Music Executive-Impresario, Huge Supporter and Friend of Thomas Chapin, bringing him onto the big international world stages of jazz
"I first met Thomas pretty early on in his career, when he was a hard-drinking, hard-working musical director for Lionel Hampton who took care of the arrangements, kept the band in order, and was a lightening-fast alto player. He was certainly iconoclastic in his personal style, but his playing really made the impression. He was demonic – the level of intensity was there in his solos, even though he was using a bop vocabulary. I think his own vision came to fruition later, but he learned a lot of great and hard lessons about being a touring musician with Hamp.
Thomas was solidly in the bebop tradition at that time, so he wasn't pushing the limits that hard. It wasn't until he moved to New York and established himself here that he started pushing things.
I first heard the trio down at the Knitting Factory in '90 or '91, some time near the beginning, and my strongest impression was how powerful the music was. It had, in spades, what I look for and enjoy the most – an incredible ensemble sound, with a lot of intuitive communication among the musicians. That's what gets me highest about jazz, and it's not all that common. Kenny Garrett had a band like that once, and Jacky Terrasson; but too many other bands are just a bunch of individuals on stage.
I think Thomas had a technique - whether he developed it consciously or it just made sense intuitively I don't know - where he always took you on a journey from the accessible, normal jazz vocabulary out into something you never heard before. Then he'd bring you back. You had a ""guided"" tour. He didn't just throw you in the deep end and see if you could swim. The themes were always pretty melodic, and he'd start the journey in a harmonically standard format. Then, once he'd established something with you, he'd put it in another realm. He didn't start the car in fifth gear. There was always a logical transition in his playing, and the free playing was always in context. I consider him solidly in the tradition, right on the cutting edge but not necessarily avant-garde.
At Newport, not only was he in front of 10,000 very mainstream jazz fans, but he was also part of the PBS show. That was a kind of a roll of the dice, putting him in that slot; but, then again, it wasn't just my call. It was a body of people who felt he could succeed in that setting. I think I also took him to Japan for the first time outside the context of the Hampton band.
The basic thing [for any musician] is to show up on time and play the gig, and Thomas always did that. He was professional, not the absent-minded professor or the spacy creative type. The antic bohemian façade was masking a serious musician.
He was definitely a seeker, in his personal life as well as his music. He was looking for answers, questing in a lot of different ways, and he was a true intellectual who knew a lot about a lot of different things. He loved life and music, and I know it was hard for him to let go over those last 18 months. I remember him coming back from Africa and saying he was sick. I told him, ""Oh, you'll be alright, just go get your tests and it will be cool."" But it was not cool.
Things were going really well for him. He was growing exponentially, both in his music and his popularity. He would have been an important voice for jazz in the 21st century."