Most full-time jazz musicians have taken gigs that are regular but somewhat less than musically challenging just to make ends meet. Trombonist Roswell Rudd, a mainstay of the jazz avant-garde of the 1960s, took one such gig — playing with a hotel band at a resort in upstate New York’s Borscht Belt — and found opportunities to improvise and to be inspired.
“I made it creative for myself,” Rudd says. “The improvisation would take the form of being creative with standards, being creative as a stage persona, working in tandem with various comics, fire-eaters, dancers, singers and the usual fare.”
“(The comedians) are the free jazz musicians of the Borscht Belt, they really are. These guys don’t script, they’re just blowin’. They were the ones that I homed in on. A couple of times I was able to come up with some pretty good lines for them during an act, and I really felt like I had played a night of free jazz after that.”
Rudd’s passion for jazz led him to pick up the trombone as a teenager. After graduating from Yale in 1958, he made his way to New York City and gigged with Dixieland bands. It was there in 1960 that he met the man who would change his musical perspective forever: the brilliant, under-appreciated pianist/composer Herbie Nichols. They played occasional gigs together, but many of Rudd’s real musical discoveries took place at informal sessions at Nichols’ house.
“I’d say it was even more formal than going to school, considering the amount of information I received. But it was not something that we did by the clock. When he had a little time, he called me up and we’d hang for a day,” Rudd says. “There was so much to be learned from this man, and fortunately I was lucky enough to be there.”
Jazz was going through violent change in the early 1960s, and Rudd found himself playing with — and becoming one of — the revolutionary voices of the era. The transition from playing Dixieland with trumpeter Max Kaminsky to playing with the likes of fiery avant-garde tenor saxophonist Archie Shepp may seem great, but it made a certain amount of sense to Rudd.
“It was not so much of a jump for me to play free counterpoint with other horns, because I had been doing plenty of that with Dixieland,” he explains. “The jump for me was in terms of musical theory, because bop and free jazz are on another theoretical level from Dixieland.”
Saturday night at the Unity Temple (875 Lake St. in Oak Park, 708-383-8873), Rudd shares the bill with pianist Burton Greene, another veteran of those tumultuous days of New York in the ’60s. Rudd and Greene played together infrequently at the time, but they recently renewed their musical relationship through occasional gigs in Europe. Asked about their upcoming Chicago performance, Rudd replies with characteristic enthusiasm: “Burton and I will be there, playing our hearts out.”
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the facts
Roswell Rudd and Burton Greene
7:30 p.m. Saturday
Unity Temple
875 Lake St., Oak Park
$12 adults, $6 students
708-383-8873
