As he prepares to celebrate his 65th birthday in his hometown, Chicago, tenor saxophone giant Johnny Griffin is making no plans for retirement.
On the contrary, he has managed to scale new artistic heights.
His most recent album, “Dance of Passion” (Antilles), is winning considerable praise and visibility. More important, the recording bristles with Griffin’s characteristically intense be-bop solos as well as melodically accessible passages that are reaching a wider audience than Griffin ever has enjoyed.
Add to that his high-intensity touring schedule, which brings him to the Jazz Showcase Tuesday through April 25, and it’s clear that Griffin has plenty to celebrate.
“Actually, I didn’t really expect that `Dance of Passion’ was going to be a big deal,” says Griffin of an album with a most unusual origin.
“I mean, the title, `Dance of Passion,’ and the (title) piece itself, actually came from a dream I was having. That happens to me sometimes. Then I get out of bed and go to the piano and try out whatever I was hearing, write it down or put it on tape.
“In the case of `Dance of Passion,’ it was almost like I was waking up in a mist, and I was in the midst of all these belly dancers. It was really strange.
“So then I went to the piano and wrote down just those few notes, and then, later, started developing it.”
As its title suggests, “Dance of Passion” is a mesmerizing piece in which an insinuating motif is repeated constantly, as in Maurice Ravel’s similarly entrancing “Bolero.” Because “Dance” is built on an exotic melodic scale and because its harmonies are decidedly non-Western, it suggests music of Middle Eastern antiquity-as in the belly dancers of Griffin’s dream.
But it takes more than a catchy tune to make a substantial piece of music, as Griffin’s recording establishes. The ingenuity lies in the way that Griffin transforms the musical material of this piece and others on the CD.
Obviously, it has taken Griffin a lifetime to learn to spin such alluring sounds, but he considers the source of his art the training he received on the South Side of Chicago.
“People don’t realize how important it is having a foundation like the one I got there,” says Griffin, referring to Du Sable High School, where the fabled Capt. Walter Dyett trained several of the world’s most revered jazz artists. Nat Cole, Von Freeman, Gene Ammons and Griffin, among others, were introduced to the rigors of jazz by Dyett.
“He was one hell of a musician,” adds Griffin. “He knew all the instruments, but he also was a strong man, a disciplinarian, a father figure. He would take no nonsense at all, he’d short-shrift anything disturbing in class.
“But that was good for the kids, because it gave them something, it gave them some support. Dyett taught dignity and honesty and, on top of that, music.
“So when I graduated from high school at 17, three or four days later I had a gig playing with Lionel Hampton’s band and was able to do it with no problem whatsoever.”
At that time, the mid-’40s, Chicago teenagers with talent and training could find themselves catapulted abruptly into the big time. With a war on, many of the best players in jazz had given up their seats in the big bands of the day. And because Chicago’s South Side was teeming with jazz clubs, a young player such as Griffin could sit in with Hampton’s band one day, win a full-time gig the next.
“And that’s when I really started to learn things,” says Griffin of his years on the bandstand with Hampton. “From Hamp, of course, I learned a lot about show business, because Hamp was-and still is-one of the best showmen.
“But I also just learned so much from the old pros in the band, because they threw me out there (in the solo spot) challenging (tenor virtuoso) Arnett Cobb playing `Flying Home,’ ” the Hampton band signature piece that originally made a star of another young tenorist, Illinois Jacquet.
With the age of be-bop already under way by the ’40s, Griffin knew he had to learn the tough, harmonically complex language. So he headed to New York-briefly in the late ’40s, and again, after an Army stint, in the ’50s-where 52nd Street was alive with the sounds of bop.
To this day, Griffin remains at once awestruck and grateful that the first generation of boppers personally showed him what the volatile new music was all about. Trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, pianists Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell and Elmo Hope, and others took the fledgling Chicago tenor into their sphere.
“Elmo, Bud and Thelonious really were like three brothers to me,” recalls Griffin, “and whenever I wasn’t working, I’d just hang with them in New York, listening, studying.
“That was my university training, staying around those three musicians. Because I didn’t want to sound like any other musician on tenor saxophone, so I spent my time around those guys and around Dizzy, who adopted me, and (trumpeters) Kenny Dorham and Fats Navarro and later on Clifford Brown.
“They were the ones who gave me a chance to peep at them and ask questions. That music was so tough that sometimes it would take me four or five months to understand something they were telling me about. And then it suddenly would hit me: `Oh, that’s how those changes work.’
“Because I hadn’t done that much formal study as far as theory and harmony goes, so I got it straight from these guys, right from the source.
“The thing is,” adds Griffin, “it was just like hanging out with friends and having fun, you know? Everybody was treated as equals. They didn’t treat me like a kid or anything, although I was a few years younger than they were, but I was just having a good time, and I don’t really know why they adopted me.
“But it happened even with the older generation. Ben Webster heard that he had been one of my first influences, so he adopted me. And the same with Coleman Hawkins and Prez (Lester Young), all my idols really made me welcome on the New York jazz scene.”
Nevertheless, Griffin went to Europe in the early ’60s and never moved back. Facing “problems with the IRS” and a split with his wife, he apparently found a kind of peace on the other side of the Atlantic.
There were more than just personal problems, however, that kept him away from the States.
“I also had problems with the so-called `jazz critics’ who were propagating avant-garde music,” recalls Griffin. “And I thought that music was a bad hoax, or a bad joke on the people listening to it.
“Although, actually, I went to Europe without any idea that I’d never move back. It’s just that the way they received jazz musicians in Europe was quite different from what they do in the States, and it’s still like that even today.
“Jazz has a high profile in Europe. And people just seem to have more leisure time to enjoy the things of aesthetic value than they seem to have over here.
“Plus the people in Europe just know more about music and about jazz history than the average American, by far.”
So Griffin, who still lives in a rustic area outside Paris, built a new life for himself overseas.
“Even now, whenever I’m in Paris,” he says, “just going out to sit on the Champs Elysses, I feel like I belong, not even knowing the language. There’s something about the atmosphere in France, it gives you a feeling of well-being. And all the people passing around in the rainbow of colors, people from Africa and everywhere else, you just feel right.”
Still, each year at this time, just as sure as showers are going to rain down on Chicago, Griffin comes back home to celebrate his April 24 birthday in the city where it all began.
“Oh yeah, that’ll never change,” says Griffin, whose homecoming long ago became a rite of spring at Jazz Showcase.
“In fact, I hear jazz is going pretty good in Chicago.
“That’s beautiful, man. That means I’m going to be having a real good time back home this year.”
