Julian Priester: March 2025

1961 Max Fights Julian on Stage in Philly

1960 We Insist! Record Date with Max Roach

1958 Blues for Dracula Record Date with Philly Joe Jones

1958 On the Road with Dinah Washington and Eddie Chamblee

1955 Julian's Tunes First Recorded

1956 Return to New York on the Liberte

1956 In Europe with Lionel Hampton

1956 On the Isle de France with Lionel Hampton

1955 The Arkestra at Parkway Ballroom

Acox, Clarence
Alexander, Aaron
Barilleau, Lary
Bennington, Jimmy
Blakey, Art
Bloom, Jane Ira
Blount, Herman (Sun Ra)
Braxton, Anthony
Brown, Ruth
Butler, Buddy
Byrd, Donald
Carter, Daniel
Chamblee, Eddie
Charles, Ray
Clayton, Jay
Clement, Dawn
Cobham, Billy
Coltrane, John
Cowell, Stanley
Ellington, Duke
Escovedo, Pete
Fahling, Hans
Ferguson, Maynard
Friesen, David
Garland, Red
Garrett, Kenny
Gasca, Luis
Grannelli, Jerry
Graye, Carolyn
Griffin, Johnny
Gruntz, George
Hancock, Herbie
Haney, David
Harper, Billy
Henderson, Eddie
Henderson, Joe
Hill, Andrew
Holland, Dave
Horvitz, Wayne
Hubbard, Freddie
Humphrey, Bobbi
Jones, Eugene
Jones, Philly Joe
Jones, Thad & Mel Lewis
Jordan, Clifford
Kang, Eyvind
Lawrence, Azar
Lincoln, Abbey
Little, Booker
Mann, Herbie
Mitchell, Blue
Morgan, Lee
Olatunji, Babatunde
Ousley, Harold
Palmieri, Eddie
Pearson, Duke
Price, Lloyd
Reed, Mike
Rivers, Sam
Roach, Max
Rucker, Paul
Schutze, Paul
Simon, Ralph
Smith, Johnny “Hammond”
Smith, Lonnie
Stewart, Billy
Summers, Bill
Sunn O)))
Tjader, Cal
Turrentine, Stanley
Turrentine, Tommy
Tyner, McCoy
Wallace, Wayne
Washington, Dinah
Workman, Reggie
Youngblood, Allen

Julian Priester Timeline

1935 Born in Chicago on June 29 to Reverend Lucius Harper Priester and teacher Colelia Smith, 4 brothers, 1 sister.

1942 Excited by brother playing piano with friends and listening to bebop records. Starts taking piano lessons.

1951-54 Attends Dusable high school under Captain Walter Henri Dyett. Starts playing euphonium and trombone. Writes a blues for concert band.

1953 Plays gigs with Charles Davis, Muhal Richard Abrams. Sits in with Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley. Plays in house band at Club DeLisa.

1953-56 Works with Sun Ra in Chicago and records several Priester originals.

1956-57 Tours Europe with Lionel Hampton.

1957-58 Tours US with Dinah Washington and writes for band.

1958 Moves to NY. Works in shipping at Riverside Records (Philly Joe Jones, Chet Baker). Records with Philly Joe on Blues for Dracula (Nat Adderley, Johnny Griffin, Tommy Flanagan, Jimmy Garrison)

1959 Joins Max Roach in Pittsburgh (Stanley and Tommy Turrentine).

1960 Records Keep Swinging (Jimmy Heath, Tommy Flanagan, Sam Jones, Elvin Jones) and Spiritsville (Walter Benton, Charles Davis, McCoy Tyner, Sam Jones, Art Taylor). Records Freedom Now Suite (Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln, Booker Little, Walter Benton, Colman Hawkins, Jimmy Schenk).

1961 Julian leaves Max after fight at Pep’s Showboat in Philadelphia. Records in large ensemble on John Coltrane’s Africa Brass.

1962 Joins Slide Hampton with Lloyd Price.

1963 Joins Ray Charles. Writes arrangements for Ray and Lloyd.

1964 Rejoins Max. Fights with Max on Abbey’s birthday and leaves band.

1965 Returns to Chicago for divorce. Performs with Muhal Richard Abrams and poet David Moore.

1965-76 Records as sideman on Atlantic, Blue Note, and other labels.

1968 Joins Art Blakey (Billy Harper, Bill Hardman, Ronnie Mathews, Lawrence Evans). Leaves after pay conflict.

1968-70 Works in pit orchestra at Schubert Theater for Promises, Promises.

1969 Subs at recording session with Duke Ellington. Tours Europe with Thad Jones/Mel Lewis.

1970 Resigns from Shubert gig to tour Far East with Ellington. Records New Orleans Suite. Starts band with Gary Bartz, Cecil McBee, Ronnie Matthews.

1970-73 Tours with Mwandishi (Herbie Hancock, Bennie Maupin, Eddie Henderson, Buster Williams, Billy Hart).

1973 Moves to San Francisco.

1974 Records Love, Love (Hadley Caliman, Ron McClure, Eric Gravatt, Bill Conners, Patrick Gleeson).

1976 Marries Jaymi Goodenough (Nashira).

1977 Adebayo born. Records Polarization (Ron Stallings, Ray Obiedo, Curtis Clark, Heshima Mark Williams, Augusta Lee Collins).

1979 Records Strike Up the Band with Red Garland (George Coleman, Ron Carter, Ben Riley). Joins Cornish (Jerry Grannelli, Gary Peacock, Jay Clayton).

1979-85 Writes for Composers and Improvisors Orchestra with Jim Knapp.

1982 Atuanya born.

1982-87 Tours with Dave Holland.

1988 King County Arts Commission grant to record Quartett (Jerry Grannelli, Gary Peacock, Jay Clayton).

1990 Records with Sam Rivers

1995 Diagnosis of liver disease. Gets transplants in 1995, 2000, and 2013.

2002 Records in Deep End Dance with Priester’s Cue (Dawn Clement, Byron Vannoy, Geoff Harper).

2011 Retires from Cornish which awards Honorary Doctorate

2021 Artist in residence at Seattle Jazz Fellowship

Julian Priester 2003 Interview From Cadence Magazine

Printed with permission from Cadence Magazine (January 2005 issue)

Recorded January 29, 2003

11,943 words

Nicholas Hoffman: Where were you born and when?

Julian Priester: I was born in Chicago in 1935. My father was a Reverend. He was a Baptist Minister, Lucius Harper Priester. My mother was a schoolteacher. They were both from South Carolina and met at college there. They migrated to Chicago in the mid-to-late twenties. Raised six children. I was the youngest of the six. I had four brothers and a sister.

And one of my brothers, who was actually twice removed from me, was a jazz fan. He played piano and a few of his friends used to come over to the house and rehearse. I was perhaps seven years old, maybe eight, not too much older than that. That was my first exposure to jazz. They would rehearse and then when they would becoming excited by music was demonstrated in front of me and I was in awe of this, and they would insist on moving the needle back to the beginning of the solo so they could hear the solo again. This would go on and on.

I was also fascinated by the names of the players they were listening to, names like Bird, Monk, Hawk, Diz. It was different for me. It was intriguing. Not that I was looking at it like it was science fiction, but it was so different from anything that I was familiar with that I was just drawn into it.

I used to sit at the piano after they finished rehearsing or were taking a break. I would sort of mimic what they had been doing. During that time Boogie Woogie was the craze. Boogie Woogie is sort of like a simple Blues form with the rolling bass line and it was easy for me to pick up. So, I would sit at the piano and play the Boogie Woogie bass line and then with my right had play the little things. I hear Dr. John doing the same thing today (laughs). Anyway, that was my first introduction to jazz.

N.H.: Were you playing trombone before you got to high school?

J.P.: No.

N.H.: You went to DuSable High School where the legendary Walter Dyett was the band director.

J.P.: Yes, yes. Because of my interest in music my parents arranged for me to have piano lessons and so I studied the piano. My ear kept getting in the way though. As a child I developed such a good ear I could go to the piano and play things that I had heard my brother play. So, when I started having lessons, I would take my lessons over to my cousin who also had studied piano and was further advanced and have her play my lesson for me and I’d memorize it just from hearing her play it. I was cheating. I got away with it. Well, I thought I was getting away with it.

One day she asked me to play this song and she put a piece of music in front of me on the piano. And I sat there and played the song that she had asked me to play but she tricked me. The piece of music she had put up on the piano was a different piece of music. And I’m looking at it not really reading it, not really paying any attention to title or notes or anything. I’m playing something totally different. So, she discovered and told my parents about it too. That was the crushing blow, because they had spent all this money for me to play the piano, and here I am pulling tricks on people. It was that incident that convinced me that I should take it serious—more serious than I had. It always came so easy for me so I just kind of took it for granted.

So, when I got to high school I wanted to play in the band. The band was organized. You were required to play in the concert band, you were required to play in the marching band for football games and various other things, parades, special performances during the summer months. Captain Dyett and the school would put on something like a Broadway type show; it was like a variety show. They would get talented kids to come and sing, dance, and do comedy routines. One of them, if I remember correctly, was Oklahoma.

So, I played in the orchestra. It was fun. It was fun doing that except that in the marching band, they handed me an instrument called a glockenspiel. And I hated that instrument. The sound of it was so harsh and metallic. It was designed like the keys on a piano. It was a metal instrument you played with mallets. I forget if they were metal or wood. The sound that they produced was too harsh for my sensibilities.

So, I told Captain Dyett that, “I wanted to play a horn rather than the piano.” I didn’t know what horn I wanted to play. It came to mind that one of my brothers played the trumpet in the army. So, I told Captain Dyett, “Trumpet.”

There were too many students playing trumpet already so there was no opening in the orchestra for a trumpet player. So, he handed me this instrument called baritone horn. It’s a horn that you see in Salvation Army bands and some of the European marching bands. It works in the orchestra. Beautiful sounding, very warm and full-bodied sound. I like the sound of that instrument, so I was very comfortable.

But I also wanted to play in the jazz band and there is no precedent for a baritone horn player in jazz. All the records that I listened to there was no baritone horn; there was a trombone player in jazz. And the coincidence is that the same mouthpiece that is used on the baritone horn is also used on the trombone, so that’s what led me to the trombone. It wasn’t like by choice I asked to play the trombone. It was just a coincidence. Couldn’t play the trumpet because there was no opportunity, no situation available and the baritone came into my hands because it had the same fingering system as the trumpet. That was the motivation for me playing the baritone horn and then the next step was to the trombone. That’s how that came about.

I already knew how to read from studying the piano. I know both treble clef and bass clef, so I was very comfortable. I learned the positions in about three weeks and moved right into the jazz band because all the rest of the information I needed to have to play in the jazz band I had already accumulated from my early experiences with my brother. So, things were moving quite fast for me.

N.H.: Who were some of your contemporaries in the jazz band?

J.P.: Charles Davis, baritone saxophone, Richard Davis the bass player. But Richard was in the upper class when I came to DuSable; Richard was in his third or fourth year at that time getting ready to graduate.

N.H.: Von Freeman, Gene Ammons, Johnny Griffin were all gone from DuSable by then?

J.P.: They were all done by then, yeah.

N.H.: Benny Green?

HP: All those guys were done. They were older than I am.

N.H.: Clifford Jordan?

J.P.: Clifford Jordan was around the same age but still older. He went through the school and came out before I was there. I met Clifford after I graduated from DuSable. We became very good friends. Richard Evans the bass player was a classmate of mine, a contemporary of mine.

N.H.: John Gilmore?

J.P.: John Gilmore. I don’t remember him from DuSable. John is also older than I am, so he would’ve gone through before me. I was very young, you know.

N.H.: It was an amazing school.

J.P.: Yes, yes!

Well, Walter Dyett was a disciplinarian. “If you want to do this, this is what you have to do. If you don’t want to do this don’t waste my time.”

It worked for him. He was merciless. If you wanted to do this you had to practice your horn two or three hours a day, and you come back in there you have to demonstrate that you’ve been practicing and perform with confidence that goes along with knowing your instrument.

He pulled something on me. I can’t quite figure it out. He must have sensed that I was getting too cocky or something. We were preparing for a concert, semi-classical for the concert band. I was still playing the baritone horn in the concert band even though I was playing trombone in the jazz orchestra. He came to me at one of the rehearsals. I had this solo, I think it was the thing from “Romeo and Juliet,” a beautiful baritone horn solo, a gorgeous solo. I could play the thing no problem but just by the fact that he came and stood beside me and put his hand on my shoulder, he’s touching me you know. I fell apart. Because the more nervous I got the tighter his grip became. I just fell apart. Disintegrated right there. (laughter)

Another lesson, you know? Don’t be too cocky. You too can fall apart. That was a wonderful experience. I still appreciate Walter Dyett for that lesson. And the many lessons, not just that one, that he provided me with.

N.H.: You were playing gigs before you were out of high school?

J.P.: Yes. Charles Davis and Muhal Richard Abrams and I and a few other wonderful players, we formed groups and promoted concerts. There was a community center called Lincoln Center and they had an auditorium there, very inexpensive to rent. We would rent that auditorium. We didn’t know very much about promoting or anything like that so we would spread the word around that we were going to have this concert. We would rehearse for it and write music for it and get everything prepared and ready to go except that nobody knew we were going to do it except us! (laughter)

But, still, it was good experience. We learned a lot by doing that; sort of the ins and outs of the music “business.” At that time, we just loved to play, and we would play anytime at the drop of a hat for free. This was like early fifties, very early fifties, ’51, ’52, ’53.

I graduated in ’53 and the whole music scene in Chicago was available for me then. I would go to the West Side of Chicago, because I lived on the South Side, where Muddy Waters and Bo Diddley and those guys were working in clubs over there.

At first, I was just sitting in. They liked what I was doing and would give me a few dollars here and there, so I started making it a pretty steady thing. Not only could I go and play, because I loved to play, but I could make a couple dollars at the same time. That lasted not long, but it was a good experience.

And I did some other odd jobs, working with orchestras, playing shows. The Club DeLisa was a cabaret that would bring in big time performers such as the likes of Joe Williams. I was in the house band. It was on 55th and State.

It was about the same time that Charles Davis asked if I’d be interested in rehearsing with Sun Ra. Sun Ra had a band that rehearsed seven days a week. It was unusual because Sun Ra would dictate the music, and then when it came time to tell us to solo, he would just point to one of us and say, “Solo.” Hey. (laughs) Solo? Where are the chords? Where’s the music? What solo? I got no solos [written in my part].

We had to develop an ear for just listening. Just play what you hear, play to what you hear. At the time I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I was game, and I was courageous, and I made a good effort at responding to whatever the situation dictated and learning to somehow get music out of those situations.

Everybody started doing the same thing. John Gilmore was doing it. Pat Patrick was doing it. Charles Davis was doing it, being the substitute for Pat Patrick. For a while Charles Davis was the primary baritone saxophone player in the band. Pat had for some reason went off doing something else. It was a wonderful experience.

I didn’t realize how wonderful until years later because it prepared me to respond to situations where there was little or no music there. You had to make the music happen. That was invaluable in terms of the lessons that he taught me and the skills that I gained as a result of that experience. They still are with me and are inspiring when I call upon those skills today to produce music.

At some point they would call it avant-garde and at some point, the term “free music” has been bantered about, but I’m here to tell you that it’s not free. There’s order there, there’s form, and there’s harmony, there’s melody, it’s just not predetermined. You have to open up your ears and be able to recognize it when you hear it and then respond to it. That’s what I learned when I was working with Sun Ra.

N.H.: How long were you with Sun Ra?

J.P.: Up till ’56… so three or four years. I left Sun Ra and Chicago in 1956.

Richard Evans, the bass player I mentioned earlier, my high school buddy, at the time was working with Lionel Hampton and there was an opening for a trombone player in Hampton’s orchestra. Richard called me and asked if I’d be interested in doing that. They were getting ready to go to Europe and the New York. That was one of my goals, to get to New York. I would have crawled there if I had to.

So, I joined Lionel Hampton and went to New York and just was in heaven there for a long time. I stayed with Lionel Hampton for almost a year and only left him after I got caught up in a situation. I was asked to stay in New York to two or three weeks. The band was going to Australia and the promoters had set up a deal to save some money because the Stan Kenton Orchestra was also going to Australia. So, what the promoters did, instead of taking each full orchestra they decided to take half of Lionel Hampton’s orchestra and half of Stan Kenton’s orchestra and put them together to make one orchestra and the leaders would take turns.

Well, since I was one of the youngest and newest members of Lionel Hampton’s band, they decided that I should stay in New York. I had not officially moved to New York at that time, so my home was still Chicago.

But they weren’t going to send me back to Chicago. They wanted me to stay in New York in the hotel. So, I told Lionel Hampton that I was going to need a retainer ‘til they get back so I could pay my hotel and eat. And as it turned out, it was decided that they were not going to give me a retainer and I was told that the band would be back in New York in three weeks and if I was still there, I would have a job. Oh well. Thank you. (laughter)

N.H.: Time to go busking on the corner, huh?

J.P.: Yeah, right! But things worked out for me.

N.H.: This is ’56, ’57 by then?

J.P.: Yeah, it was ’57. As it turned out, while I was in Lionel Hampton’s band, the saxophone player—he was the main soloist in the orchestra—his name was Eddie Chamblee. He and Dinah Washington got married. He left the band to go with Dinah Washington and form a band, a road traveling band.

I guess either he heard that I was stranded in New York, or he just took a chance. He called me up and asked me if I’d like to join Dinah Washington’s band. This was like the day after Lionel Hampton had told me that if I was still in New York in three weeks I’d still have a job. So naturally I accepted the offer.

They flew me out to California, and I stared working with Dinah Washington. She had a seven-piece group, four horns and three rhythm.

I recommended Charles Davis to Eddie Chamblee, so he called Charles and Charles came on the band on baritone saxophone. The pianist at first was Sonny Clark. Arthur Edgehill on drums, Jimmy Rowser playing the bass.

Sonny Clark left for some reason. I don’t know if he left voluntarily or was asked to leave, but they found another pianist from Fort Wayne, Indiana. His name was Jack Wilson. Jack came on the band. He was young and enthusiastic and very musical. And so, we had a good time out there on the road. Traveled in Dinah’s Chrysler Imperial.

N.H.: The whole band?

J.P.: The whole band. Except for Dinah and Eddie. They either flew or whatever. There was six… was it six?

N.H.: Seven and the singer, right? Six left?

J.P.: Yeah, six left. Somehow, I only remember five traveling in the car. Three in the front and two in the back, one on each side of the upright bass. (laughter) The bass in the middle and I was on one side and somebody else was on the other side.

But anyway, we toured the United States, the West Coast, the South. Dinah was very popular. That was a good experience for me ‘cause I got a chance to write for the band. There were only four horns, so we had lots of solo space. And Dinah, not only was she a great musician, she played piano and she knew what she was doing. And she knew what we were doing, and she didn’t take any shit. (laughs)

So that lasted a year until Dinah and Eddie got a divorce and she offered me his job. The band was trying to encourage me to go ahead and take the job. I would have taken the job if there hadn’t been strings attached. I was the likely candidate because I wrote music, and I could arrange things and keep the band happening.

But as I said there were certain… how could I put it... benefits that I wasn’t very enthusiastic about having. Mainly because at the time Dinah Washington had this crush on me and so, if I would take the job as leader of the band, I would also be accepting her overtures. So, I decided not to take the job.

N.H.: So, did you stay in the band? Move on?

J.P.: No. I moved on. She disbanded. The band broke up. She went on and did something else. The guys in the band were a little angry with me, but, hey… (laughs)

But it allowed me to make up my mind, because I’d already had a taste of New York, that I was going to move officially to New York. Because all this time I had kind of a home in Chicago.

I left out an important factor that I was married at the time and had two kids. So, I went back to Chicago for a while. Then a local singer in Chicago and another guy who was a jazz fan and had a car, and myself decided we were going to drive to New York, which we did.

The three of us arrived in New York with about fifteen dollars between us. But we went straight to the Five Spot where Johnny Griffin was performing with Thelonious Monk. Johnny and I were close from Chicago days.

Johnny took us home when he got off of work, fixed a wonderful breakfast for us. Thelonious Monk was there, too, so we were sort of in awe of this whole scene. Having breakfast with Monk, Johnny and Monk were just gabbing all over the place talking about this, that, and everything. It was just wonderful, a wonderful experience.

Johnny introduced me to Orrin Keepnews, who was vice president of Riverside Records. So, I got a job. They put me to work in the stockroom packing boxes with records and putting shipping labels on them and shipping them out to various distributors, record stores, whatever. I never looked at the labels. I just slapped it on there and sent it.

Riverside Records was unique in that way because they’d hire musicians to do this. Along with myself, Philly Joe Jones was working there, Chet Baker was working there, Kenny Dorham was working there, and a few others, so I was in good company.

At the same time Johnny was encouraging Orrin Keepnews to record me. First, Johnny asked me to be on one of his records and Orrin Keepnews had an opportunity to hear me play and he liked what I was doing. Orrin Keepnews booked Philly Joe Jones and I up and we recorded a record called Blues for Dracula (Sept. 12, 1958).

As a result, Max Roach heard that record and when Ray Draper, for whatever reason, left Max’s band, Max asked me to fill in in his place. So, I joined the band. Max had George Coleman and Booker Little and Ray Draper performing with him and had recorded Deeds Not Words on the Riverside label.

My second recording for Riverside (July 12, 1960), actually, the subsidiary of Riverside, the Jazzland label, I did a recording with Charles Davis and McCoy Tyner. Walther Benton on tenor saxophone, Charles was playing baritone, Sam Jones was playing bass, and I think it was Elvin Jones playing drums.

There were two of those recordings. The first one was Keep Swinging (Jan. 11, 1960). It was on Riverside. My band consisted of Jimmy Heath on tenor saxophone, Tommy Flanagan on piano, Sam Jones playing the bass, Elvin Jones playing the drums. My band. (laughs) I’m this little kid. It was 1960 so I had to be about 25. I left my real gig down in the shipping department to make this record. (laughter)

N.H.: You joined Max in ’59.

J.P.: Exactly. My first performance was in Pittsburgh and unbeknownst to me there was some tension. I got to Pittsburgh, and we were on stage performing and the next thing I know George Coleman and Max Roach are fighting each other on stage.

N.H.: Physically?

J.P.: Physically. It must have been an argument that was left over from something that happened previously. It came to a head either the first or the second night of our engagement in Pittsburgh. So, George Coleman left, Booker Little left, and Art Davis—who was playing bass with Max at the time—left.

And here I am with Max. We’re the only two there. I don’t know what to do. Max didn’t have money to pay his hotel bill. The club owner fired him, so he didn’t get any income. We were actually stranded. We couldn’t get back to New York.

So, Max made an arrangement with the hotel owners to perform in the restaurant and raise money. That way we could pay our hotel bill and get back to New York. Well, the musicians’ union in Pittsburgh took issue with this arrangement.

N.H.: You had filled out the band with local musicians?

J.P.: Yeah. We filled out the band with Stanley Turrentine, his brother Tommy Turrentine, and a bass player named Bobby Boswell. They had been playing together for the longest time. So, they were very comfortable playing with each other, and it was a simple, easy transition from Booker Little and George Coleman to Stanley and Tommy Turrentine.

And so, we went on from there. The musicians’ union was trying to sue us. They fined each of us $250. When we got back to New York, Max went to the national union and had that fine rescinded.

That was the beginning of a wonderful two-year period with the Turrentine brothers. We toured Europe and we toured the States. Everything was going fine.

N.H.: No piano in that band.

J.P.: No piano at all. Stanley made a decision he wanted to go on his own, which he did. Bobby Boswell, who had left a family back in Pittsburgh, he was homesick, he wanted to go back to Pittsburgh, which he did. I don’t know what inspired Tommy Turrentine to do something else and I’m not even sure what he did, but he didn’t stay.

Booker Little came back in the band along with Eric Dolphy and, on occasion, another sax player from the West Coast, Walter Benton. Max brought Walter to New York and Walter hated New York.

It’s funny. People get to New York, and I guess they’re not used to the atmosphere. It’s a fast pace. So, don’t blink, you know what I’m saying? Walter was hanging out with some unsavory company, and they wound up taking his horn and all of his clothes and pawning that stuff.

So, here is Walter stranded in New York with no horn, no ability to make any money. So, he wrote or called his mother, and she sent him bus fare to go back to California. So, he went back to California and disappeared into the woodwork or whatever.

As a result of that, Booker Little and Eric rejoined the band. By this time Booker Little discovered that he leukemia. And he was getting sicker and sicker to the point where from time to time he had to take off. His hands and feet would swell up. He was in just too much pain. He couldn’t play.

N.H.: That must have been a real difference going from Stanley in the band to Eric Dolphy in the band. Did the material change a lot?

J.P.: We were doing mostly original stuff. Even with Stanley and those guys in the band we were doing mostly original stuff. We weren’t really doing jazz standards. If we didn’t write the material ourselves, other jazz players wrote the material. We did some of Kenny Dorham’s music. And of course, we all wrote. Tommy contributed and Max was also a very prolific composer. So yeah, it changed character, but it was a natural transition. So, Booker came back in the band, and we did some more recordings with that group.

Of course, Abbey Lincoln, you can’t leave her out of the picture. She was there and she played a very important role in creating the music and adding thought and inspiration and purpose to what we were doing. That’s the lesson I learned from Max.

Up until that time I had just been playing at the drop of a hat for the love of playing. I had no political awareness or anything like that. It never entered my mind that there were issues. But with Max and Abbey Lincoln, I discovered that there were issues that needed attention.

Somebody had to express, to make the public aware of these issues. Max was keen to do that, to bring about some kind of social understanding. That was the period when he did the album Freedom Now Suite (Aug./Sept. 1960). We were all together; we did those recordings, one with Coleman Hawkins. Abbey Lincoln was on that one, too. That experience led to Max having a nervous breakdown.

N.H.: This was early sixties?

J.P.: Yeah. I was with Max from late ’59 through ’60 and ’61. I left him in ’62. Went back with him in ’64.

What caused me to leave him was an incident in Philadelphia. We were celebrating Lem Winchester’s birthday. Lem had died as a result of shooting himself playing Russian Roulette.

People actually did stuff like that. I still don’t now why.

We were doing a matinee at Pep’s Show Lounge, and it was a dedication to Lem Winchester. Booker was ill and he couldn’t perform. I don’t know whether it was Booker who called Ted Curson or if it was Max that called Ted Curson, but Ted Curson showed up as a substitute for Booker Little and didn’t know the music, didn’t know the charts, didn’t know anything.

So, we were performing up there and really sounding bad. Max at the time was having some psychological stress.

The situation with Lem Winchester, Lem from Wilmington, Delaware, the same hometown that Clifford Brown was from. It brought back those memories of Clifford Brown. Clifford Brown’s death was devastating for Max. It was just horrible, they had that wonderful group together, Brown/Roach Inc. and Clifford Brown was killed in an accident. It killed the group. And all the hope and expectations for Max that he had for himself.

Anyway, Max had a nervous breakdown. He had been taking Librium to calm himself before this happened. I was unaware at the time. He hadn’t slept in two or three days. His nerves had to be jangled, taking the downers and not being able to sleep on top of it.

I think he was also drinking. He didn’t really drink. He’d just have two beers. So, he had this nervous breakdown. He stopped playing the drums in the middle of the performance and went up to the microphone and started criticizing the band. He was ranting and raving, talking about the band, and the place was full of people.

So, since we weren’t using the piano, they had pushed the piano to the back of the stage. The bar was an oval shaped bar, and the stage was inside the oval. So, I went over to the piano because it was dark over there. I just went over and leaned on the piano in the dark and lit up a cigarette.

At the time I didn’t know why but Max came over to me and punched me in the jaw. BAM! It happened so fast that I didn’t realize what happened. I mean, I knew I had been punched but I didn’t feel anything. I just knew that he had punched me and so I just immediately exited.

I walked off the stage and went back to the dressing groom, packed my horn up, and I was getting ready to go to the bus station to go back to New York. The club owner came in and announced that Max wanted me to stay, that he apologizes.

I said, “Well, if Max is apologizing how come he’s not coming back here to tell me? What are you saying that for?”

So, a few minutes later Max came in and he was tight. He was talking through clenched teeth. He said, “The club owner is going to fire us if we don’t play this next set. I want you to come down and play.” His eyes were glazed over.

So, I said, “Okay.” I figured it would pass.

We get back up on the stand for the next set and in the middle of the first tune I’m playing a solo, my eyes closed, and all of a sudden, I don’t hear any drums anymore. The drums have stopped. I open my eyes and turn around and look and here’s Max climbing over the drums with the same glazed look in his eyes. He’s got anger on his face. Crazed. And he’s coming towards me. (laughs)

This time I didn’t wait for it. I just put my horn down and prepared for it. And so, we tussled, more wrestled than actually punching each other. We rolled around on the stage and knocked the drums off of the stage down into the bar on the floor. They knocked over a whole bunch of whiskey bottles and that pissed the bartender off, so the bartender got into it and he’s hitting Max.

While this was going on the audience was cheering. (laughs)

The headline in the newspaper the next morning read something about a “Barroom Brawl.” We made the headlines. Naturally we got fired.

So, Max called me up about three or four o’clock in the morning and asked me if I could come to go see his psychiatrist. So, I did and that’s when I found out what really happened.

Max’s motivation for attacking me was that he knew I wouldn’t hurt him. He was venting, he had this pent-up anxiety and anger. He couldn’t contain it, so he vented, taking it out on me. So, I understood that.

Also, I found out that he has a physical condition, his body does not process alcohol like normal people. We drink alcohol and a day or two later it’s out of our system. With Max it lingers. So, if he drinks a beer today and tomorrow drinks another bottle of beer, for him it’s like drinking two bottles of beer back-to-back. And he had been drinking beers prior to this engagement so between the beers and the Librium…

Max and I remained friends after that. I left the band.

N.H.: Was that around the time you made the Hubcap record?

J.P.: No. I made the Hubcap record later.

Actually, I left the band, didn’t know what to do.

I got an offer to go on the road with Slide Hampton, who was working with Lloyd Price at the time, so I did. I worked with Lloyd Price for a while until the work fizzled out. The next year, 1963, I went with Ray Charles’ band for a year.

All this time I’m still writing, arranging music for the band because that’ always been one of my great ambitions, to compose and arrange music. That started in high school I wrote this extend Blues for the concert orchestra. It was a learning experience, my first effort. It shouldn’t have been as grand as I tried to make it. (laughs) It just didn’t work out. But anyway, it was the beginning of something that eventually did work out.

I was able to arrange some things for Ray Charles and Lloyd Price. Ray was really encouraging because he recognized that I had some talent as a writer. Every time he sees me now, he shakes his head because I’m not a commercial writer. I like to write for the groups that I’m working with. He thought I should go commercial and just write for commercial projects.

N.H.: You went back with Max?

J.P.: It was ’64 when I went back with Max. We had another little physical incident.

I think it was Abbey’s birthday and that was at Max’s house, at his apartment there. I had brought my little girlfriend up there and we sequestered ourselves away from the main body of people. I think Leo Parker was also around at that time. He had just gotten out of jail a few weeks earlier and he and Max had been hanging out partying and drinking again, and so Max was would up. And so, we got into a little tussle there and that was the end of the Julian Priester/Max Roach admiration.

That’s when I started doing those things for Blue Note Records, becoming sort of an on-call studio musician. I did some nice recordings there for Blue Note and Atlantic Records. Clifford Jordan was instrumental in introducing me to Atlantic Records as I think at the time, he had a contract with Atlantic. So, I had a chance to do some recording. Blue Note was the mainstay. I think by this time Bill Grauer, the actual owner of Riverside Records, had been killed in an automobile accident so Riverside Records had folded as a result.

I became sort of a studio musician. I made a goal to break into the commercial studio scene. In other words, I wanted to expand my recording career to include not only the jazz stuff, but also commercial recordings because that’s where the money was. There were musicians who did only that. They were on-call studio musicians and they also worked Broadway shows, Radio City Music Hall, etc. I started to apply myself to those musicians, hang around with musicians who did those kinds of things and meet contractors who hired musicians to do those gigs.

I discovered that although I had Lionel Hampton and Dinah Washington and Max Roach and several other people that I had recorded with in my resume I had no “legitimate orchestra” work. So, it was hard to find work in the studios. They want to know you can read anything. They want to know that you’re dependable, that you will keep your word, that if you say you’re going to be there you will show up. So, I had to go out and find some orchestra work, which I did.

I found an orchestra up in Yonkers that had a position for trombone. I worked with that orchestra for about a year and then started to reestablish my contacts with the contractors in New York. I got called onto the studio orchestra at the Schubert Theater and at the same time I was doing recordings. I was an on-call studio musician.

I was doing well economically, but there were drawbacks. Because in order to do this it's like a political gamesmanship kind of things. You rub shoulders with these same people, contractors and musicians. There was this little place called Jim and Andy’s. It was like this bar and restaurant where all those guys would go to drink and socialize and have lunch and stuff like that. They served Italian food there. Jim and Andy would also let us run up tabs.

So, I was in there. I was laughing at jokes that weren’t really funny, buying drinks for people I didn’t really like. (laughs) Playing that game. I was getting work. But I was also running up two- and three-hundred-dollar tabs buying drinks for people I didn’t like. So those were the drawbacks.

I was working at the Schubert Theater, and I got this call from either Joe Benjamin or Mercer Ellington. For some reason Bennie Green didn’t show up for the recording session. I guess he had gotten drunk or something and overslept. So, I got a call asking me if I could come to the studio. The conditions for doing this were you had to respond in half an hour. You get a call—they expect you to be up at the studio withing half an hour. So, I showed up at the studio and recorded with Duke Ellington (Sept. 9, 1969).

N.H.: What was that like?

J.P.: It was good. It was a job. Money. Of course, I was awed by the experience too. Here’s Duke Ellington, one of my heroes from way back when I was climbing on the piano because that was one of the groups that they had been listening to and his name was one of those names I was fascinated with, like Duke and Count and Bird and Bud and Diz.

I played the record session. We took a break for lunch. We all went out and had lunch. We went back to the studio to finish the session and my horn was gone. My horn. I had left it right by the chair in the case in the studio. I got back there and no horn, no case, no nothing.

Somebody said that Matthew Gee had been up there. And they said that they saw him on the elevator going back down with a horn in his hand. So, I got on the telephone and called Matthew Gee’s house and spoke to his wife and she tells me that Matthew is out of town, a gig upstate or Boston or somewhere. Matthew doesn’t have your horn, he’s out of town.

Unbeknownst to her, Matthew was not out of town. Matthew had taken my horn and went to this bar on 42ndStreet and go into a tussle with some Latino guys. They beat him up real bad. The entrance to the subway was right outside the entrance to the bar and they kicked him down the subway stairs, the horn case went flying. He lost consciousness. Someone called the ambulance, and they took him to the hospital. Fortunately, they took the horn case along with him. Nobody knew where he was. His wife thought he was out of town.

I borrowed a horn to finish the session. I think I called Benny Powell, and he brought me one of his horns. He had several.

It turned out OK because three or four days later Matthew came out of the coma and called his wife, and his wife told him. “Julian Priester’s been looking for you, you’ve got his horn.”

And Matthew said, “No. I don’t have his horn. I got my horn.”

And she said, “Matthew, your horn is here in the closet.”

So, I got my horn back. That’s the story.

Matthew Gee was a wonderful trombone player. He played with Dizzy Gillespie. He played with a whole bunch of people; he even had a recording out under his own name. Back in the fifties and sixties he was a powerful, very influential, on the scene trombonist. He had developed an alcohol problem. That was his demise. He was a very talented arranger and writer and composer, and he had all these things going for him, but the alcohol just took him out of that. He just couldn’t control himself.

N.H.: What year was it that you did the Duke recording?

J.P.: That was ’69. In the interim I’d been doing these things with Blue Note Records. That was like ’65 through ’67.

And then Art Blakey called me to work with his band in 1968. It got to be more that what I wanted to do because Art Blakey was playing around with the money.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was when we went to Boston and played this job. Art instructed the band to go to Priester’s house and he would meet us at my house with the money to pay everybody. Well, everybody shows up at my house and we’re sitting up there, and here’s two, three, four, five o’clock in the morning and Art hasn’t shown up. And I called his house. The first few times there’s no answer. I kept calling and kept calling ‘cause I knew his wife had to be there.

So finally, his wife picks up the phone and I ask for Art Blakey, and I heard Art’s voice in the background tell her to tell me that he wasn’t there. Art was living down in the East Village at the time; he had an apartment down there. So, the guys in the band, and myself…

N.H.: That’s with Billy Harper and Bill Hardman and…?

J.P.: Yeah, Billy Harper, Bill Hardman, and Lawrence Evans on bass, and Ronnie Mathews. The band is on a CD, Moanin’, recorded live at Slug’s, one of those projects that is actually a bootleg. I’m still waiting for the money.

Anyway, we get into a taxi or whatever it was, en masse, and go over the Art’s house and knocked on the door. No answer. I can hear music. It’s coming from inside.

So, I knock louder. No answer.

So, I started kicking the door.

Art lived in one of those apartments where there are several apartments adjacent to him. It’s like you come up, walk up the stairs and when you get to this landing, then there’s several apartments along this hallway and Art’s apartment was at the end. This is like 5 o’clock in the morning and I’m kicking on the door and screaming, “Art, open the door!”

And everybody’s door opened but Art’s! (laughter) His neighbors started opening doors trying to find out what the hell is going on.

One of them said, “Call the police!” and that’s when Art opened the door.

He was so furious. He had kicked the door with his foot, and he was barefoot and split his big toe wide open, blood flying everywhere.

So, we confronted him, “Now why you want to have us waiting for the money and you not going to show up and give me my money, man? Don’t do that.”

I had to tell him ‘cause he wanted to invite me in and talk to me but leave the band outside. I insisted everybody come in, so he apologized and said wait, he would call his manager up and get the money from his manager up and get the money from his manager, because of course he had spent it on drugs.

So about eight or nine o’clock he got in touch with his manager, and we all went over to his manager’s. We had to wait outside. He went in and got the money and came back out and paid us and then we took him to the hospital so he could get his big toe stitched. That was the last time we worked with Art Blakey.

After that, that’s when I went into the Schubert Theatre Orchestra and then the record session with Duke Ellington, after the Art Blakey experience.

So, I did the record with Duke Ellington went back to the Schubert Theatre and was finishing out the show. The show had been running about a year, maybe two.

It was something like January of 1970 I got another call from Duke Ellington. Not from Duke in person. I think it was Joe Benjamin again, saying that Duke Ellington was getting ready to do this tour of the Orient and asked me if I’d be interested in going on this tour. Of course, I was interested.

I insisted on being interested and I went to the contractor at the Schubert Theatre and told them that I was going to do this and he refused to give me the leave, saying that I’d just taken a leave to go to Europe with the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra two or three months prior and he didn’t want to give me the leave to go to the Orient with Duke Ellington.

I looked at him and I said, “this is Duke Ellington. This is not Joe Blow, this is duke Ellington, man.”

He didn’t want to let me go. So, I just resigned on the spot. I didn’t even wait around to pick up my paycheck. I just resigned, went on the road with Duke Ellington.

Now that was another experience. I had all the respect and admiration for Duke Ellington with what he had accomplished and the music he had written. It goes without saying, the brilliance and genius and the message that he put out there. He was about music to listen to. He was about playing music for the spirit and the soul. He was also very conscious of the Black culture. He addressed that in his music over and over.

But after a few months of being in the band I became weary of playing the same music over and over and pretending that, although I could do it, pretending that I was from that era, from the era of the 1920’s and the 1930’s. Because that’s the style of music that we were playing.

It came home for me at one rehearsal where I had this solo that required me to take a four-bar break before the beginning of the solo. Fortunately, this was during rehearsal and not in a live performance. I stood up and took my four-bar break and then when it came time for the downbeat of the chorus no one played. The rhythm section just did not come in. I stopped and turned around and looked and they were all staring at me.

What happened was that I took the solo, asserting my own character musically. It was sort of a free from kind of a solo. There was form there because I knew what bar, what beat. I knew all that stuff and I came out on time, but it completely threw them. They lost the sense of tempo, the meter and everything.

It just convinced me that I’m just going to have to stay true to Duke Ellington, his era, I’m going to have to imitate Lawrence Brown. I can’t really express my own character here. I have to take on another persona that I wasn’t happy with. What occurred was that I was deprived of my own creative expression, so I became less enthusiastic.

I didn’t leave the band because of that, but as fate would have it, we were getting ready to do a tour of Europe. The night before we were supposed to leave, I was packing. I packed my bags and got everything ready to go and at the last minute I said, “Ok, where’s my passport?”

I turned everything upside down looking for my passport and I never found it. I found it about six months later. I couldn’t find it that night or that morning.

So, I took a chance and went out to the airport with my bags anyway hoping that Duke could pull some strings and maybe make a phone call or something and have someone issue me another passport in time for me to make this tour, but that didn’t happen.

They left me. I was disappointed. I was really kind of embarrassed that I lost my passport. About six months later I was going through some manuscript paper, getting ready to write something and my passport showed up in the middle of these papers.

So, things change. For the better, because now I can do my own expressions and I put together a band in New York with Gary Bartz and Cecil McBee and I think it was Ronnie Matthews playing piano, and a young drummer who I thought would work out but didn’t.

I was also looking for a new expression. I wanted to use a voice. I didn’t want to use the voice in the conventional way of having a singer. I wanted to have a poet and I wanted the poet to improvise poetry just like the musician’s changes and stuff.

I had an experience in Chicago back in 1965 when back to get a divorce from my first wife. While there I did a performance with Muhal Richard Abrams and there was this poet there named David Moore. David would write a few notes down on a matchbook cover and he could use that information there to improvise this poetry on a microphone and he would improvise in a fashion that was like a horn taking a solo. He would take the words and break the words up into syllables and do a rhythmic treatment to these syllables. Repeating the syllable and adding the second syllable to it and repeat that and then the two syllables together and eventually you’d hear the whole word and then he would go into the next word. All of this would start out kind of chaotic and then you’d realize the man is telling a story. Everything is coming together. And that fascinated me.

So, I wanted to do that and use that in the group that I was trying to put together. I couldn’t find the poet. I got this material and I tried to get an actor to do it. It didn’t work out. He wasn’t a poet so he couldn’t actually feel the momentum.

I had pretty well gone through the money I had saved when I was with Duke and I was in need of some work and I got this call from Garnett Brown who’d been working with Herbie Hancock, asking me to go work with Herbie in his place. He had this writing project that he needed about three weeks to complete. So, I accepted because it was an opportunity to put some money in my pocket and after three weeks I could come back and finish working with my own group.

Well, Garnett never did come back. Three years later I’m still working with Herbie.

N.H.: Did you know Herbie in Chicago?

J.P.: No, he was younger than me. When he came on the scene I had already left. But I enjoyed working with Herbie Hancock because our heads were in a very similar place.

Everybody in that band, we all thought as one. The only difference between what we were doing with Herbie and what I had planned on doing with my group was that there was no voice. But in terms of the treatment of the instruments, I had already decided and started working on developing variable timbres, producing variable timbres with the trombone instead of just using the pure tone that the instrument has.

N.H.: Was Herbie electrified when you started?

J.P.: No, we were all acoustic, but we were all stretching.

N.H.: Who was in the band then?

J.P.: Bennie Maupin, Eddie Henderson, Buster Williams, Billy Hart, Herbie, and myself. It worked out musically, artistically, creatively. I was really having a lot of fun with that band.

N.H.: Were you plugged in by the time you guys recorded?

J.P.: Well, on the first recording, Mwandishi, Herbie was using the Fender Rhodes. No synthesizer on there. And no one is really plugged in on the first one. The synthesizer came on the second recording, Crossings (Dec. 1971). My favorite of the three records that I did with Herbie was the first one because it was acoustic. That’s the one.

N.H.: What brought you out west? Did Herbie live there?

J.P.: Later, yeah. I don’t remember the exact year. He may have been living out west at that time. This was in 1970. The same year that I had done the tour of the Orient with Duke Ellington

I joined Herbie and spent a lot of time on the West Coast. So, Herbie may have been living there. I know his manager, David Rubinson, lived on the West coast. Herbie had to be living out there because we all spent most of our time out on the West Coast which ultimately led to me moving to San Francisco.

After being with Herbie for three years he disbanded the sextet for personal reasons, of course. He had actually invested a lot of money in the sextet, and he had just begun to break even.

The popularity of the sextet was mainly among musicians although we were winning a lot of jazz fans because we were sort of on the cutting edge musically and artistically. We were turning a lot of heads our way. People who were at first made uncomfortable when they listened to the music gradually began to become accustomed to the intensity of the music that we played. It was sort of the same reaction that John Coltrane had on the public when he first came out with his own group. The shock of hearing something that is so far removed from the traditional way of listening to music is at first sort of repulsive. But when you continue to listen to it, especially when the recordings of the group hit the market and you have a chance to not just listen to it on a one time basis, as happens when you listen to it live, but you also have a chance to go back and listen to it three, four, five, six… any number of times, you become accustomed to the intensity and it becomes very interesting and opens up a lot of doors for you. So that was the same thing that happened with Herbie Hancock.

We were working in Chicago at the London House. The London House was this fabulous fancy steakhouse. All the businessmen come with their clients, and they make these deals over dinner. We had a two-week engagement there strangely enough.

Did we have fun? Oh yeah. The music was just awesome. The things that we were doing at that time… energy and music and love and all of that was mixed up into it. Spiritually free, although the music was not free. It all came together with Herbie. The lessons that I learned when I was with Sun Ra all came together because this was the first time I had to revisit that style of play where we had songs with chord progressions and in that very song with the chord progressions there would be certain sections where the music would become free.

Free, using that term to describe what other people are used to making a reference to. But for the record it’s not free at all, it’s very disciplined, orderly, with rules, with guidelines that were very important, and we would have to adhere to them. There’s form, and although it may not be premeditated, there is some thought put into it prior to performing. As I did with Sun Ra, we would respond to the music at the moment, in the moment. That’s the fact of the matter with so-called free music, at least from my experience with it. I know there are other experiences in other treatments of the philosophies about that music.

From time to time, you find certain individuals who feel that the energy that’s created is enough, and they sort of lose track of the musicality. Free music is a device to play off of the more orderly music. Any one style of music done to an excess will soon become too familiar and as a result loses interest. After a while you are going to yearn for some kind of variation on that and the true artist will know how to mix the whole thing together with the traditional, with the new, in the exact amount so there is a balance between the two.

N.H.: You touched on Herbie Hancock’s reasons for disbanding the band.

J.P.: On the advice of his management and I have to honor that. I have to respect that. On the advice of his management and of course on his own desires. Herbie needed to and wanted to make more money. He certainly deserved to make more money.

So, he decided to cut the group down to a smaller size and play a more commercial variety of jazz. So, he disbanded the sextet and formed a quartet. At times it was a quintet because he added guitar. Bennie Maupin stayed with him from the sextet. He played not only tenor saxophone but bass clarinet and flute; he was a multi-instrumentalist, so he was perfect for that. Herbie formed a group called Headhunters and his first recording with that new group was a hit.

He hasn’t looked back since then, so it was a wise decision, although it was very painful for me and a few other members of the group because we had always felt that we were one big family. The product of that sextet was a product that we all had a hand in producing. It wasn’t just Herbie Hancock’s music, it wasn’t just Bennie Maupin’s or mine, it was a collective venture. So, when the collective broke up it was like a family breaking up. It was emotionally stressful.

Years went by before I recovered emotionally from that break. It was like getting a divorce. Or being divorced. (laughter) But I recovered and now the group is still very close. The camaraderie and the friendship that we developed during that time are alive and well today.

Life goes on. Miraculously it goes on.

N.H.: Life went on in San Francisco for you?

J.P.: Yeah, because that’s where Herbie broke the band up. I made one trip back to the East Coast to New York because I had not made up my mind what I was going to do.

At that time in 1973, conditions in New York for musicians were not very good. A lot of the recording companies had moved to the West Coast, so the studio music scene had weakened. There was not as much work there as when I had left New York. All of my musician friends were suffering. Everyone was depressed emotionally. It just wasn’t an inviting atmosphere.

I’m considering moving back there. I’d already given up my apartment and I was a roadie, a road musician, moving from one hotel to the other with my suitcase. I might stay with friends but with the same suitcase. I’m living out of that suitcase.

So, I made a decision right then and there. I said, “No, this is not a happy scene here in New York. I’m going to go back to San Francisco.” Where everybody was happy. It was love overflowing. So that’s what I did. I officially moved to San Francisco.

I recorded some with various people. One album that I still love today was a Red Garland album called Strike Up the Band (July 1979) with Ron Carter, George Coleman, Ben Riley playing drums, and, of course, Red Garland. That’s just a gorgeous recording.

I did a few other things record wise. Then I got into education.

The city of Berkeley was doing a summer music/arts camp for families, adults, teenagers, and younger folks. I was asked to join the faculty there and I even shared the administrative duties. I was artistic director, camp director, whatever you want to call it. I got some administrative experiences after a few years of doing that.

The director at that time was a candidate for the position here in Seattle at Cornish College. At the time they were looking for someone to chair the music department. Melvin Strauss, who was then the president of Cornish College made a trip to this camp in California. So, he came down and visited and hired John Dykers to assume the position of the music department here. It was John who asked me if I’d be interested in coming to join the faculty here. I made the trip sight unseen to Seattle and brought my family up here and joined the faculty here at Cornish College.

That was 1979. In 1978 the political scene in San Francisco changed dramatically. That was the year that the mayor and one of the city councilmen were assassinated. That was an uproar, a political uproar. The gay community was really upset because the city councilman was gay. The person who assassinated him took issue with having a gay councilman and he was picked with the mayor. I don’t know if the mayor had appointed this individual or what, but they were working together, and I guess this person who committed the crime assumed that the mayor was responsible in some way, so he killed both of them. There was so much turmoil.

My oldest boy had been born a year or two earlier and I had to consider the risk involved for him growing up in that environment. So, when this opportunity to move to Seattle to join the faculty at Cornish appeared, I accepted immediately because it was time to get out of San Francisco.

So that started a whole new chapter in my life. I officially became and educator although I continued to perform. I continued to compose, and I continued to arrange music.

At the time there was a composers’ and performers’ orchestra headed by James Knapp, who’s on the faculty here. In fact, James had also recommended me to the president, sort of endorsing my joining the faculty. He had this orchestra that gave me an opportunity to write for it and also a platform to perform. So that fulfilled that need in my life.

Cornish has been very good to me. Having a position here assured me that there would be a steady paycheck. Raising a family, I needed that security.

It took its toll on me as a traveling performer although Cornish never did resist when the opportunity presented itself for me to go out and do something elsewhere. But Seattle is at the corner of the country. The opposite corner. (laughter)

It’s not economically feasible for people in New York to call me for work and most of the work I’d been getting up to that point had been based out of New York. The work I was getting on the West Coast after Herbie broke his band up was just kind of local stuff. I wasn’t happy with the position I was in.

I had a few opportunities. I went out on the road with Dave Holland with the good graces of Cornish College who encouraged the faculty to continue their careers. What this does is…

N.H.: Advertising?

J.P.: Yeah, right.

N.H.: When were you with Dave Holland?

J.P.: That was mid-eighties, ’84,’85. At the time I joined the faculty, Jerry Grannelli, the drummer, was here. Jay Clayton joined the faculty shortly after I did. Gary Peacock was on the faculty.

So, there was a little nucleus, a little group that I could join. We all sort of formed a little collective and recorded the quartet. I got a grant from the King County Arts Commission to do a project with these folks. We got rave reviews. It was another one of those situations where it was my idea, my doing, putting this quartet together, but I could not claim sole ownership of it because you got people like Gary Peacock, Jay Clayton, and Jerry Grannelli, all of whom are leaders in their own right. So, it turned out to be this collective. We stayed together for a few years.

Then there was a yearning on, I guess, everyone’s part to branch out on their own. So ultimately that’s what happened. Gary was the first one. He resigned his position here on the faculty, went to New York, and eventually wound up with Keith Jarrett. Jay Clayton just resigned over the last year or two and moved to New York. Jerry Grannelli, he’s been gone a little longer. He moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia with the Europa Institute out of Boulder, Colorado.

So those folks are no longer here. I’m sort of the last of them. I’ll probably be here… I said, “probably,” because who knows what’s going to happen… but my plan is to stay here at Cornish until my two sons are out of college. The need to have this steady income, to have the tuitions paid is what’s keeping me here. Not solely, but that’s part of the reason.

The other part of the reason is that Cornish is a great place to work, as an educator and also to work on my own projects. I’m provided with a studio, with a piano, and space to work.

N.H.: Your newest group is made up of…?

J.P.: Graduates from Cornish. The pianist, Dawn Clement, recently graduated from Cornish and now she’s on the faculty here. Byron Vannoy graduated several years ago and then went to California Institute of the Arts to get his master’s and he’s now back in Seattle playing drums with me. Geoff Harper didn’t graduate from Cornish, but he spent some time here, took some classes. Wonderful, wonderful bass player, very imaginative, very creative, he’s generating material, he writes music. So, it’s a perfect situation for me. And they’re all young! All young and unknown. I find that inspiring. Energy galore.

It’s special when you have a situation where you are the main focus. I don’t have to compete name wise with Herbie Hancock or Buster Williams or Bennie Maupin, although I would love to interact with all those folks.

On my own projects I’m better off having new faces. And I have wonderful new faces with me now. I’m really enjoying it. I really am, as evidenced by the music on the new CD (In Deep End Dance). On the recording, everyone has input. Everyone has contributed music. That’s the way I want it. There’s no selfishness there at all. Just love and warmth. The best music comes out of those situations. Nobody’s competing, nobody’s trying to upstage. Everybody just wants to create in an honest fashion.

N.H.: Are there other Seattle related projects?

J.P.: Recording-wise and workwise I’ve done some things with Wayne Horvitz. He calls the band Four Plus One. I’m not sure who the one is. We all can say “I’m the one!” (laughter)

That’s very nice about the way Wayne handled that because when he first approached me about working and playing with them, I explained that I wasn’t really interested in doing anything like that. I would do it as a featured artist, but I don’t want to be the sideman in the band. So, I guess he solved that problem by colling the Four Plus One. Which I think is ingenious. (laughter)

N.H.: What has your association with Sam Rivers been about?

J.P.: Sort of a late development a few years ago in the late nineties. Not too long ago. Resulting from a project I was doing with Reggie Workman, recording for a record label in New York called Postcards. We did two recordings for that label.

I asked the producer to do an album of my own. He suggested that Sam and I do a duet album (Nov. 1990) because he was fascinated by the work we had done together. It wasn’t my first choice, let me put it like that, but I agreed to do it because I wanted to do a recording and I thought maybe after I did this it would be a little feather in my hat. I’m doing something with this jazz great and something unusual with him, not just the normal combo with jam tunes.

So, I dug out some music and went to New York and Sam and I met, and we talked about what we were going to do. We didn’t really rehearse, although we looked at some music and I knew right away that that was not going to work because there was no time to rehearse it and tighten the tunes up. They were too arranged anyway. I really didn’t have the concept when I wrote the music that it was going to played by just two people. I was thinking about rhythm section. I had written parts for the rhythm section, but I took this music in thinking that it might work with the two horns. But it just didn’t work so we came up with some things that did work. Sam came up with some ideas and I came up with some ideas and it turned out to be a collective project co-led by both Sam Rivers and myself.

N.H.: One last question. I was reading about this record. I wonder if you remember making it. It just sounds bizarre. You were on it. Paul Butterfield, Mike Bloomfield, Elvin Bishop, Lester Bowie, Roscoe Mitchell, Erwin Helfer, playing harpsicord, Steve McCall on drums, and Scotty Holt on bass. It was Nick Gravanites’ album. He was a poet/musician that hung with Paul Butterfield’s crowd. Does that ring any bell? 1965…

J.P.: 1965 I was in Chicago. I went back to get my divorce. I don’t doubt that it happened, but I don’t have one recollection. You know how some of those things come together, somebody will say “Let’s go” and then we just go. And when it’s over with we don’t have one clue as to what we did or who it was for or anything like that. I’m sure I didn’t get any money for that.

Antidote to Loneliness

Published in Earshot Jazz February 2023

In the winter dark, Norah Jones’ voice warmed me as I drove wet Seattle streets. A piano solo drifted, lifting the temperature. The notes pondered, wondering rather than shouting for attention. The song was “Court and Spark” by Joni Mitchell. Had I not stayed with the sound, my mind would have wandered to worry. I loved jazz because it brought me back to the joy of possibilities.

The pandemic had kept me away from live music, both from the stage as a performer and in the seats as part of an audience, but I longed to be back with the sound and scene. A Chicago musician friend had declared October as “Hangtober” to counter his long isolation and each day posted on social media photos of bands he had ventured out to hear in person. I needed to reconsider, reconnect, and rekindle my place in my community. My jazz tribe was small but steadfast.

I squeezed into a lone parking spot on a residential street, paid at the kiosk to park until 10pm, and walked three blocks through the chill. My destination, a tall skinny art gallery named Vermillion with a bright white front room. In the back, a brick-lined space with a six-seat bar, eight rows of chairs, two speakers, drum set, and a grand piano. I took a seat in the middle of the chairs, behind the entire audience of four others, a small but devoted following. I had come for the Seattle Jazz Fellowship, a weekly event hosted by award-winning trumpeter Thomas Marriott. Each night featured two bands with “the hang” in between. The hang was for swapping tales and a taste of refreshment, social glue to keep a jazz community from splintering into ego and exclusion.

But a big draw for me was how each Fellowship began – a listening session and storytelling by Julian Priester, an 87-year-old Black bald bard who had played trombone with Herbie Hancock, John Coltrane, Sun Ra, Max Roach, and Duke Ellington. Insiders knew Priester by his apt Swahili name, Pepo Mtoto – Spirit Child. His spirit was strong. His curiosity was childlike. He retired from teaching at Cornish College of the Arts in 2011 after 31 years, but still performed and recorded with wisdom and vigor.

His debut album as a leader in 1960 was titled “Keep Swinging,” a play off the pun of jazz and boxing. Today, Julian is the only surviving performer from the recording. Throughout his life, Julian played like a heavyweight, but his lean body appeared closer to welterweight. Tonight, he wore a blue dress shirt, brown checked necktie, red fleece jacket, and black flat cap – old school meets Pacific Northwest. In the dim spotlight, his bespectacled face wore only a few wrinkles circling his mouth. His body moved with patience, poise, and a laser-pointed focus.

Priester sat on a chair next to the piano. Next to him, a table piled with records and compact discs that featured his playing and composing. Marriott picked an album from the pile, unsheathed vinyl onto a turntable, lowered the needle, and slid a volume nob up a few notches. Priester’s trombone resonated in the air – smooth and sonorous. After the song, the intimate assembly clapped and offered affirming “Yeahs.” Silence hugged the space.

Priester leaned into the microphone, his voice rhyming with his trombone sound, deep and quiet with a hint of rasp. “I was a father at 17 in Chicago. We were too young for that responsibility.”

A long pause landed the words.

I had admired Julian for years and wrote a tribute to him in our local jazz newsletter on his retirement. The stories he spun were familiar but enjoyable to hear again and again. Sadly, his wife, Nashira, died in 2021. I mustered the courage to speak.

“Julian, we’ve lost so many,” I began.

Masked heads in the audience turned in the dark to identify the questioner.

“Among your former colleagues at Cornish, singer Joni Metcalf passed days ago. Bassist Chuck Deardorf left a few weeks ago. A year ago, composer Jim Knapp.”

I paused, trying to figure out how to ask about legacy in a respectful way.

“How do you want to be remembered? What do you want us to know about you when you’re gone?”

Without pause, Julian responded, “Well, I’ve left all this music for you.”

He trained his gimlet-eyes on mine, “And I want you to know, ‘I love you.’”

Julian loved me, loved the audience, loved the music, and loved sharing the present moment with others. The Seattle Jazz Fellowship lifted my spirit to reunite with my musical family.

Julian Priester: Spirit Child

Originally published in Earshot Jazz September 2011, Vol. 27, No. 09

Outside room 209, on the second floor of Kerry Hall at Cornish College, flattened cardboard boxes and a hand cart lean against the wall. They await Julian Priester, Professor of Trombone and Jazz History. He retired on May 14th, 2011 with an honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts after thirty two years of service. With the help of a student, the boxes will transport Priester’s teaching materials from his studio back to his south Seattle home.

Inside the studio, nine boxes full of scores, books, recordings, trombone mutes clump in the far corner. Sun filters through two tall south facing windows that gaze over the corner of Roy and Boylston streets. Cracked and chipped white paint ornament the stark walls, high ceiling, and radiator. A crisp black Kawai baby grand piano rests atop utilitarian grey industrial carpet.

Silence hangs in the air. On a small chalk board, neatly written scales and rhythms hint at the sounds that filled this studio. Here, and in nearby rehearsal rooms, Priester shared his skills, stories, and studies. A quiet end to this chapter in his career belies the length of experience, depth of artistry, and breadth of creativity Priester carries forward into every situation.

Humility gained from Captain Walter Dyett at Chicago’s DuSable High School, the pit orchestra of New York’s Schubert Theater, and work as an on-call studio musician set a positive model for students. Practical experience gleaned from Priester’s world travels with Sun Ra, Lionel Hampton, Dinah Washington, Max Roach, Thad Jones, Art Blakey, Duke Ellington, Herbie Hancock, and Dave Holland add depth to his lessons. Recordings of his compositions by Ray Charles, Maria Muldaur, Patrice Rushen, Abbey Lincoln, Eddie Henderson, Philly Joe Jones, Sam Rivers, Reggie Workman, Stanley Turrentine, Bobby Timmons, Clifford Jordan, and Lee Morgan testify to the significance of studying his written music. An extensive discography of improvising with these and other creative artists for more than fifty years authenticates the lineage of jazz offered to students in his “spontaneous composition” ensembles.

To teach “spontaneous composition” he helped students identify what they heard so that they could respond musically. One technique involved instructing a student how to relate to pitch through their voice. First, a student learns to identify the lowest note they can hum. Next, the student identifies the interval between a heard note and the lowest hummed note. Then, the student develops a musical response given the harmonic and melodic implications of this interval. With practice, this can open up a student’s ears to assign a harmonic picture from the sound a group is producing.

Acquiring this skill can be difficult, especially for young students experiencing life away from home for the first time. “I encourage students to stay open minded when they get discouraged. I remind them that bad experiences are only temporary.”

In addition to collaborating with and encouraging students, Priester developed ensembles and performed with other Cornish faculty members. His first concert was July 15, 1979 with pianist Art Lande. Over three decades at Cornish he performed with Hadley Caliman, Jay Clayton, Chuck Deardorf, Denney Goodhew, Jerry Granelli, Randy Halberstadt, Wayne Horvitz, Carter Jefferson, Jim Knapp, Joni Metcalf, and Gary Peacock.

Priester’s work in Seattle extends beyond academic circles. He performed in the rhythm and blues band Jr. Cadillac. He even helped journalists evolve vocabulary to communicate an appropriate level of artistic respect to jazz, for example “play” became “perform” and “local musician” became “regional performing artist.” In 1984, Priester was quoted in the Seattle Times, “Seattle is basically a rock and roll town. It’s a good place to cultivate jazz. I’m optimistic.”

Priester’s positive attitude about jazz was instilled at an early age. “My dad was a Baptist minister and my mom was an avid Christian. I was exposed to jazz through my older brother jamming with his friends. I was fascinated with jazz musician’s names – Monk, Diz, Bird – and the excitement of my brother and his friends while they were listening. I developed my ear by going to the piano and picking out the melodies from the records. Then my parents got me piano lessons.”

“My high school band director Captain Dyett outlawed the word ‘can’t.’ He emphasized positive thinking. Positive thinking attracts positive things. I attribute my success to being in the right place at the right time. Benefits came my way. I was always rescued from crises.”

Dyett may have emphasized the positive, but he would challenge students. “Music came pretty easily to me so I guess I was a little too sure of myself. I had a little trombone solo in one piece. Dyett came over to me in the rehearsal and put his hand on my shoulder. It destroyed my bravado. I have been more humble ever since. Now I study instead of relying on instincts. I carry that around with me beyond music.”

Positive thinking and humility didn’t guarantee smooth sailing. “I had a crisis early in life. I was married at age seventeen with two daughters. I was working with Sun Ra. He was more of a legend than a supplier of funds. I was not yet established as a professional musician. It was hard on the family. I found an apartment in the projects but I couldn’t even make that rent.”

“Lionel Hampton asked me to go on the road in 1956. I was making $25 a night but had to pay for my food and room and send money home for rent. Hampton stranded me in New York City. That was a GOOD thing.”

“The tenor player from Hampton’s band, Eddie Chamblee married Dinah Washington and asked me to go on the road with the band. One day Dinah got in a fight with Eddie and fired him. She threw his saxophone against the wall. She called the maid back in New York to get all his clothes out of the apartment. Dinah offered ME the jobs of being band manager AND her lover. I declined both opportunities and went back to Chicago.”

“In 1958 I decided to move to New York. Three of us drove straight from Chicago to the Five Spot in New York. When we got there, [Chicago saxophonist] Johnny Griffin was playing with Thelonious Monk. After the gig we went back to Griffin’s apartment and cooked breakfast.”

“Griffin introduced me to Orrin Keepnews, the producer for Riverside records. Orrin hired me in the shipping department. Through that relationship I got to record with Blue Mitchell, Johnny Griffin, and Philly Joe Jones. Max Roach heard the recordings and asked me to join his band to replace Ray Draper.”

“I left Max in 1961 when he broke down. He was abusing some medication he was taking and his body could not absorb the alcohol from beer he was drinking. We were at Peps in Philadelphia to play a benefit for Lem Winchester. Lem played vibraphone and was classmate of Clifford Brown’s. [Trumpeter Clifford Brown age 25 and pianist Richie Powell age 24 died in a car accident while on the road to a gig with Max Roach in 1956.] “Booker Little [the trumpet player in Max’s band at the time] was very ill [Little died of kidney failure at age 23 later that year]. His hands were swollen and couldn’t play.”

“Ted Curson subbed for Booker but he didn’t know the music. Max lost it. He got on the microphone and was talking to the audience about how sad the music sounded.”

Priester stepped to the side of the stage during the tirade and lit up a cigarette. At some point Max stopped talking, walked over to Priester and cold cocked him right in the chin. Julian headed backstage to pack up his things. The club owner interceded and said, “Max apologizes.” Priester said, “Why can’t Max come back here and apologize?” Max came back and through clenched teeth said, “I’m sorry. The band will be fired if you leave.” Priester decided to stay.

During the next set, Julian was playing a solo and started to bear down. Suddenly, Max stopped playing. Julian turned to see Max climbing over his drums in a rage. They wrestled on the floor and fell into a bunch of whiskey bottles behind the bar. The bartender tried to break up the fight. The band got fired. “We made the front page of the Philadelphia Inquirer. Right after that Max invited me to come with him to a therapist. I went back with Max in 1964 but left after another incident in 1965.”

Lucky for Priester, not all of his employers hit him. His first record as a leader came out in 1960, a year before the fight with Roach in Philadelphia. The album was titled Keep Swingin’and featured a picture of a boxer standing behind Priester. Who knew the album’s title was a premonition?

Priester’s second record as a leader also came out in 1960 and the title Spiritsville, was echoed later in his career. In 1970, Priester joined Herbie Hancock’s sextet that blended electronics, trumpet, saxophone, trombone, to explore funk, ambient, and free music. Everyone in the band acquired Swahili names to deepen the bonds within the close knit ensemble. Trombonist Julian Priester almost got the Swahili name for “great cook” because the band appreciated a breakfast he prepared. Instead he adopted the name Pepo Mtoto which means “spirit child.” For the band’s first album, Mwandishi, Priester wrote a long open vehicle for exploration called “Wandering Spirit Song.”

Throughout his career, Priester’s spirit animates his music, breathes warmth into his voice and instrumental tone, imparts courage and determination to students, lifts the mood of those in his presence, demonstrates loyalty and dedication to his peers, and reveals his soul to the listener. His artistry touched a wide swath of improvised music. When Priester’s peers heard about this article, several contributed comments. A selection of excerpts appears below.

Saxophonist Bennie Maupin talks about meeting Priester, then playing with him in Herbie Hancock’s sextet from 1970 to 1973.

“The first time I met Julian was at Van Gelder’s studio for McCoy Tyner’s record Tender Moments. I knew about him before that. He was right up there with J.J. Johnson and the other great trombonists.”

“We played our first gig [with Herbie Hancock’s sextet] in Seattle in 1971. [According to the Seattle Times, the sextet first played in Seattle at the Seattle Center Arena on October 4, 1970 for the Northwest Jazz Spectacular. They shared the bill with Miles Davis and Bill Evans. Joe Brazil then booked them at the Club Ebonee at 1214 E. Pike October 9-11.] The horns [trumpeter Eddie Henderson, trombonist Priester, saxophonist Maupin] got together in the hotel to rehearse our parts. The rhythm section instruments were already set up on stage so they [pianist Herbie Hancock, bassist Buster Williams, and drummer Billy Hart] rehearsed there.”

“The first time we played together as a band was on stage. It was a real coming together that was so magical. It was so amazing that after the first two hour set, we went to the break room and we couldn’t even talk to each other.”

“For the next three years, every night was amazing. Julian never played the same thing twice. He was my teacher every night on the bandstand. He is a master improviser. I was continuously blown away by what he was playing. Julian is a remarkable soloist. The experiences we had together were fantastic. When I go back and listen, it still blows me away.”

Pianist Dawn Clement talks about being a student of Priester and performing with him in Priester’s Cue.

“Julian is an amazing teacher. He's very methodical, articulate, and patient. He had such a huge connection to the history of the music, bringing in guests like Pharaoh Sanders and Eddie Henderson.”

“Julian fills a room not with volume but with a quiet presence. He doesn't boast or talk too much in fact he only says things at the perfect time and only what needs to be said. He carries himself with a proud posture.”

“His music has a way of challenging you as a listener and as a player. Within the challenge lies a simplicity that is unique to only his hand and character. The same could be said of his playing. As soon as you hear that first note you know it is Julian. He manages to always be himself and compliment whoever he is with. He is a true artist and innovator.”

Drummer Byron Vannoy talks about being a student of Priester and performing with him in Priester’s Cue.

“He still approaches music with the enthusiasm and interest of a beginner, but with the knowledge of a true jazz master. Julian always played in every ensemble he taught at Cornish. He allowed all his students to experience performing with him no matter what level they were at. Julian listens very deeply at all times to the whole sound of group he’s playing with and plays or doesn’t play based on what he hears. He is an extremely thoughtful player and has a wonderful sense of space.”

Multi-instrumentalist Steve Moore (a.k.a. Stebmo) talks about being Priester’s student.

“Probably because he's been in so many different musical situations, Julian seems to be able to teach just how to be the most Musical in any given situation. I've heard so many musicians express how being next to Julian and hearing his sound, how he navigates and improvises in the moment, teaches you all that can be taught regarding music. The music above the music!”

Drummer Jimmy Bennington, Cadence Recording Artist, talks about his recording Portraits and Silhouettes.

“To play with one of my heroes in this music and hear those melodies that belong to Julian alone unfold in front of me was beyond description. After the recording session, Julian was kind enough to sit down with me for an oral documentation telling of his early life and musical beginnings to round out the music we had made.”

“That recording earned us an Honorable Mention in AllAboutJazz New York's Best Recordings of 2007 as well as a featured spot at the 30th Annual Chicago Jazz Festival. We made two nights at Fred Anderson's Velvet Lounge in Chicago with Mr. Anderson as well as former Arkestra members in attendance. Words cannot describe the absolute thrill of sharing the stage in such settings with this legend.”

Relieved of the teaching load at Cornish, Priester looks forward to opportunities as guest clinician and lecturer. With plenty of time to log the required three hours of daily trombone practice, his physical energy is not always up to the task. A liver transplant in 2000 stabilized his health. Now, dialysis improves his energy and he is in line to receive a kidney transplant. Meanwhile, he searches for a way to release a 2007 recording of his band Priester’s Cue made at Van Gelder Studios with the help of Don Sickler. Keep swingin’ Julian.

Julian Priester

1950 Census