugs or drank.

JW: In 1953, you recorded the first hard bop recording with Clifford Brown and Elmo Hope.

LD: Clifford was amazing. He could play a strong trumpet. Other trumpeters would play three sets a night, but by the third set, they couldn’t play anything. Their lips were gone. This happened to Miles, Kenny Dorham and Joe Gordon. Not Clifford. He could play the last set as good as the first.

JW: In February 1954, you’re with Art Blakey and Kenny Dorham on A Night at Birdland.

LD: That was probably the greatest live jazz recording ever made. But it wasn't a Jazz Messengers date nor was Art the leader. Art already had a band in Brooklyn that he called the Jazz Messengers. The quintet we had a Birdland was a studio band that Blue Note put together. It wasn't Blakey's. It was just a recording band.

JW: How did Blakey become the leader?

LD: Art owed a lot of money to someone. Blue Note made it his date so he could get more money as the leader and pay off his debt. It was just a blowing session. We didn’t have a lot of time together and it was all new music, much of it written by me and Horace Silver.

JW: What made that band and hard bop in general sound different?

LD: The blues sound. We wanted to keep the blues sound firmly in the band. R&B was coming on strong, and the blues had to be a part of what we were doing so the music would stand out. Blues gives jazz its identity anyway, so it wasn’t too foreign.

JW: Was there anything borrowed from old-fashioned bebop?

LD: Oh sure. Charlie Parker was one of the greatest blues musicians who ever lived. We just played what he played—but with more conventional, standardized music. We also were swinging more.

JW: What about the hard-bop rhythm?

LD: Our rhythm was more definite than bebop's. The bebop drummers were always trying things, adding this and that. What many people don’t realize is that Art Blakey wasn’t actually a bebop drummer in the purest sense.

JW: How so?

LD: He was first and foremost about a strong beat and a strong rhythm. He was a swing drummer. Enormous rhythm.

JW: What's the big difference?

LD: The effect or impact was different. Art’s style, and the style of all good hard-bop drummers then, is that his sound would project out more to the people listening. The hard-drop drummer was less about nuances and more about a big, driving beat.

JW: What was it like playing with Horace Silver.

LD: Amazing. Horace was originally a sax player and P-silver started piano late. Hard to believe, right? He had trouble with his back and couldn’t hold up the instrument for long periods. We used to rehearse together all the time. On the keyboard, he was a piano player and a bass player and a drummer all at once, that's how good he was back then.

JW: The Birdland recordings sound like everyone was having a lot of fun during that run.

LD: I would have played those jobs for no money. It was nice and free and light what we were doing. Most of the time we’d be playing and just thinking of what to do with the song’s melody line.

JW: What makes up a great group?

LD: Musicians have to play together for a couple of weeks in clubs so each one knows exactly what the others are going to do. You sense what each musician is going to do and the result is this perfect sound. Unfortunately today you don’t have those kind of clubs where musicians stay together for extended periods.

JW: You toured the country and played clubs quite a bit in the mid-1950s.

LD: I was working steady during this period, playing many clubs in urban markets across the country, so I didn’t make many records during this period. Whenever I was in New York, I was the house saxophonist up at Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem. It was a fantastic, experimental period.

Tomorrow, Lou talks further about why he didn't record much in the mid-1950s, his sax-organ period starting in 1957, and how one of his most popular albums, Alligator Bogaloo, got its name.

JazzWax tracks: Lou's early 1950s recording period is especially rich. His first leadership date was in June 1952, with Horace Silver, Gene Ramey and Art Taylor. These recordings, his dates with Blue Mitchell from the same year, and a session from 1954 with trumpeter Kenny Dorham and trombonist Matthew Gee are on Quartet, Quintet, Sextet (Blue Note), which is only available as an import. But fortunately, all of these sides can be found at iTunes on Lou Donaldson: Ultimate Jazz Archive No. 31.

Lou with Clifford Brown in 1953 can be found on The Clifford Brown Memorial Album (Blue Note) at iTunes.

A Night at Birdland in February 1954 is indeed one of the most exciting live dates ever recorded. The fire and energy virtually leap out of the speakers. The recording can be found on two Blue Note CDs at iTunes.

Lou recorded three exceptional hard bop albums in 1957 after spending three years on the road. They are Wailing with Lou (with Donald Byrd and Herman Foster), Swing and Soul (also with Herman Foster) and Lou Takes Off (with Donald Byrd and Curtis Fuller), which is exceptional. All are must-owns.

Between mid-1955 and the start of 1957, Lou Donaldson did not record for reasons he outlines below. Instead, he booked a long string of urban clubs across the country and toured them back and forth while fronting a quintet that included organist Big John Patton. Along the way, Lou became creatively comfortable with the sax-organ sound, in which he borrowed elements from r&b and bebop. When he returned to Blue Note in 1957, Lou recorded with organist JImmy Smith in 1958 (The Sermon and Cool Blues). From 1961 onward, Lou was almost always recorded backed by a series of great jazz organists.

Among the earliest examples of this sound between 1961 and 1963 were Here 'Tis with organist Baby Face Willette, Man With a Horn featuring Brother Jack McDuff, and The Natural Soul, Good Gracious!, Signifyin' and Possum Head with Big John Patton. Then came Dr. Lonnie Smith, Charles Earland and Leon Spencer. With each album, the sound grew progressively reliant on inventive hooks, groovy hooks and a strong hip beat.

In Part 3 of my interview with Lou, the alto saxophonist talks about why he didn't record for a year and a half in the mid-1950s, the rise of the sax-organ sound, and why what he played in the 1960s was funky—but not technically funk:

JazzWax: You helped invent hard bop, yet you’re not on many of the big hard-bop recordings. Why not?

Lou Donaldson: I got pissed off at the musicians coming to the dates. The drug thing was bad then. A lot of musicians would come into Blue Note’s offices and owner Alfred Lion would take them back to his room. When they came out, they’d sober up. I said to Alfred, “I’m not going to make any more dates with these junkies you bring in here. They want to get high and come back and mess up a record.”

JW: What did you do instead?

LD: I traveled quite a bit on the road. So Alfred got Hank Mobley and just continued the hard bop sound but with a tenor player. I had my own tour, hitting dozens of clubs from New York to California. I just kept working my tour. But I still loved Blue Note. By my count, I brought 58 musicians to the label. I was like Alfred’s scout [laughs].

JW: Who did you tour with?

LD: Bill Hardman on trumpet, John Patton on organ, Grant Green on guitar and Ben Dixon on drums.

JW: No bass player?

LD: Big John used his feet on the bass pedals of the organ.

JW: How did audiences react?

LD: We played 25 clubs that had never featured jazz before. They went crazy. But Grant Green was a problem, as good as he was.

JW: Why?

LD: He had to have his stuff with him on the road. If they had pulled us over and found his drugs, we could all get hit with a $10,000 fine and we might do time if we crossed state lines. Grant was a liability, for a touring band.

JW: What set you apart from everyone else during that period?

LD: I wasn’t a junkie. And the sound on my horn was a little better than most other guys. I always prided myself on my tone.

JW: What was the thinking behind your tone?

LD: I knew the sound I produced had to project since I played at so many clubs. I developed that tone because as an asthmatic, I’d do a lot of hold and sustain songs to build up my strength. That’s what saved me.

JW: Wasn’t playing the saxophone only raising the risk of an asthmatic episode?

LD: Many people thought that blowing the horn would make my asthma worse. But doing so actually eased the condition.

JW: In 1957, you recorded a blockbuster album with Donald Byrd, Curtis Fuller, Sonny Clark and others, called Lou Takes Off.

LD: Oh, yeah. That was a good one, you're right about that. It was one of the first recordings where I had an extended band on a Blue Note album. Most of the time I recorded in a quartet setting. Back then there were so many great musicians around New York. They all could play good, and each one played a little different than the other. Everyone had individual styles and sounds.

JW: Were hard bop musicians in competition with the West Coast scene?

LD: Our thing was the opposite of jazz on the West Coast. We consciously tried to do everything that they didn’t do. We tried to swing hard, not cool. They had a light touch to their music. We had a heavy touch, with a swinging feel underneath. We knew that creating a contrast was going to be the only way to stand out.

JW: You never played with Miles Davis?

LD: No. Miles wouldn’t pay musicians their money, and he’d always have his junkies with him. I wasn’t in that category, so I never worked with him nor did I want to.

JW: So not being a junkie put you outside the inner circle?

LD: Yes. Musicians who were junkies tended to hire only people who were using.

JW: Why?

LD: So after the gig the leader could push the others to pool their earnings and buy stuff. Not being called to work with them didn’t bother me. I knew that on most of those jobs, the sidemen didn’t get paid what they should have anyway. I had a wife and a family by the mid-1950s and couldn’t afford that kind of scene as a sober guy.

JW: How did this position you an outsider?

LD: The junkie musicians were afraid of me. On gigs they'd eventually realize they had come up short with their money and they’d think I was scheming. I used to remind them that they were the ones getting high and I was sober and what would happen to them eventually if they kept using.

JW: I would imagine it was hard to trust them, too.

LD: That’s correct. Those guys were street smart. They could spot a policeman 1,000 miles away. Then they might stick their stuff in your case, getting you in a jam. You had to be very careful around them. I had to watch myself and keep my distance.

JW: How did you come to invent the organ-sax groove sound?

LD: The blues groove is where I’m from. I was playing whatever music people liked, but with my sound. I used audience reaction as a barometer for what I would go into the studio and record. We’d try out songs on audiences on the road. If they responded big to songs, we’d record them. Every one of those records in the 1960s sold well [laughs].

JW: So the sax-organ sound started on the road.

LD: Yes, while we were traveling cross-country. Jimmy Smith was the one who refined the jazz-organ sound. But he didn’t do the circuit. We played ghetto clubs. Jimmy played high-paying jobs.

JW: You recorded a few albums with Jimmy Smith.

LD: I told Jimmy I’d make him famous with The Sermon [laughs]. Jimmy was a great piano player as well as a great organist. What set Jimmy apart is that he discovered stops on the organ and setups that a lot of organists didn’t know. He made the Hammond sound like a piano. But with Jimmy, the groove was always there.

JW: So is the sound you eventually created called funk?

LD: No. What we did with the sax-organ thing was what I call “swinging bebop.” That’s what makes it different. The groove was so strong. Funk is James Brown and Earth, Wind and Fire, and I’m not about either one.

JW: How did you come up with specific grooves and riffs?

LD: I’d work out the song in advance with the organist, whether it was Lonnie [Smith], Charles Earland, Leon Spencer or whoever. There was no real mystery to those records. We made them the way we wanted to make them—which was to sell them [laughs].

JW: But the formula was fairly consistent—mostly groovy riffs with a kicky beat, and a standard or two.

LD: I’d be playing all the time in clubs. I’d use riffs on different chord sequences and remember the ones I liked. One of my best albums was called The Scorpion, which was recorded live at the Cadillac Club in Newark, N.J. in 1970. That was with Fred Ballard on trumpet and Leon Spencer on organ. It has a great sound.

JW: Of all your albums, which is your favorite?

LD: Probably Blues Walk. I love the groove on there. But Alligator Bogaloo made me the most money [laughs].

JW: How did Alligator Bogaloo get its name?

LD: It was my title. I’m a golfer and had been playing down in Florida. One day I hit my ball and it went in a ditch. I started to go in to get it and the caddy stopped me and said, “Don’t do that.” Then he told me why. When I stuck my club down in the ditch with all the foliage, an alligator lifted up his head [laughs]. I liked the way the word "alligator" sounded with "bogaloo," which was a new hot dance then.

JW: Looking back on your career, would you have done anything different?

LD: I doubt it. Every move I made was exactly the one I should have made. That’s why I’m still here today. I always made the right decision.