Don Sebesky (1937-2023)

Don Sebesky, a composer and arranger best-known for his jazz orchestrations for albums produced by Creed Taylor at Verve, A&M and CTI and for his Broadway scores for a large number of revamped popular musicals, died on April 29. He was 85. [Photo above of Don Sebesky, courtesy of Don Sebesky]

Over the course of his long, prolific career, Don played and arranged for a wide range of bands and artists. He could write and score swingers with heavy brass, he could arrange contemporary pop-rock hits for big bands and he could arrange for strings on ballads. What's most astonishing is that Don was self-taught.

Here's my complete interview with Don Sebesky in 2010 plus 12 audio clips...

JazzWax: What was growing up in Perth Amboy, N.J., in the ‘40s like?
Don Sebesky: Perth Amboy was a nice little town, in a Norman Rockwell sort of way. Most residents at the time were of Polish and Hungarian descent.

JW: What did your parents do for a living?
DS: My father was a laborer who worked in a steel-cable factory. My mother was a housewife.

JW: Was the trombone your first instrument?
DS: Actually, my first instrument was the accordion.

JW: For real?
DS: [Laughs]. Yes, and it forced me to learn harmony. Once in a while, I’ll still record an overdub on accordion, but it’s a pain to lug around. My favorites in the '50s were Mat Mathews and Art Van Damme. Many people may not be aware that Mat used the button accordion rather than traditional keyboard. There's a difference in the attack.

JW: How did you come to music?
DS: Music was the only thing I knew or cared about—starting at age 10. In high school, I took up the trombone to get into the marching band. Then I began commuting into New York from New Jersey to take trombone lessons from Warren Covington. He was working in the New York recording studios at the time, before he joined Tommy Dorsey's band. Through Warren, I was introduced to trombonist Kai Winding. I also started absorbing what trombonists Frank Rosolino and Carl Fontana were laying down.

JW: How did you learn to arrange?
DS: I’m self-taught. And I worked very hard [laughs].

JW: One of your earliest recordings was Maynard Ferguson’s A Message from Newport in 1958. You arranged Humbug and Fan It, Janet. What’s the origin of those two titles?
DS: I’m a huge fan of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. I have several copies of the book. I just love the story. So Humbug comes from Scrooge. Maynard named my song Fan It, Janet. I don’t know who "Janet" was or if it’s a name that was even significant to him.

JW: What was working with Ferguson like?
DS: Maynard was a great guy and great leader. You came in with something and the band played it. Maynard was one of the cats. Most people don’t realize that there were only 12 musicians on Message From Newport. That’s relatively small considering the big sound. Everyone had to play longer and harder to achieve it.

JW: Did Ferguson ever lose his temper?
DS: Not really. The only time I saw him get angry was at a prom someplace. He was playing a ballad and someone who was a little loaded stumbled into him and bashed his horn into his mouth. He almost killed the kid. The band stopped, and he had to control himself. Some security guard came over and took the kid away.

JW: Did the band tour?
DS: We did our share of one-nighters, but we didn’t travel far. We’d go up to Buffalo, N.Y., and come right back to New York City after the gig. We’d go up with six guys in a car. I was stuck with them. Pot smoke would be swirling around our heads. We’d stop and someone would get out and steal a bottle of cough medicine to get high. The band was swinging, but I could have wound up on a chain gang [laughs].

JW: You recorded on Viva Kenton! in 1959, a magnificent Latin-themed album arranged by Gene Roland.
DS: Unfortunately I caught Kenton’s band at the tail end of the Bill Holman era. We traveled a great deal on that band. The book was made up largely of Bill Holman leftovers. Arranger Gene Roland traveled with the band then and wrote new charts. He was a mini genius. His Cool Eyes from 1952 was so great. Gene wrote that chart in jail a year or two earlier—without a piano. He never could quite get a handle on his talent.

JW: You arranged Double Exposure and Two's Company with Chris Connor and Maynard Ferguson.
DS: I fell in love with Chris's voice listening to her in high school, when she was with Claude Thornhill’s band. I think she sang Fine and Dandy. So much has been written comparing her with June Christy. They’re from the same breathy, cool school. But Chris had a sound that was deeper and more like Lester Young’s horn. Her voice had the quality of a tenor sax. It was a little lower than June’s and had a cooler tone to it, too. Chris was the essence of coolness. I still compare everyone to her. [Album jacket photos above of Chris Connor and Maynard Ferguson by the spectacular Lee Friedlander]

JW: How did you meet Creed Taylor?
DS: One day in 1965, I was writing in my home studio in North Branch, N.J., when the phone rang. Creed was on the other end. He said, “I heard something you did and want you to arrange an album for me.”

JW: Was that for Wes Montgomery’s Bumpin’?
DS: Yes. On the first day of recording, we went into the studio with Wes, the rhythm section and all the strings. But nothing went well. The session wasn’t happening. Wes, who always smiled, wasn’t smiling.

JW: Why?
DS: I went up to him and asked what was going on. He said, “I can’t compete with these cats. They all went to Juilliard.” Wes didn’t read music.

JW: What did you do?
DS: I sent everyone home except the rhythm section. I decided to tape them swinging on each track. Then later I recorded the orchestra and overdubbed the tracks of Wes and the rhythm section. Rudy [Van Gelder], the recording engineer, liked the idea, since we had contained Wes's guitar sound by recording this way. There wouldn't be any sonic leakage. Instead of writing complete arrangements, though, I’d write in a loose form so that the orchestra would sound natural around Wes's solo playing.

JW: What did this do for you?
DS: On later albums, like California Dreaming, Herbie [Hancock] on piano would play a lick, for example, and Wes would react to that. The whole point was to give the rhythm section free reign and to capture the rise and fall of the emotional content with the orchestra. When we would do this and one of the guys in the rhythm section would create something inventive, I had a reference, a catalyst that I could use to bounce off of for the arrangement.

JW: In many cases, recordings were done the other way around—orchestral tracks recorded first, followed by the soloist, wearing headphones, recording his tracks.
DS: I know. The albums I did for Wes sound as though every instrument was scripted. In fact, they were loose enough that I could change the form. We worked them out synergistically. We were kind of helping each other, Wes and the orchestra. The result was a sound that was very natural and breezy.

JW: How did the orchestra hear Wes’s recorded tracks when it recorded later?
DS: The entire orchestra was wearing headphones. The way it came off, it’s almost as if these two halves were intertwining. A give and take on two tracks and a third track for solos. They'd always be reacting to each other.

JW: So how would you arrange a track Montgomery recorded?
DS: I’d take it home and listen to it. Then I'd write around what he was doing or echo his lines. A Wes arrangement became a dual force. It was both a background and a co-conspirator. The guys in the rhythm section who played on the initial tracks were completely unhampered and had complete freedom to come up with lines. My orchestration would then feed off of those lines. This made the orchestra an active participant in the fabric, like a tapestry.

JW: How did you come to arrange Wes Montgomery’s A Day in the Life, in 1967—the year the Beatles recorded it?
DS: Producer Creed Taylor called and asked me to come in and listen to a new album he had just received. When I arrived, he put on A Day in the Life from the Beatles' Sgt. Peppers album. As we listened, Creed was very excited and asked if we could turn it into something for Wes.

JW: What did you say?
DS: Definitely. It wasn’t that difficult. Wes’s approach on the guitar fit the percussive nature of the song perfectly. His octave playing style was a natural fit. Wes was amenable to Creed’s desire to expand his audience.

JW: What happened when the album came out in 1967? It was the first to adapt a late-period Beatles composition.
DS: More jazz musicians and arrangers gave rock a harder listen after the album came out. Cross-pollination began in earnest between jazz musicians and pop music. Many great jazz musicians like Stan Getz and Herbie Hancock crossed over. Everyone wanted to take advantage of the Beatles’ material, since doing so would likely bring a wider audience and longer staying power.

JW: Looking back, what was the impact of this crossover phase?
DS: I think many jazz musicians lost track of their roots. The rock-pop trend was a wave that swept through the jazz world. It was an experiment. The bossa nova was probably the demarcation line—where jazz-pop ended and jazz-rock began—since the Brazilian form was so musical.

JW: Tell me about George Benson’s White Rabbit, in 1971.
DS: I had been listening to Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow, which was released in 1967. I, too, of course, went through a pop-rock phase. It was an amazing time. Many rock bands back then, like Airplane, were made up of serious musicians, and the writing was interesting. So was the playing. For example, The Mamas & the Papas also were great. They had a special joie de vivre that they incorporated into their records with great success. Jazz hoped to tap into the feel.

JW: Did you play Surrealistic Pillow for Creed?
DS: Yes. I suggested we do White Rabbit in a Spanish mode. He agreed. George Benson doesn’t read music. He just heard the song and automatically fell into the groove. It shows you that music doesn’t exist on the page, only in the air [laughs].

JW: Speaking of The Mamas & the Papas, you composed and arranged Buddy Rich’s Big Mama Cass as well as Preach and Teach.
DS: I got a call from Dick Bock of Pacific Jazz. He was Buddy’s producer at the time. He wanted me to write arrangements for the band. Rich was always on the road, so I’d just send in the charts and the band would record them.

JW: Did you ever meet Rich?
DS: One day I told Dick that I wanted to meet him. So I went down to a club in New York where Buddy was playing. I told someone to let Buddy know I was there. But he never came out from his dressing room nor did he respond. As a result, I never met him nor did I ever speak to him. But he kept recording my stuff. He even sent me a joke track of Mama Cass with all the wrong notes being played, as though the copying had come out wrong [laughs].

JW: Paul Desmond’s Bridge Over Troubled Water, in 1969?
DS: I arranged and produced that one. Creed had already left A&M to form CTI as a stand-alone label. Paul Desmond owed A&M one last album and this was it. The concept for the album came up through a go-between. Paul Desmond and Simon & Garfunkel had the same agent—Mort Lewis. Paul Desmond didn’t really get fully into the material. The resulting album wasn’t bad but Paul was a bit awkward on there. He wasn’t of a mind to go down the crossover road, and you can hear it.

JW: How do you feel about your Giant Box album for CTI, in 1973?
DS: I have mixed feelings about it. Firebird was a good track, particularly with the crossover between Stravinsky and the John McLaughlin sound. But I wasn’t entirely happy with everything on the album. It didn’t feel as organic to my way of thinking as other albums. By the time I arranged it, I was already heading in another direction. In my heart, I’m a big-band guy. I would have preferred to have done a straight-ahead big band album. But it wasn’t considered sell-able at the time. You have to remember that jazz-rock fusion was everywhere in 1973 and poised to grow even bigger through the '70s.

JW: Do you ever listen to Giant Box?
DS: No. I don’t like listening to things I’ve done. I hear too many things I wished I hadn’t done. It makes me feel as though I dropped the ball. I prefer looking forward.

JW: I Remember Bill: A Tribute to Bill Evans, in 1997?
DS: I sat with that music for three years until I felt encouraged enough to put it on paper. Bill’s music was so utterly musical, which made it hard for me to commit to anything in terms of original compositions. We won a Grammy for my arrangement of Waltz for Debby on there.

JW: Did you ever play with Evans?
DS: Yes. I played one studio session with him. It was a jingle for an Esso TV ad, before the oil company became known as Exxon. Bill Russo wrote the arrangement and Bill played piano. It was in ‘60 or ‘61.

JW: What’s your favorite Don Sebesky album?
DS: Probably Joyful Noise: A Tribute to Duke Ellington, in 1999. I think it was my most fully realized work from a jazz, big band standpoint. There is a strong cohesiveness and unity on there, from track to track. I was at the top of my game. The album won two Grammys.

JW: What’s coming?
DS: I’m due to record another album with guitarist Earl Klugh and another with guitarist John Pizzarelli. Every time John plays it’s like a party.

JW: Any other projects?
DS: Actually, I just started to compose and arrange a new album. It's going to be called Credo. It will be a combination of jazz and classical elements with a contemporary feel. I've even commissioned a philosopher-poet to write a rap for one of the tracks that's different from anything else out there. The person who will sing it is very famous on Broadway, but I can't tell you yet who it is because the contracts haven't been signed. It's all a new beginning for me.

In tribute to Don, here are 12 of my favorite Don Sebesky tracks:

Here's Don Sebesky's Humbug for Maynard Ferguson's A Message From Newport in 1958...