Hamish: Neither does Paquito. They've done some research. They know what they want because they've been in the game for so damn long at this point that they just know.

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And you trust them, based on their experience and the strength of their musicality, that you are the right person for the gig. And then, what you're kind of asking is, when you're actually on the gig, how do you go about that? For me, it was really just trying to treat it like I was playing with my friends. When I play a gig with someone who's twenty to thirty years older, or Paquito is like fifty years older than I am. You really just have to treat it as though you're making music with another fellow musician. Not, “I'm making music with a fifteen time Grammy Award winning saxophone player.” Rather, how do I do my job the best in the moment? How do I fulfill my role in the band to the best compatibility? And that comes with a tremendous learning curve.

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People have been very gracious and given me great advice along the way. Drummers that I play with or piano players…older musicians always like to give you a little bit of, I don't want to say it's like advice, but just like it's a form of advice that they're just trying to point you in a direction that's maybe going to suit that gig better.

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Dave: Wisdom?

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Hamish: Exactly. That's the word I was looking for: wisdom. At the beginning, there were definitely times where I had some people impart their wisdom on me, and that's fantastic. That's how it should be. You know, when you're playing with people who are a lot older than you, they're more experienced. And so that's part of the gig is that you're going to learn something from playing with everyone. And those guys are going to learn something from playing with someone younger than them. That they're going to take some things from playing.

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Dave: Yeah, well, youthful exuberance for sure. And changes in harmonic vocabulary. And for older people who have always loved the music, they probably see themselves in you on some level. They remember when they were your age, right? If you've done something for your entire life and you love this thing, it's got to be super encouraging to find nineteen year olds who love that thing that you love as much as you, or as much as you did when you were nineteen. And to see that it’s still going. And it's got to be heartening because there are a lot of things in life that you grew up with…we're separated by a couple of decades, and our pop culture experiences and things we were attached to are different. We're all going to have different experiences that we won't understand. But Paquito can be seventy-five and you can be twenty-five, share something and understand it.

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Like back at the start: one of those things is sports. That's more geographical than generational. I’m sure it’s great if you live in New York and if you have a son or a father and they can all share the love of some sport. I’m old and finding out how to connect with my own kids, so I think about these things.

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Hamish: Yeah, part of it would be in a mentorship capacity, but just the fact…exactly. 

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Dave: The fact that there are teenagers that really love jazz and are committed to it and are in school for it and are really sounding good. And clearly they're just going to go after it with everything that they've got, indefinitely. Yeah, that's got to feel good. There are a lot of those people.

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Hamish: Yeah, there's a lot of really great young eighteen year old, nineteen year old jazz musicians who are going to music school to study jazz and they're hungry for it, which, I think, is what keeps pushing the music forward. As you just mentioned, the word “mentorship,” I think that used to exist far more than it does now. And I'm very lucky that because my generation of musicians, not many of them had that opportunity of getting called by someone like Paquito, right after their first year of college. That doesn't happen as much anymore. It used to more back in the day.

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The mentorship thing was how guys came up. Like, you look at the Marsalis brothers, they came up through [Art] Blakey, the Jazz Messages and then they started their own thing. 

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[I like how when Hamish thinks back in time, far beyond his years, it’s to the 1980s.]

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Dave: Before, you mentioned Berklee. I don't know because I haven't spent any time there and I’m sure the model is completely different now. But back when Branford went there it seems as though there were a huge number of people looking to find each other, like-minded musicians.

And it was already expensive to go to school at some places back then. Even in Canada, they were pretty freely handing out Berklee scholarships to kids at educational jazz festivals. Almost anyone playing a decent solo. Something like $2500 or $5000 scholarships, which would have more than paid the entire tuition at the local university. And that was exciting to be acknowledged in that way but it was a tiny percentage of the total bill. We looked at how much it cost to go there and it was still unmanageable. But like in your case, school wasn’t going to work the first time financially so you figured out how to up your game to get there on better terms. That says everything to me about you.

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But I think Branford [Marsalis] met Jeff Watts at Berklee, right? I think that was a pretty common story back then. I’m not sure how many people decided at the outset that they weren’t going to finish the degree but, at some point a lot of people made that decision. A ton of great people went to a lot of places and didn't finish. And in general, I think it’s a good idea for people to finish school. Jack Cooper was always big on getting students “across the line” who were maybe having trouble at the ends of their degrees, because having the degree was going to be more valuable in the future than they realized. And these weren’t kids deciding between finishing school and going on the road with some big name musicians. But I’ve never thought there was an argument that people on the level of Wynton or Branford would have been better off graduating. And guys like Wynton and Miles are extreme because they went to Juilliard for almost no time. Or I remember Ryan Kisor saying in a masterclass, “and I went to Manhattan School of Music, for a minute.”

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Hamish: That's kind of the way it used to work, but not really anymore, at least in my perspective. You kind of have to finish school and use those four years, because that's pretty much how long it's taken to develop things. It’s at least four years to start to sow the seeds that get your career started. That's how it starts to develop, by being in a place for that long. You've had the chance to form some strong roots within the group of students and also with the faculty members.

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It's not like you can do one semester or one year at Berklee, drop out, and move to New York, and then suddenly you're a big deal, right? These days it doesn't really happen.

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Dave: I spent time talking with Donny a couple of weeks ago and did a long write up about our conversation. I’d assume that you probably know him really well by this point after those years of lessons with him. It seems like Donny is a great example of so much of what you're just talking about. His background is so diverse and eclectic, but also his dedication has been extraordinary. I made a comment about how every time somebody says, “I think this is the end of jazz. Everybody sucks now. There are no good young players, players aren't going to be the same, and jazz is going to be a dead music,” I always think of Donny. Because I'm saying to myself, “There will always be somebody like him.” They're not going to be evaluating how many gigs there are and how much being a jazz musician is going to pay and whether I'm going to be able to buy a house or any of that. But there will always be people. They just love the music and they're going to make the music, and they're going to do it for a ton of hours to get to where they are.

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And maybe you're one of those guys. The one thing I'm most impressed about with you is you had a certain amount of tenacity, and you can kind of only know after the fact whether that's going to be the case with most people. And Donny just seems to just be the epitome of all that, and he's such a positive guy. That's a good thing to talk about from your perspective.

How much have those kinds of interactions with great musicians propelled you forward during the last five years? 

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Hamish: Totally. And I love Donny. He's a fantastic person and an amazing musician. And I do think that these experiences, hanging with these guys and playing with them is really the most important education you can get. No one can really teach you how to play jazz. You know what I mean? You can teach them the theory of everything, the theory of playing jazz music, and the theory of jazz composition, and everything. But that still doesn't really set you up to play on a level like you might want to play, or how someone like Donny plays, because you really have to kind of be thrown into the deep end. That's another thing that I forgot to add earlier about why I chose to study in New York and move to New York was because you really have to throw yourself in the deep end. Or at least try. And all of a sudden you're playing a tune with Donny McCaslin or whoever it may be. We're using Donny as an example right now, but that's really how you learn to see what's up.

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That's really the best self assessment. You're in a room playing a trio or a quartet session with someone great, or whoever you're studying with, and then you're like, “Oh, man. Okay, yeah, now I see. Boom.” I think that’s the way you really learn and progress. You have to take your playing to a level of seriousness so that these people might actually call you for a gig.

And maybe they're going to say something to you in a direct way, or maybe they're never going to. Every teacher is different and every musician is different in how they want to deal with imparting some wisdom onto their students or onto younger musicians.

Some of them don't really say anything at all, and you’re just going to have to figure some things out for yourself, which is why it's important to record all your lessons and record your sessions.

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Playing with others is the biggest lesson for developing playing. And I think now it really comes down to your experience in school.

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I think for an earlier generation, someone like Larry Grenadier or these guys were getting called to play with Gary Burton when they were like nineteen or twenty years old. All of a sudden they're on stage with Gary, who was obviously a huge deal for them because he was their idol. And then for someone of my generation, we're looking up to Donny and Miguel Zenón and Larry Grenadier and all those people. So you have to put yourself in that situation. And I think that's why the school that you go to has such a big effect on that.

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As we discussed a couple of minutes ago, these opportunities with older musicians calling younger musicians for gigs, this mentorship thing doesn't happen as much now as it used to. Which is why it's so important, I think, to put yourself in those situations.

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Dave: Yeah. So that brings up a really good point about the nature of education. You just said you can't teach someone how to play jazz. There are so many things to figure out in that statement. There are a lot of things, definitely, that you can't teach. Or maybe things that a teacher can’t “experience” for their students is more accurate. If you're thinking about education on some sort of superficial level like, “I'll present a lesson to you. I'll give you fifty minutes worth of information and then you go away and do something with that information.” I think that's the reality of education in some places. Maybe it works in some disciplines.

Given that you're a couple of years out of school, still pretty close to that experience but you're also had some time to reflect, it will be good to get your thoughts here. Presumably you're doing well enough that there wouldn't be a lot of second-guessing your experience: “What could I have done differently to even make myself better?” But I'm sure that you collected a number of ideas, especially being around really good jazz musicians. 

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Great jazz musicians have a number of criticisms about organized or institutional jazz education, right? In the future, we're not going to get rid of jazz schools or formalized education. So maybe the key to jazz teaching and mentorship in the future is taking those criticisms and finding solutions to what’s missing.

 

What are your perceptions about the criticisms that exist in the way jazz is taught? Now, presumably, you might not be an expert in this because I’m guessing what you got was pretty good because some top people were doing the teaching. You might actually be less aware of what happens in lesser places. [laughs]

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But still, what are your thoughts about the nature of education in the future? How much of getting education right is understanding these great players, their criticisms and then reinventing jazz education in a way that takes those things into account? That was super long-winded and convoluted. 

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Hamish: No, it's a really good question, man. And it's really hard to put it into words, in a way, because no one person is going to have the same vision or the same ideal desire of what they want to get from a jazz education. 

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Dave: Right. 

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Hamish: And they shouldn't, necessarily.

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Dave: That's why you're taking a bass lesson and lessons from a saxophone player in the same semesters. You saw value in that, and the school sees value in that variety of perspective.

Hamish: Right. I'll touch on that in a second. But going back to the original point, for me, I think there's never really been, at least to this point, a really great way to write jazz into a textbook, because you can't.

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Dave: Arranging books, too. You try to put yourself in the place of a student who doesn’t know what they’re doing and think, “Is this book is going to get them there?” It’s almost always miles away. 

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Hamish: It's very hard to structure a formulated way of teaching people to play this music, because what it really comes down to is, are they going to put in the effort that it needs? Because you can give everyone the information, right? I guess in my upbringing, you gave me a ton of information when I was still in high school, and that was fantastic. But it's what you do with that information that really counts. 

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I remember you sent my school a bunch of stuff about jazz harmony and progressions and ways to play over changes and all these things. But you can't really play the music with just that. Without a lot of things [that can go on a page, the students] aren’t going to make music sound like jazz. It's might just sound like some kind of weird arpeggio thing over chords.

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Dave: Yeah, there’s no substitute for a mentor to explain things and balance things. That’s what you struggle with as a teacher, especially at events like a jazz camp where you only see the students for a few hours, one week a year.  I actually call it the “band camp method” of jazz improvisation and almost all of the approach is the opposite of what you should do if you have more time. 

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Hamish: So how do we get this information and then translate in a way that actually sounds like jazz? To me, that really comes down to playing with people as much as you can. 

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Dave: Just that: you saying to a student that, “This information is good but you need to play a ton with real people.” That’s a huge difference right there.

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Hamish: Playing with people as much as you can and listening to the music as much as you can. And that's what I talk about when when I teach now. If I'm teaching a private student or a clinic or master class at a school or university or whatever, I always ask people, “Are you really listening to the music in your own time? Are you really absorbing all of it?”

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And when I say listening, I mean like wearing out the CD player. That's the kind of listening I'm talking about. You really have to almost memorize the whole album by ear. You can put on an album, sing all the solos, or, you know, where all the drum hits are, all that kind of stuff. That's the kind of listening I'm talking about. Where you really immersed yourself in the music. So I think that isn't talked about enough. People are always like, “Yeah, you’ve got to listen to this record. You got to listen to that record.” But I feel like that's maybe one of the most important things that I did, and what a lot of people have done, is really listening a lot.

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Hamish: Obviously, being able to play your instrument incredibly well, that's fundamental. You’ve got to be able to play the instrument if you want to try to improvise. If you're having problems expressing yourself because you're confused about fingerings or positions, or whatever technique you’re lacking, then you’re never really going to be able to freely express yourself, right? So that's the first thing. 

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The second thing is listening to the jazz greats to understand the language. And transcribing them. “Okay, that's cool.” You can transcribe them and stuff. But to me, you can listen to a solo and write it down, but do you really know a solo, or do you know how a tune progresses because you can put it on and then sing the whole thing? That, to me is when you really know that record or you know that song.

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And then the third thing is playing with people all the time. When I first got to New York, you know, I probably did between ten and fifteen sessions a week when I was a freshman at MSM. Some nights I would do two or three sessions in one night. And go until very late. But playing with as many people as possible, learning tunes on the spot that I didn't know, playing with different drummers, seeing how my feel locked into different drummers in different ways.

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And piano players comping. How do I navigate that along with what I'm doing? What about the soloist? How do I interact with them? There are all of these components that come along with playing with people that can't be taught in a classroom setting unless it's a performance class. So I guess this whole tangent about jazz education comes down to needing more performance based time, more listening, and the fundamentals of your instrument. So I don't know if that answered your question. 

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Dave: It's a lot of good information, but it doesn't necessarily give anything viable for a more average person, right? It’s hard to see a pathway that’s a more casual approach. Not that I want to but we’re always being sold some version that supposedly makes it easier but never ends up with the right result. This is something we were wrestling with at the beginning.

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Hamish: It's very tough to put into words. And what I want is not necessarily what the next person is going to want out of a jazz program.

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Dave: I remember feeling like certain things were a million miles away. Winnipeg, where I'm from, has three quarters of a million people. The distance between where I was and bigger cities in Canada or the US, and not just the geographical distance, was large. In New Zealand, it’s greater in several ways. You remember Richard Thai from Christchurch? Really good tenor player. I think he was in second year when I got here. Eventually he left to do a master’s degree. I think he started at City College and then transferred to Queens. But he got to New York before the school semester started and was having a tough time adjusting at first. And I was like, “Listen, it's like the beginning of August. School hasn't started yet. You haven't met anybody. You’re going to meet good people, nice people, and realize that, musically, you belong there. But it’s an adjustment. And if you move from Christchurch to New York and there isn’t some period of freaking out, something’s probably wrong with you. [laughs]

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Hamish: You have to be patient with yourself and give it time. Because then, as you said, once you get into that school environment, all of a sudden you're not going to have time to be thinking about the other things going on with living in New York. Obviously, moving a long way from home is difficult and being in a different environment, different culture, with different kinds of people.

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Dave: I think there are significant cultural differences between New Zealand and the United States, just in general. If you’re from Canada, it’s not as though there aren’t cultural differences, they’re different by region, but it feels like we’re at least aware of them. It’s good that you were able to spend more than two months in New York City before going to school. It must have normalized things considerably, right? 

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Hamish: It did. It was like a really good transition for me to see how I actually liked being here. It's not a huge amount of time, but it's enough to get a feeling of how it would be to live here. If you visit for a week or two, that's really not enough to give you an idea. I don’t think everyone can realistically come to New York for two months before college, but visiting the places that you're interested in going to school for is really a good idea.

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Dave: How old were you when you started playing the bass? Was that your first musical experience? 

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Hamish: I played quite a few instruments before I played bass. I think I started at five or six on clarinet and guitar at the same time. Then I was dabbling in some other instruments for a while, so I was always very interested in music. 

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Dave: So how did that happen though? How did you play clarinet when you were six in Christchurch? That has to be unusual.

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Hamish: Yeah, probably. Just through school. There was an advertisement or whatever. They had music lessons available at the school I was at, I guess, obviously, clarinet and guitar. So I did it. I don't know how. Maybe my parents would be able to say it better than I am. But they still tell me now that there was always something about me that was interested in music.

And I have to credit them a little bit in that my parents were always playing music around the house. They're not musicians themselves, but they are huge music appreciators and lovers, and so they are always playing music at our house. And I think that definitely has a lot to do with it, because when you're a child, between being an infant and being a five year old, those influences that are happening around you, even listening to music, are huge going forward.

And some of my parents record and CD collection is jazz. There are all these little spots or reference points, I think, in life that kind of signal what you may end up doing. I'm not saying that I was six years old and knew I was going to be a musician, but I think it must go back to that point, man. I was passionate about music and obviously I enjoyed listening, even though I probably wasn't really aware of what it was. I wasn't six years old and being like, “Boom, that's Frank Sinatra on the CD player.” I didn't know that.

I started the bass when I was eleven. I think I was in middle school, intermediate school as they call it in New Zealand.

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Dave: Yeah, you were at Chisnallwood, right?

 

Hamish: Right. They had a jazz program at Chisnallwood. And they had a very dedicated music teacher [Judith Bell] who happened to know quite a lot about jazz for someone who lived in New Zealand.

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There's not a great magnitude of people in New Zealand that have a whole lot of information about jazz music. So I was lucky that I went to a middle school that happened to have someone who knew about jazz. I guess I was just really lucky, man. That I just met the right people at the right time. And that continued through high school. The high school I went to had, and still has, a strong jazz program with teachers who have a good knowledge of jazz. It just paved its way through until then, eventually, I met you and then I met people through those programs in the New Zealand Jazz Foundation.

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The [NZ] Youth Jazz Orchestra was obviously huge for me in that I met Luis [Bonilla] and Scott [Wendholt] and Dick Oatts and those guys, you remember at that time, they were all very encouraging to me. And all those guys, even at that point, were suggesting that I look to move to the US, for school and whatever. So there has been luck, you know, because there was, there there was a lot of luck. But I was also very passionate about the music and I think that those things intersected well. I was passionate, keen, willing to learn, had a really strong love for it from an early age. And then I just met these people who were willing to dedicate a bunch of time and energy to me going on to do things that I dreamt of doing. And you're one of those people. 

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Dave: I appreciate that. 

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Hamish: It's cool that we get to talk about it a long time later because I think, when did I meet you, man? I was probably thirteen or fourteen or something.

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Dave: Yeah, I think a little over ten years. There are pictures of you looking very young. And if you'd had no music experience in your house, no musical experience in intermediate school, nothing in your high school, no lessons, no youth band, well, you probably wouldn't be a jazz musician without all those things. Maybe one in a million people has some sort of insatiable investigative spirit where they just realize…they hear one jazz record and that's all they're ever going to be obsessed with. Maybe that was you, but statistically, probably not.

But with what you had, you still jumped over that year, made that year into something. You made some progress, but you didn't take your eye off the ball. 

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Hamish: Yeah.

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Dave: From an educational standpoint, what I struggle with now is, can you teach, not just one person who wants to be taught, but many somebodies? I think with the right motivation, I can tell you a whole bunch of things that will be super helpful. You can point someone in the right direction.