Victor Goines and Herlin Riley to Perform at the McPike Park Sessions on August 8th: Rooted in the Jazz Sounds of New Orleans
Part 2 of 2
By Jonathan Gramling
Victor Goines and Herlin Riley are brothers bonded in the spirit, the rhythms of and the love for New Orleans jazz. While both of them were born and raised in New Orleans, they have taken different — yet complimentary paths — to reach the heights of their profession. Both have performed with the Wynton Marsalis Sextet at Jazz at Lincoln Center.
And while both teach at Northwestern University in jazz studies — Goines is the director — both emphasize that a formal education in jazz only takes one so far. It is the playing in a cauldron of jazz like New Orleans that the spirit and soul of jazz are absorbed. It is an almost osmosis of jazz delivered from elder to student through the performance of jazz.
Victor Goines
Herlin Riley
“The wonderful thing about being with the Wynton Marsalis Sextet outside of playing some great music with some great musicians was the education we got from each other, as musicians and as men,” Goines said. “We learned to occupy the same space together, not only musically, but also we learned to respect each other. We learned to disagree with each other. We learned to agree with each other. The music became a vehicle for education for us. So when I think about Herlin Riley and I think about his uncle, David Lastie, who was a great tenor player. I remember his song was Canadian Sunset. He was coming out of the world of Gene Hammonds. I met Gene Hammonds through David Lastie. He played every week at a club called Jerry’s. For whatever the reason was, he allowed me to sit in with him every weekend. I cannot imagine why he would let me sit in with him because I knew I was bad. But he let me play every weekend with him. I used to go to Tyler’s Beer Garden up on Magazine Street. Two nights a week, Earl Turbinton had one night with Mike Pellera and Ken Singleton and his band. And the other night would be Ellis Marsalis. All of those musicians let me sit in with them. Ms. Germaine Bazzle, our First Lady of Jazz, she let me sit in with her. Alvin ‘Red’ Tyler was a great piano player. He played with Fats Domino. He let me sit in with him. I played with Ruth Brown.”
Riley also gave homage to the jazz greats who came before him.
“New Orleans is a very, very welcoming, embracive kind of culture and atmosphere,” Riley said. “I experienced the same thing and most guys who live here in New Orleans experience the same thing of being able to go on other people’s bandstands and sit in and play with a welcoming spirit. They welcome you to the bandstand and allow you to play. That’s another thing that the great Ellis Marsalis did constantly. I worked with him just prior to his passing at a club here in New Orleans called Snug Harbor. Every Friday night, if I wasn’t playing with him, his son Jason Marsalis was playing with him. At the end of the set, he would often allow younger musicians to come and play with him to develop. And that is part of the culture here in New Orleans. We allow younger musicians to come and develop. The music is bigger than the individual. The way that I look at this music, the music is the queen bee. The art of jazz is the queen bee. And we the players and educators are the workers. We are the workers who keep the bee alive. And so the only way that we can do that is to allow the younger people to come and share the bandstand to keep perpetuating the energy and keep sharing the information that we have.”
However, the education didn’t end in New Orleans for there were jazz greats based all across America.
“When I think about Ellis Marsalis, I hate to even mention them in a comparison to someone else who obviously is one of the great drummers of all time who is Art Blakely in the Jazz Messengers,” Goines said. “And if you were young and you wanted to play, you sought out Art Blakely. And if you were young and you wanted to play in New Orleans, you sought out Ellis Marsalis. And you found Danny Barker too. There just isn’t enough time to mention everyone. I just want to say one last thing about the education thing. To me philosophically, education is about finding people who do what you want to do. When I think about Herlin Riley as an educator, I think about him as a master drummer. If you want to be a carpenter many, many centuries ago, you didn’t go to school. You sat in the presence of a carpenter, a master carpenter. And you watched him or her — it was primarily male dominated — chisel on a piece of wood for hours at a time and weeks and maybe even years and hope that they give you the chance to actually work on your own piece of wood. Guess what, Herlin Riley and so many other of the people we mentioned, drummers, pianists, vocalists, clarinetists, all of that who I believe are the important parts of what education is about.”
But jazz somehow comes back to New Orleans, which Goines called the graduate school of jazz.
“When we come together, we want to use the term ‘swing time’ generically, but it’s not always going to be the chink-a-ling, chink-a-ling kind of groove,” Goines said. “John Lewis would always say the suggestion of swing. And the suggestion of swing suggests that people come together to be in synch with each other.”
And like those before them, Victor Goines and Herlin Riley are ensuring that the soul and spirit of jazz is passed on to the next generation and the generation after that. Jazz is not contained on a piece of paper. It is written in the souls of the musicians who play it.