Jazzview

I first heard Lorne on the radio years ago; his debut trio recording produced by Oscar Peterson had been released, and everyone was talking about how incredible it was that a guitar player could even get close to sounding like the legendary Ed Bickert. Two years later he came to Montreal with Rob McConnell(of Boss Brass fame) and I found myself playing drums with this extremely talented musician. Many years have passed and whenever I get to Toronto I try to find out if Lorne is playing. Most recently I have heard him at George’s Spaghetti House with saxophonist Kirk MacDonald, and the experience was memorable. All week long the young jazz students at the University of Toronto were checking out the band; the word had gotten around that it was one of those special gigs. Lorne plays the guitar as if it is an extension of his brain; he seems to have no limitations technically on the instrument. Sometimes you’ll hear very lush, complex voicings, other times long rhythmically complex single-note lines. He plays his instrument in a very interactive way, always stimulating interplay amongst the musicians he is working with.

He can be heard on a fairly recent CD, on the Jazz Inspiration label, along with bassist Kieran Overs and drummer Bob McLaren, two longtime musical associates. There are also some guitar “duets” and “trios” thanks to the miracle of multi-track technology. Entitled simply Lorne Lofsky, the first track, All of You, makes it clear to the listener just what kind of talent is involved in this production. One can hear Lorne’s influences: Bill Evans, Ed Bickert, Lennie Tristano, Lenny Breau. The way in which Lorne has combined these elements into a fresh and exciting style is obvious. Ironically, this process of maturation has gone pretty well unnoticed by the public and themedia, because Lorne performs infrequently in Toronto, and survives by teaching and occasionally substituting on electric bass. He is one incredible guitar player in a city of very good guitar players. Check him out if you have the chance.

The Interview

AW: How did you get interested in guitar?

LL: Total fluke. I had a good friend whose parents bought him a guitar for 16 dollars at a pawn shop. This was about 29 years ago! It was just a piece of garbage, a baseball bat with strings.The strings were so high off the neck it’s a wonder my fingers didn’t bleed. I took some real legit stuff, classical lessons. Number one, I didn’t have any nails to speak of, and number two, I didn’t have a classical guitar, and my teacher was only five years older than me, but she seemed like a real pro. I was eleven, and somebody who was 16 seemed much older. So I went to these lessons, and I would really never prepare (for) them until the morning of the lesson, and I thought at the time there was a lot of pressure to play these mundane exercises, which are great exercises. I did that for about a year and a half. That was back when a guitar lesson cost $3.50 for a half hour!

For my barmitzvah my parents bought me a classical guitar, and then I passed it down to my nephew. The worst thing you can do is force anybody into music. You get turned off if your parents force you, you naturally rebel against it. You get a bad taste in your mouth when you get an authority figure saying “You have to practice.” My parents, fortunately, never said that to me.

I pursued that for a little while, and then in two years my parents bought me an electric guitar…

AW: Were you listening to a lot of guitar music at this time?

LL: You know what I was listening to? The Beatles, The Monkees, Dave Clark Five, Bobby Vinton, Del Shannon. I still love the Beatles. I don’t know if they wrote all those tunes, I think George Martin had a lot to do with that. They might have written the basic shell, and then George Martin would step in and say, ” No, no, it’s got to go to this chord. You don’t really mean A minor sixth.” We’ll never know. I used to regret being born when I was, in terms of the time period and the music happening at the time, but now I don’t because I think that anybody born in that era, if you play jazz you sort of borrow from that period. There’s a certain sensibility that comes from listening to Cream and Funk music like James Brown; you get a certain edge to your playing that you might not have if you came from the BeBop Era. When I play a blues I can take some things from B.B.King and Eric Clapton and mix it with Bird and Bud Powell. That’s why I think it’s important to check out different styles of music. I’m not saying you have to go back and listen to the Monkees and the Dave Clark Five; you take what’s happening around you and let some of that stay as part of your musical personality.

I got the electric guitar and at first I wasn’t very serious about it, like any young student. I had a real tin ear; I remember it taking my friend and I about an hour and a half to work out the intro to “Mr. Tambourine Man” by the Byrds. That was a real hurdle. I felt so good after getting that! Then I heard Eric Clapton on “Sunshine of Your Love.” To me it sounded suave, so exciting, so new. Meanwhile, three quarters of his stuff he stole from all the black blues players. He turned up the amp, and got a fuzzier sound. Back then he was really playing. I can still listen to “Crossroads” and think that was some of the best guitar playing in that style of all time.

I had a fairly good ear for mimicry, and I’d get together with friends to play, and I wanted to be Eric Clapton, like every other guitar player. I lifted a lot of his solos, played in basement jams, and eventually put a garage band together. We tried to get some local jobs. It was fun; one day you’d discover the fuzz pedal, you’d leave it on for ballads, for everything! Everything was fuzz-tone, then I discovered phase shifters, then playing deafeningly loud. There wasn’t much music happening, so we made up for it with volume.

So we played sock hops and dances. I was in high school by now and some friends of mine, bass player Shelly Berger, and drummer Allan Roth, dropped out of school and started taking lessons and trying to play jazz. Allan went to Jim Blackley and Shelley studied with Ted Moses and Dave McMurdo, around 1973 or 74. I remember we were in Shelley’s basement playing these tunes. I had this idea that we should just jump right in and play jazz; I had the album “Light As A Feather,” so we tried to play “Spain,” and the tunes on “Kind of Blue.” I had no idea what they were doing on that record, but I knew I liked it.

Then I found out about the AABA business. I couldn’t feel eight bars. I could feel twelve bars because of the blues, but eight bars was strange. We played “Milestones,” which really screwed me up because it’s AABBA, and there would be a train wreck in the middle of the tune, like two locomotives crashing in the night. We’d stop and ask each other, “Where were you?” Trial and error, we persisted.

At the same time this was happening, I was taking some guitar lessons with a guy named Tony Braden, who was at the time a very well respected teacher. I asked Ed Bickert years ago, in a very shy way, because I didn’t know him at all, with my hand stuck out like it was in a cast, “Hi, my name’s Lorne. Uh, do you teach?” I didn’t know what else to say to him. He said, “No, I don’t teach, but you should call Tony Braden.” So I studied with him for about a year and a half; I still have the notes he gave me. But it wasn’t music; it was how to shift from one string to another with a C scale, when to do this and when to do that, all technical stuff, triads and inversions, nothing to do with making music. I got what I thought I needed at the time.

This whole time I was playing my guitar all the time, and listening all the time. At that time I was going through this funny phase where I’d turned my back totally on my rock ‘n’ roll roots, and I became a jazz snob, because I thought that’s what you had to do. Everybody does that when they dive into something. It was the year before I went to University that I joined a rock band just to make some money and get some experience. We played in this town called Listowell in the northern part, and in Brampton which is southwest, in Atherlou which is close to Aurelia, and played in a couple of dumps in Toronto. I think the most money I ever made was a hundred dollars for the week out of which I had to eat.

After doing that I thought, screw that, I gotta get into jazz, and so I went to York University. The reason I went there was because I had a friend who played guitar who was in the classical program. I heard him play some of this classical stuff at his house one day, and it just blew me away. Probably now it wouldn’t have the same effect, but at the time it sounded like John Williams sounds to me now.

I went there; I lasted a year. I took four courses and at the time, it was over my head. John Giddings was teaching there and he’s a genius. When you hear him play piano, you don’t know that he can wear the other hat and talk about things the way he does. He also teaches Social Sciences and is a warm, loving man. I can’t say enough good things about him. I played in a couple of ensembles and took a theory course, which at the time was way over my head. It was there that I first got the idea of how important it was to play with a strong time feel. I went out and bought a metronome, and I’d sit there in the house I lived in with Shelley and Allan, and put the metronome on 40 and play the high-hat on two and four for an hour. That’s what I got from York.

Eventually I realized that it was better to make it feel good than to be metronomic, and I started to see the difference between it feeling good and being perfect. It takes awhile to find the difference, to let time breathe. The metronome should be used as a reference point, a guide or pivot. You can back-phrase or play ahead, depending on what else is happening in the group.

Influences

I went back to York the second year and I just took a workshop; I was auditing. In 1974 I was up at Shelley Berger’s parent’s cottage near Aurelia, and Phil MacKellar’s show was on. He played lots of big band stuff, and then he played Paul Desmond’s record “Pure Desmond,” with Ed Bickert. It was another time in my life when I was completely blown away, the same way I was affected by hearing Eric Clapton. A completely different thing, melodically, harmonically, rhythmically. Everything was different; a beautiful warm sound, just impeccable voicings, beautiful touch, economy of line, perfect! For what he does, I think Ed Bickert is the best guitarist in the world. I think he’s the greatest; I think he’s so great that I can’t listen to him play anymore because he was such a great influence on my playing. To me, just like Paul said in the liner notes, this was Ed’s album. It was almost like Paul couldn’t wait to finish what he played so he could listen to what Ed was going to do.

AW: So you hadn’t really had much chance to hear him live?

LL: Well, I did with Moe(Koffman). It wasn’t like “Here’s Ed.”

It was in situations where he wasn’t necessarily presented at his best. Ed got a chance to be featured on this record. I heard this and said to myself, “I don’t know what the hell he’s doing, but I’m going to figure it out,” and I did. I just about busted an old Sony reel to reel from all the playing and rewinding. I taped the whole album. The first tune, “Squeeze Me,” I figured out every single note and voicing, and a way of rationalizing it for myself, with passing chords, etc.

There are things he’s doing where he’s got it voiced like a saxophone section….

I can’t say enough about Ed. He was my new Eric Clapton. All of a sudden a new universe opened up. It was so inspiring, and sometimes depressing. I’d hear something and think, “how do you do that?” I didn’t realize he’d been doing it for twenty years already.All of a sudden I wanted to be Ed Bickert and then I heard some Jim Hall and wanted to be Jim Hall. I got ahold of some bootleg tapes and started playing along with those, and for awhile I wanted to be Jim Hall. Then I heard Lenny(Breau); there was a local show with Terry David Mulligan that played alternative rock music. One night I heard out of the blue just as I was getting ready to go to sleep this guitar player singing quietly with harmonics, and different voicings, and I felt this electric bolt go through me. I sat up and I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I didn’t hear the name of who it was. A couple of years went by and somebody mentioned Lenny Breau’s name. I said “who’s that?” and they described how he sang sometimes, played a cross between country and jazz, used harmonics, etc. They played a tune for me and I made the connection. Then I went out and bought “Live at Shelly’s Manne-Hole.”Somewhere along the way I also heard Sonny Greenwich play, and those are the four guitar players who really got to me.

Working

I wound up listening so much to Ed that his musical essence sort of took over my personality. It was now about the late 70’s and I was starting to work a lot at George’s. I was getting a lot of attention; Mark Miller became my champion. For whatever reason, I was the ace. It was my turn; who’s young, who’s new? They had the new faces series, once in a while they’d throw a bone to some young guy trying to make it. I was working with Jerry Toth, Don Thompson, Butch Watanabe, when there was a whole other group of people working there. I started working at Bourbon Street; I was making a good living playing jazz. Now I play much better and there’s no work! They give you a break when you can hardly play, and then when you can play they don’t want to know about you.

I played with Butch, Chet Baker, Carl Fontana, Bob Brookmeyer, Pepper Adams, Bud Shank, Jimmy McGriff, Richard ‘Groove’ Holmes, Georgie Auld, who played the same five tunes every night…

AW: Any bad experiences?

LL: Just one, actually. I was working with Chet, and we were doing this tune, “This Is Always.” I didn’t know it, and I was reading a chart. There was a full house. It didn’t seem like he wanted it to stop, so we kept going. He turns around and he says, “Man, the tune was supposed to end two bars ago!” and he slams his horn down and walks off. I’m there with David Piltch, and we didn’t know what to do, so we laughed. I went up to him after and I said, “Sorry, we didn’t know you wanted to stop there,” and he said, “It’s OK, I’m a little tired.” He wasn’t in great health at that point.

AW: And from that time, any positive experiences?

LL: Oh yeah, I didn’t have any other problem with him. He said he really dug my playing. We went and played in Sam Noto’s Renaissance Club. They put out a CD which was a transfer of the radio show; the quality is just horrible. They did it because Art Franks was the drummer; he knew Chet pretty well and Chet’s wife Carol. And Chet never gave a dime to Carol and the kids, and this was one way to supply her with the proceeds.

So now it’s like ’79 or ’80, and Oscar(Peterson) comes in one night, because he and Butch Watanabe are still close. We play and I meet Oscar, he says, “you sound good,” and I say, “thanks.” A couple of weeks later I’m at home and the phone rings. I answer, and the voice says, “Hello, this is Oscar Peterson.”

“Oh, hi!”

“Are you signed to any record label?”

“Uh, no.”

“Hang on a minute, I’ve got Norman Granz here.”

At this point I was like six feet off the ground. He says, “Hi Lorne, it’s Norman Granz. Oscar says he really enjoyed your playing and he’d like to produce an album.

We go into Manta downtown and in about six hours we did the album. I was just so nervous and excited I thought we had some good material. Every once in a while somebody will come up to me and say, “I just got a copy of your first album. Boy, you really sounded good back then.” I don’t want to disagree so I just say thanks. You hear something from fourteen years earlier and you’re not going to like it because you’ve matured.

It was Joe Benza and Kieran Overs. We played at this place for the better part of a year every Sunday, couple years before the record. So we took a bunch of chances and it was loose. The engineer, I don’t know how experienced he was recording jazz, the drum set had a rock sound and the guitar was too up in the mix. It got some reviews, and people started to say I was the new Ed Bickert. It was really complimentary; I had so much press back then it was embarrassing. I didn’t think it was deserved. I never let it get to my head or anything.

AW: Up until this point, had you played with Ed? Had he heard you?

LL: Oh, yeah. He heard me. Jane Bunnett and Larry Kramer had a jazz series on Sunday nights with people from out of town. Larry asked me if I would be into playing with Ed. I thought, “Oh man, I’m going to play with God!” So I went in with Kieran Overs and Jerry Fuller, I probably had about five shots of scotch before I played. My family came down, it was a big deal.

AW: So you guys didn’t really have a chance to get together and you didn’t really know him that well?

LL: Not really. Now it’s fine, let’s play. Back then I was scared. I’d ask him, “What do you want to play?” and he’d say, “Let’s play stuff we’re comfortable with.” I’d say, How about this, how about that, and he’d say, “Oh yeah, sure.” He knows (just about) every tune ever written and if he didn’t he’d pick it up real fast. He’s got the deadliest hearing. In one way I’d like to have those kind of ears, in another not. We live in a very out-of-tune world.

So we played; there was Ed, the original, and there’s me doing my imitation. I guess it sounded OK, but I felt like a fish out of water. Eventually we decided for fun to put together a quartet and try to do a week at George’s. I was getting all this press, and he was already a legend. I did a record with Johnny Hartman, a sweetheart a true gentleman.

Ed and I did a record for Unisson, and Ted O’Reilly approached me about starting this label. One afternoon, Neil’s amp screwed up during the session, so Ed and I did a take of I Remember You and Ill Wind. I was teaching and working a lot. Around this time I was teaching at York at a workshop instructor part time and delivering tires during the summer. I was playing constantly with Mark Eisenmann. Play, play, play.

I recorded with Brass Connection. I started teaching at Mohawk. For awhile I was going through a real bad time; I found it really hard to cope with the fact that here I was, I’d arrived, and this big world had opened up for me. But I didn’t realize that the work was going to stop. All of a sudden I wasn’t everyone’s favorite anymore, and I got real bummed out about it, and I started to not practice. I got really demoralized; I didn’t know how to handle it. I’m not talking about being a pop superstar, just about someone who was quite busy and well liked in the music field. Now I know why, because the music business is cyclical, people get different favorites and there are different circumstances. There are different cliques that take over for awhile, not even intentionally, it just happens.

The Guitar