J. Walter Hawkes: Transcript
Episode Video and Podcast with show notes
J. Walter Hawkes:
It wasn't fun. I never want to do it again. Probably the best thing ever happened to me, and it's so much more than just becoming a musician. I mean, honestly, that's the icing on top of the cake. Just my overall attitude about living in life drastically changed after that. Drastically.
Leah Roseman:
Hi, you're listening to Conversations with Musicians with Leah Roseman. J. Walter Hawkes is a four-time Emmy-winning composer for the PBS series Peg+Cat and Wonder Pets is a renowned jazz trombone player and also performs as a jazz vocalist, ukulele player, and pianist. As a young man, he survived a horrible accident which changed the course of his life. We talk about this and his mentors, including the legendary Slide Hampton, how he got into composing for Blues Clues and many hilarious and heartwarming personal stories. Those of you who listened to my episode with Pat Irwin will remember his album Wide Open Sky with Walter, and we're featuring two pieces from that album in this episode, along with an impromptu performance of Cole Porter's Get Out of Town. Walter's love of adventure really comes through in this conversation, and it's really inspiring to hear how he's built such an interesting career in music. You can use the timestamps to navigate, and like all my episodes, you can listen to this on your podcast player, watch the YouTube video or read the transcript. Please do sign up for my newsletter to get access to Sneak Peeks on my website, leahroseman.com, everything linked in the description along with a support link to support this independent podcast. In case you missed that episode with Pat Irwin, I'll link it in the show notes as well now to our conversation.
Hey, Walter, thanks so much for joining me here today.
J. Walter Hawkes:
Absolutely.
Leah Roseman:
I found out about you through Pat Irwin because when I was researching him, I was listening to your album Wide Open Sky, which I love. I still listen to that. It's so great, and I thought hopefully people will check out his episode if they haven't heard it, and he spoke to the creation of that album. I thought before we got into your story, which is so interesting, and you do so many things, if we could dig into that project a little bit and have one of those tracks early in the episode so people could actually hear your trombone playing, that would be cool.
J. Walter Hawkes:
Oh yeah, that's great.
Leah Roseman:
So you moved out to Long Island City in 2001, which is the same neighborhood he lives in.
J. Walter Hawkes:
Yeah, I moved, I was living in the East Village and I actually ended up moving October 1st, 2001. That was not planned as obviously, we did not know what was going to happen in September, but it worked out fairly. It worked out all right. I was living in a pretty rough situation in the East Village, what they call an SRO, single room occupancy, eight foot by 10 foot with a sink, and I share the bathroom with the rest of the tenants in the hall. So moving to Long Island City not only was a pretty serious, just a better living situation for me. It was also the beginning of, I mean, I ended up staying there for 21 years. This studio is in Long Island City. I actually moved from Long Island City to Astoria about a month ago
Leah Roseman:
Now. This album was a departure for both of you in terms of your style of writing.
J. Walter Hawkes:
Oh, totally. Pat had put out a couple of CDs,
Leah Roseman:
His Lost and Found tapes.
J. Walter Hawkes:
Yes! And I was very inspired by that stuff. All of the songs were kind of these short vignettes and just, I found them very pleasant to listen to, and I really wanted to try to do something along those lines. So definitely when we first started doing this together, I was thinking a lot about those, and then it just sort of morphed into this other thing. And yeah, it's quite a bit different. Most of the trombone work I do is in the jazz world, and I would even say of that stuff in the jazz world, the vast majority of it is in a very traditional jazz setting. So yeah, this was a bit of a departure from that, but when I first moved to town in 1995, I was really pretty all over the map, so it was nice to be able to open up some of those creative pathways that hadn't been used in a minute.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, I love those Lost and Found projects of Pats, and some of that music's included on my episode with him as well, so people should check that out.
J. Walter Hawkes:
Oh, yeah, it's good.
Leah Roseman:
So from this album Wide Open Sky, I was hoping we could include two tracks. So one of them is called February and the other one's called For a Dance. Would that be okay with you?
J. Walter Hawkes:
Yes, yes. February, that's actually one of my tunes, and it was originally, I was at an artist colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, I believe VCCA in Amherst, Virginia. I was working on a very large scale piece of music that I never quite finished, but it was a beautiful time out there, and it was February, and I called my wife and she wasn't there, but I had this room with this amazing white baby grand piano that was actually, it was MIDI-ed, but when I called my wife, she wasn't there, and I was sitting at the pianist. So I just sort of doodled something and let that be the message, and she really liked it, and then later on was kind of like, you really should do something with that too. I was like, well, we had to go through some fairly technical whatever to finally get that message off of, I forget what the, I think it might've been her phone, or maybe it was, I don't know. I just remember it was a thing, and it was very much just that sort of lonely cold February shortest month of the year kind of thing that I liked so much.
We did a video for it after we recorded it, me and Pat, and at that time I was in the process of digitizing a bunch of eight millimeter film that my grandfather had made going back to forties. Most of it was pretty deteriorated. It smelled like vinegar, and it took forever to find a place that could do it. And then when I got it, there was just so much amazing footage, and my grandparents, my father from the Pacific Northwest where they certainly have winters, and I found this really amazing footage that my grandfather had taken in front of the house, and you see my dad, his sister throwing snow at each other, and he's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever. Look how beautiful all this stuff is. And then the last cut is him getting a shot of my grandmother going to the outhouse, and she just go like, hi, stop. But it's really beautiful footage and I'm really happy with how that came out.
Leah Roseman:
What a treasure to be able to have access to that.
J. Walter Hawkes:
Yeah, I grew up in Mississippi and we lost everything in Katrina. Fortunately, those films were up on a high. That was one of the only things that kind of got saved. Unfortunately, everything else was pretty close to the ground, including all the family photos.
Leah Roseman:
Oh, that's hard.
J. Walter Hawkes:
And so for years I was trying to get this stuff done, and of course the longer I waited, the worse deterioration was, and eventually I got all of it that could be digitized, digitized. But unfortunately, the oldest of the stuff, I wasn't able to get it done until sadly after dad was gone and yeah, that is what it is.
Leah Roseman:
So will we be able to share that video to the people?
J. Walter Hawkes:
Oh, totally.
Leah Roseman:
Okay.
J. Walter Hawkes:
Absolutely. That's the other great thing. I mean, it's so hard to, when the footage is yours, you can use it. So yeah. Yeah, it's great.
Leah Roseman:
Wonderful. You're about to hear February written by J. Walter Hawkes performed on trombone by Walter with Pat Irwin on electric guitar. This is from their album Wide Open Sky. For the podcast listeners, the video will be linked in the show notes.(music)
So would you be willing to talk about 30 years ago when you had a really dramatic life-changing moment?
J. Walter Hawkes:
Oh, sure, sure. Right after I graduated college, I got my first job on a cruise ship. I actually got the job before I graduated college and took all my juries and my finals early so that I could take a plane to Acapulco, catch a cruise ship. I was 23 and no, I was 22. Yeah, it was 1993. I was 22. That was kind of my first real, I mean, I had played gigs, but this was my first real professional job and certainly my first music, full-time job. Yeah, one day. I mean, we had gone to a lot of places. I was probably on, I guess I was on there for a couple weeks, and then we went to Cabo San Lucas, which is on the tip of the Baja Peninsula, and we rented four wheelers. We were riding around me and the band and some of the eight, the audio and video crew, and I feel like some of the other people on crew staff. And we were riding around, and it was in this area with a lot of big tall sand dunes near these cliffs that went down to the ocean below.
And I was kind of riding around by myself at one point, and I had heard this rumor, so 23, 22, I had heard this rumor that there was a photo session happening at the top of the mountain for the Playmate of the year. And so I told myself, I'm going to go check that out, man, that's crazy. I got about halfway there and just thinking, I'm going to look like a pervert. I'm going to go get the rest of the guys and be a group of perverts. So I turned around, started heading back to where everybody else was riding. I saw this trail that I didn't notice before, and sure, I was exploring, went down this trail and made a hard turn to the right it. Right when it did that, it was against tall rocks here. Right when the turn finished, those rocks disappeared, and I was literally riding along the edge of a cliff to an insane, insane height to the crashing ways below in rocks, and I was like, whoa. So I tried to get away when I should have just hit the brakes. But anyway, 22. And so I tried to get away from the edge and I hit a rock that knocked me airborne and literally teetering on right here is where I should have jumped, I should have just jumped. But all of my instincts, just from years and years of being a crazy kid on a bicycle, jumping over things and doing all that stuff, I held on and it went over.
I free fell about half of the way holding onto the bike, stayed upright again. That might've been some of the experience I'd had in the past or something, I don't know. And did I free fell about halfway down the cliff landed about halfway down the bike flew one way. I flew another, I kind of did this and rolled against rocks. God knows how much further down. When I made it to the bottom, I was very alone. I wasn't wearing a shirt, wasn't wearing a helmet, but I was wearing jeans, and there was no question that my leg was really injured, and that's with the jeans on.
And so I was stuck and I was alone and I was losing. I was starting to feel sleepy. I didn't realize that was because I was losing blood. I, and eventually, I don't know how long it was, it felt like forever, but it may not have been that long. The whole concept of time when you're in shock is - one of the kids that was in the area, I say kids, he was probably my age local, climbed down the cliff, and then other people started coming down. Evidently, the Playboy photographer had seen me go over the cliff from far away. It was like, what the hell?
At least that's the word I heard. And yeah, there was talk of a helicopter, there was talk of a boat, all this stuff. But eventually they got a stretcher on a rope down there. They tied me to it, and at one point, I was literally a vertical, and I remember all the sand just going over my head, my very bleeding head. And eventually I made it to the hospital in Cabo San Lucas. It was a crazy ride in the ambulance. A couple of the guys in the band were there by that point, and they rode in the ambulance with me and were trying to make me laugh.
And I ended up staying in Mexico for 12 days in the hospital. And of course when I woke up that next morning, I was in a lot of pain and I realized, oh yeah, the cruise ship probably just left without me. So here I am alone in Mexico. I can't speak Spanish at all. I could barely speak English. And so I started calling for help. Nurse came in, and I just kind of started crying, I guess, and it was like, my arm really hurts, my leg really hurts. My head really hurts. I think the ship left without me. I don't know what's going on. Can you help me? Or something. And she just says, no English.
Yeah, I think they tranquilized me or something like that. But I was there for 12 days according to the newspaper, the local newspaper. I fell 80 meters. I mean, obviously should not be alive. I mean, it's just as simple as that. I shouldn't be alive. And especially during those 12 days in the hospital by myself, my father did eventually come out, poor guy. But it was during that time that I realized that I had double majored in computer science and music. I had always been making sure that I had a safe out from music. I didn't grow up in a family that had any professional musicians anywhere nearby. I mean, my grandfather played the ukulele with his friends, that kind of thing. So just the concept of not having a traditional career with a pension and all that was just completely foreign to my family.
But it was during that time in the hospital when I just kind of was struggling with all this anyway, and I realized there are people that make a living as a trombone player in the world. There are, they exist, and why can't I be one of 'em? It's not that deep, actually. And it's interesting. This has been my approach to a lot of things that I find unfamiliar, like say food, some sort of food that I might think is weird from another culture, but that culture has been eating that food for decades, like decades, hello, eons for their entire history perhaps. So it's fine, just try it just to really come to terms with that idea that people really do this. And it's not that crazy was the thing. Honestly, in some ways, just from a point of privilege. I grew up in a nice middle class family, but yeah, so I basically fell over a cliff, hit my head on some rocks and decided I was going to be a trombone player. That's actually the truth.
Leah Roseman:
And having read your blog post about this, so you're stuck in the hospital, there's nothing to listen to. There's no tv, no one to talk to, so just your thoughts.
J. Walter Hawkes:
Yeah, yeah. And it wasn't fun. I never went do it again. Probably the best thing ever happened me, and it's so much more than just becoming a musician. I mean, honestly, that's the icing on top of the cake. Just my overall attitude about living in life drastically changed after that drastically. And just trying to make the life that I have and the life that I share with the people around me, as good as it possibly can be, because this most likely is our only chance. And that's really precious, insanely precious. But at the same time, life's too important to take seriously. It depends on what time of the day, which side of that I'm going to be on!
Leah Roseman:
Hi. Just a short break from the episode, which I hope you're enjoying so far. If you want to check out over a hundred episodes you may have missed in addition to your podcast player or YouTube, I have an extensive website, leah roseman.com with show notes, transcripts, the complete catalog of episodes, and you can sign up there for my weekly newsletter to get access to sneak peeks of upcoming guests. Please do share your favorite episodes with your friends, follow me on social media and share my posts. And if you can spare a few dollars to help support the series, that would be amazing. And you can find that link in the show notes. I'm an independent podcaster and I really do need the help of my listeners. Now, back to the episode
J. Walter Hawkes:
For a Dance is a wonderful example of Pat's, just beautiful melodic writing and approach to composition. I love goes a couple different places in there, but it's all very mellow. And yes, it also opens itself up as a vehicle for improvisation. But again, with these things, it's, it's not like a jazz jazz thing. It's kind of a different head when I'm improvising with this because it's so much more, I feel like, and maybe all jazz should be this way. I mean, that's a certain point, but it's more about evoking a vibe, a feeling, emotion, motion, and that song really does that. And yeah, I love that too.
Leah Roseman:
Me too. Thanks so much for sharing. This next piece is For a Dance from the album Wide Open Sky, composed by Pat Irwin.(music)
J. Walter Hawkes:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
So you started with piano and you've gone back to that recently more seriously.
J. Walter Hawkes:
I have amazingly, I played piano at Joe's Pub last night. Yay. I played with a band called The Hot Sardines, and they've been nice enough to let me play piano on one song. So now I was playing gigs on piano before I moved to New York, but once I got to New York, no way. But lately, oh, it's been so much fun. So my first little bits of playing on actual cakes have been like a Birdland and Joe's Pub and these really great venues, and I don't deserve it, but I'll take it. Thank you. It's so much fun. So much fun.
Leah Roseman:
I was going to ask you about The Hot Sardines. So great. And of course I discovered them because of you and you guys are debuting at Carnegie Hall in the spring. You're going on tour to Japan soon? Yes. What a great band. And there's a tap dancer in the band.
J. Walter Hawkes:
There's been a lot of tap dancers in the band, currently is Dewitt Fleming Jr. Dewitt is a monster. It's really great too. I do like The Sardines approach to it where yes, the tap dancer will get up and do solos and be featured, but also when he is not dancing, standing up and doing the stuff, he's sitting down and lightly tapping and adding to the rhythm section sound, and it's very infectious. It's a fun situation. I like how once you bring something like a tap dancer into a serious, I'm not going to say serious, but whatever jazz band, no matter what, you can't get away from, there's this little bit of a variety show, act vibe that comes to it regardless how, let's say deep and artistic the dancer is, and believe me, Dewitt is man rhythmically. I've never experienced a dancer that can swing as hard as he can. His technical prowess is impressive, but it does, it adds this really cool dimension to it. Yeah,
Leah Roseman:
I'll link one of their videos in the show notes connected to this episode, so people can check that out.
J. Walter Hawkes:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Now, let's go back to you. So you started piano, and then to get into North Texas, you figured trombone was an easier bet,
J. Walter Hawkes:
Correct? That was right. I sent a cassette tape. Usually I have some cassettes around. It would've been great if I just held one up. But anyway, I sent a cassette tape in and somehow it worked. And I mean, I was an okay trombone player for a kid in Mississippi that, yeah, so when I got that scholarship, I had also gotten almost a full ride to Mississippi State for computer and electrical engineering. And my high school band director is the one who sat me down in his office and just said, I know you're struggling with this decision, but I need to tell you that you need to go to music school. And that he said, I was one of the most talented students he'd ever had, and I certainly wasn't going to get that kind of encouragement in music at home. And I don't mean that to sound like a dis to my parents. I completely understand where they were coming from. And so it was due to that conversation that I ended up going to North Texas and I was horrible.
I got there, they have seven full big bands, or they did when I was there. I think they still do ranked from one to seven. They call the top one the one o'clock. That's when they rehearse at one o'clock in the afternoon, and then there's the two o'clock, the three o'clock and down to the seven o'clock. So I made the seven o'clock, but they told me that the only reason I was going to be in the band is because they needed warm bodies that played the trombone there, but you also have to take the remedial band, and I deserved all that. Don't get me wrong, I'm not bitter. I was then, but I'm not now. And that turned into a four and a half year ass kicking. And I don't necessarily do well in a real academic environment. I never have. I mean, I do fine with my schoolwork, but as far as just the way things work out politically and interpersonally, and especially anything involving large amounts of authority,
It is a miracle. I graduated. That said, for all of the angst and frustration that I had during those years, because I wasn't excelling like the other students, I also didn't have the discipline it took to do it until I had gone. It took those years to instill that sort of discipline into me to where I could do it on my own. And I felt like my real growth musically happened after college. And part of that is because of what happened on that cliff in Mexico, because I had made a conscious decision like this is what I'm going to do and I'm going to do it right, and I know how to do it. I had gotten trained to learn how to do it, even if that actual training at college I didn't do so great with, but I took what I learned from school and made it my own. My dad, when I was recovering a long time, I had my leg in a big old cast or this insane thing of screws and rods attached to my leg and my pop. I take that back. My mom would take me to the church that I grew up in, and the church let me use their choir room, and I just stayed there all afternoon with the piano and my trombone not bothering anybody that I knew.
My pop would pick me up at the end of the day when he got off of work. That was my job, because since I couldn't really do anything of my leg, it worked out quite nicely. And I love my father, but he has such a low tolerance for noise, and I'm a trombone player. One can read into that, maybe I was. But I remember one time, this was before we started the thing at the church. I was practicing my scales and they were these diminished scales that are not very, how should I say, user-friendly to the listener. And my father came to my room in tears. He felt so bad, so guilty that I was working so hard in doing this thing, and it was driving him insane. I get it. I get it. The older I get, the more I find myself so incredibly affected by ambient sound, et cetera, et cetera. Such a classic old person thing. But
Leah Roseman:
I can hear a lot of construction noise outside your studio there.
J. Walter Hawkes:
Speaking of ambient, yes, it's New York. Yeah, they're redoing the road out here. So
Leah Roseman:
I'm not a jazzer, but a diminished scale, I believe is alternating whole steps and half steps.
J. Walter Hawkes:
That is correct.
Leah Roseman:
Okay.
J. Walter Hawkes:
That is correct. And there's half whole and whole half. It's basically kind of almost all the same scale, and certainly if you're the one listening to someone practice it, it's all the same scale.
Leah Roseman:
So you've won four Emmys for composition, and I know you wrote for Blues Clues back in the day when my older daughter would've been watching that show and Wonder Pets, which I hear is a great show, and now Peg+Cat, right? Yes. So the Emmys were one for Wonder Pets and what else?
J. Walter Hawkes:
Peg+Cat. Okay, three for Wonder Pets, and then one for Peg+Cat, and definitely the, I mean, the Peg+Cat one is really special. I was the Music Director for that one. I got to make the speech.
And yeah, that's is a pretty amazing story in itself, how Peg+Cat kind of came to being when I was working at Wonder Pets, that was a particular production company, and I was very close to the creative director who was the number two, or I don't know exactly how you do the numbers, but whatever. As far as I was concerned, she was the number two. And we got to be good friends. And we were doing some projects outside of class as such some films that she had been putting together for children's film festivals and that kind of thing, and things were getting a little rocky at the production company. And so she decided to leave the company.
I like to think that I may have, we had a couple heart to hearts over cocktails, and I like to think that some of those heart to hearts maybe. Anyway, so once that happened, and that was kind of a big deal, it was kind of a coup. She had an ex-boss who was working at PBS tell her, Hey, I heard you're not working there anymore. We're actually taking submissions for new shows right now. The deadline just passed, but we're old friends. If you want to send something in and you can do it quick, we'll consider it. And so right there, she called up Billy Aronson, the writer who, one of the original writers of Rent who also worked on Wonder Pets, some of my favorite episodes were his. And they came up with a show, they put it together and pitched it, and the main character was a little girl who played the ukulele, and the side character was this cat who was supposed to play trombone. So it kind of literally wrote it around me.
It was amazing. Eventually the cat did not play trombone. Eventually it was somebody, me going (singing) this kind of thing, doing a mouth trombone sort of stuff. But still, oh, it was great because that job, the only job I ever have where I could just do whatever I wanted. I mean, I had been in the kids TV business for an easy 10 years, no, 15 years by that point. So I knew the ropes and I knew the vibe, but I've always had a certain approach. And to have the kind of freedom to be able to do that and hire my friends as musicians and engineers, oh, it was so great. It was so much fun, such a great show. And it taught math, which also considering my academic background, just everything lined up and that was so much fun. The other thing that was really fun about that job, now all of these shows with the exception of Blues Clues were kind of what I would call typically, especially when I'm giving a clinic to graduate students kind of ass-backwards where we would not see any video.
These shows are so music heavy, so much singing that we actually did the music before they did the visuals. So what a composer would do, and actually I got issued an episode today where they issued me a script, and that's all I get. I get a script, and then I record myself singing and speaking the entire episode with the demo music behind it. So composers in this case sort of act a little bit as directors because you're literally setting the pacing of the entire episode. You can have a lot of influence on comic timing, how jokes go through and all this kind of stuff. And that to me is just fun. There's other composers that it doesn't work for, and there's a lot of composing work out there that doesn't work for me. So I'm just glad that there's something, when I was a kid, we would make little skits on audio tape and stuff, and mostly recording toilet flushes and things like that, little boys, but it feels like that I am kind of making this school long skit with music. And then I turn it in and we go through various rounds of revisions, and then they actually do the storyboard to the composer's demo, those poor storyboard people having to listen to us singing.
But the great thing about this for me is I do some singing and I really enjoy the acting and certainly the joke telling part of it. And just to make it fun, I always did my episodes in characters. I'd have my own version of voices for each character that were always uber exaggerated and would never pass the preschool kid police, preschool media police. But once I turn this in, once it passes, they replace my voice with the talent, and it might be kids and actors or whatever, but every once in a while I'd hit one out of the park and suddenly I'd be a character. And so I was the voice of the arch villain in the Peg+Cat and oh, it was absolutely hilarious. It was just so much fun. And of course, also the great thing is I had already done the work, so it was so much fun. The first time that happened was on Wonder Pets, and we did a version of the Blue Danube Waltz, and there was like a yak and a bear and some other animal. And so on my demo, I just go (yak noise honking) kind of like whatever, the young Frankenstein or whatever as the yak, and I got the gig, although they made me come in and rerecord it, which was fine. But I came in, I yacked all over the place. It took 15 minutes and I got paid better for that than I did for composing.
I mean, that was a long time ago, but still, it was amazing, amazing. I mean, these are the kinds of things like just these really wacky situations that are just so absurd and that I just love this kind of insanity that life is would've before the accident or whatever. I think this would've wigged me out. It would just that. But I like just how completely insane the world is.
Leah Roseman:
So ukulele, you belong to a New York ukulele club, is that still a thing?
J. Walter Hawkes:
That's not a thing. That was the New York ukulele, what do we call it? Ensemble, the New York Ukulele Ensemble, I believe it was. And of course that was led by a guy named Uke Jackson, and he's a very interesting character as one would expect with a name like Uke Jackson, writer musician. Anyway, yeah, going back to the SRO, I lived on St. Mark's place. The guy that lived below me was rumored to have been the murderer of Abe Lebewohl of the Second Avenue Deli. And so playing trombone in that apartment wasn't really an option. So my father had given me my grandfather's ukulele right about the time I was recovering, I think probably maybe a little before that, but I thought it was a toy, whatever.
And I showed it to my friends at Blues Clues and they're like, this is a nice ukulele, Walter, you should have this looked at, because one of the strings didn't keep in tune, just didn't hold whatever. And in the end, dad said that Grandpa said it was broken. I brought it to Matt Yuganov and Guitars on the guitar store in downtown. I want to say West Village, don't even know if it's still there. And turned out that grandpa had strung it incorrectly, and that's all it was. The friction tuning was holding up just fun. So I started playing it all the time because that's what I would do in the SRO. And also I would - alternate side parking. So when I had to go out and go to my car and wait for the street cleaner to come by, I would just get in the car and I would practice. It was so much more convenient than trying to do something with a trombone.
And what I started to find, first of all, there was no YouTube at the time, and I refused to go get lessons because in that ukulele case of my grandfather's was a Rosetta Stone of about three or four songs that he had either typed out the lyrics and drawn Tablatures, the little things where you put your fingers. And so using that and math, I figured out how to tune the ukulele and how to do all the other chords just from the three or four chords that he had had written out. Obviously, I had a lot more time in my hands than I do now, and I just loved this concept because the idea of the ukulele, I was not taking it seriously at all, and I didn't want to take it seriously. Trombone was all about taking it seriously. Piano even was about taking it seriously. This was going to be just something that's kind of fun. And I liked the idea of feeling like my grandfather taught it to me.
And what ended up happening is I ended up on the road with a band in the late nineties called a band called Jet Set Six. We were kind of riding the wave of the neo swing movement that was happening at the time, big band Voodoo Daddy and Cherry Pop and Daddies and all those daddy bands that were happening back then. But we'd be going across the country and I would just be quietly in the backseat practicing. And I found that I learned so much more about harmony from playing the ukulele. I was already pretty good. I got around on the piano and I was no stranger to harmony. I orchestrated for orchestras and big bands and all this stuff, but it's a totally different animal on this little thing with only four strings, as I'm sure you understand, of all people.
And it kind of blew my mind just how much more I understood how the notes relate to each other from this as opposed to your typical piano approach. And I would even say it's better, at least to me than guitar with all those extra two strings, it's just too much. With this (music) that chord is literally 12 different chords. It just depends on where the bass is, whether there's a bass playing or not, if you know how to get around it, around the instrument. And you can do very little and imply a whole lot, but you have to understand just how complex everything is to be able to simplify it in the smartest way that's going to get those still make it feel a little more sophisticated, even if you're not actually doing much on this. It's also the easiest instrument I think of all to start on and actually start sounding like you're making music, which I'm very sensitive to because being a trombone player, no matter how naturally talented anyone is, you're going to sound like lawn equipment for about four years. There's no way around it before you start doing things that sound remotely like music. So this thing is great.
Leah Roseman:
I'm guessing you have a few ukuleles, but the one you just picked up, is that your grandfather's ukulele?
J. Walter Hawkes:
No, grandpa is right over there. I could just run grab it. Sure. I have so many stories about this ukulele too, because I have left it on the train platform. I have left it on a dumpster on Ludlow Street at two in the morning. I have lost my balance and sat on it and flattened it, and this is one of the few family heirlooms that exist. Thank you, Katrina. So it's just amazing. I still have it, but yeah, she is and very well worn. You can see there's good many cracks. I do need to get reinforced, but it's probably going to be out of tune.(music) Oh, it's not too bad.(music)
There's a little bit of distortion and that's coming from the cracks here, and that's why I got, so I don't really use this on gigs anymore. It used to be my main one. But I will say that this is still from my experience, the most loud and true ukulele I've ever played. I mean, obviously if you get a banjo ukulele, it's going to be louder, but I had this one made custom for me specifically trying to get the volume that I would get from this. And it doesn't do it. I tried, I mean, I'm no luthier, but just as far as, I mean those guys made it. I didn't make it, but it was still custom and I was really trying to (music), I mean, you can even just, (music)I mean, it is just so much louder. It's too bad. It's still got the cracks right now though.
But yeah, my now wife, that night that I left it on the dumpster, we were all out with our friends the night before our big party and woke up at noon the next day, didn't even really realize what had happened till about one. And I thought for sure that this thing was gone. And so we went back to the area and I think I was already in tears. I'm sure I was. And she had started knocking on doors around there, and there was a candy company that wasn't really, it wasn't like a storefront, it was like a little factory, an old candy, if you know The Pianos is the name of the club. It's now there. It was called the Piano Store back then. And we used to throw these somewhat, not completely legal parties there, and next door was this candy place. And sure enough, he had picked it up. He saw it at 6:00 AM when he came into work that day, and I think that would've been on a Sunday, if I remember correctly. And after she kept her cool and I was flipping out all over the place and I read the writing on the wall, and I proposed fairly soon after.
It's good for me to have somebody a little more be around somebody a little more as I can be a little all over the place. I'm sure that's hard to believe.
Leah Roseman:
I'll just mention for my listeners who haven't heard those episodes, there's a wonderful jazz singer, Diane Nalini I featured who plays jazz ukulele, really gorgeously, and she plays quite a bit on that episode. And I also featured on Australian musician, Philip Griffin, who's done a whole bunch of things and including ukulele and taught a lot of ukulele schools like in New Zealand, they have this huge tradition with these huge ukulele orchestras. So we talked about that quite a bit in that episode.
J. Walter Hawkes:
Yes, yes. There's the one out of Great Britain as well. Yeah, there is a total tradition with that. And we sort of did a little of back in the day with the ukulele ensemble, it was much more of a, let's just say a downtown hang. It was a very much a gaggle of extreme individuality, speaking of which, oh yeah, we would remember. We played a parade at some point.
Leah Roseman:
So what are you going to play?
J. Walter Hawkes:
Yeah, Cole Porter's Get Out of Town. I especially like a lot of these songs from the Tin Pan Alley era as such, I would always enjoy trying to learn the verses to a lot of songs. People know the choruses too that are famous. And for a while I was getting a little cocky about it, and I remember playing one time a concert in Brooklyn for a group of mostly older Brooklyn ladies, and I was making some sort of quip about, I like to do the verses, not that many people do the verses. And then they come and then some lady just goes, why you think you're Tony Bennett? I was like, alright, you got me. Okay.
Anyway,(music)
The farce had ended,
The curtain drawn, and I at least pretended that love was dead and gone, but out of nowhere, you come to me as before to take my heart and break my heart once more. Get out of town before it's too late, my love. Get out of town. Be good to me, please. Why wish me home? Why not retire to a farm and be contented to charm the birds off the trees. Just disappear. I care for you much too much 'cause when you are near so close to me, dear. We touch too much. The thrill when we meet is so bittersweet the darling. It's getting me down. So on your mark, set, get out of town.
Leah Roseman:
Fantastic. Thanks so much.
J. Walter Hawkes:
Oh yeah. I'm actually right next door to a loading dock, hence the beeping, which is actually a beautiful thing because when I got this space, I've totally scored because the idea of having a place where I could blow my brains out on the trombone 24 hours a day without worrying about bothering anybody is worth its weight in gold in New York City. Yeah, one year I was playing with the Ukulele Ensemble, New York Ukulele Ensemble. We were playing a ukulele festival at the theater for the new city that of course was being run by Uke Jackson, Uke was all excited because we made it into Timeout. And my picture specifically was all over the magazine about this event. He was so happy. And at the time I was starting to play on and off or at least record with Nora Jones. And I have to say my biggest professional regret, and I don't have a lot of regrets, but I definitely have a regret here, was Nora had asked me to play Jazz Fest in New Orleans with her, and I turned it down because this was right after the whole thing in Timeout came out and I felt like I was going to be doing something really wrong or I needed to do the right thing.
And even though I wasn't getting paid a dime to play the ukulele festival, Uke was just so excited about all the promo and all this kind of thing that I felt like the right thing for me to do is to not play that gig with Nora. They got this guy Trombone Shorty to be my sub. So that's what I got out of it is I can say, oh yeah, Trombone Shorty, he's subbed for me once. But yeah, that was, you live and you learn. I mean this is, again, the thing about existing and surviving is you learn from your mistakes hopefully. Yeah, I definitely regret that.
Leah Roseman:
I know you'd recorded with her. I looked up a video of Sinking Soon. It was a concert you'd done in Austin. You're featured doing a fantastic solo.
J. Walter Hawkes:
Oh, thank you. Yeah, the studio version is much better. That studio version, Nora, I've known for a while before she really blew up, but also she went to North Texas as well much after I did. And so we knew some people in common, but her boyfriend at the time was also playing bass in my trio, and that's sort of how that whole connection kind of started. Plus, just in general, a lot of my friends were in a sort of singer songwriter jazz like scene that was playing, especially at the original living room. So we all knew each other and it was a big surprise when that time when Nora won all the Grammys and we were all so very happy for her and also just so very freaked out about, she was one of us basically, and I mean Ravi Shankar, sure, but still, you know what I'm saying? But basically, and actually we didn't know that at the time. None of us knew that, or at least I didn't.
She's such a sweetheart. But to see the crazy media frenzy that went around her and seeing what that did at the time, I mean, she's obviously gotten over it. She's doing great. But that whole thing was really intense. But she asked me to play on one song, and it was Sinking Soon. This was her third record I think or something. We came over and played, basically the first take is what we used, and this was at her new studio that her and Lee had set up together in the Carl Fisher building in the East Village definitely is what will probably go down in history is that. And then, yes, they asked me to come out and play at Austin City Limits, and I'm just going to be completely honest, they flew me out for an eight bar solo and I completely psyched myself out. I'm really pleased to hear that you thought it was a good solo it in my mind.
I blew everything I had in the first three notes and then was just confused the rest of the time. I was so incredibly nervous and freaked out. And I was sitting in this dressing room that Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson were maybe in last week, and there's all these pictures of everybody hanging out backstage and I'm sitting in this room by myself like, whoa, oh, I just go out there. And I'm like, and yeah, and of course that was also released as a record that live performance. And I was working on a Wonder Pets episode and I had to go to J&R Music to get a copy of DVD of Moulin Rouge because we were doing a Moulin Rouge themed episode. So I go to the store and where can I find Moulin Rouge? And he's like, oh, it's over here. So as we're walking, that song comes on right on in the store and I'm like, Hey man, you hear that trombone? That's me. And he is like, oh, okay. Here's Moulin Rouge. Okay, cool. Alright. So I go up to the register, wait in line, and I'm buying my Moulin Rouge, and I give her my credit card, and the second she looks at my credit card is when Nora on the recording says, J.Walter Hawkes! And she looks at the card, she looks at me and she says, that'll be $14.96.
Such good stuff. Anyway,
Leah Roseman:
It's interesting about performance anxiety. It's something that comes up on this series a lot, and as a performer myself, it's a big part of my life. And also talking to a lot of jazz musicians on this series, because people have said they kind of like when it's not necessarily a listening audience because you can feel more free, but let's face it, you're at a level of skill where even if you feel pretty awful, it's probably going to sound okay.
J. Walter Hawkes:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, just to be able to survive in any city as a full-time professional, even part-time, but still, you know what I'm saying? You have to be on a certain level and what you were saying about playing where people are listening, I absolutely feel that 100%. I have a - plug time! I have a weekly gig in New York City at a little wine bar in Long Island City, Domain wine bar every Wednesday, 8:30 to 11, and it's a cute little wine bar with a pretty beat up upright in the back. And I refuse to use microphones or any sort of amplification. I have a few weird hills I'm willing to die on.
It's not a music venue. And so people are just talking over it sometimes right by me. Sometimes it annoys me sometimes. Most of the time I'm pretty cool with it because of what you were just saying. It's like once I start really paying attention to every little nuance that I'm doing, I start getting a little self-conscious. I'll be the first to admit it. And I definitely playing in the wine bar situation like that because I also like the idea of adding an ambiance to a room. I don't need to necessarily make it a show about me even when I'm singing. That's one of the reasons why I don't want to use a microphone. I definitely feel more comfortable that's set the more you do it all these times, playing with Nora, playing with even The Sardines when I was out with Lucy Woodward and a lot of these places where we're playing big stages and I'm heavily featured, the more you do it, the more you get used to it, or at least that's been my experience.
And part of that is I think because as a trombone player, I'm just being forced into so many different situations, completely different. One day I'm out in front, another day I'm way in the back part of a big band or whatever, or in a horn section or playing a salsa band playing for a while I was in a Persian wedding band. Just all these, a klezmer band, a lot of different situations. And the more of those situations that one does, I feel like it's like flight hours and it does become easier. But boy, I can certainly psych myself out at the most random of times. And definitely that time on Austin City Limits was, that's also the most viewed YouTube video I have. It's one time somebody commented on there is like, this guy needs trombone lessons. I just hit like, as one of my jazz professors would say, every note you play is the first note of the rest of your solo.
Leah Roseman:
You got to perform with Slide Hampton, a real legend. And I was researching him. I wanted to ask you about that. And there's a great quote from him. He said, playing the trombone makes you realize that you're going to have to depend on other people.
J. Walter Hawkes:
Yes. Oh, that's funny. I have heard that, but I forgot about that, that he had said that. Yeah, that's true. And he always had a crew around him. It was pretty amazing. I took lessons with him for quite some time. Another funny situation that I just somehow gotten myself into, I cold called him one day. I got his number out of the Musician's Union book and just cold called him and asked him how much he charged for lessons. And he told me, and I couldn't afford it. And a friend of mine, a trumpet player, John Mark McGowan, wonderful player who was in Lionel Hampton's band for years, told me that Slide was starting, this would've been like 1996, 97 Slide, was starting to use computer copyists exclusively as opposed to people who did copy work by hand. And I had a laptop, I had Finale, I'd done two cruise ship arrangements on Finale by that point. I was like, okay. So I tried it again. I called up Slide and Hey, I've got an offer you can't refuse. You give lessons to me. I do copy work for you. And he actually went for it. It was amazing. And so I started taking lessons with him, and it was absolutely beautiful. One of my favorite things that I got out of them, that sounds bad, I don't mean it that way, but that he said to me that really affected me was, I've always struggled with the fact that what do you practice? You got to practice everything. And it's impossible to practice everything. And I'm not the kind of person that keeps a log. I respect those that can do that. I wish I could. I can't. I'm just, yeah, that's not me. So I asked him, how do you know what to practice? He just looks up and he says, practice for the next gig, man. It's just like, oh, that's so much deeper than it actually is, or that it comes across and it, yeah. And Slide after six months of taking those lessons, oh, he was so good. I still have so many of those recorded. And he was so nice to me, so nice to me. After about six months of this, he still hadn't asked me to do any copy work. So he said, don't worry, don't worry. I said, okay, all right. And sure enough, he calls me one day and he says, okay, so I got some copy work for you, but I'm about to go out of town, so why don't you just pick up the score from my doorman? I'm like, okay, cool, man, that sounds great. So I got to pick this thing up. He hands it to me and it's a huge, this big score, and it says Carnegie Hall on it. And I'm like, what?
And I open it up, and it's a full orchestral arrangement for Barry Harris for a concert that was being produced by Clint Eastwood. I mean, I hadn't been in town for a year, man. I hadn't been in town for a year. And suddenly I get thrust into this. And like I said, I'd done a couple cruise ship arrangements on Finale at this point. So I just dropped everything and I dove in. I didn't do everything perfect for sure. I had a whole lot of questions for Slide, and he was so patient with me. I mean, so many of his voicings I just didn't understand. And he's approaches, and he completely answered in the nicest way a lot of my stupid questions. But of course, I asked them, which is something I wish when I teach younger folks that they would like to ask questions. Sorry, that was an old man alert coming out again.
But I was not afraid, for better or worse, not afraid to ask those questions. And not only did he answer them, he was very gracious about it. I ended up ghostwriting a little part of it in the harp, and I was so excited because when it got broadcast on television, at one point, the camera focuses in on those harp players. And I'm like, you know what? Had I not written that part there, those cameras wouldn't have done that. So in a way, I made that happen. Something I did actually had an effect on something, and it was such a great feeling. Also, it felt like a very positive thing. I was so proud of the work. Granted, it was mostly copy work. I still have that score. Every single time, from that point on, when I would get a score from Slide, I just saw it as a learning opportunity. I would take those scores apart. I would ask him questions about Why did you put this in the saxophones and not in the trombones, and things like that. And he was always so great, so great. And through that, eventually I became one of the copyists for the Carnegie Hall Jazz Band, which put me in many other completely insane situations around jazz greats.
And I don't know how far I should go with those stories, but I will just say that a lot of, I found myself in some fairly uncomfortable situations that I put myself into, and I made it out, and I learned a lot from it. And I was working for a while, and I was working with George Wien, going to rehearsals with Frank Foster and just all these amazing, amazing musicians that I'd heard about all my life. And then suddenly, barely a year in town, and I'm hanging out backstage, Carnegie Hall with John Faddis as we're doing all Gil Evans and Maria Schneider's there, and Randy Brecker's in the section, and just all these names and figures that I had heard so much about, loved their music, and suddenly was just like right there. Had I been a little more mature, it probably would've gone a lot better, but that's not how it worked.
Leah Roseman:
I'm curious, when you moved to New York, did you have any connections?
J. Walter Hawkes:
Yeah. What ended up happening was I was working on cruise ships after I recovered from that accident on the cruise ship. I lived in Biloxi for a minute, then I moved to Mobile, Alabama for a minute, and then I went back on cruise ships. I didn't know what else to do. And when I had met a cabaret singer that I really enjoyed working with, and she had invited me to New York to play two weekends worth of gigs at a piano bar, the West Village. Before I knew what a piano bar in the West Village was, and I was like, sure, I'll do that. I mean, at the time, I mean, sure I'd worked on cruise ships, but from a domestic point of view, I had never really been northeast of Atlanta. I mean, I'd been on the Pacific West Coast with the family, but just certainly nothing about the eastern half of the United States did I really know and certainly had never been to New York City and a dancer I had worked with on one of the ships I knew was living up here.
So I called her up and I'm like, Hey, I'm going to be in town for a couple weeks, want to get together for coffee or something. She's like, oh, hey. So you know anybody that might want a room. We've got an extra room here for 250 a month where you could practice, and it's right by the train in Astoria. I just dropped everything. I dropped everything and moved to New York. My first time being in New York was literally the day I moved here, and I'll never forget going up the Jersey Turnpike that first time with traffic coming at me on both sides as we're driving over this post-nuclear-holocaust cesspool of industrial waste, and I see this hazy first view of the skyline. I'm like, I'm moving here. I was freaked out. But yeah, so we did those two shows and I went to North Texas.
I knew a lot of people here, and because of the cruise ships, I had friends. And so it was cool because a lot of my first work was through my college connections, and then the real work started once I kind of started going to places where they were playing traditional jazz, I found that a young person knowing those songs, a good thing, a very large amount of trombone players in the jazz world were doing more of a modern and big band thing, but I could get work pretty quickly. That paid pretty okay. Doing these Dixieland is not really the term we use anymore, but trad jazz jobs, of course, back then it was a lot of red vests and red bow ties and arm garters and straw hats playing at nursing homes, a lot of nursing homes, and there was a club called The Cajun that was in Chelsea and the Red Blazer Two, which is now Swing 46 in Midtown. I was playing those places a lot, but yeah, so I did know some people that was, of course, a very scenic route. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
I'm curious, you must know so many tunes, right?
J. Walter Hawkes:
I know a lot of songs.
Leah Roseman:
And how do you go about memorizing them?
J. Walter Hawkes:
Pretty much it's not very deep. It's over and over and over and over again, especially if I have to sing it, it's harder for me to memorize. I really, I'm more stressed about memorizing lyrics than I am melodies. I'm pretty good with memorizing melodies pretty quickly, but when it comes to lyrics, I basically start from the beginning and I get away from the book as quickly as possible. A lot of times, let's say it's an AABA tune, I do it one section at a time, always starting over at the very beginning. Let's say if I make it halfway through the second A of lyrics and I mess up, I start over right at the very beginning. And what I found that does is even if I'm not quite as solid with the end of the tune, if I have the beginning of the tune really burned into my system ROM, then this other stuff comes back, if that makes sense.
Especially if it's a song that I haven't played for a while. But if I learn it that way, where the first lyric always comes to my head very clearly, then that works. But I play it over and over and over again. Then I walk away, I do something else, and I come back fairly soon. And when you give yourself little breaks like that, it gives you a chance to forget it, if that makes any sense at all. And so when you come back after a little break, it helps I feel with me to get it past just short-term memory. And a lot of times I have to learn songs specifically for one event. What ends up happening is I'll think I know it and then a year later, not be a year before I do it again. And then of course it's actually completely gone. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Now, I know you love vintage electronics and old computers, and you also have a Thermin.
J. Walter Hawkes:
I do.
Leah Roseman:
What's your instrument collection in general? Because producing music all the time,
J. Walter Hawkes:
When I'm doing my actual work that pays the rent for the kids shows, I mostly just do everything as they call it, in the box, which means just using software. However, when I do things for me, I like using other bits of gear. It's a little bit of a problem, but still on the kids shows, certainly there's a lot of Peg+Cat where I was using my, I have a Wurlitzer electric piano that I like to use and an old organ. Actually, I just used the old organ for a Hallowe'en episode. It's so perfect. It's an old Lowry. It sounds like soap opera or a horror movie organ from the fifties. That's what it is.
But yeah, it's a combination of just love for the gear and my computer past whatever you want to say. And I like actually buying broken stuff and fixing it. I don't always succeed at it, but I found when I'm trying to repair something or build something, it's one of the few times I can really listen to music. As most of the time when I'm working, I'm working on music, so I can't listen to music. It's kind of like knitting for nerds. I like a hot soldering iron and just trying to get things to work. The monster that's behind me kind of happened over the pandemic, and I most likely will end up probably having to get rid of most of it maybe sooner rather than later. I don't know. But it's funny because I've never been a huge fan of electronic music, but I've always been fascinated by the gear.
And now that I've really dove into the gear more, I've started to do more research into actually what people were doing with the gear. And I've gotten to be listening to a lot of electronic music now. It's kind of a funny thing to start in your fifties, but yeah, and I do have a pretty, can't really, this place is kind of crazy, but this is this here and see if I can even get anything out there. But we have, god, it's a lot of junk though, and you can't even see, but there's piano there, the organ, and you'll see some, ah, no, I don't even know what you can say. I can't do this. No, it's too hard. But I have a whole section over there of vintage computers that fix up most of them Commodore because that was the computer I used when I was a kid, and I was just as much of a computer nerd back then, if not more than a music nerd. Me and my best friend from high school broke into our local hospital computer using a 300 BOD modem stuck into the back of the cartridge port of our Commodore 64, which is kind of the digital equivalent to going to school, barefoot, uphill both ways in the snow.
We were very proud of ourselves, but it was funny, once we got into the computer, we were like, wow, we did it. They were like, now what do we do? I don't know. Let's play some games, turn off the computer, load up a game. But I am completely fascinated by those old machines. The great thing about not doing computer science for a living is that I still love computing because I don't have to do it. I can work on some fairly esoteric things. I am a big fan of the 65 0 2 processor, and I've been learning to compose and to program in assembly code, and sometimes I use it for music. We did a series of cartoons for Cartoon Network called Ulu and Anju that I used Commodore 64 to make the music with, and that was a blast. And suddenly my entire retro computer hobby was tax deductible. I was using it for my business. So great.
It's a lot of nostalgia, but it's also a good exercise in that if you understand how those old computers work, you can keep the entire, if I'm going way off of music here, I'm sorry. Anyway, you can have in your mind the entire computer. The old computers are small enough that the entire memory map and how it works, you can kind of keep track of in your head. And if you understand how that works on the lowest level, when I say lowest level, I mean every bit that gets flipped and how the CPU works and executes instructions, if you understand how that works, you understand how this works. Yeah, your phone, you understand how your phone works, which is just basically that same thing times 3000 trillion, zillion, but the same basic concepts are there, and that's helped me a lot having that understanding, certainly in the troubleshooting thing. And if you can see, I'm surrounded by a bunch of gear, a bunch of equipment that is kind of held together by twine and string and bubble gum, and knowing how that works makes troubleshooting problems, and you will have problems much easier.
Leah Roseman:
Well, to close this out, thinking of two things, and maybe you're willing to speak about both of them. I mean, one of the things I'm always so interested in mentorship because you mentioned your high school band teacher just sitting you down. We didn't really talk about the experience of going through band education, so maybe you want to address that. But the other thing I was thinking about is just the fact that you do these quite different things in the music world, so maybe that helps keep you balanced, right? It's not all just playing jazz gigs.
J. Walter Hawkes:
Yes. I think it keeps you balanced, and I think, well, and very similar to what Slide said, I think as a trombone player to survive, one has to have a fairly diversified portfolio, which is similar to what Slide was saying about needing other people. And I'll be the first to admit that my attention span could be longer in general on anything, and perhaps I would be a better trombone player if I was more focused that way. But at the same time, having all these other things going on does keep it pretty fresh, and I'm enjoying it. And somehow I've been able to mostly manage the insanity as far as my mentors, definitely, my high school band director was a huge one. Actually, my junior high band director was also big.
I took my first guitar lessons actually with my junior high band director, and both he and my high school band director were very supportive. And I was, I guess because I had started on piano so early, I already had an ear to a certain degree. I mean, on the first day I got the horn, people were freaking out. I could play shave in a haircut. Amazing that that's exactly the first place I went. Telling. So I did have a big advantage in that I already understood a lot about music that said always kind of all over the place. And so junior high teacher combination of guitar and just general really pushing me to practice more. And again, high school was the same way and more intense. And my high school band director Junior High was a man named Duncan Goff High School was Jerry Ball, and Duncan Goff is still around.
Jerry passed away, and Jerry was a saxophone player that would play with the Four Tops and the Temptations whenever they would come through town. He was a great band director, had a military background as well, which really works well in a marching band. And just as far as getting the kids in line, just a general, a very loving and creative person, he would make a point to practice on his lunch break in the band hall, just to kind of set as an example what it meant to practice. He also had the only jazz improvisation class in the state, and we didn't have a big band. It was only jazz improvisation. And I really thought that that was a conscious decision on his part and a smart one because it put us horn players in a situation where we're in a combo. And as high school kids, that's not really a common, or at least it wasn't back then.
It was always either marching band or concert band. And the real fancy schools had big bands. We were playing in that jazz band class. We were playing, sure, we were playing some jazz songs, but we were also playing Sam and Dave, and we played the final countdown songs that were on the radio. I was playing a lot of keyboard there, and that was first period. So I would show up really early so I could practice before jazz band, and Mr. Ball was always there and always kind of in a very good way, pushing me to do more, pushing me to do the work that I needed to do just to, and it was amazing. It was about that everyday thing. He was great. And actually, the last gig I played in Mobile, Alabama before moving to New York City was with the Four Tops and the Temptations with my high school band director.
Leah Roseman:
Wow.
J. Walter Hawkes:
Anytime I would go back to Mississippi, I would always hang out with him, and often we would play a gig somewhere or something like that. It was such a good feeling. It was only in the last few years that he was around that I really started feeling like, oh, okay. I'm pretty much on a similar level. I can hang on the bandstand with my high school band director, which is saying something because I mean, he's great. Mary Wilson come through town, he'd be playing all the saxophone solos, just really, really nice. The other mentors I had were in New York, Slide Hamptons certainly, and a real character by the name of Sol Yaged.
What a character. He just passed away, I want to say about five years ago in his nineties, he a disciple of Benny Goodman and would follow Benny Goodman around everywhere. And eventually he even subbed for Benny Goodman on the Steve Allen Show. He was the one that taught, I think it was Steve Allen that played Benny Goodman on the movie, the Benny Goodman story. But anyway, whoever it was, that was the star in the Benny Goodman story. Sol was the person who basically taught them how to pretend to play clarinet and Sol's on records with Jack Teegarden, Coleman Hawkins. I mean, it's just kind of crazy. I mean, he just really was in the scene, but a real character. And it's funny because a lot of people don't like him, understandably. Actually, I've gone through phases where I didn't like him, but sometimes people like that, especially because of his overall just life experience, you can learn from and take those bits that are positive and the bits that were positive were mostly musical. I learned a lot about how to play songs and what songs to learn, and standard practice of songs, and I learned a lot about how not to be a band leader.
He'd come up to me after we - "Walter Walks, you sounded great. How did I sound?" Right? Just have all these, " quick quit talking while I'm interrupting!" Just a real character. Real character. I remember the other one. The first, soon after I met Sol, I went to the Strand Bookstore for the first time. I found this book called Rhythm Man. It was by Steve Jordan, the guitar player that was in Benny Goodman's band. And so as I typically did, I looked in the index to see if there's anybody I knew, and sure enough, at the end of the index there saw Yaged. So I opened up to the chapter and Steve Jordan says something, I have the book up here, but Steve Jordan says something to the effect of, well, Sol Yaged, that guy that tries to act like Benny Goodman, but definitely isn't. Well, one time he's just really ruthless. One time we were playing with Benny at the Steel Pier in Atlantic City in 1950 something, and Sol comes up to me and says, "Steve Jordan, you sounded great. How did I sound?" He'd been saying that for how many years? And strange that I'd call him a mentor, but I do have a real soft spot for him, and a lot of us that were in his orbit back in those days, it's become practically a sport to tell Sol Yaged stories and quote him just because he was just such a kook and he was kind of not really a, I mean, all these other people I talk about were really wonderful, sweet, loving people, not Sol, but I definitely appreciate him in a lot of ways.
Leah Roseman:
I've just so enjoyed hearing all these stories and your perspectives, and it was so great to start with that plunged off the cliff. It really does frame the rest of everything else you've been experiencing.
J. Walter Hawkes:
Yeah, truly. I mean, everything was possible because of that. I certainly, and again, things like the ukulele and Sol Yaged and all the just completely absurd things that I gravitated towards. I would've never just wouldn't have been my approach before. Much too tightly wound as such. And now it's just, I mean, that's also, you look at Blues Clues. That was a situation where I was just in a band and a couple of the guys in the band were starting to work on this new kid show, and they asked me to come play some trombone on one of the episodes, and it turned out it was Blues Clues. And then eventually, first I was the trombone player for the whole thing, and then after a while, they asked me to come on board as a composer. I'd never done anything like that. I mean, I knew basically the technical part of it, but none of this would've happened a, if I wasn't a player, being a player and a professional, whatever level player that I can be put into any situation, at least on the trombone, for the most part, you put the dots in front of me and I go because of that.
And that put me in so many different situations. It gave me those opportunities. But I think because of the accident and just my kind of, Hey, let's see what happens. What could possibly go wrong attitude about is what allowed me to say, oh, I'll give that a try. Sure, why not?
And I mean, I certainly didn't move to New York City to be a composer, a TV composer or anything like that. And I mean, there are things about it that, sure, I could be a better composer. I could be doing more films, all this kind of stuff. I could be a better trombone player. I could be more of a serious trombone player, which honestly, to me is a little bit of an oxymoron, but let's not go there. I mean, I am a ukulele player, so I get enough writing work that I don't have to take every playing job, and I get enough playing work that I don't have to take every writing job, which is a wonderful place to be. But it also kind of tames my ambition a little bit on both sides. For better or worse, at this point in my life, I'd say for better because oh, ambition is so tiring.
Leah Roseman:
Thanks so much for joining me here. It was great.
J. Walter Hawkes:
Absolutely.
Leah Roseman:
I hope you enjoyed this episode. Pleased to share this with your friends and check out episodes you may have missed at leahroseman.com. If you could buy me a coffee to support this series, that would be wonderful. The link is in the description. Have a wonderful week.
