Gary Burton and Dick Schory

Yeah man, you're so knowledgeable about all this!

i am besides myself! this is pretty cool to have all these guys on the site.

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Tony Miceli
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That's two pretty diverse influences to comment on: Dick Schory and Bill Evans! I haven't thought much about my Dick Schory experiences in a long while, it was such a long time ago. I met Schory through his role at the Ludwig/Musser companies, since that was my brand of instrument. Dick organized these orchestra projects featuring a lot of percussion, usually three or four of us percussionists employing every known percussion instrument (specifically every instrument marketed by Ludwig/Musser, naturally). The writing was high quality, though certainly commercial in intent. I was in school at Berklee when this all was taking place, so it was a welcome gig for me, even if it wasn't a well-known jazz band, which would have been my first choice. Every few months, I would fly out to Chicago and record or play some concerts with Schory's musicians. I wasn't all that interested in being a generalist percussion player, but I did enjoy getting a close-up view of the excellent players, such as Bobby Christian, that were in the orchestra. In those days, if not currently, Chicago was the leading city in the USA for percussionists (I think LA probably holds that title now, just a guess.) All said, it was a nice opportunity for me, at age 18, to have some new musical experiences, meet some great players, and make some extra money while I was going to school. By the time I made my final recording with Schory (the Carnegie Hall date), I was probably 21 or 22, and touring with Stan Getz.

Bill Evans was my hero during my formative years as an improvisor. I still remember the first time I heard Portraits In Jazz, at the end of my first year at Berklee, 1961. Bill's playing seemed to represent the approach to soloing that I had been trying to imagine, but hadn't quite managed to crystallize. Bill broke several barriers: he escaped from the rigidity of playing in two and four bar melodic phrases to "play across the bar lines," as it was then described. He also used a classical touch on the piano, using more nuance and variety of dynamics than was typical of jazz pianists before his time. His ability to re-harmonize and re-conceive standard songs was also something to admire. Once Bill recorded a song, you felt like his version was the only way to play it. He became a major influence for me because I wanted to overcome the limitations of the vibraphone just as he had done with the piano. Both instruments are very much on the mechanical end of the scale, compared to horns and string instruments which are by nature, more naturally expressive. I saw how Bill could make the piano, with its limited variety of tone color, the dying out of sound as soon as you hit the note, etc., into a very expressive instrument. He used dynamic variety, interesting voicings, and the piano's extended range all to his advantage as a player. I figured if he could do it on piano, I could do it on vibes somehow. That led me to my use of pedaling techniques, dampening, greater use of dynamic variety, more use of four mallets for voicings, etc. Lucky for me, although I was at first imitating Bill's melodic style fairly closely, most people didn't notice it and criticize me for it because I was doing it on vibes instead of piano.

I got to know Bill during my 20's. We played together three times during the 80's, although none of those occasions went particularly well. It's funny to me that the two times I got to play with musicians I considered legendary, instead of being something really easy, it turned out to be awkward. That two occasions would be my attempts to jam a few tunes with the Bill Evans trio, and the time I subbbed for Milt Jackson with the Modern Jazz Quartet. I'll save those stories for another time.

Gary B.