The saxophonist Johnny Griffin owes his life to being a musician. He talks to Martin Gayford
'There is no time for regrets," says Johnny Griffin. "Life is for living."
When you put that together with another of his obiter dicta - "Jazz is life" - you get a concise autobiography: a career devoted to music in the present tense; this gig, this audience, this ballad, this blues - the true jazz life.
Griffin - who turned 80 at the end of last month, and appears at Ronnie Scott's, London, next week with an all-star band - is one of the greatest saxophonists in the history of jazz. His wandering life - "Home is where my saxophone is," he once remarked - has taken him from 1930s Chicago, through bebop New York and post-war Paris.
Since the mid-1980s, his residence has been an elegant château in central France. As Mike Hennessey points out in his new book, Little Giant: the Story of Johnny Griffin (Northway, £19.99), you can count the number of master saxophonists from the Midwest who have ended up in such accommodation on one finger.
"It is," says Griffin, "a nice peaceful place, much different from where I grew up on the south side of Chicago." Peaceful, however, is not the correct adjective for his music. Swinging, soulful, succulent, sinuous, dynamic - yes - but no one ever accused him of tranquillity.
He was described by Richard Cook in his Jazz Encyclopaedia as "the fastest tenorman of them all". He has slowed down a little, but not that much. "I got so excited when I played and I still do," he has said. "I want to eat up the music like a child eating candy."
There was always, however, more to Griffin's style than simply speed. Whatever you are playing, he once advised a fellow musician, you should always play the blues - meaning, always play with feeling. He has a richness of sound that is characteristic of the great jazz tenor saxophone tradition.
When he was a schoolboy in Chicago, he would listen to the star saxophonists with the big bands - Lester Young with Count Basie, Ben Webster with Duke Ellington. To me he lists the masters - Don Byas, Dexter Gordon, Lucky Thompson. Actually, he belongs on that list himself.
Griffin had an extraordinarily full musical education. He began by learning piano and Hawaiian guitar. Then at high school, the teacher in charge of the band told him he had to learn clarinet before he could graduate to saxophone. "He also told me I had to learn oboe and English horn, while still playing clarinet." The oboe saved his life, since it got him into an army band. The other soldiers drafted in the same group were all killed in Korea.
One reason why he was not allowed to play tenor was that it was too big for him. He was still under 5ft as a teenager, and did not attain his full 5ft 5in - hence "Little Giant" - until he was over 20. When he first sat in the reed section of the Lionel Hampton band, his first big job, witnesses claimed his feet didn't reach the floor.
In New York in the late 1940s and early 50s, he made friends with three extraordinary pianist composers. "I was hanging out with Bud Powell and Elmo Hope, who were good friends with Thelonious Monk. They were the amazing monsters of the day."
He went on to record some celebrated albums with Monk in 1958. Griffin was disconcerted neither by Monk's idiosyncratic compositions, nor by his famously terse and sparse conversation. "He was never one to waste words. In that way, his conversation was a good introduction to his music."
But Monk - who would play one note where some pianists would use 20 - surprised him one day, by claiming that if he wanted to he could perform like the virtuoso Art Tatum. "I said, 'Get out of here, Thelonious, stop kidding me.' He replied, 'Well, check this out.' And he sat at the piano and executed a real Tatumesque run. I couldn't believe my ears or eyes. Then he said, 'But I don't need that'."
In 1963, Griffin moved to Europe, becoming part of the Parisian jazz scene for a while with his old friend Bud Powell. In Europe, he claims, he learnt to relax. But in other ways, he feels, nothing has changed. "I'm not a person who deals in nostalgia," Griffin is quoted as saying in Hennessey's book.
"I deal in now! I get my juices and positiveness out of the life forces that are happening now. Charlie Parker said, 'Now's the time', and I tend to agree with him."
