You’ve worked with prominent jazz icons like Ray Brown, Dizzy Gillespie and Sarah Vaughan, among others. Which collaboration has stuck with you the most?
First and foremost, I’d have to say Art Blakely. Playing in his Messengers band caused me to be more of an ensemble player. I felt like I was really in school at that time, like I had joined a university. The modern style of the songs we’d play was a new challenge to me, since prior to that I was playing mostly with swing and post-bop jazz musicians.
I got that gig with Blakey the first week I moved to New York. Around Christmas of 1979, I was living in Atlanta and I met and got to play with Clark Terry for the first time. He told me whenever I come to New York to give him a ring. So, a few months later I landed in New York, and I saw in the listings that he was playing at the Blue Note. I called him and asked who was playing piano with him. He said, “You are!” And then Art Blakey came to our gig on the last night of our run and asked backstage if I would join his band, and that we were going to Europe for three months. That was my first time going to Europe. The whole band was only two or three weeks old, and we went right into the studio and recorded Oh By the Way. The band was Donald Harrison, Terence Blanchard, Billy Pierce and Charles Fambrough.
