PAUL MOTIAN ON JAZZ CAPSULE 1

PAUL MOTIAN ON JAZZ CAPSULE
In 1974 I began recording Gerald Wilson at KBCA-FM radio in Los Angeles when he would broadcast his show Jazz Capsule, which went on the air every weekday at Noon. Gerald would interview Jazz musicians and during the two hours would play their music and talk. It was a very popular show.
Instead of the Sony Port-a-Pak, for this session we were using a Sony AV-3650, which recorded on 1-hour reels of ½-inch videotape. It was a table model; no batteries. We had two cameras, one locked off next to Gerald, and mine a portable monochrome Sony. My partner Paul Challacombe ran the switcher and recorder. There are a couple of glitches in the recording, which is typical with tapes that are almost 50 years old. Today’s users of iPhones have no idea what it took to shoot, transfer, edit, and archive these tapes. That we can still view them is some sort of miracle.
Paul was a “drummer of the new breed” as Gerald called him. Gerald was “old school” but he knew about the new musicians, like Keith Jarrett and Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, and could appreciate what they were trying to do.
John Fordham in the Guardian wrote that Paul “was perhaps most famous for enhancing the work of a brilliant jazz pianist. This he did not just once, but three times: in Bill Evans's pioneering trio from 1959 to 1962, over the next two years with Paul Bley, and then with Keith Jarrett from 1966 to 1977. Motian added "beautiful" to the adjectives associated with the drummer's art, and was much in demand by the most adventurous jazz improvisers.”
He goes on: “In rethinking the connection between the rhythmic pulse and the improvised melodies unfolding around him, Motian was as significant a drummer as Charlie Parker's partner Max Roach had been in the 1940s, and played a key role in transforming the sound of small jazz ensembles from the 1970s on. As a composer, he produced original material of quietly persuasive character that offered irresistible invitations to improvisers - beginning with the album Conception Vessel (1972), with Jarrett on flute or impresionistically free-jazzy piano, and [Charlie] Haden in the lineup.”