_Buell Neidlinger
published in Coda (Toronto) 188 (Feb. 1983)
Active in the jazz and classical worlds through the 1950s and '60s while living in New York and Boston, bassist Buell Neidlinger (b. 1936, Wesport, CT) recorded with Cecil Taylor, Steve Lacy, and others. Subsequently, he developed a career as a teacher and also became a regular studio musician after moving to Los Angeles. There, to help maintain and document his musical activities, with saxophonist Marty Krystall he founded K2B2 Records, which has released a dozen of their own projects as well as those of others. This interview took place at his home in April 1982, and is edited from a wide-ranging discussion.
I moved out here to California in 1970. When I was in the Boston Symphony, October 1970, I took a trip out here to California to record with Frank Zappa and Jean-Luc Ponty: Concerto For Low-Budget Orchestra and King Kong. It’s been reissued many times, a two-record set but it was originally one record, Jean-Luc Ponty plays the music of Frank Zappa.
Anyway, he flew me out to California and in one day the following things happened to me: I had an interview with Mel Powell, who was the dean of the new California Institute of the Arts, and as a result I was hired to be Professor of Bass at that school, where I taught for 11 years, until I quit last year. I met [trombonist] Glenn Ferris, who turned up as a student, the first year of the school. I met a lot of freelance musicians that Zappa had hired; he had hired all the first-call musicians to be on that session---the French horn player, the oboist, and those are people I was later to know in the line of work that I do now. So, it was a very eventful day. A drummer had taken me by to hear the Don Ellis band rehearse. Don pretended not to recognize or remember me. It was wild, Don played trumpet, drums, and some other instrument too, like Indian drums. But Glenn Ferris stuck out like a sore thumb, because he was so good; because he could actually play music. He’s a very good improvisor.
Marty Krystall has been in all the bands that I’ve had since I moved to California. We had a quartet for a long time, with Billy Elgart on drums, called the El Monte Art Ensemble. It was many sizes, from duos up to, I think we had eighteen pieces at one time at Cal Arts. I met hundreds of students from all the departments at Cal Arts, because I gave a course called “Modern American Peoples’ Music Since 1955” and I played a lot of rock and roll and jazz in there. It was a survey course and I used to have maybe a hundred people at each session. From listening to simple chord progressions that we hear in rock and r&b and stuff like that, a lot of people who took that course learned enough to go on to be able to work in commercial music.
That was a good course, but they stopped me from teaching it after a few years, because they heard that some students had sex in the back of the class during one of the sessions---which is probably true. But that was a very popular course. A lot of people learned things about music that they would have liked to learn, but had never had a chance to in any school. So they never learn that stuff and then they become some of these strange kinds of musicians that we have around. Because what I was after was teaching people the emotional value of simple harmonies. Most American classical music since 1955 has very little emotional value, to my way of thinking, and very little harmony of any traditional sort. So, there wasn’t too much of that in my course. I played some Cecil Taylor records, some Ornette Coleman records, but after all these are people who, no matter how advanced they ever got, never forgot the musical roots that they were dealing with. That’s quite different from someone like Morton Subotnick, let’s say, who has no musical roots whatsoever. Or Mel Powell, a pseudo-jazz musician if there ever was one. When the faculty first met at Cal Arts, a couple of us who were interested in jazz said to Mel, “Well, Mel, we don’t see anything in the curriculum about jazz.” And you know what he said? I’ve never forgotten this: he said, “They can get that on the radio.” They can get that . . . that’s where his head was at. And, of course, if it wasn’t for jazz, who would have ever noticed him? How would he have stuck out in music if it hadn’t been for jazz? I realize that clearly, because if it wasn’t for jazz, I wouldn’t have made my mark in music either. For two reasons: nobody would have known my name; and, one of my major benefactors in music, who helped me when I was younger, Gunther Schuller, was impressed with me because I could play classical music and jazz. If I could have just played one or the other, he never would have noticed me. But he noticed a number of people like that. He has a phenomenal set of ears and he was very helpful to me, because he heard that I could express myself in many different ways. That’s been important to me, because not many people can hear that.
I find that in my business all the time. The instruments I play are Fender bass, upright bass (contrabass), and cello. Now, a lot of contractors won't hire me on contrabass because they think I’m a Fender player. A lot of contractors won’t hire me on Fender because they think I’m a contrabass player. And the cellists don't want any of them to hire me on cello because I’m pretty good and they don’t want a bass player coming in that area, so I hardly ever get to play cello. But there are a few very astute people who recognize my abilities on all the instruments, so sometimes I get calls for all three.
Studio dates are all I do now; I try to work every day. I’d like to play more in public, and I’m going to be doing that more with Krystall Klear and the Buells. But I’m deep into the studios. Deep. I won that award in 1978---not that I believe that much in awards, but that’s a certain gauge of my viability in the music business---the Most Valuable Player Award, awarded by the Los Angeles chapter of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. That means record producers, recording artists, and my fellow musicians. So, that was nice.
Do you have an agent?
No, I have a phone answering service, that’s as close as I come. I’m a freelance musician, and God, with a capital G, has been good. Because, as you can see, I’m living okay.
Do you get enough satisfaction from studio work? Is it creative enough?
Sometimes the studio work is very creative. But mostly it’s not that creative, except insofar as I feel that I bring a lot to it, that my playing matters. But most of the work is pretty cut and dried, very little improvisation, and it mostly has to be done fast.
One of the great musical moments I had in Los Angeles was the night they called me down to Studio 55, I got in there and there was Barbra Streisand. She had recorded this song that she wrote, but she had just sung it on the track by herself. She said, “Okay, Niles . . . ” She doesn’t really know my name, whether it’s Buell or Bill or Niles or Neidlinger. She says, “Okay, Niles, you put bass on that.” So I did. It was a love song, in a slow tempo, no drums, no nothing. That was challenging, that was what I would call real jazz. It’s a little backwards, due to the technology, but a certain challenge is there. And that sort of challenge we don’t meet that often here, because commercial music can’t have that.
I have played solos. For instance, Maurice Jarre has written big solos for me to play in motion pictures. And Leonard Rosenman, who you might say singlehandedly reformed the sound of movie music with his scores for East Of Eden and Rebel Without A Cause; he’s still a big force in the industry, he wrote a concerto for me [heard on Basso Profundo].
Do you compose much music?
I compose at the bass. And I do some arranging. For the last couple of years I’ve had this little band, Buellgrass, that I arrange for, including the music of Ellington and Monk.
I played with Monk, just once, at The Five Spot. Wilbur Ware didn't show up and I had brought my bass for him to play. I don’t think I impressed Monk at all.
How did you feel about your own playing?
I was great.
Did you enjoy it?
Oh yeah. How could you miss? Shadow Wilson on drums, Thelonious Monk at the piano, and John Coltrane on the sax.
When did you start playing with Cecil Taylor?
When I was nineteen. Steve Lacy introduced me to Cecil. He was studying with him. I had heard about Cecil before; some people who went to the New England Conservatory told me about him---not in glowing complimentary terms, because they were mystified by his music. But Cecil was a big influence in Boston, because while he went to the Conservatory he used to hang out at the record shop across the street with Nat Pierce, Nat Hentoff, and others.
Nat Hentoff had a column in DownBeat at the time, and people started to notice that the same things they were hearing at the record shop in the afternoons were appearing a few months later in Hentoff’s column. Cecil was always a very vocal, very opinionated person who happened to be correct about a hundred percent of the time, especially in music, so he became very quotable.
But I didn’t meet Cecil until after the Conservatory. Things hadn’t been going well for him, and he was living with his father at 98 Sheriff Street, New York City, on the fifth floor and about sixteen blocks from the nearest subway station, way downtown. Lacy was taking music lessons from him. I was playing dixieland. I was playing at Eddie Condon’s club, I used to substitute for Walter Page there, and I played a few times with Rex Stewart, and a banjoist named Danny Barker, and Conrad Janis. I knew Steve Lacy from the Metropole Cafe. He was working there with Rex Stewart when I met him. I originally met him at a Yale reunion, I went to college there for a year, then I met him again at the Metropole and he said, “Come on down, I’ve been studying music with this piano player, you’ve got to play with this guy.”
I remember carrying the bass from Delancey Street, about sixteen blocks or so to Sheriff Street, and walking up the five flights, and there was this very short person. He had a Wurlitzer spinet, and he had an alarm clock on top of that. I was impressed by that, because I realized that there had been practicing there, otherwise why have an alarm clock. He said, “Let’s play ‘A Cottage For Sale’.” And I said, “Well, uh, man, I don’t know ‘A Cottage For Sale’.” Cecil said, “That doesn’t matter. You just play along.”
I knew what energy was in music, because I had played with some rather energetic dixieland groups—drummers like George Wettling, Zutty Singleton, Arthur Trappier, who used to play with Fats Waller, different people who were energetic, so I understood what energy was. But I had never experienced an energy surge the likes of which I experienced with “A Cottage For Sale”!
Shortly after that, Condon saw me walking in Washington Square Park. I had a whole new way of walking, I guess, and talking. I had a new raincoat quite like Cecil’s, and a little cap, a bit like his, and I was playing with him. Condon said, “Haven’t seen you in a while. Haircut’s okay, raincoat’s got to go.” That’s when I had my first inkling that I was no longer acceptable to those sorts of musicians. So I would be with Cecil Taylor forever, I thought, and that was okay, that was good.
I played with Cecil on and off for about seven or eight years after that. Mostly off, because we never worked that much. We did break a lot of musical ground in New York, though, and we did work at The Five Spot a few times, and the Newport Jazz Festival. Otherwise, the clubs weren’t exactly welcoming us with open arms. So, I was forced to find other ways to support myself, because you really can’t make it on two hundred bucks a year.
But I do remember certain things that I wish had lasted forever. Like the engagement at The Five Spot in 1960 with Archie Shepp, and myself, and Cecil, and Dennis Charles. Then we played The Connection; when Freddie Redd and the others were making the movie, they hired us to perform the music in the play, and that was interesting. I can think of some times when I wished it could have gone on forever.
But music of that intensity, I found out later in my musical life, isn’t meant to go on forever. People can only withstand a force like that up to a certain point, after which time they cease understanding it or wanting to understand it.
So, in the last few years, I’ve gotten kind of away from that sort of thing and doing more what I’m doing now, like on my latest records with Krystall Klear and the Buells. And Buellgrass, which is a musical concept I’ve had for a long time, ever since I heard a string band for the first time. I like the dynamic level of Buellgrass, because it’s such that the bass can predominate, rather than disappear behind a set of drums, a Fender Rhodes piano, a guitar, and God knows what else. But now Buellgrass has to stop, because I can’t find any good musicians to do it. Richard Greene, the violinist, was in Buellgrass until his outlook became overly fiscal. But he’s on the record we have coming out on K2B2 Records. The other people on it are: Andy Statman, mandolin; Peter Ivers, harmonica; Marty Krystall, reeds; Peter Erskine, drums; and myself. I picked all the tunes, and I made the arrangements (Marty helped me do some). I make arrangements a little bit like Mingus or Johnny Hodges used to, where they point to someone and say “play this” or “I’d like you to do this.” A lot of musicians don’t like that; their egos can’t stand it.
Cecil prepared his music that way. He taught everything by rote more or less, all the parts. I have some early music that’s written out, but he abandoned that. He would play the part at the piano and you would learn it by heart. And I find that music that you learn by heart, without the paper if possible, is much better sounding than music that has paper involved.
Is that because learning it by heart has more of a folk root?
It is. And that folk thing has a lot to do with Buellgrass. Jazz intrigues me, and I have always loved it. And I love the blue tinge, the black tinge, the Arab tinge, the Spanish tinge, I love all the tinges, but I love especially the American tinge. To me that’s what’s been ignored in jazz for a number of years. John Coltrane wrote “Giant Steps” based on a Nicolas Slonimsky book that supposedly shows all the possibilities in music. And the first page is “Giant Steps”; not exactly, but almost. So, even that evolution of jazz hinges on the most deeply intellectual Western musical thought. What I’m trying to do now is use the violin, the mandolin, the harmonica, the bass-drums rhythm section, to give what I would call the American tinge to jazz and to try to get a little more homogenous acoustic arrangement with those instruments. So that we don’t always have to play up to the loudness of a Fender Rhodes piano or an electric guitar, or other things that are supposedly jazz now. They weren’t jazz before. Cecil Taylor will never play a Fender Rhodes piano, I guarantee you.
How do you feel then about playing electric bass?
Well, I’ve played electric bass since 1953. And people used to laugh at it. I was using it because my grandfather was an attorney for the Ampeg company, and it was a gift. I got an Ampeg amplifier and, I think, a ‘53 Precision bass. I didn’t get into playing it professionally until about 1958. I had sort of screwed around with it to the extent that I could read music on it. As a matter of fact, at the time I was the only person in New York who could actually read music and play the Fender bass. So you can imagine what happened: I did a lot of work, and I still depend on that instrument today.
The Fender bass is a completely different instrument than the upright bass, and I play it as though it is. On this record, Our Night Together, on K2B2 Records, I play Fender bass on two tunes. “When It Drips, It’s Ready,” which I wrote, is in 15/16 time, and it has a certain feeling that couldn’t be played on the upright bass, no matter what you did to it. The other tune I play Fender on is a walking blues, “Blues In White”; you don’t hear the Fender played that way too much anymore. That could have been played on upright, but it wouldn’t sound quite the same.
In general, the Fender bass is probably the worst-played and most misunderstood instrument on the face of the earth. Most of the famous practitioners of electric bass today remind me of menstruating trombones played through loud amplifiers. They have very little bass function; none of them play low notes, and the sound is very nasal, which is un-bass-like. On my records you may notice lots of low notes; I like low notes. But now bass has become a guitar player's practice basically---especially on Fender, but extended over onto the upright too. Most of the upright bass playing you hear now, since Mingus doesn’t play anymore, is sort of imitative of guitarists. A lot of fingerwork up in the high register, fast notes. I prefer a long low note; if it’s placed correctly and has the emotional content, to me it says a lot more than many fast notes.
But in jazz that heavy fingerwork goes back to bebop, doesn’t it?
Well, the greatest bebop player of all time died too young, before he gave us a chance to see what he could have made out of bebop. That was Paul Chambers, and his many imitators have gone nowhere, they’re just playing his licks.
The bass has become what it is because of the ego of bassists, which is a very strange ego indeed. It’s the reason that bassists are very seldom seen together. Although I’m married to a bassist, most bassists aren’t nice people.
Drums have tended to intimidate the bassist. Especially after the recording Night at the Village Vanguard, with Elvin Jones on drums, Wilbur Ware on bass, and Sonny Rollins on saxophone. It was recorded live and I think they had just gotten a new tape recorder---anyway, whoever engineered the recording obviously thought that the needle should be in the red at all times. Actually, Elvin used to play with these wired-up brushes. He would take a brush and twist it once, then take a wire and wrap it around, so he would have like a little metal fork at the end of a stick, and he would really flail the cymbals with those. Of course, the volume wasn’t that loud in person, they were brushes, not sticks of wood, so it was okay. But with the recording techniques of distortion used on Night at the Village Vanguard, these little wire things became like caterpillar tractors tearing up metal. Young drummers heard that and tried to imitate that: total distortion, total splash, the snare drum tuned in a way so that if you tap it softly it doesn’t speak, it has to have the stick practically driven through it. Ever since then, the bass has been at a disadvantage in terms of being heard, so bass players have had to resort to amplifiers, and the habit of playing a lot of notes way up. And I never liked that: frankly, I just like the long note. It has a lot of emotional content. It might lead somewhere, to another long note.
You started by studying classical music?
Yes, when I was a child I studied cello. Then I gave up the cello and took bass. For a long time after I started playing bass, I didn’t own a bass bow, I was just playing dixieland and jazz.
How have you managed to keep your interests in playing different musics untangled?
I’m a dichotomous soul, I can’t help it. When I was in the Boston Symphony I had a band called Looney Toons in Boston, that had an article in a French jazz magazine where for the first time ever I saw the words “jazz-rock” put together, a long time before any of those Jan Hammer people came along. That band was offered, at the time, fantastic sums of money by Epic Records, but I couldn’t do anything with it because the guitar player wanted to go back and get his degree in archaeology at Tufts University.
How many dates were you on with Cecil Taylor?
I’m on Jazz Advance, the Transition album; World of Cecil Taylor, on Candid; Looking Ahead, on Contemporary; Love For Sale, on United Artists---later reissued on Blue Note although I didn’t get credit for it. A lot of stuff I’ve done I’ve never received credit for. You see, a lot of foreign scholars base their research on record company records, which are often totally inaccurate. Look at the reissue of Love For Sale on Blue Note: at $4800 worth of scholarship, what does it take? Michael Cuscuna could have called me up and come over. These scholars are worthless, in jazz they’ve created more harm than good, and they’re not out interviewing the musicians as they should be. Do you know what Lawrence Brown did in music? Well, he’s sitting here in town and no one’s interviewing him, nobody’s interested in what he has to tell: the saga of Ellingtonia, which is a highly misunderstood body of work. You know, scholars can really murder music and musicians without too much trouble.
Was New York City R&B your date?
Yes. I was forced to put Cecil Taylor’s name on there by Jon Waxman, who produced those reissues for Barnaby/Candid. I made that session happen. There’s a whole other album from that session which has never come out in the United States. However, in spite of the fact that they don’t have any songwriter’s agreements with me, they have produced that session in Japan, on Sony CBS. I’ve never received any royalties from those records . . . although I was paid for the original dates. I got paid $250 for New York City R&B because I was the leader. And I got $100 for writing the liner notes, that have never been printed. You know, that’s a totally unmixed tape that comes to you courtesy of the 2-track backup tape, because the originals of all those sessions, and of the old Mingus records, were sold as scrap tape. Candid couldn’t have cared less for jazz.
Why are you not better documented?
That’s always been a good question to me. I think a lot of it has to do with being white. A lot of it has to do with my cantankerous nature, and my dislike of ineptitude in music criticism and record production.
I’ve recorded with Jimmy Giuffre, Steve Lacy, many singers. But when I got into jazz full-time, around 1955, there was a lot of racism happening in music. I used to play with a lot of people in New York who would have liked to have used me on their albums, but when it came time for them to record they couldn’t. Inter-racial bands weren’t happening in the ‘50s.
What kind of differences do you see between East Coast and West Coast musicians?
I saw this clearly recently. Peter Erskine moved to New York, so Marty and I started looking around for drummers, because we like to play and wanted to do some dates. We tried this drummer and that drummer, but no drummers wanted to put any energy into the playing. We asked Garnett Brown, a trombonist who used to play with Duke Ellington’s band, who’s going to be playing with us now, and he recommended this one guy. So, Marty called this guy up and he came over here. I thought he looked familiar to me, and we started to play and the difference between the other drummers and him was like night and day. This drummer had the energy, he had all the energy we’d been missing. Plus he knew Monk’s music, he knew Ellington, and he could play all the tunes, or catch it right away. Turned out he’s from Philadelphia, he grew up with Spanky DeBrest and he’d known Henry Grimes and Shepp, and a lot of musicians that I knew. And he’s a true Eastern jazz musician. He can play jazz, no ifs ands or buts, swing his ass off. His name is Sherman Ferguson.
Have you had much occasion to play and record classical music in recent years?
Oh yes. I was Neville Marriner's principal bass player here in the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra for six years. I made a lot of different records with him, Stravinsky . . .
I’ve heard that you were Stravinsky’s favorite bassist.
That may be true. I don’t know if I was his favorite, but I was once selected by him out of a group of my elders, a bass section, they just needed one bass to play L’Histoire du Soldat. He liked my playing. I didn’t tell him I had played jazz before, but I think he recognized in my rhythmic ability something that some of my older and younger colleagues today don’t quite have: the ability to lay it on the line. That’s what I do every day.
I was very young when I first moved into the loft at 21 Bleecker Street in New York. I think that was about 1955. There weren’t too many lofts at that time, and this whole place was eighty bucks a month, and we used to have music there. Lacy showed Trane his first soprano sax in that loft, and that was the same loft where Jackie McLean first heard Ornette Coleman and ran screaming from the building. That was the same loft where Cecil Taylor rehearsed his bands, it was a big loft. That was where I first noticed that, as more and more people enjoy something, the more it is that those who don’t like people to enjoy things fight back. This loft was across the street from the Mission House and the winos were laid out all over the street and the sidewalk. But as soon as we would play music there, the police would come and beat their nightsticks on our iron gate downstairs, and make us stop, like we were annoying someone. Police have never enjoyed seeing people have fun, and music is having fun.
I think that’s had a lot to do with what has happened to jazz in America in the last few years, and the reason that non-jazz musicians have been able to make such an inroad, because people who have been moved by Cecil Taylor, or Ornette Coleman, or Roswell Rudd, or Archie Shepp, or perhaps even myself, they’re not going to be playing anything that’s too readily acceptable. It’s going to be pretty harsh, because it’s going to be a reflection of the way we’ve learned to make music, a reflection of our lives and the things that we’re seeing. Some people say, “Okay, well if you’re so fucking violent, then why Buellgrass, why play with Jerry Garcia and Richard Greene?” I have to tell them: Well, this is my way of trying to be able to play music. Because the opportunities to go out and blow your head off on a saxophone or a bass or a drum, and express yourself absolutely freely, are not forthcoming. No one’s interested in that. Very few people can get away with that stuff.
You’ve played with Ornette Coleman, haven’t you?
I played with Ornette a lot, because when he was at The Five Spot for six months I worked with Jimmy Giuffre opposite him every night. Many nights, Charlie Haden would come in late and I would play with both bands. It would infuriate Giuffre, because of course when I played with Ornette it would sound so beautiful, playing with Billy Higgins, or later Ed Blackwell, and Don Cherry and Ornette, you could really play beautiful bass notes with musicians like that. And then when I’d go play with Giuffre, it would sound so mundane. He used to say---and I couldn’t understand how he couldn’t see this—“Why don’t you play with me like that?” I mean, how could I? Because when I played with Ornette and those guys, the music was being pulled out of me like a long, rubbery blood vessel; the music was being pulled out of my bass and it didn’t have anything to do with me. With Giuffre, it had everything to do with me, because I had to work constantly to make a groove. And that was the difference.
However, I never recorded with Ornette. One time, Gunther Schuller had these concerts at the Circle In The Square, that were later recorded: compositions by Gunther Schuller for string quartet and Ornette Coleman. These were the musicians: Bill Evans, Sticks Evans on drums, myself and Scott LaFaro, Ornette , Eric Dolphy, and Freddie Hubbard. We did the date, and when the review was written Martin Williams left my name out. Therefore, the credibility of participating in those history-making concerts wasn’t available to me through the New York Times or DownBeat. It was a turning point in music, in a certain way, in that Ornette received classical credibility with these concerts.
I’ve always loved Charlie Haden’s beautiful groove, his beautiful bass notes---long, supple, sinuous. Strangely enough, the bass players I’ve hung out with and been really friendly with in my life---Percy Heath, Charlie---we all play beautiful long notes. Just as they say: birds of a feather flock together.
Jazz musicians are usually found in the woodwork, not out on the floor. The ones who are out on the floor are usually not that interesting. Like, who has heard of Roswell Rudd recently? I haven’t seen Ros in twelve or fifteen years, or heard him play, but I know that if he came in the door and took his trombone out, now, and I took my bass, that the sparks would fly. That’s a real jazz musician.
I don’t always get to play jazz and I’m thankful I’ve played all the bullshit I’ve played, the Merle Haggard dates, the Bob Dylan dates. I’ve played with all these people, because that’s what we do here: we make records. We overdub. We save careers. And I’ve done it one note at a time. . . .
You have said, too, that in some ways you would like to still be doing classical music, playing in a symphony.
Yes, because I miss the womb-like nature of a symphony job. When I was in the Boston Symphony, we would go to rehearsal at 10 in the morning. At 11:10, we would have our 20-minute intermission, and we would go downstairs. And there, laid on the table: bone china, silver spoons, cakes freshly baked, 100% cream in the pitcher, and fresh coffee. Everyone has a nice 20 minutes, drinking, eating, talking. We go back upstairs, play the most beautiful music until 1:00. Go home, return to the hall at 7:45, 8:00, 8:10, perhaps 8:25, slip into a suit, grab an instrument, go out on stage, play the most sublime music, you can’t beat that.
But I want to do sessions, I want to do studio work, I like it. Right now I’m doing Star Trek II; the music is very interesting, written by a good composer, James Horner. I did another movie with him, Wolfen. As a matter of fact, I scored that movie twice, with another composer before that. Some movies get scored three or four times. Some people want to spend a million dollars on a film score. What can you do?
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published in Jazz Forum (Warsaw) 132 (Feb. 1992)
Rear View Mirror (K2B2, 1991)
This CD compilation of four Neidlinger records from the past decade represents a hearty dose of the wide world of Buellworks. Whether deeply inquisitive or walking a muscular line behind a tune, his bass holds as the sonorous root of the music, awash in rich timbres. Neidlinger's career marks him as an artist of ample perspectives; from his early tenure with Cecil Taylor and his subsequent distinction as Stravinsky's favorite bassist, to his predominant work in the last couple decades as a busy L.A. studio musician, he never ceases to have fun at what he does. Aided in all the present groupings by his longtime associate, the vibrantly resourceful saxophonist Marty Krystall, they show an improvisatory gusto on everything from the most outside tunes to the solid tributes honoring Monk and Ellington with such soulfulness. Nor will they be kept down in stylistic boxes. Their arrangements for the near-bluegrass versions of the last three tunes (“Stardust,” “Jumpin Punkins,” “Happy Go Lucky Local”) cannot fail to surprise and delight!
published in Coda (Toronto) 188 (Feb. 1983)
Active in the jazz and classical worlds through the 1950s and '60s while living in New York and Boston, bassist Buell Neidlinger (b. 1936, Wesport, CT) recorded with Cecil Taylor, Steve Lacy, and others. Subsequently, he developed a career as a teacher and also became a regular studio musician after moving to Los Angeles. There, to help maintain and document his musical activities, with saxophonist Marty Krystall he founded K2B2 Records, which has released a dozen of their own projects as well as those of others. This interview took place at his home in April 1982, and is edited from a wide-ranging discussion.
I moved out here to California in 1970. When I was in the Boston Symphony, October 1970, I took a trip out here to California to record with Frank Zappa and Jean-Luc Ponty: Concerto For Low-Budget Orchestra and King Kong. It’s been reissued many times, a two-record set but it was originally one record, Jean-Luc Ponty plays the music of Frank Zappa.
Anyway, he flew me out to California and in one day the following things happened to me: I had an interview with Mel Powell, who was the dean of the new California Institute of the Arts, and as a result I was hired to be Professor of Bass at that school, where I taught for 11 years, until I quit last year. I met [trombonist] Glenn Ferris, who turned up as a student, the first year of the school. I met a lot of freelance musicians that Zappa had hired; he had hired all the first-call musicians to be on that session---the French horn player, the oboist, and those are people I was later to know in the line of work that I do now. So, it was a very eventful day. A drummer had taken me by to hear the Don Ellis band rehearse. Don pretended not to recognize or remember me. It was wild, Don played trumpet, drums, and some other instrument too, like Indian drums. But Glenn Ferris stuck out like a sore thumb, because he was so good; because he could actually play music. He’s a very good improvisor.
Marty Krystall has been in all the bands that I’ve had since I moved to California. We had a quartet for a long time, with Billy Elgart on drums, called the El Monte Art Ensemble. It was many sizes, from duos up to, I think we had eighteen pieces at one time at Cal Arts. I met hundreds of students from all the departments at Cal Arts, because I gave a course called “Modern American Peoples’ Music Since 1955” and I played a lot of rock and roll and jazz in there. It was a survey course and I used to have maybe a hundred people at each session. From listening to simple chord progressions that we hear in rock and r&b and stuff like that, a lot of people who took that course learned enough to go on to be able to work in commercial music.
That was a good course, but they stopped me from teaching it after a few years, because they heard that some students had sex in the back of the class during one of the sessions---which is probably true. But that was a very popular course. A lot of people learned things about music that they would have liked to learn, but had never had a chance to in any school. So they never learn that stuff and then they become some of these strange kinds of musicians that we have around. Because what I was after was teaching people the emotional value of simple harmonies. Most American classical music since 1955 has very little emotional value, to my way of thinking, and very little harmony of any traditional sort. So, there wasn’t too much of that in my course. I played some Cecil Taylor records, some Ornette Coleman records, but after all these are people who, no matter how advanced they ever got, never forgot the musical roots that they were dealing with. That’s quite different from someone like Morton Subotnick, let’s say, who has no musical roots whatsoever. Or Mel Powell, a pseudo-jazz musician if there ever was one. When the faculty first met at Cal Arts, a couple of us who were interested in jazz said to Mel, “Well, Mel, we don’t see anything in the curriculum about jazz.” And you know what he said? I’ve never forgotten this: he said, “They can get that on the radio.” They can get that . . . that’s where his head was at. And, of course, if it wasn’t for jazz, who would have ever noticed him? How would he have stuck out in music if it hadn’t been for jazz? I realize that clearly, because if it wasn’t for jazz, I wouldn’t have made my mark in music either. For two reasons: nobody would have known my name; and, one of my major benefactors in music, who helped me when I was younger, Gunther Schuller, was impressed with me because I could play classical music and jazz. If I could have just played one or the other, he never would have noticed me. But he noticed a number of people like that. He has a phenomenal set of ears and he was very helpful to me, because he heard that I could express myself in many different ways. That’s been important to me, because not many people can hear that.
I find that in my business all the time. The instruments I play are Fender bass, upright bass (contrabass), and cello. Now, a lot of contractors won't hire me on contrabass because they think I’m a Fender player. A lot of contractors won’t hire me on Fender because they think I’m a contrabass player. And the cellists don't want any of them to hire me on cello because I’m pretty good and they don’t want a bass player coming in that area, so I hardly ever get to play cello. But there are a few very astute people who recognize my abilities on all the instruments, so sometimes I get calls for all three.
Studio dates are all I do now; I try to work every day. I’d like to play more in public, and I’m going to be doing that more with Krystall Klear and the Buells. But I’m deep into the studios. Deep. I won that award in 1978---not that I believe that much in awards, but that’s a certain gauge of my viability in the music business---the Most Valuable Player Award, awarded by the Los Angeles chapter of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. That means record producers, recording artists, and my fellow musicians. So, that was nice.
Do you have an agent?
No, I have a phone answering service, that’s as close as I come. I’m a freelance musician, and God, with a capital G, has been good. Because, as you can see, I’m living okay.
Do you get enough satisfaction from studio work? Is it creative enough?
Sometimes the studio work is very creative. But mostly it’s not that creative, except insofar as I feel that I bring a lot to it, that my playing matters. But most of the work is pretty cut and dried, very little improvisation, and it mostly has to be done fast.
One of the great musical moments I had in Los Angeles was the night they called me down to Studio 55, I got in there and there was Barbra Streisand. She had recorded this song that she wrote, but she had just sung it on the track by herself. She said, “Okay, Niles . . . ” She doesn’t really know my name, whether it’s Buell or Bill or Niles or Neidlinger. She says, “Okay, Niles, you put bass on that.” So I did. It was a love song, in a slow tempo, no drums, no nothing. That was challenging, that was what I would call real jazz. It’s a little backwards, due to the technology, but a certain challenge is there. And that sort of challenge we don’t meet that often here, because commercial music can’t have that.
I have played solos. For instance, Maurice Jarre has written big solos for me to play in motion pictures. And Leonard Rosenman, who you might say singlehandedly reformed the sound of movie music with his scores for East Of Eden and Rebel Without A Cause; he’s still a big force in the industry, he wrote a concerto for me [heard on Basso Profundo].
Do you compose much music?
I compose at the bass. And I do some arranging. For the last couple of years I’ve had this little band, Buellgrass, that I arrange for, including the music of Ellington and Monk.
I played with Monk, just once, at The Five Spot. Wilbur Ware didn't show up and I had brought my bass for him to play. I don’t think I impressed Monk at all.
How did you feel about your own playing?
I was great.
Did you enjoy it?
Oh yeah. How could you miss? Shadow Wilson on drums, Thelonious Monk at the piano, and John Coltrane on the sax.
When did you start playing with Cecil Taylor?
When I was nineteen. Steve Lacy introduced me to Cecil. He was studying with him. I had heard about Cecil before; some people who went to the New England Conservatory told me about him---not in glowing complimentary terms, because they were mystified by his music. But Cecil was a big influence in Boston, because while he went to the Conservatory he used to hang out at the record shop across the street with Nat Pierce, Nat Hentoff, and others.
Nat Hentoff had a column in DownBeat at the time, and people started to notice that the same things they were hearing at the record shop in the afternoons were appearing a few months later in Hentoff’s column. Cecil was always a very vocal, very opinionated person who happened to be correct about a hundred percent of the time, especially in music, so he became very quotable.
But I didn’t meet Cecil until after the Conservatory. Things hadn’t been going well for him, and he was living with his father at 98 Sheriff Street, New York City, on the fifth floor and about sixteen blocks from the nearest subway station, way downtown. Lacy was taking music lessons from him. I was playing dixieland. I was playing at Eddie Condon’s club, I used to substitute for Walter Page there, and I played a few times with Rex Stewart, and a banjoist named Danny Barker, and Conrad Janis. I knew Steve Lacy from the Metropole Cafe. He was working there with Rex Stewart when I met him. I originally met him at a Yale reunion, I went to college there for a year, then I met him again at the Metropole and he said, “Come on down, I’ve been studying music with this piano player, you’ve got to play with this guy.”
I remember carrying the bass from Delancey Street, about sixteen blocks or so to Sheriff Street, and walking up the five flights, and there was this very short person. He had a Wurlitzer spinet, and he had an alarm clock on top of that. I was impressed by that, because I realized that there had been practicing there, otherwise why have an alarm clock. He said, “Let’s play ‘A Cottage For Sale’.” And I said, “Well, uh, man, I don’t know ‘A Cottage For Sale’.” Cecil said, “That doesn’t matter. You just play along.”
I knew what energy was in music, because I had played with some rather energetic dixieland groups—drummers like George Wettling, Zutty Singleton, Arthur Trappier, who used to play with Fats Waller, different people who were energetic, so I understood what energy was. But I had never experienced an energy surge the likes of which I experienced with “A Cottage For Sale”!
Shortly after that, Condon saw me walking in Washington Square Park. I had a whole new way of walking, I guess, and talking. I had a new raincoat quite like Cecil’s, and a little cap, a bit like his, and I was playing with him. Condon said, “Haven’t seen you in a while. Haircut’s okay, raincoat’s got to go.” That’s when I had my first inkling that I was no longer acceptable to those sorts of musicians. So I would be with Cecil Taylor forever, I thought, and that was okay, that was good.
I played with Cecil on and off for about seven or eight years after that. Mostly off, because we never worked that much. We did break a lot of musical ground in New York, though, and we did work at The Five Spot a few times, and the Newport Jazz Festival. Otherwise, the clubs weren’t exactly welcoming us with open arms. So, I was forced to find other ways to support myself, because you really can’t make it on two hundred bucks a year.
But I do remember certain things that I wish had lasted forever. Like the engagement at The Five Spot in 1960 with Archie Shepp, and myself, and Cecil, and Dennis Charles. Then we played The Connection; when Freddie Redd and the others were making the movie, they hired us to perform the music in the play, and that was interesting. I can think of some times when I wished it could have gone on forever.
But music of that intensity, I found out later in my musical life, isn’t meant to go on forever. People can only withstand a force like that up to a certain point, after which time they cease understanding it or wanting to understand it.
So, in the last few years, I’ve gotten kind of away from that sort of thing and doing more what I’m doing now, like on my latest records with Krystall Klear and the Buells. And Buellgrass, which is a musical concept I’ve had for a long time, ever since I heard a string band for the first time. I like the dynamic level of Buellgrass, because it’s such that the bass can predominate, rather than disappear behind a set of drums, a Fender Rhodes piano, a guitar, and God knows what else. But now Buellgrass has to stop, because I can’t find any good musicians to do it. Richard Greene, the violinist, was in Buellgrass until his outlook became overly fiscal. But he’s on the record we have coming out on K2B2 Records. The other people on it are: Andy Statman, mandolin; Peter Ivers, harmonica; Marty Krystall, reeds; Peter Erskine, drums; and myself. I picked all the tunes, and I made the arrangements (Marty helped me do some). I make arrangements a little bit like Mingus or Johnny Hodges used to, where they point to someone and say “play this” or “I’d like you to do this.” A lot of musicians don’t like that; their egos can’t stand it.
Cecil prepared his music that way. He taught everything by rote more or less, all the parts. I have some early music that’s written out, but he abandoned that. He would play the part at the piano and you would learn it by heart. And I find that music that you learn by heart, without the paper if possible, is much better sounding than music that has paper involved.
Is that because learning it by heart has more of a folk root?
It is. And that folk thing has a lot to do with Buellgrass. Jazz intrigues me, and I have always loved it. And I love the blue tinge, the black tinge, the Arab tinge, the Spanish tinge, I love all the tinges, but I love especially the American tinge. To me that’s what’s been ignored in jazz for a number of years. John Coltrane wrote “Giant Steps” based on a Nicolas Slonimsky book that supposedly shows all the possibilities in music. And the first page is “Giant Steps”; not exactly, but almost. So, even that evolution of jazz hinges on the most deeply intellectual Western musical thought. What I’m trying to do now is use the violin, the mandolin, the harmonica, the bass-drums rhythm section, to give what I would call the American tinge to jazz and to try to get a little more homogenous acoustic arrangement with those instruments. So that we don’t always have to play up to the loudness of a Fender Rhodes piano or an electric guitar, or other things that are supposedly jazz now. They weren’t jazz before. Cecil Taylor will never play a Fender Rhodes piano, I guarantee you.
How do you feel then about playing electric bass?
Well, I’ve played electric bass since 1953. And people used to laugh at it. I was using it because my grandfather was an attorney for the Ampeg company, and it was a gift. I got an Ampeg amplifier and, I think, a ‘53 Precision bass. I didn’t get into playing it professionally until about 1958. I had sort of screwed around with it to the extent that I could read music on it. As a matter of fact, at the time I was the only person in New York who could actually read music and play the Fender bass. So you can imagine what happened: I did a lot of work, and I still depend on that instrument today.
The Fender bass is a completely different instrument than the upright bass, and I play it as though it is. On this record, Our Night Together, on K2B2 Records, I play Fender bass on two tunes. “When It Drips, It’s Ready,” which I wrote, is in 15/16 time, and it has a certain feeling that couldn’t be played on the upright bass, no matter what you did to it. The other tune I play Fender on is a walking blues, “Blues In White”; you don’t hear the Fender played that way too much anymore. That could have been played on upright, but it wouldn’t sound quite the same.
In general, the Fender bass is probably the worst-played and most misunderstood instrument on the face of the earth. Most of the famous practitioners of electric bass today remind me of menstruating trombones played through loud amplifiers. They have very little bass function; none of them play low notes, and the sound is very nasal, which is un-bass-like. On my records you may notice lots of low notes; I like low notes. But now bass has become a guitar player's practice basically---especially on Fender, but extended over onto the upright too. Most of the upright bass playing you hear now, since Mingus doesn’t play anymore, is sort of imitative of guitarists. A lot of fingerwork up in the high register, fast notes. I prefer a long low note; if it’s placed correctly and has the emotional content, to me it says a lot more than many fast notes.
But in jazz that heavy fingerwork goes back to bebop, doesn’t it?
Well, the greatest bebop player of all time died too young, before he gave us a chance to see what he could have made out of bebop. That was Paul Chambers, and his many imitators have gone nowhere, they’re just playing his licks.
The bass has become what it is because of the ego of bassists, which is a very strange ego indeed. It’s the reason that bassists are very seldom seen together. Although I’m married to a bassist, most bassists aren’t nice people.
Drums have tended to intimidate the bassist. Especially after the recording Night at the Village Vanguard, with Elvin Jones on drums, Wilbur Ware on bass, and Sonny Rollins on saxophone. It was recorded live and I think they had just gotten a new tape recorder---anyway, whoever engineered the recording obviously thought that the needle should be in the red at all times. Actually, Elvin used to play with these wired-up brushes. He would take a brush and twist it once, then take a wire and wrap it around, so he would have like a little metal fork at the end of a stick, and he would really flail the cymbals with those. Of course, the volume wasn’t that loud in person, they were brushes, not sticks of wood, so it was okay. But with the recording techniques of distortion used on Night at the Village Vanguard, these little wire things became like caterpillar tractors tearing up metal. Young drummers heard that and tried to imitate that: total distortion, total splash, the snare drum tuned in a way so that if you tap it softly it doesn’t speak, it has to have the stick practically driven through it. Ever since then, the bass has been at a disadvantage in terms of being heard, so bass players have had to resort to amplifiers, and the habit of playing a lot of notes way up. And I never liked that: frankly, I just like the long note. It has a lot of emotional content. It might lead somewhere, to another long note.
You started by studying classical music?
Yes, when I was a child I studied cello. Then I gave up the cello and took bass. For a long time after I started playing bass, I didn’t own a bass bow, I was just playing dixieland and jazz.
How have you managed to keep your interests in playing different musics untangled?
I’m a dichotomous soul, I can’t help it. When I was in the Boston Symphony I had a band called Looney Toons in Boston, that had an article in a French jazz magazine where for the first time ever I saw the words “jazz-rock” put together, a long time before any of those Jan Hammer people came along. That band was offered, at the time, fantastic sums of money by Epic Records, but I couldn’t do anything with it because the guitar player wanted to go back and get his degree in archaeology at Tufts University.
How many dates were you on with Cecil Taylor?
I’m on Jazz Advance, the Transition album; World of Cecil Taylor, on Candid; Looking Ahead, on Contemporary; Love For Sale, on United Artists---later reissued on Blue Note although I didn’t get credit for it. A lot of stuff I’ve done I’ve never received credit for. You see, a lot of foreign scholars base their research on record company records, which are often totally inaccurate. Look at the reissue of Love For Sale on Blue Note: at $4800 worth of scholarship, what does it take? Michael Cuscuna could have called me up and come over. These scholars are worthless, in jazz they’ve created more harm than good, and they’re not out interviewing the musicians as they should be. Do you know what Lawrence Brown did in music? Well, he’s sitting here in town and no one’s interviewing him, nobody’s interested in what he has to tell: the saga of Ellingtonia, which is a highly misunderstood body of work. You know, scholars can really murder music and musicians without too much trouble.
Was New York City R&B your date?
Yes. I was forced to put Cecil Taylor’s name on there by Jon Waxman, who produced those reissues for Barnaby/Candid. I made that session happen. There’s a whole other album from that session which has never come out in the United States. However, in spite of the fact that they don’t have any songwriter’s agreements with me, they have produced that session in Japan, on Sony CBS. I’ve never received any royalties from those records . . . although I was paid for the original dates. I got paid $250 for New York City R&B because I was the leader. And I got $100 for writing the liner notes, that have never been printed. You know, that’s a totally unmixed tape that comes to you courtesy of the 2-track backup tape, because the originals of all those sessions, and of the old Mingus records, were sold as scrap tape. Candid couldn’t have cared less for jazz.
Why are you not better documented?
That’s always been a good question to me. I think a lot of it has to do with being white. A lot of it has to do with my cantankerous nature, and my dislike of ineptitude in music criticism and record production.
I’ve recorded with Jimmy Giuffre, Steve Lacy, many singers. But when I got into jazz full-time, around 1955, there was a lot of racism happening in music. I used to play with a lot of people in New York who would have liked to have used me on their albums, but when it came time for them to record they couldn’t. Inter-racial bands weren’t happening in the ‘50s.
What kind of differences do you see between East Coast and West Coast musicians?
I saw this clearly recently. Peter Erskine moved to New York, so Marty and I started looking around for drummers, because we like to play and wanted to do some dates. We tried this drummer and that drummer, but no drummers wanted to put any energy into the playing. We asked Garnett Brown, a trombonist who used to play with Duke Ellington’s band, who’s going to be playing with us now, and he recommended this one guy. So, Marty called this guy up and he came over here. I thought he looked familiar to me, and we started to play and the difference between the other drummers and him was like night and day. This drummer had the energy, he had all the energy we’d been missing. Plus he knew Monk’s music, he knew Ellington, and he could play all the tunes, or catch it right away. Turned out he’s from Philadelphia, he grew up with Spanky DeBrest and he’d known Henry Grimes and Shepp, and a lot of musicians that I knew. And he’s a true Eastern jazz musician. He can play jazz, no ifs ands or buts, swing his ass off. His name is Sherman Ferguson.
Have you had much occasion to play and record classical music in recent years?
Oh yes. I was Neville Marriner's principal bass player here in the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra for six years. I made a lot of different records with him, Stravinsky . . .
I’ve heard that you were Stravinsky’s favorite bassist.
That may be true. I don’t know if I was his favorite, but I was once selected by him out of a group of my elders, a bass section, they just needed one bass to play L’Histoire du Soldat. He liked my playing. I didn’t tell him I had played jazz before, but I think he recognized in my rhythmic ability something that some of my older and younger colleagues today don’t quite have: the ability to lay it on the line. That’s what I do every day.
I was very young when I first moved into the loft at 21 Bleecker Street in New York. I think that was about 1955. There weren’t too many lofts at that time, and this whole place was eighty bucks a month, and we used to have music there. Lacy showed Trane his first soprano sax in that loft, and that was the same loft where Jackie McLean first heard Ornette Coleman and ran screaming from the building. That was the same loft where Cecil Taylor rehearsed his bands, it was a big loft. That was where I first noticed that, as more and more people enjoy something, the more it is that those who don’t like people to enjoy things fight back. This loft was across the street from the Mission House and the winos were laid out all over the street and the sidewalk. But as soon as we would play music there, the police would come and beat their nightsticks on our iron gate downstairs, and make us stop, like we were annoying someone. Police have never enjoyed seeing people have fun, and music is having fun.
I think that’s had a lot to do with what has happened to jazz in America in the last few years, and the reason that non-jazz musicians have been able to make such an inroad, because people who have been moved by Cecil Taylor, or Ornette Coleman, or Roswell Rudd, or Archie Shepp, or perhaps even myself, they’re not going to be playing anything that’s too readily acceptable. It’s going to be pretty harsh, because it’s going to be a reflection of the way we’ve learned to make music, a reflection of our lives and the things that we’re seeing. Some people say, “Okay, well if you’re so fucking violent, then why Buellgrass, why play with Jerry Garcia and Richard Greene?” I have to tell them: Well, this is my way of trying to be able to play music. Because the opportunities to go out and blow your head off on a saxophone or a bass or a drum, and express yourself absolutely freely, are not forthcoming. No one’s interested in that. Very few people can get away with that stuff.
You’ve played with Ornette Coleman, haven’t you?
I played with Ornette a lot, because when he was at The Five Spot for six months I worked with Jimmy Giuffre opposite him every night. Many nights, Charlie Haden would come in late and I would play with both bands. It would infuriate Giuffre, because of course when I played with Ornette it would sound so beautiful, playing with Billy Higgins, or later Ed Blackwell, and Don Cherry and Ornette, you could really play beautiful bass notes with musicians like that. And then when I’d go play with Giuffre, it would sound so mundane. He used to say---and I couldn’t understand how he couldn’t see this—“Why don’t you play with me like that?” I mean, how could I? Because when I played with Ornette and those guys, the music was being pulled out of me like a long, rubbery blood vessel; the music was being pulled out of my bass and it didn’t have anything to do with me. With Giuffre, it had everything to do with me, because I had to work constantly to make a groove. And that was the difference.
However, I never recorded with Ornette. One time, Gunther Schuller had these concerts at the Circle In The Square, that were later recorded: compositions by Gunther Schuller for string quartet and Ornette Coleman. These were the musicians: Bill Evans, Sticks Evans on drums, myself and Scott LaFaro, Ornette , Eric Dolphy, and Freddie Hubbard. We did the date, and when the review was written Martin Williams left my name out. Therefore, the credibility of participating in those history-making concerts wasn’t available to me through the New York Times or DownBeat. It was a turning point in music, in a certain way, in that Ornette received classical credibility with these concerts.
I’ve always loved Charlie Haden’s beautiful groove, his beautiful bass notes---long, supple, sinuous. Strangely enough, the bass players I’ve hung out with and been really friendly with in my life---Percy Heath, Charlie---we all play beautiful long notes. Just as they say: birds of a feather flock together.
Jazz musicians are usually found in the woodwork, not out on the floor. The ones who are out on the floor are usually not that interesting. Like, who has heard of Roswell Rudd recently? I haven’t seen Ros in twelve or fifteen years, or heard him play, but I know that if he came in the door and took his trombone out, now, and I took my bass, that the sparks would fly. That’s a real jazz musician.
I don’t always get to play jazz and I’m thankful I’ve played all the bullshit I’ve played, the Merle Haggard dates, the Bob Dylan dates. I’ve played with all these people, because that’s what we do here: we make records. We overdub. We save careers. And I’ve done it one note at a time. . . .
You have said, too, that in some ways you would like to still be doing classical music, playing in a symphony.
Yes, because I miss the womb-like nature of a symphony job. When I was in the Boston Symphony, we would go to rehearsal at 10 in the morning. At 11:10, we would have our 20-minute intermission, and we would go downstairs. And there, laid on the table: bone china, silver spoons, cakes freshly baked, 100% cream in the pitcher, and fresh coffee. Everyone has a nice 20 minutes, drinking, eating, talking. We go back upstairs, play the most beautiful music until 1:00. Go home, return to the hall at 7:45, 8:00, 8:10, perhaps 8:25, slip into a suit, grab an instrument, go out on stage, play the most sublime music, you can’t beat that.
But I want to do sessions, I want to do studio work, I like it. Right now I’m doing Star Trek II; the music is very interesting, written by a good composer, James Horner. I did another movie with him, Wolfen. As a matter of fact, I scored that movie twice, with another composer before that. Some movies get scored three or four times. Some people want to spend a million dollars on a film score. What can you do?
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published in Jazz Forum (Warsaw) 132 (Feb. 1992)
Rear View Mirror (K2B2, 1991)
This CD compilation of four Neidlinger records from the past decade represents a hearty dose of the wide world of Buellworks. Whether deeply inquisitive or walking a muscular line behind a tune, his bass holds as the sonorous root of the music, awash in rich timbres. Neidlinger's career marks him as an artist of ample perspectives; from his early tenure with Cecil Taylor and his subsequent distinction as Stravinsky's favorite bassist, to his predominant work in the last couple decades as a busy L.A. studio musician, he never ceases to have fun at what he does. Aided in all the present groupings by his longtime associate, the vibrantly resourceful saxophonist Marty Krystall, they show an improvisatory gusto on everything from the most outside tunes to the solid tributes honoring Monk and Ellington with such soulfulness. Nor will they be kept down in stylistic boxes. Their arrangements for the near-bluegrass versions of the last three tunes (“Stardust,” “Jumpin Punkins,” “Happy Go Lucky Local”) cannot fail to surprise and delight!