Dennis Dotson Interview

For this interview, I met Dennis two hours before a gig we did together. The gig was downtown at a jazz club called Sambuca's, so we decided to have this interview at Houston's premier Vietnamies restaurant called Kim Son.

I began by commenting to Dennis that he has an element of beauty in his playing that I’ve not heard anywhere else. My first question to him was about this beauty. Does he actually think about the things that contribute to that beauty or is it something on a more subconscious level?

Dennis:

I think that probably how anybody plays, it's not anything conscious at the time but rather shaped by your over all philosophy. The music that you feel should be in a solo. And also, it's just by your personal experiences. And sometimes by the context. Frequently by the context. 

One thing I don't like is I don't like effects. One of the most beautiful players, to me, of all, is Art Farmer. And Miles too, but check it out. Miles uses a whole lot of expressive effects. He doesn’t use a lot of vibrato, but half valves, bending notes, fall offs and things like that. But if you listen to Art Farmer, there’s absolutely no expression there what so ever. It’s just as dry as can be. But the beauty is in his ideas. I think of him as one of the most lyrical players of all and there’s a temptation to even think of him as a very expressive player, but really he’s not. In the way he plays the instrument, he isn’t at all.

So, things that go into making up a style a lot of times involve effects. And the effects that go into making a commercial trumpet player, I can’t really do that. I don’t even like doing that. I don’t feel right doing effects of any kind. I just don’t. It’s just not me. So, when I do that kind of playing, I just try to concentrate on being clear and concise, play notes on chords that you might consider to be pretty notes, lyrical notes; ninths, elevenths, thirteenths. You know, I never land on a root. I always land on a ninth or a major seventh instead. Something like that. 

I think it’s more of a timing thing than anything else. 

Eddie:

You mean, when you’re actually playing, that’s what you think about?

Dennis:

Not really, but I try to feel that. 

I had a composition teacher in college (Dr. John Butler) who stressed form, over and over and over. We had private composition lessons. I was very weak harmonically. I didn’t have command over any harmonic idiom. But he didn’t stress any kind of idiom. He didn’t care if you wrote in the baroque style or if you used serial technique. He approached everything the same way, which was a matter of form. He told me once when we were walking down the hall one day, talking, and he said, "There’s no such thing as an unmusical sound. The key is in the organization. That’s all music is, is organized sound." So this big light lit up and I thought, "I’ve gotta remember that!!!". 

Eddie:

Was Fisher Tull there while you were there?

Dennis:

Yes.

I played in his brass choir for a semester and he conducted a musical one year and I played in that. And I took an ear training coarse, an elective. 

One of the most memorable things was we had a thing called the "Grand Chorus". Every music major in the campus had to sing in the grand chorus and we did a concert every semester. We did some interesting music; some Bruckner, Ralph Vaughn Williams and some other things like that. One of the most  enjoyable one’s was when one year, for some strange reason, he (Fisher Tull) conducted the Grand Chorus and we did Arthur Honegger’s "Le Roi David". Boy, that was a gas!!

You know, it was just a gas working with him. He was just so smart.

You pick up things from those guys you don’t even remember. There are things that just go into shaping you. 

I like to play free music. But I like the way my friends and I did it in New York, the way Joe Levano does it, for example. Instead of playing atonally, he played more chromatically. He’s just changing keys all the time. There was also a guy named Billy Drewes who played with us who was a sax player. He played rather atonally. Boy, he invented some things that were just startling. He played with a lot of chops, but still, the main thing is guys were devoid of effects. It was all musical ideas. 

Eddie:

Those guys also?

Dennis:

Yeah, there was no effects to it. It was all musical ideas. 

So we had a large free ensemble the guitar player put together; it was soprano, clarinet, flute, oboe, trumpet and acoustic guitar. We played a whole bunch of sessions around there. Played a couple of mall concerts and some things. Did a concert at Berkley and they added some people to it. It was a free band but we were not playing sounds. A lot of guys play sounds and effects, but it was notes. What it was…it was free counterpoint, really. It was a-rhythmical. It was  a-harmonic. It was really JUST counterpoint. Even the guitar player didn’t really play harmonies. He played lines and stuff. 

Eddie:

Wow, that’s very interesting.

Dennis:

My whole concept of playing really, I’d say, boils down to those two things; no effects for the sake of effects and form. Even in the absence of form there can be form. I find beauty in things that aren’t lyrical. When it comes to jazz, I like dissonance. I like rhythm above all. 

Eddie:

I’ll never forget the time when it finally dawned on me what you were doing differently, rhythmically, that I was trying to hear myself. I determined that you do more triplets than anyone I know. And I remember asking you, because the only person I had heard do a lot of triplets was on my dad’s old Woody Herman albums and I asked you if that had anything to do with it, since you were in his (Woody Herman’s) band. But I think you said that that wasn’t it. 

Dennis:

I don’t think so. I don’t really know where it came from but I worked on that. 

Eddie:

Oh, you did?

Dennis:

It’s something I heard in all of my listening that grabbed my imagination. I like to take triplets and group them into quartuplets. 

[Here Dennis scat sings a line based on four note patterns over a triplet feel while snapping the pulse with his fingers.]

You could almost go into a whole other tempo. You can get lost really easy. [We laugh]

Eddie:

I don’t know if I’ve told you this yet, but I’ve transcribed about ten of your solos.

Dennis:

Good God!!! I didn’t think I had that many recorded that I’d consider worthy of transcribing. 

Eddie:

Well, I’ve transcribed just about everything I’ve got of yours and I’ve noticed triplets of all kinds, everywhere; quarter-note triplets, half-note triplets, sixteenths, eighths. I really think your the only person that I’ve ever heard do that. And it really adds a smoothness to your playing. 

Dennis:

I never thought of that.

Eddie:

I’m not saying that’s what you’re thinking about. 

Dennis:

Obviously, it’s what I’m feeling. That’s interesting. 

The next question I had for Dennis was about listening. Some of my favorite CDs in my collection are recordings he recommended. So I asked him who he’s been listening to. His reply was:

"Lately, I’ve checked out some of the newer players, because I need to know about them."

Then he goes on to describe the differences between the newer players and the earlier players. He said:

"They’re (the newer players) marvelous trumpet players, God they’re wonderful trumpet players, just wonderful trumpet players."

"It’s just, I don’t know,  it just doesn’t sound as natural with them as it does with those other guys. Freddie, Lee, Booker, Miles, Clifford, Dizzy, those guys just sound so natural. You know they practiced their asses off, but still, it sounds like a natural thing to them. They ‘had it’ and they practiced to get better. Some of the new players sound like they practiced to get it and then practiced to get better."

With that, I asked Dennis who he thinks we should listen to.

Dennis:

I feel like it’s better for you to know the whole tradition of jazz. I think you need to have at least a [passing] acquaintance with all the great players. There are some people who aren’t that way. They’ll focus on a certain thing and if someone else is a great player, they’ll blow him off. So I think you really need to know at least the best albums of all the great players. I don’t have fifteen Bill Evans albums but I think I have the best three or four. I don’t have twenty Trane albums but the one’s I have are just the most wonderful music I ever heard. I don’t have all the Clifford albums, but I have three that I think are better than any of the others I’ve heard.

Eddie:

That’s a great point.

Dennis:

A lot of those guys did their best work on other people’s albums. My favorite Lee Morgan is not on Lee Morgan albums, it’s with other people. And really, that’s pretty much true of Freddie Hubbard, too. My favorite albums by him are with other people.

Eddie:

So how far back - talking about what you’re saying, people should listen to ALL the greats - how far back should they go?

Dennis:

Well, okay. I only go back as far a Bop because that was the beginning of modern jazz. You know, if I think about it, that may be because it was at that point when they stopped using so many effects. I like the purity of Bop. I believe that the players before bop, great players that they were, utilized to much effects to me. Fast, wide vibratos; exaggerated swing feel. You know, that bop players were more pure. Dizzy’s swing feel goes back to an earlier time and Miles’ does too, to a certain degree. And Monk’s does for sure. But there was an absence of effects there. It was about notes.

My next question was about road life. Dennis toured with the Woody Herman band for eight years and lived the life that many trumpet players only dreamed of in those days.

Eddie:

Ten years ago I asked you about "road life" and then we spoke about it again, two years later, and you had two entirely different answers. The first one, you absolutely hated it and the second one you said they were the best times of your life. I know that whenever I contradict myself like that, it means that there’s more to it than just one simple answer. 

Dennis:

Well, yeah, I get the feeling that you might have misunderstood me because I can’t imagine myself saying that I absolutely hated it, ever. But I could get burned out real quick. It was very hard. There were times when you didn’t like it and there were other times when you had just wonderful, wonderful times.

I’m a country boy. My family had never really gone anywhere. I never had a lot of money. I couldn’t go anywhere. It was fascinating to me to see all the places I got to see. Although, when you’re driving through Kansas for a week, or really three weeks through the Midwest and you don’t play anything but small towns, you know, you can’t find a decent place to eat, the hotels aren’t very good, you know, it’ll kick your ass. 

And then there were times when just the physical grind of it would be so hard that we’d just be worn out - and having to play - and still expected to play with a lot of energy - and to try to be creative. There were times when it would really kill you but then every now and then we’d get to do something really cool - and see magnificent sites all over the country.

Then the one thing that I really loved that I swear took a long time to get used to when I -  first of all when I got off of the road and went to New York and then even worst when I came back here -  is the fact that we were citizens of the country and I had friends all over the country. And I would see them, periodically. Now, I’m back in Houston and there’s people I haven’t seen in twenty years that I used to see every two months. I’ve totally lost track of a lot of them. 

Sometimes the music could get to be a grind  because we’d do the same thing night after night after night. It became really difficult when you played the same solo, over and over and over, to NOT play the same solo, over and over and over. 

Eddie:

Did you have time to practice on the road?

Dennis:

You had to make it. You generally had to give something else up. 

The worst thing about the road - the worst thing that could happen would be to get a room next to a trombone player. 

Eddie:

Ha, ha, ha…….

Dennis:

You can stand to hear the other guys practice but the trombone players would drive you crazy.

I have to admit though, I did finally get so burned out that I - you know, one of the hardest things about it was that there was never any privacy. The good thing was that it was like family. But there was never any privacy. I have to admit that I did get so burned out that I took to checking into the hotel and asking to be put somewhere away from the other guys. I did that so I could cool out, take a nap or something. 

We did get a lot of listening done. We sat on that bus and listened to album, after album, after album.

One night - the guys were into different things. Lovano and I always used to the same music so we’d always be plugged into - listening with head phones. No music played on the bus. That was uncool. It was always with head phones. But I remember one time we played a gig in New Jersey, and were going to hit and run in New York City. And I think I hadn’t been on the band long and I hadn’t been in New York City. I couldn’t wait to go, but anyway, we hadn’t been there for a while. I asked one of the guys in Las Vegas who’d been on the band if the band ever got to New York. He said, "oh yeah, that’s where the offices are, they go there all the time." So I went out of the road and it was six months before we got to New York City. So finally, we decided to have a party, on the bus, after the gig, you know, we got through at midnight or one and we got back on the bus and every one says "let’s listen to some music". 

So somebody said, "Okay, let’s listen to this!" Someone else said, "no, no, I don’t want to hear that". 

"Well how about this?"

Somebody else said, "no, no, I don’t want to hear that."

"Okay, well put this on."

"No, you kidding?"

And we’re sitting there - we couldn’t figure out what to listen to that everyone wanted to listen to.

So finally I got real bold. I jumped up and I said, "I have it!!! I have it!!!" 

I didn’t tell them what it was and I reached in - and I had a wonderful cassette of two albums of Charlie Parker. And I put it in. I said "Check this out!!". I turned it on and the whole buss was just like - [facial expression] - it was just a matter of seconds, just hangin’ over the seat, listening harder. It was the one thing that everybody could hear. 

After this, the discussion turned towards the great food we were eating and it wasn’t long before we had to head on out to the gig. I don’t play very many gigs with Dennis, mainly because most of the gigs both of us do only call for one trumpet player. But I can tell you that the times when we are able to play together it is always a treat. I admire and respect Dennis, not only as an influential player in my career but also as a super nice person. I’m glad we had the opportunity to sit and talk shop over dinner. I’m also glad to be able to share that time with you, through my web site.