I have done a lot of interviews in the past week or so - Francisco Lopez, Henry Rollins, two guys from Trivium, and today Ornette Coleman. And with the single exception of the vocalist/guitarist from Trivium, who was nice enough but kinda bored 'n' dull, they have all been really positive experiences. Lopez is urbane, smart as a motherfucker, and extremely nice; Rollins, who I've interviewed twice before in person, is also extremely nice, and a talker, and a giant music geek (the first time I talked to him, we spent 45 minutes doing standard interview talk, and then, when I turned off the tape recorder, we spent an additional hour talking about jazz - this time, he wound up our conversation by asking me Miles Davis sessionography trivia for his radio show); the drummer from Trivium, Travis Smith, is an enthusiastic kid with brains and a good sense of humor about his music, his job, and everything else (that shouldn't be taken to imply that I dislike Trivium - their first album is good, if a little too metalcore-y in parts with the clean choruses and all, and the new one absolutely smokes); and Ornette Coleman is, well, Ornette motherfucking Coleman. I've seen him play live twice, as mentioned below, have played the Beauty Is A Rare Thing box about 1000 times since buying it the week it was released, and his new album is just as brilliant and beautiful as you're hoping it will be. It's live from last year, with the two-bass band he's been traveling with since '03, and...well...it's hard to describe just how fucking awesome it is. It's called Sound Grammar, it comes out on 9/12, and if you don't buy it, there's no excuse you can offer - I just don't want to be your friend anymore.
Anyway, the interview went better than I even hoped it would - he's soft-spoken, thoughtful, laughs out loud at his own insights and his interviewer's responses, and rambles from topic to topic exactly the way his saxophone picks up a melody and goes tearassing across the universe, eventually coming back to where he started as though nothing out of the ordinary happened in between. So yeah, I'm pretty much floating about a foot off the ground as I type this. I don't even care that my iPod died yesterday, and ordinarily a thing like that would have pretty much crippled me for the rest of the week.
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