beginnings as a bass player or as a musician where you were a little kid and your mom had a piano at home or you were picking up songs you know playing them by ear ok well i came from a musical house only there was always tunes so there was always going on musical in my house either my mother playing or recordings or the radio so as a as a young kid i first got interested in playing the guitar w actually first got interested in playing the trumpet and it didn't last too long then i was interested in playing guitar and i took guitar lessons and learned a bunch on my own i also started listening to some jazz recordings and especially trying to sit down at the piano and just sort of pick out by ear the melodies that were being played and i used to like the modern jazz quartet and especially their pianist john l who typically played in a very simple style that my ear could follow and try to pick out those tunes on the piano but not not seriously i studied classical guitar in high school and when i went away to away to college i went to the university of chicago and a friend of mine had a who was a year older than me from my high school who was a really good guitar player had gone there  so i went and joined him there and he had a blues band and so i started playing with that playing rhythm acoustic twelve string guitar which is totally inappropriate for chicago blues band but there you have it and one during vacation during spring break break we had some gigs booked and the bass player wanted to go to colorado to go skiing and the band said well we have these gigs and he said well i'm going anyway we need a bass player you need a bass player so i looked at his and his equipment then the bass had four strings and it was the same four strings  the bottom of the guitar and so i thought how hard can this be so i pick up the bass and i started playing and i played those gigs and the other gigs at the band had even when the other bass player came back so that's kind of how i got started playing and i got started playing blues in chicago and chicago of course is kind of the home of the blues so this was during the sixty's and there were a lot of great players w playing just a couple miles from where the university was in on the south side people like junior wells buddy guy muddy waters howlin wolf and i got to play with some of those guys so that was sort of my then i moved to west virginia for about four years and no jazz there are no blues but they have bluegrass and old time music and i had sort of given up music at that point i wanted to be kind of a self sufficient farmer at that point but some musicians in the area local musicians approached me because they needed a bass player and i had actually played in a bluegrass band in chicago but it was playing electric bass bass guitar i'd never played bass like this stand up bass so they said to me well can you can you play bass can you play bass bluegrass space and i said sure i was right and well they  said can you play i mean play the upright bass before and i sort of gulped and swallowed hard and said yes even though i never had but i think there'd four strings just like a bass get towards it just turned out the other way and and off you go so i said sure and so they brought me a bass and i quickly learned how to play a little bit and i ended up playing a number of gigs with them it's just the morris brothers and west virginia travel all over guitarist great blues player great jazz player great bluegrass folk just any any style of guitar you could think of paul is a master of and i actually met  paul in chicago when i was in school there we played in a band together for a while one of the first bands that he played with there and we kept in touch over the years i played with and back in vermont in my first vermont student and after coming back again from west virginia we begin playing again in various various groups and sort of playing as a as a duo playing jazz which was a jazz group that played every tuesday night at sneakers and went to ski for eleven years that's some great musicians like dave cripple and joey somerville james harvey played with that group jeff to play with him now and then when the regular bass player couldn't play and that was always a big thrill to play with big joe but i have been playing together since college forty years and counting so he asked me to play on a couple of the tunes on his cd and one of the tunes misbehavin also features a fiddle player named joel smirnoff who is a incredibly good classical musician classical fiddle player also plays every other style of music on fiddle and just about any instrument he's one of these musical geniuses that you give him an instrument and in half an hour he's better than you are on it but he played for a long time with the julliard string quartet and he went to college in chicago with myself and paul and so the tune  know somewhat i don't at all consider myself either an authority or a master of cuban music or other latin styles but i know a little about it back when i was growing up in new york city i lived on the edges of spanish harlem so i would hear the music you know kind of coming out of people's radios didn't pay too much attention to it when i started playing jazz  i started playing some latin styles but there's a sort of sub style of jazz that is goes under the generic term the latin and what it is is sort of an amalgam of brazilian and cuban styles sort of a mishmash of it that sort of takes a little bit of all of it but doesn't play either the cuban or the brazilian styles really authentically so i learned that as part of my education as a jazz player but it wasn't really aware of those differences until i actually started teaching courses on music and i taught a course called music of the americas that focused on various styles of south american music and i part of the course was on brazilian music and on cuban music so that's when i really started to get tuned into the differences in the different rhythmic emphasis the different ways of playing bass  like that so as a bass player usually there's no sort of doing a bass and a jazz band so when i'm trying to play in a real samba style i'll try to try to mimic the sounds of this now when you get to cuba and there are a lot of different styles a lot of different ways of playing but the we're talking about before the basic style which really something that a nation i do play it on that i might be mixing my metaphors there a little bit i'm not sure if it fourth beat of the measure instead of the first beat of the next measure so you make it early and it's very hard as a north american musician to wrap your head around that because you're always trying to make the chord changes on the first beat or on the third beat but making on the fourth beat make it early it's kind of really yet to do a little internal brain surgery to do that but that's really crucial to giving the music that kind of the kind of sway that cuban music has and that's what i was trying to do on that too i would like you to make a comment about the great cradle of musician we have here in the with phantom band that i'm also bobbing players here around food and  and of course he can play bass really well i can play mandolin that also not quite fair to switch but he's a he's a great bass player he also plays guitar mandolin all different kinds of mandolin  i don't know laili all kinds of he plays many many beautiful you are watching the great album too i really love it you know the dance element group dan is a trombone player and first of all having a trombone leading a group is unusual in and of itself dan is a great drummer player  and the music there is a combination of some of his original through some jazz standards and some tunes which are original that are a little freer than most  some of the other jazz that i play there's some through his on there that we really just improvised the structure of the tune right in the studio as we were playing it just listening to each other and reacting without sort of pre planning it and without talking about it so the the album combine some of that with some more traditional straight ahead jazz playing there are some great players on that place in the i've also both of them perform on this on this album joe lovano is one of the one of the most famous tenor players in the world so there's there's a lot of musical pedigree there and you have a lot of students in the johnson s blues and i also teach a course on new orleans new orleans music and many of the students to take my course some of the students are musicians but a lot of them are non musicians and i really enjoy teaching non musicians especially because i enjoy introducing them to a new way of looking at music a new way of listening to music and i'm especially interested in interaction music and culture music today is so available to everybody you click a mouse and you can you can hear any style of music and hear anybody playing any style of music which is great makes it very accessible it means you can listen to anything you want whenever you want the downside of that in my opinion is that most people have a very superficial understanding of the mechanics of music but also especially of the meaning of music and music always has a meaning it always is a reflection of a culture that the culture that birthed it that supports it and when music is so excessive oh i don't think there's much of an incentive to investigate i think you listen to some music all that sounds good let me don't look underneath very much so my courses focus on the music itself but also its connection to the meaning of the music a few weeks ago you were playing at the ver know that was another project that i was involved in i was led by another english professor johnson told me we was also a trombone player and it was kind of bringing jazz and poetry together and similar to some of the things on the dance overman album the musicians would try to improvise a company ment's to the to the poems reacting of come in and out to play it but we did do a recording session at the back door and man period which is yes no longer in existence sadly we did a live recording there of a number of really good musicians were on that time cleary keyboard player generate all get out layering drums steve blair was playing guitar i was playing bass and several horn players tony and i think then songs on that too and one of the poems was recited by neil are actually several of them were and we said i think i one of them we played an actual jazz tune behind what he was saying and another one  of improvise something so that was an interesting project and you know in some ways it's a little scary because you never sure how it's going to come out and sometimes it's a train wreck and sometimes it's subli who are spreading their voice over the when he was probably about thirteen years old and i gave him some lessons and he certainly learned well he's fabulous bass player and we have also been following some of the educators legle especially the burlington this call your first year where you have been playing for many years i think is one of the best in the world discovery jazz festival is a wonderful festival they get world class talent they hire a lot of remonde local talent lots of venues to play and they showcase various vermont musicians often james harvey i know it's been showcased and once the speakers b gig let's say next friday i'm playing at the marriott with a guitar player from new york city named george pettit who used to live up here and