GOIN' OUT WITH DOM MINASI
(Continued)

"After my first album at Blue Note I really wanted to go in the direction that I'm recording now" he explains. "So I wanted to record 'Dumpy', I wanted to record 'As the Spirit Moves', and I just got a 'No, we're not doing that kind of stuff.'" Minasi's tenure at Blue Note was not an altogether happy one. Control of the label had recently passed from its founder, Alfred Lion, to George Butler. Butler wanted Blue Note to remain competitive, and given the nature of the times that meant a bigger, glossier sound than Minasi felt comfortable with. "At that time in the '70s CTI had all of these records and commercial kind of things and Donald Byrd had the Blackbyrds, so they were going for the money. It just wasn't ture to myself and it was not the right thing for me to play." So Dom walked away from the jazz recording world and spent his time freelancing, composing and playing music for some off-Broadway productions as well as authoring books on music theory and technique. He also found time to go back to school to study with Oscar-winning composer John Corigliano and received a degree in composition.

"When I went back to school it was all classical training. I had to learn the classical language…it wasn't all that difficult because it's all the same stuff; this stuff has been going on for hundreds of years, just different names we call them. So I actually loved going back to school. Fifty years old, I got a degree!"

Not that he needed it. Dom has been busy composing all of his career, and figures he's got 300 vocal and an equal number of instrumental compositions filed away. "I have tons, files and files of music that I've written over the years." He's also got a lot of children's songs, the fruit of his literacy through songwriting program, developed for the New York City Public School System. "I developed a program where I could teach actual songwriting using literacy and I would write songs with kids. This way they would learn their vocabulary, their spelling, and their grammar, everything through songwriting. That's how I ended up writing so many songs. I actually had a great time, and I always taught the blues first." I ask him if kids are open to blues and jazz music. "Kids are very much open" he replies. "You have to expose them to it. I remember years ago, I went into a school and talked about Duke Ellington and these kids had no idea who Duke Ellington was. These kids were like, twelve or thirteen years old. So I started right with the blues, then get into rhythm and blues, I get into jazz blues, I get into rock and roll, and then we expand from there and do all kinds of things. Kids love music, and they learn a lot quicker that way."

Takin' the Duke Out came about in part because Minasi was playing Ellington compositions several times a day. He had become part of Joe Coleman's rhythm section, playing with a variety of featured guest musicians that included Jimmy Heath, George Coleman, and Charles McPhearson. "Joe's a Duke Ellington fanatic," recalls Dom. "So it was Duke Ellington every day, three times a day. So I always wanted, one day, take some of these tunes and take them to another place. On an album I did for CIMP I recorded a tune that I wrote in the early '80s called 'In a Quarter Tone', which was really 'In a Mellotone.' I changed the melody and played it in quartertones and reharmonized it but it was still 'In a Mellotone.' So then, after that album I got Jackson and Ken together and I said I want to try some stuff, and I wrote the arrangement for 'Satin Doll.' And it really worked out, so my wife said 'Why don't you just do a whole album of Duke Ellington tunes?' I purposely picked the Duke Ellington tunes that I thought were recorded the most and overplayed the most."

That "Satin Doll" arrangement, which leads off the Ellington CD, features Dom playing the famous melody in whole tones against a bass pedal note. "Don't Get Around Much Anymore" explodes into a breakneck tempo, while "I Got It Bad And That Ain't Good" uses dissonance to approximate the pain and weariness of the song's lyrics. "I don't have the treble all the way up" Dom explains "because I end up playing a lot of dissonance and what I find is that if I have the guitar too trebly the dissonance, combined with that, is too much. People can't handle it. So if I mellow it out in the sound, they can handle the dissonance a lot better. It's more acceptable." Dom wasn't at all sure how "acceptable" the whole concept of Takin' the Duke Out would be to listeners. "I thought it would totally do me in," he laughs. "Some reviewers really hated it, but on the whole I would say 95% of the reviews loved it." One reason may be that although Minasi and his trio are playing "outside" the sound is that of a bona fide jazz trio, and Dom's guitar sound is totally jazz guitar with no gimmickry involved. "The only sound effects are those that come naturally from the guitar. Maybe I'll scrape my nail or a pick along the string…I'm not adding anything to the guitar. I'll bend the notes upward, I'll go for harmonics that don't exist, tone clusters. I'll just keep going and going…meanwhile I'm still using a real jazz guitar, an archtop guitar to get that 'real' sound."

I ask Dom what he's been listening to lately, new or old. The answers might surprise some folks, but really, after listening to Minasi talk about his musical background and hearing his two albums with the trio, it makes perfect sense. "I'll tell you still one of my most favorite albums…Miles Davis, Kind of Blue, I still love that. I still love the Trane album Favorite Things. And I love the Jim Hall album he did with Bill Evans…Undercurrents. So, I don't have that much time to listen too much, but when we're just sitting around I'll put on these things. Listening to the Miles Davis, that record is just one of the greatest records of all time. I just love it. I like 'out' playing, but this is done so…it just changed the history of music. Cannonball Adderley…I just love the way he plays. And to me no one has ever reached that level in alto playing. I mean, there have been a lot of great alto players…but Cannonball just knocked me out."

It's lucky for all of us that Dom Minasi hung in there, waiting for the opportunity to play and record the music he wanted to play. Listening to Goin' Out Again I am reminded of the tradition of jazz musicians who went against the grain, who kept playing the way they played because that's what they heard, just as Van Gogh painted things the way he saw them. Miles, Monk, Mingus, Ornette, Coltrane—I think they'd all agree with Dom when he says "You do everything you have to to make money, then you go for the art, you work on your art. And hopefully something will happen. But you can't do it to think that you're gonna make it. If that's what you're doing it for, you're doing it for the wrong reasons--it's not about the music."