It’s not no deep fuckin’ secret! People talk about this shit like it’s some kind of…
– Paul Motian
From jazz writer Ted Panken, several unedited interviews with Paul Motian— he posted this in 2014, somehow it escaped my notice until Gary Kennedy shared it on Bluesky just now.
You should go read them all on Panken’s site, but here are a few things that caught my eye just from the first one, from 2005. He’s a remarkably simple guy, at least in how he expresses himself verbally. It’s hard to be that plain, maybe equally hard for us to accept it.
The time is there. It’s already there. You don’t have to beat it to death, I don’t think.
I played at Dizzy Gillespie’s Coca-Cola Room with Joe Lovano, Mulgrew Miller and George Mraz, and it seemed different to me. I had my own drums and my own cymbals, but it seemed like after the second or third night I changed the cymbals. That’s the first time I’ve ever done anything like that. It seemed that in that room, the cymbals I was using didn’t quite sound right. There’s a huge glass wall behind you, there’s a wooden stage, and there’s a wooden floor in the club. People in the club say the sound is great, but for me it was very different. I changed the cymbals. But after I changed my cymbals, I was satisfied. It sounded good.
TP: But wasn’t it a conceptual leap to play behind Albert Ayler after you’d been playing with Bill Evans?
PAUL: No.
TP: Maybe Scott LaFaro prepared you for that.
PAUL: Nobody prepared me for… No. No! No, man. None of that stuff is true! Somebody calls you for a gig, and you go, and you play, and you play with the people that you play with, and you play with them, and you try to make music. You try to make music with the people you’re playing with, and then play a certain way, so you might play a certain way just to make it musical or make it magic or make it something that’s worthwhile.
I guess because I was on the scene, and playing so much all over town and in a lot of places, people heard me, and if somebody needed a drummer and liked what they heard from me, they called me. I don’t think it was anything any deeper than that.
That time when I played with Monk, I didn’t know his music. I just kept my fingers crossed that I didn’t fall on my fuckin’ ass!
No rehearsal. I don’t do that with anybody.
I never thought about doing anything special or doing anything on purpose. It just happened.