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223 2 March 1995 Wilson: I guess just, um, as a, as a listener, what do you, when you go to hear music, when you go to hear a jazz performance, what are you . . . do you bring anything to the performance? Do you . . . What, what do you bring to the performance? Jackson: What I bring in is, um—I was talking to Bruce [Barth] about this before , um—like when I was, when I was in school, when I was coming up, you know, I was listening to a lot of funk and a lot of soul, um, a lot British rock music, um, at least in the early part of the ’80s ’cause, you know, I was born like, I was born in 1969. And so, I had all those things, and I was playing in bands and stuff like that, playing guitar. Um, and I didn’t start listening to jazz until I was about fifteen or sixteen. My grandfather brought me Charlie Parker, Charlie Christian, Thelonious Monk, you know. So I started getting into those things then. And, like all throughout college, you know, I was trying to learn how to play and do all this other stuff, so I bring to it basically, like, um, you know, having a bunch of favorite records, a lot of favorite performers, um, you know, like all those ’50s Miles Davis recordings, ’60s Miles Davis recordings, John Coltrane, um, um, and then, you know, Horace Silver, Art Blakey, um, a lot of listening to Duke Ellington and Count Basie. And so basically knowing the history of the music and knowing a lot of performers and also knowing people who are active now. So when I come to a performance, I’m listening to . . . First I’m listening for like the heads for the compositions. If it’s material I don’t know, originals, you know, just listening for the way the compositions are put together, you know. So like when I saw Stephen Scott the other night, he was playing some really heavy compositions, you know. And I dug the fact that he had all these compositions with like all these metric changes, tempo changes, you know, and this other stuff Appendix: Excerpt from an Interview with Steve Wilson 224 | Appendix that worked. You know, it didn’t sound, you know, it didn’t sound, um, like “Okay, well, because I can do this, let me do this,” you know. So that’s the first thing I listen for. And then after that, um, when, um, you know, when the solos start, um, you know, what kinds of note choices are being made, you know, by the person who’s soloing? What’s the bass player doing? What’s the drummer doing? So basically, what’s the whole band situation? I don’t know whether every listener comes in with that. But what I’m really li . . . I’m listening most of the time for like, you know, for the groove, for the interaction between the musicians, um, and, and for the shape of a solo. So that like, um, you know, where does it go? Um, you know, a lot of people start off with short phrases, you know. You know, you start off with short phrases, and you, you sort of play around with them, and then, you know, things get, you know, they get more lyrical, you start to peak, you know, and like the band increases intensity and response, and you know, so that’s the kind of stuff that I listen for to see whether it happens. And if that doesn’t happen, then, you know, what does? And why does it work? Or why doesn’t it work? W: Do you ever get the same, um, the same feelings from some of these performances that you would get, say, from, um, some of the other types of music that you would listen to? You know, like some of the old funk stuff, you know, or some other kind of . . . In other words, are you moved in the same way? J: Yeah, actually that’s, that’s a really good question because, um, this, um, a friend of mine called me yesterday ’cause she’s been listening to, um, to the, to 98.7 Kiss[-FM] a lot lately . . . W: So have I. J: Yeah, and they’re playing all the old stuff on there. And she said, you know, she said, “I heard this...

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