Jazz Master: A Conversation with Terry Gibbs (Part One)

Since 1982, the National Endowment for the Arts has bestowed its Jazz Master award to living legends of the music. The designation is considered by many to be the highest honor an American jazz musician can receive. Generally, the NEA has made wise choices when selecting new Masters. Sonny Rollins (1983), Ron Carter (1998), George Benson (2009), Kenny Barron (2010), Dave Liebman (2011), George Coleman (2015), Dave Holland (2017), Henry Threadgill (2021), Stanley Clarke (2022), Donald Harrison (2022), Kenny Garrett (2023), Amina Claudine Myers, (2024), Marilyn Crispell (2025), and Marshall Allen (2025) have ranked among its worthy recipients. However, the Association’s process for selecting Masters is not without its faults. One of the more blatant errors lies in the failure to recognize vibraphonist Terry Gibbs. This mistake is even more evident after listening to the recent release of Terry Gibbs Dream Band Vol. 7: The Lost Tapes, 1959 (Whaling City, 2024).

In a broad sense, Gibbs is a fascinating figure who straddled between big bands and bebop. As to the former, he worked with several names who made music that enraptured audiences in the era of swing – Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Buddy Rich, and Woody Herman. As to the latter, he worked with the founding fathers of Bop: Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie (1982). Besides Roy Haynes (1995), the vibraphonist is one of the few people still with us who played with Bird. For his groups as a leader, Gibbs refused to draw stylistic lines between the lyricism of swing and the improvisational breadth of bop. Perhaps the best-known of these was his Dream Band, a large ensemble that emphasized intricate arrangements – including those by Bill Holman (2010) – while providing space for individual expression. Between 1959 and 1961, the Dream Band released four studio recordings. However, most of its output came to light decades after the group disbanded, as live recordings were made public.

The most recent of these live releases, Vol. 7, was a surprise recording that hid for decades. Its discovery was something of an accident. It emerged when Gibbs’ son, drummer-bandleader Gerry Gibbs, stumbled upon a file marked “Party 1959” on the computer where he had digitally stored all surviving tapes of the group’s performances – featuring Bob Brookmeyer, Al Cohn, and Mel Lewis, among others – from Hollywood, California in March and November of 1959. 1959 was a fascinating year musically, as it saw the fissure of bop into several different threads, from the modality of Miles to the free jazz of Ornette. Hues of another, the West Coast cool jazz most commonly identified with Dave Brubeck, is occasionally heard on Vol. 7, as on the ingeniously arranged “Dancing in the Dark.” But more than anything else, what stands out about Vol. 7 is how thoroughly modern and contemporary it sounds. If heard blindfolded, one would likely never suspect it was recorded sixty-five years ago. The band’s approach to standards like “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You” or “Softly as in a Morning Sunrise” sound practically designed to rekindle a love in the listener for the music that hit its peak popularity generations ago. Swing and bop never died and with this release, Gibbs affirms the music’s sustained vibrancy.

But the Dream Band is only part of Gibbs’ legacy. With Lionel Hampton (1988), Red Norvo, and Milt Jackson (1997), Gibbs was one of four who laid the blueprint for modern improvisation on the vibraphone. Would someone like Warren Wolf be making the same music today without him? Gibbs’ influence also extends beyond his instrument of choice. As the longtime TV bandleader for Steve Allen – and for a lesser period Regis Philbin – in some ways, he blazed a trail for someone like Jon Batiste to come to prominence. Gibbs was also at the forefront of exploring the intersection of jazz and traditional Jewish music. As Gary Giddins noted in Visions of Jazz: The First Century (Oxford, 1998), the record Terry Gibbs Plays Jewish Melodies in Jazztime (Mercury, 1963) was “an appealing combination of klezmer bravado and bebop cool.” Though sounding distinctly different from anything ever released by Tzadik Records, one cannot help but wonder if there is some subtle element of Gibbs’ work in this area that shaped John Zorn’s numerous Masada offerings. Jewish Melodies also brought the talents of a young Alice McLeod to light. And it was also through her time with Gibbs that the young pianist would be introduced to her eventual husband, John Coltrane.  All of that is before even getting into his seventeen-year working relationship with Buddy DeFranco (2006) throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

We are honored to have sat down with Gibbs to discuss the Dream Band and his career more generally. This conversation occurred on October 17, 2024, four days after the legend reached his hundredth birthday. Despite this advanced milestone, Gibbs was as sharp as ever. He was even a producer on Vol. 7. This author implores the NEA to properly recognize the contributions of this man while it still can.

PostGenre: What does it mean to you to turn a hundred years old? 

Terry Gibbs: Numbers don’t mean anything to me. My wife passed away a year and a half ago. She was twenty-five and a half years younger than me, and we were married for forty-six years. And it is similar to the numbers for jazz musicians. I was twenty when I joined Benny Goodman‘s band. Benny was forty-two at the time. But after we played about four bars, we were the same age, you know? That’s what jazz does to you. It has nothing to do with race, creed, or age; when two people play together, that’s all that counts.

PG: Though your relationship to music may have changed over time. You stopped publicly playing when you were ninety-one. How do you feel your relationship with music changed over the last almost decade? 

TG: Well, I don’t play, but I listen to a lot of music. I have a new album [Vol. 7] that’s coming out. And the weirdest thing is that most disc jockeys are very young and don’t even know what a big band sounds like. So, I was never sure where this record would go on the charts. But, today, it shot from fifty up to nineteen in the jazz charts. That shocked the hell out of me.

You’re in Austin, right?

PG: Yes. 

TG: That’s something like the Beverly Hills of Texas. 

PG: It’s constantly changing here. A lot of tech companies are moving in and pricing a lot of people out of living here.

TG: Well, you know, my son Gerry [Gibbs] plays in Austin a lot. Actually, he is driving to Austin today with his wife. I played in Austin once, but that was a long time ago. It’s a great town and a great place to live. 

PG: The summers can be brutal, but the winters are much more manageable than back on the East Coast. 

TG:  Yeah, it’s the same thing as when I moved to California from New York. After I moved, it was somewhat weird whenever I went back to New York. No matter what part of the year, my body falls back into it. My brain falls into it. I grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and that’s never left me, I don’t think. 

PG: Which gets a little into your Dream Band – you moved to California in 1958 and a year later were working on the Band. Do you feel your perspectives on music changed when you crossed the coasts? 

TG: You know something? What some call West Coast jazz is not West Coast jazz. The people who created West Coast jazz were Shelly Manne and Shorty Rogers. They were both from Bronx, New York. They just happened to be living on the West Coast, so it became known as West Coast jazz. 

With the Dream Band, we were packing the place. The Dream Band played that club [, the Seville Club,] for four years. Every night, we would get three hundred people to watch us play. That was the most fun. But the new Dream Band record knocks me out because we recorded it in 1959. Sixty-five years ago. But it doesn’t sound like it was recorded in 1959. It sounds like it was recorded yesterday. 

In those days, you could only get four minutes of play. Otherwise, you wouldn’t get on the radio. I patterned my band after Benny Goodman. He didn’t focus solely on the clarinet, and I don’t on the vibes. When I would go into a club to hear a big band, I didn’t want to hear a saxophone player stand up and play ten choruses. I want to have the arrangement in the band. That’s what this is. And I’m very happy about it. 

I never called the Dream Band “my band.” It was always “our band” because it took fifteen of us. But we had so much fun. The union scale was only fifteen dollars a night.  I used to joke that the first rule if the band is that there’s no drinking off the bandstand, only on it. Then we can have a party. Let’s have fun. And the audience loved the band. 

PG: You mentioned how Vol. 7, The Lost Tapes, 1959 sounds like it could have been recorded yesterday. What do you think that says about both the music you were making back then and the development of large ensemble music since?

TG: Swing music is swing music. It calls for the right kind of arrangements that fit me. I had three arrangers from New York. I worked with them before, and they knew how I liked big band music to be. I like excitement. With a big band, if you’re gonna play loud, play loud. If you’re gonna play soft, play soft. I think I learned this from Woody Herman. He told me that the most important thing is the band, not the soloist. All the guys in the band were great soloists. But it is the band playing together that knocks me out. 

PG: It seems you have always worked with great arrangers. One of the best examples is your album 52nd & Broadway: Songs of the Bebop Era (Mack Avenue, 2004), where you have a string orchestra that sounds more like a big band than an orchestral string section.

TG: That’s right, I didn’t use the strings as strings. The whole idea was to use them so the strings sound like the trumpets of the Dream Band. The whole thing when I hired the four arrangers for that record was that they needed to know bebop. They had to know how to write for strings, too. But without knowing bebop, they couldn’t make the strings sound like a brass section, as I wanted them. So, all of the arrangers were bebop players. When I’m given a project, I am very hands-on. I worked with the arrangers to get what I was looking for. They really came through for me.

Plus, the girl who played lead violin was both a jazz singer and a studio violin player. I made her the lead violin player, and she hired all the strings. She hired people who knew how to play syncopated figures, not just whole notes. And they got it great. 

PG: A little earlier, you mentioned Benny Goodman. What do you feel you learned the most from working with him?

TG: He was so foggy. I learned not to be foggy. I used to hear all kinds of Benny Goodman stories. Things like that he put on two different shoes. I thought everything about those stories was far-fetched. I enjoyed him. He was out there and a little foggy. But he sure could play. 

I’ve been blessed. I’ve had a few highlights in my career. I won the Major Bowes Amateur Hour when I was twelve years old. That was bigger on the radio than American Idol is on television. And the Amateur Hour had better talent too, because people like Frank Sinatra also won that same contest. There was no Frank Sinatra on American Idol. Winning that contest was one of my big things. And then I went on to play with Benny Goodman.

PG: But even before the Major Bowes Amateur Hour, you studied drums with Fred Albright. Albright wrote “Contemporary Studies for Snare,” a classic book for students learning how to play snare drum. What was it like studying with him? 

TG: Well, I was a little kid when I studied with Fred Albright. I only had one teacher – him –  and he was one of the greatest people. He taught me at my house. It was a three-hour trip for him to get there. He made three dollars per lesson. This was around 1935 or so.

I was very good at memorizing music. I wasn’t good at reading music but great at memorizing it.  In my first lesson with him, he showed me something and then gave me some music to learn. He came back the next week, and I played the music he gave me perfectly. We did this for about four weeks in a row. Then I think he realized I was shuckin’ and jivin’, as they call it.

So, he told me to take it from bar seventy-two. But I didn’t know what bar seventy-two was because I was working off memory. And, so, he taught me from there. He was a great teacher and a great guy. 

PG: After the Major Bowes Amateur Hour, but before Benny Goodman, you worked for Bill DeArango. 

TG: He was the first bandleader I ever worked for. He was a guitar player who played and recorded with Charlie Parker. he started a little group and asked me to join it.  

I’ll tell you a little story. The group was like George Shearing’s group, but we came first. We were kind of quiet compared with what bebop groups were playing because we didn’t have any horns. We got our first job in Chicago. When we got there, we didn’t have any money. We were just young kids – in our twenties – and Bill was a little older than me. He checked us into a hotel. We opened up at the club but got fired the first night. So, we had to go back to the hotel and all moved into one room. Bill tried to find money to get us back to New York. We all slept in one room on the floor. We took the mattress apart. But Bill was a great guy. 

PG: After DeArango, you ultimately wound up with Benny Goodman, as we discussed. After Goodman, you started providing music for television shows with Regis Philbin and Steve Allen. 

TG: That’s right. I was with Steve Allen for seventeen years. 

PG: As far as serving as band director for both Steve Allen and Regis Philbin, you were making primarily instrumental music. It seems you are less likely to find instrumental music in mainstream entertainment media today. Do you have any sense of why that is, and why vocals predominate so much now? 

TG: You know, I wish I could answer that question for you. In all the things you have today, you don’t seem to hear a melody. You hear words. All the kids can sing the song for you. Take the words away, and they probably could no longer sing it. But every era has its own thing. And I don’t put others down.

PG: After Steve Allen, you started working with Buddy DeFranco.

TG: I played with Buddy DeFranco for seventeen years, too. I’ve had a blessed career. 

PG: What do you feel it was about that collaborative relationship with DeFranco that worked so well? 

TG: Well, that happened because we were both booked as separate performances at Ronnie Scott’s in [London,] England. He played for a half hour, and I played for a half hour. I never knew Buddy before that. At rehearsal, Buddy played his clarinet and rehearsed. But my vibes hadn’t come in, so I rehearsed two fingers on piano. I asked Buddy – he was very laid back – if he would mind playing first. Ronnie Scott wanted us to play a song together at the end. 

Anyhow, Buddy played, and then I played. But when we played together on the song at the end, we broke up the place. The clarinet and vibes sound very good together. Lionel Hampton and Benny Goodman made up that sound. It is such a great combination, just like how Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie made the alto [saxophone] and trumpet combination sound so well together. So, we were made for each other; we were two bebop players. After that tune together went well, Ronnie asked us to do two songs together for our next night. So, I cut my performance short, and Buddy cut his short, too, and we played two songs together. After that, Ronnie asked us to play three songs together. So, little by little, we started playing together. It was fun to play with him, and then we started to outdo each other. We just played music and would listen to each other. And that went on for about seventeen years. 

PG: You mentioned how you were both bebop players. How did you first get into bop?

TG: I’m a bebop vibe player who grew up learning from Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. My friends were Miles Davis and John Coltrane. That was my era. I was lucky that at the young age of twenty-five, I became a bandleader. Club owners loved what I did. I didn’t like what I played half the time. But when I listen to it now, I say ”damn, I really was good.” I never thought about it much back then because I was also a drummer. I played when I got out of school. I went on the road playing drums.

Then, I went to the army. I was a tank driver for a little while. And then, all of a sudden, I wound up being with a band in Dallas, Texas that was making Army movie pictures and radio programs for bond drives. And I wound up with a large orchestra. 

But, as far as bebop, I grew up with a guy named Tiny Kahn. He was a very important figure to anybody who knew him. He weighed about three hundred and fifty pounds and died when he was twenty-nine. We were childhood friends from the time I was six years old up until I went into the army. We looked like – if anyone knows these names these days – Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet when we would walk down the street together. Tiny was so big, and I was so little. But musically, he was the one who got me into bebop. 

PG: And you ended up playing with both Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie.

TG: Yes, I did. 

PG: What was it like working with Parker in particular? No one doubts his genius but you also hear a lot of stories about how his drug addiction made him erratic and difficult to work with. 

TG: You know, when I knew him when he was a druggie. And I told him off a bunch of times. I’m very vocal about that. Now, I know that drug addiction is a sickness. But I didn’t know that when I was young. 

In 1952 or 1953, a new club opened. It had Billy Eckstine who, at that time, was considered the new Frank Sinatra. It also had Harry James with his band, featuring Buddy Rich. And my quartet. We were playing at that club for about a month. After four days of playing there, the owner of the club came to me and told me Bird was coming out of the hospital and wanted to play with me. I asked the owner if Bird wanted to play with Billy Eckstine or Buddy Rich, but he told me he had asked to play with me. 

So, I got to know Parker when he was sober. He was a very intelligent guy who spoke very eloquently, and he was fun. He was such a great musician. The first day we played together, I called out what they called the American Songbook songs, and we played them for two days. After the second day, in the dressing room, Bird said to me, “Terry, Dizzy and I saw you play your original songs four or five times at Birdland. Why don’t we play the original songs you normally play instead of only standards?” So we played some, and I swear to God, he played them better than I did. I may have written them, but he played them better. Charlie Parker and George Gershwin were the two geniuses that I loved. Many people today don’t know those names because they’re young kids. But I do. That’s all that counts.

Continue the conversation here. Terry Gibbs Dream Band’s ‘Vol. 7: The Lost Tapes, 1959’ can be purchased from Whaling City Sound. You can learn more about Terry Gibbs on his website.