Feature Interview Rusty Jones

Feature Interview Rusty Jones

Date Posted: March 14 2009

Written By: chicago jazz

Bookmark it!

Subscribe to Chicago Jazz Magazine and get FREE Jazz Cds!

Comment on this Article!
in his own words...Rusty Jones


Chicago drummer “Rusty” Jones was born Isham Russell Jones II on April 13, 1942 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Music is a family affair in Jones’ life. His parents were in the music business long before he was born. Jones’ father was a saxophonist and his mother a vocalist (appearing under the name of Gretchen Lee), with most of their gigs being in and around the Chicago area, with an occasional national appearance. His mother was working at the Bismarck Hotel in 1936 when the two were wed. Other musicians in Jones’ family were his grandfather, a trombonist/bandleader named Frank Jones, who worked in the Saginaw and Detroit, Michigan areas, and Jones’ mother’s brother, Dean Herrick, an early artist on the Hammond organ. Jones’ great uncle, Isham Jones, was a renowned American bandleader/songwriter, and wrote popular songs of the era such as “It Had To Be You” and “I’ll See You In My Dreams.”

Jones began playing drums at the age of eleven, eventually choosing traditional and modern jazz as his preferred mode of music. He went “on the road” after graduating college in 1965 from the University of Iowa with a degree in history and political science, to “get it out of his system,” but he never stopped his pursuit of a musical vocation. He moved to the Chicago area in 1967.

Jones appeared with Chicago musician Judy Roberts from 1968 to 1972, and was a member of George Shearing’s trio from 1972 to 1978. In the late seventies and early eighties, he worked frequently with pianist Marian McPartland and freelanced throughout Chicago with several bands, while occasionally touring the United States and Europe. He has also worked frequently with Adam Makowicz, Larry Novak, Danny Long, Patricia Barber, Johnny Gabor, Patrick Noland, John Bany, Scott Holman, Jim Beebe, Charlie Hooks, Frank D’Rone, Art Hodes, Mark Pompe, Frank Portolese, Ron Surace, Ira Sullivan, J.R. Monterose, Stéphane Grappelli and Curt Warren.

Jones has also had brief stints with Buddy DeFranco, Art Van Damme, Kai Winding, Curtis Fuller, Lee Konitz, Chuck Hedges, Bill (“Wild Bill”) Davison, Anita O’Day, Mark Murphy, Flip Phillips, Sylvia Symms, Morgana King, Red Holloway, Eddie Higgins, Isaac (“Ike”) Cole, Clifford Jordan, Bill Porter, Polly Podewell, Jim Clark, Franz Jackson, Bobby Enriquez, Monty Alexander, and Joe Daley, among many others. Currently, Jones appears regularly around the Chicago area with, among others, the Johnny Gabor Trio featuring vocalist Connie Marshall, and with vocalist Frank Lamphere.


Chicago Jazz Magazine: You come from a strong musical background.

Rusty Jones: Well, I have the genes on both sides. My mother was a singer in the 1930s, and my dad was a saxophone player; and his father was a bandleader. And my dad’s ancestors came over from Wales, who knows when, maybe before the Civil War. But in the late 1800s, my grandfather and all his brothers, including the famous Isham Jones, were all born in Coalton, Ohio. They were from a big coalmining Welsh family. They weren’t well educated, but they were natural musicians, and that was their ticket out of the coalmines.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: So your great-uncle is the famous Isham Jones?

Jones: Yes, my grandfather’s brother, who wrote “It Had To Be You”––he just wrote the music not the words––“The One I Love Belongs to Somebody Else,” “I’ll See You in my Dreams,” a stupid one he made a lot of money off of, “You’re In the Army Now,” “On the Alamo,” “Swinging Down the Lane,” “You Got Me Crying Again,” and “There is No Greater Love,” which jazz musicians love to play. But he wrote a lot of songs. Those are just the best or most well known.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: What was it like growing up in the Jones household with a couple musicians?

Jones: Well, they weren’t musicians any longer––they got out of the business and moved to Iowa. And my father was kind of a child prodigy and it was always naturally assumed that he would be a professional musician. His dad was a trombonist and my father was a saxophone player. Actually he quit high school when he was about fifteen and went on the road with the Isham Jones Band, which was the top dance band at the time. He did that for about a year-and-a-half and then stopped.

Then he was a studio musician in Detroit for a while. Then the Depression came and he moved to Chicago, and later to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where I was born. When the Depression hit, Detroit’s auto industry was hit overnight. He was playing day and night there, he had more gigs than he could handle. My dad was playing seven nights a week since he was fourteen years old. It kind of robbed him of his youth, and he always resented that. And he was determined that that wouldn’t happen to me. And it didn’t, though I started playing gigs when I was thirteen. But that was just an occasional party in Cedar Rapids. By the time I was fifteen I was playing on the weekends.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: How did drums come about?

Jones: To give a little background, in the Depression my dad got a job with this band that was playing the World’s Fair in Chicago. Nineteen thirty-three to 1934 was the World’s Fair here in Chicago. You know, even in the pits of the Depression there was ten times more work for live musicians than there is now, even before we had this economic crash. My mother graduated high school from DeKalb, moved to Chicago and got the gig singing at the World’s Fair in the same band that my dad was playing lead alto with.

That was 1934––she was eighteen at that time––and two years later they got married. And then the gig ended and they couldn’t play in the same band. She was singing at the Bismarck Hotel with Phil Levant’s band in 1936, and my dad was playing at the Schrader hotel in Milwaukee with another band.

They got married secretly on their days off, in Waukegan, and had a happy marriage for fifty years until she died of a cerebral aneurism at age seventy. They were in the music business, but they both wanted to get out of it. Her brother, Dean Herrick, was a well-known theatre organist here in Chicago. He was trying to do better. He was living here, and married to a classical harpist named Aida Salvi, who was from a family of harpists––her father and brothers were all highly regarded classical harpists in Chicago––and they didn’t get along. She drove him nuts and he left her.

That’s what he told me, anyway. Aida was mad that he left her, and so she went to this jerk named Petrillo, who was head of the union in those days, and said, “Oh, my husband has done me wrong, give him some trouble.” So Petrillo sent a couple of his goons down to the Bismarck Hotel where my uncle was playing organ––this is in the thirties. And my uncle, Dean Herrick, was on break and these big guys come in and say, “The boss, Petrillo, wants to meet with you tomorrow in his office.” And he said, “What does he want to see me for?” And they say, “Just be there.”

He goes down there in the morning and talks to the receptionist and she tells him that his wife Aida had been down there talking to Petrillo and that he should expect the worst. And so he goes in the office, and there’s this little runt sitting in between these two big guys, and my uncle says, “Y-Y-Yes, M-Mister P-P-Petrillo, what did you want to see me about?” And Petrillo pounds the desk and says, “Get off the fucking job.” So he made him give up the best job he ever had, where he was making a good name for himself and doing well.

He was playing in concerts in the area and Aida would show up frequently and heckle him from the audience, and she was driving him nuts. Hell hath no fury like a scorned woman, you know. Anyway, MGM was opening a theater in Cape Town, South Africa, and they asked him if he’d like a job and he said, “Would I? Get He eventually moved to Johannesburg and met a woman who was one of the fifteen grandchildren of Sir Thomas Cullinan––the Cullinan diamond was the largest cut diamond ever found––and he fell in love with her and got married. They loved each other and lived happily ever after.


Chicago Jazz Magazine: So how did you end up on the drums?


Jones: My parents had finally gotten out of the music business, and they listened to a lot of Harry James, the good standards. My dad loved Dixieland jazz and good swing––you know, Bobby Hackett. My dad had played with a lot of those guys in Chicago. My first instrument was the trumpet, but I gave that up to play the drums. I don’t know what appealed to me about drums, but I taught myself how to play drumset when I was eleven.

My parents bought me a drumset, much to their later regret. I started playing gigs with some guys in my high school, at my junior high school when I was about thirteen. There was a lot of music in the air, Cedar Rapids was quite a town for music in those days. In my high school in 1958––I was a sophomore––there were three small groups with different personnel trying to play modern jazz, and two different big bands. I’m not saying we were making jazz history.

Cedar Rapids had a couple jazz clubs, and there was a drummer, Joe Abodeely, who had a club called the Tender Trap, and he would bring musicians in from Chicago and some fine Cedar Rapids players would play there. And then there were a couple dance halls, and dance bands coming through, and we could see all the great bands, like Woody Herman and Count Basie. Woody Herman took over the Isham Jones’ Band when Isham retired in 1936. Kept most of the guys, changed the tone of the band from kind of a jazz-oriented dance band, to a dance-oriented jazz band, which later went more toward jazz. So we got to see all those guys. But it wasn’t like being in Chicago every night.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: Was there a moment when you decided you wanted to be a professional or did you evolve into it?

Jones: It sort of evolved. I went through high school, I played football, I wanted to be an actor for awhile. But I always played the drums, music was always my first love. And I went to college and got a degree in History and Political Science, two majors. I was there for five years at the University of Iowa from ‘sixty to ‘sixty-five.

I studied four foreign languages, which I was more interested in than Political Science. I always played gigs. I took an extra year because I was playing gigs around there. I just didn’t want to kill myself. I even studied. I did everything but sleep. Then I graduated and said, Well, okay, I could go to law school or graduate school, or the Foreign Service. I even dabbled with the idea of being a history teacher. But I said, I’m going to play a year and get it out of my system. In the meantime I got married and had a little boy. During that time I was on the road, and after being on the road for a couple of years, I moved to Chicago. The groups I was playing with were okay, but it wasn’t really where I wanted to end up.

I became a musician strictly because of jazz music. I mean, I like classical music, but I don’t want to be a classical percussionist. I’d rather drive a cab. I’m not putting it down, because I respect those guys. But the only reason I became a musician is because I love jazz. I love everything from Dixieland to swing to West Coast jazz, which I listened to in high school in 1950. Then later, more modern––Miles Davis.

And then I heard Bill Evans, and that was it. Ever since then, if you asked me what my life’s ambition would be, I would say to be the drummer in Bill Evans’ trio. And Charlie Parker I loved, and I loved bebop, but Bill Evans was it. But I moved to Chicago and quit music for a while, and took a job with the Quaker Oats Company as a salesman. That was when I had a wife and kid.


Chicago Jazz Magazine: Did they move with you to Chicago?


Jones: Yes. I moved to Chicago and got a job calling on supermarkets with Quaker Oats for a year. That taught me a lot about real life. During this time I realized that’s not what I wanted to do. But I did a good day’s work and put my time in. Then I met a lot of other musicians here in town, and I thought, Holy cow, this is a whole new world. I would hear all these wonderful musicians and all this great music. I played with a couple little groups. I got acquainted with Judy Roberts and her group.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: How did you meet Judy Roberts?

Jones: Well, I would go hear her. Even before I moved here, I would go see her. On the off day I would drive my car in and go to the Plugged Nickel and hear the matinee. And sometimes I’d go back there again at night. I would hear all these great bands, like Horace Silver and Miles Davis. But on Sunday afternoon at the Midas Touch on Wells Street there was a jam session where Judy Roberts had a trio, and I used to go there and I even sat in a couple times.

Later, in 1968, Judy had a Sunday afternoon jam session at a place called Jack Mooney’s Pub in Sandburg Village. I didn’t know it, but her drummer, who was one of the most creative musicians I’ve heard, was moving to the West Coast to play with Danny Zeitlin in San Francisco. So I sat in, and her bass player at that time was Nick Tountas. A lot of drummers had showed up this day. And I thought, Oh, this is kind of neat, all these guys are here. I played two or three tunes. After I played, Judy Roberts came up to me and said, “All these guys are here because George Marsh is leaving and they are auditioning for the job. But we want you to join the group.”

And I thought I had died and gone to heaven. In the summer of sixty-eight I started playing with her at Will Sheldon’s, which later became the Back Room, the place on Rush Street. Almost overnight I had met all these great musicians. I thought it was everybody in Chicago. You never meet everybody, but I met all these great players––bass players, piano players, drummers, everybody would come out. We always played late––we played six hours a night. I met Larry Novak, he’d come and sit-in and we’d hang out. His wife, Carol, who later died of cancer about ten or twelve years ago, was a fine pianist. She was doing the off-night at the London House with a trio.

Eddie Higgins was there with his trio playing on-nights. I didn’t know it at the time, but Carol was pregnant with her son, Gary Novak, who became one of the best drummers in the world. But I played the last five months at the London House with her. So I would do two nights with Carol and three nights with Judy. That’s when I quit my day job. We went to Montreal to do a three-week gig over Halloween. I started in the summer of 1968. I remember one day in the summer of 1968, we were on a break, and everybody was running down Rush Street and saying the cops were going at it with the hippies in Grant Park because of the Democratic National Convention, and the cops were conking the hippies on the head. I stayed with Judy for three and half years and learned my way around Chicago and met all these great players.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: Did you go directly from performing with Judy’s trio to George Shearing?

Jones: Yes. We replaced Eddie Higgins as the full-time house group at London House. Eddie had a great trio with Marshall Thompson and Eddie DeHaas. He’s a great bass player. We played alongside all kinds of great people: Jonah Jones, Dizzy Gillespie, Tamba 4 from Brazil, Oscar Peterson, all kinds of great people. And with Judy we were in residence for a couple years.

So I got to meet George Shearing and played opposite him three times. He had a wonderful drummer, but he didn’t match up to the bass player musically. George was doing some different kind of stuff, some bossa novas, some Chick Corea tunes. This drummer was more into straight-ahead stuff. But George had been listening to me and asked me to sit in one night. I loved George, and I was playing to his records with my brushes when I was younger. He was the first big-name band I ever heard in Cedar Rapids. He played a concert at Coe College. He had talked to Judy, and at the end of the night he offered me the job. That was my big break. I was with George for exactly six years.

From the time I was with him, I met people all over the country and I was thinking about moving to New York or Los Angeles, but my kids were here. And New York was a little complicated––I played there many times and L.A. too. In retrospect it wouldn’t have hurt me to move to New York for a year and Los Angeles for a year just to get my feet wet. But I didn’t. We were on the road the first year around seventy-five percent of the time. Toward the end of the six years it was down to half of the time. When I wasn’t on the road with George, I was busy all the time, working around Chicago with Larry Novak and Danny Long and Judy Roberts.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: This was in the late seventies. At that time there seems to be a shift––not just in your situation, but in music in general––where being in a band three to five nights a week at the same club dried up, didn’t it?

Jones: Yeah, it kind of did. But the George Shearing band was an ongoing thing until 1978.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: So the fact that you didn’t have a steady like you did with Judy or George, isn’t that indicative of a shift in the marketplace?

Jones: Mr. Kelly’s closed around that time and so did the London House. That was in 1975. They were owned by the same corporation, which also owned the Happy Medium. So there were fewer opportunities. But guys like Danny Long had a terrific ongoing trio that was working all the time. I played with him for years. I did lot of gigs with the superb piano player, Larry Novak. And right around the time that the George Shearing gig ended, I started playing a lot of gigs with Marian McPartland.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: Musically speaking, when were you the happiest? Was there anytime that you think you were in the zone, exactly where you wanted to be?

Jones: I don’t know if there was an era that I was in the zone. Because with George, I loved playing with him, but I always used a lot of restraint, I didn’t really stretch out. Actually, I had the most fun with guys here in Chicago. Playing gigs where I could really stretch out. After the gig with George Shearing ended, I started playing with Marian off and on; it wasn’t all the time. That was around 1978. I got a chance to play with a lot of different people. I’d play with Marian, go on the road, and play with Danny Long when I got back, which was a hard-hitting commercial jazz trio. And working with Larry Nova was more of a hardcore jazz thing, with different bass players like Steve LaSpina and other guys.

I was stretching out with some good people. I’m not sure if I had a zone. Some nights you just go along, even if it’s a good group. Then again, there are some groups where you have one great night after another––you know, if you do your homework. I never had any problems with drugs and alcohol––never drank, never took drugs. I always would try to take care of myself physically. I did Tae Kwon Do for eighteen years, from age thirty-five to fifty-three. I did that a few times a week. I always practiced drums, too. I’m not a super practicer, but I’m diligent. But there are a lot of professional guys that don’t practice––a lot of drummers. If you want to play at a higher level, you have to practice.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: Which drummers have had the biggest influence on you?

Jones: You name it. The old Dixieland drummers, one of whom I became good friends with––Barrett Deems. When he was with Louis Armstrong I thought he was one of the greatest. But I listened to all the drummers: Ray Bauduc and Barrett. I like the Chicago-style playing, too. As far as the big band drummers, although I’ve never been a big band guy, to me the greatest drummer ever was Buddy Rich. He was in a class by himself. And he wasn’t just a great drummer, he was a genius.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: Why do you say he’s a genius?

Jones: You can just hear it. There are certain people that I’ve known in my life, that I thought, This guy, to me, is a genius. One of them was Ira Sullivan; one was George Shearing. Those are the two guys I think of that way. Ira Sullivan has to be the most inspiring musician I have ever played with. Anyway, I listen to all the great drummers. I remember when Sonny Payne came through with Basie’s band. I thought, This is incredible! And it was. It was thrilling. I’ve seen Buddy Rich. Gene Krupa was a big idol of mine when I was younger. I still listen to his old records and they still sound great. I love all the West Coast drummers, Shelly Manne, and Joe Morello, with Dave Brubeck, was a wonderful drummer. I love West Coast jazz. Then I went on listening to other drummers: Philly Joe Jones, Roy Haynes. Jack DeJohnette is to this day one of my favorite drummers. He’s so multi-faceted. George Marsh, this guy from Chicago who moved to the West Coast, who’s not known, but he’s great; and Gary Novak, Larry Novak’s son, who played with both Chick Corea and Alanis Morissette.

He played with the Bob Berg Quartet. Bob Berg, the saxophone player, later died in a tragic car accident. Joe La Barbera when he was with Bill Evans, that was the group I always wanted to play with. Out of all the drummers who played with Bill Evans, I think Joe La Barbera was the best. I mean, Bill had so many great trios over the years. Elvin Jones was also a gigantic influence on me. Elvin Jones is one of the most natural musicians I ever heard. Tony Williams––oh my god––Tony Williams might have been a genius. Another drummer, originally from Iowa, is Bill Stewart, who has a great, loose feel.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: Is there a common thread, a certain trait that’s common in all great drummers?

Jones: They all have to be very musical. The guys I like are masters of their instrument; they are all virtuoso players. They have great control of the instrument, and great time. They have great drama and passion in their music. I prefer the kind of playing where the drummer is not just sitting back and keeping time. Interaction is the essence of the kind of jazz I like. I always loved the Oscar Peterson Trio, but I would much rather have played with Bill Evan’s group. I really appreciate the guys that play with a high degree of loose interaction. For about the last year I’ve been getting together almost once a week with a trio consisting of Rich Corpolongo on tenor saxophone and Danny Shapera on bass. We do what we think of as a Sonny Rollins Trio-type of thing. He had a great trio of just tenor, bass and drums. We love playing together and we’re thinking about doing

Read the entire interview with Rusty Jones by subscribing to Chicago Jazz Magazine and receive a FREE CD:
Subscribe to Chicago Jazz Magazine and get FREE Jazz Cds!


Comment on this Article!

Don't miss anymore Chicago Jazz Information.
Subscribe to Chicago Jazz magazine / Get A Free CD.
Subscribe to our Chicago Jazz weekly newsletter.