Peripatetic Benny Golson

“When I write jazz things, it’s still what I feel,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve been influenced too much by what’s going on around me, not the avant-garde movement, anyway. I might write maybe three or four jazz things a year now—used to write 50 or 60. But what I do write, I try to make meaningful.”

Golson likens the connection between his writing and instrumental activity to the luxury of having two wives—“I love them both!” But playing jazz full-time provides too precarious an existence for this moderate man, who likes security and enjoys the good things in life. Apart from the occasional gig undertaken more or less to keep his hands in, Golson’s saxophone spends much of its time tucked away in his apartment.

On his way home from Europe last December, though, Golson was persuaded to play a short engagement at Ronnie Scott’s club in London, where he demonstrated an uncanny knack for feeling out an audience while getting into a tune and then gradually building his course of improvisation on the result of this survey to reach a moving, emotional peak. All this was done with a consummate skill that gave the impression that the saxophone is still his constant companion.

Noticeably, Golson prefers to restrict himself mainly to the work of other composers. “People always say, ‘Why don’t you play your own tunes?’ But I get just as much of a kick out of playing other people’s tunes as I do out of mine,” he said. “It’s not that I don’t like them, but sometimes I feel too close to the songs, and I’d rather play something else. When they ask for ‘Along Came Betty,’ and I say I don’t remember it, they think I don’t want to play it, but I honestly don’t remember it.”

There is one piece he will never forget, and it is one he does play occasionally. And no one who has heard “I Remember Clifford,” his tribute to trumpeter Clifford Brown, will forget it, either. Golson started explaining how the song came about by saying, “If Clifford had never been killed, obviously it would never have been written. But, unfortunately, he was. ... I met Clifford in 1949, and even at that very early age—he was younger than I was, just a kid—he was playing like a blue streak. Some years later when Max Roach formed a group with him, they were working at the Blue Note in Philadelphia, and Max had asked me to write some things for the group. So, I took a couple of tunes down to an afternoon rehearsal, and the strangest thing happened that day—it’s never happened to me before or since.

“When I walked in, everything was very informal. Sonny Rollins and Clifford were leaning against the bandstand, and the music I brought was up on the bar. I was sitting on the bar facing them. The first tune was called ‘Step Lightly,’ and they began to play through the melody. Sonny took the first chorus and played it very well, and then Clifford started to play. His horn was pointing straight at me, about two feet away from my face, and the sound was coming straight at me. And then I got the strangest feeling. I got chill bumps all over my body, and I felt a sort of involuntary nervous reaction. He was playing so much on the horn that I felt like somebody was holding me on the stool. It really frightened me. I got scared, and then when he finished, I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to let him know how much he had impressed me, but it was a little embarrassing for a man to come on like this to another man, you know: ‘You made my heart beat fast’ and so on, so I didn’t say that.

“Instead I said, ‘Clifford, boy, you sure did play.’ And then he said something classic. He said, ‘Oh, I’ll get it the next time.’

“When I left the club that day, I was in another world, trying to figure out what had happened. I went home and tried to explain to my mother what had happened, but I don’t think she understood. So, I just kept it to myself. That, incidentally, was the last time I saw him.”

Some months later, Golson was working with Dizzy Gillespie’s big band at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, and during a band break, he learned of Brown’s death in a car crash.

“I just couldn’t believe it, and I started to cry,” he recalled. “I heard a voice from the wings sayings, ‘All right, all on,’ and during the whole show I could hardly see the music because I was crying. The pianist, Walter Davis Jr., was crying too, and I kept saying to myself that once we are given the gift of life, we are simultaneously given an inescapable death. I realized that everybody has to die. Now, it may sound cliched, but I didn’t expect that it would happen to him. Clifford’s career was zooming, he was just more and more every day. You’d hear him, and he would fill you with awe. It was just so frightening the way he was playing. And to realize that it had all been snuffed out in an instant, it was just too much. This man could change from a raging tiger into a graceful swan.”

And so Golson set to work to write a graceful melody that might be indicative of the way Brownie had played his horn, and the gentle way he had lived. It took him more than two months before he was satisfied with what he had written, and then he showed the score to Gillespie, who immediately fell in love with the tribute and was the first musician to play it.

“Originally,” said the composer, “I had thought of it as a vehicle for the trumpet, but soon other people started playing it. Jon Hendricks put lyrics to it, and Carmen McRae recorded it, and later on I even started playing it myself. But I do feel quite close to it. Sometimes when I play it, it’s like I’m by myself—like nobody else exists.”

One of the factors that make Golson such a consistent and interesting writer is that he is interested in every musical happening taking place in the vicinity. He is hardworking and never bored by life; he welcomes challenges and meets them head-on. By his refusal to be type-cast he is able to employ a wide canvas when painting his musical pictures. As a result of this approach, his score for the skiing movie is dynamic and refreshingly original. He views this assignment as his greatest challenge to date—and the fulfillment of his ideas, his most rewarding moment. DB