The world has lost a magnificent musician and magnetic personality with the passing of longtime Santana conga player Raul Rekow. Heartfelt wishes to all who knew and loved him. Spinterview is working on a tribute to Raul, and his late bandmate Armando Peraza, for 2016.

The post Remembering Raul Rekow appeared first on Spinterview.

I’m thankful for the opportunity to contribute to the following magazines/papers/sites:

BAM (Bay Area Music), Bass Player, Billboard, Bold Life, Boulevards, Creative Loafing, Downbeat, Drum Business, Drums & Drumming, Frisco, Guitar Extra, Guitar Player, Hendersonville Lightning, Hendersonville Times-News, Hit Parader, jambase.com, Jazziz, Jazz Times, Mix, Modern Drummer, Modern Percussionist, Mountain Xpress, Music Life, Music Makers, Musician, Musicians’ Industry, News From Brazil, The Pacific Sun, Performer, SFSU Prism, San Francisco Chronicle Datebook, Strings, Upbeat, Valley Music News, and Wind Player.

Along the way I’ve worked with many great editors, including John Burks, Regan McMahon, Blair Jackson, Michelle Margetts, Rick Mattingly, Bill Miller, Rick Van Horn, Adam Budofsky, Art Lange, Ed Enright, John Ephland, Bobby Reed, Melanie Bianchi,  Elizabeth Moss, Bill Moss, Michael Fagien, Melinda Newman, Dan Armonaitis, Dean Budnick, Greg Cahill, Sue Adolphson, Thom Duffy, Bruce Haring, Dave DiMartino, John Shelton Ivany, Royal Stokes, Jock Baird, Bill Flanagan, Dan Forte, Tom Wheeler, Don Menn, Andy Aledort, and Kevin Berger. Many thanks to each and all!

And to all of the promoters, publicists, record companies, managers, personal assistants, tour managers, agents, tech support, venue support and others who have helped these interviews to take place, your efforts are appreciated very much.

Sincerely,

Robin T

The post Publications appeared first on Spinterview.

The post UNC-Asheville Hosts Spinterview appeared first on Spinterview.

A longtime music journalist will be paying tribute to the great pianist and Greenwood native Mulgrew Miller with an event at Turnrow Books.

DownBeat magazine senior contributor Robin Tolleson will be mixing together selections from some of Miller’s jazz albums with recordings of interviews about Miller with friends, associates and colleagues in a format Tolleson calls a “Spinterview” Tuesday beginning at 5 p.m.

Miller, a 1973 graduate of Greenwood High School, died in 2013 at the age of 57. He was widely considered one of the greatest jazz pianists of his generation, having played and recorded with many of the titans of jazz during a storied career that began in teenage cover bands and behind the organ at Greenwood-area churches.

Tolleson said he’d spoken with a number of noted contemporary jazz musicians about Miller — including pianist Donald Brown, saxophonist Donald Harrison, trombonist Steve Turre and saxophonist Alphonso Sanders — in preparing the “spinterview.”

“I was hearing all these great stories from these guys about Mulgrew,” Tolleson said. “To me, it’s a real pleasure to be able to do this — to play some of the great vinyl he played on and let people hear these interviews.”

In his nearly four decades as a professional jazz pianist, Miller played on more than 600 different albums, playing with iconic stars including trumpeter Woody Shaw and drummer Art Blakey.

Miller’s professional career began in 1976 when he was recruited to replace the recently deceased Duke Ellington behind the piano in the Duke Ellington Orchestra and also included a three-year stint in Blakey’s legendary Jazz Messengers.

Tolleson said he’d gotten interested in putting together a tribute for Miller after visiting the journalist’s son, James Tolleson, who lives in Greenwood and works with the Greenwood School District as a member of FoodCorps, a national nonprofit.

Tolleson said he’d met Miller several times while living in the San Francisco area but had never realized he was from Greenwood. Talking with folks around town during his visits, Tolleson found many who’d known Miller personally but didn’t quite grasp the magnitude of his achievements in jazz.

“They may have known who Mulgrew was, but they didn’t realize what all he’d accomplished in music. It’s pretty astounding how many albums he played on, the great people he played with,” said Tolleson, who now lives in Hendersonville, North Carolina. “I was always really impressed with him as a person and as a jazz musician. When I started visiting James, so many things kind of came together to make this happen.”

Tolleson said he’s been putting on “spinterview” performances for several years now, drawing from the massive vinyl record collection — about 8,000 records — he amassed during his 30-year career as a freelance music journalist, as well as tape recordings of hundreds of interviews with jazz greats.

“In the last few years I’ve noticed how many of those people that I’d interviewed start passing away and thought their voices really need to be preserved,” Tolleson said. “I just had the idea of mixing them, spinning the vinyl, dropping the vinyl down and bringing up little bits of the interview.”

The post Event to Honor Piano Legend (Mulgrew Miller) appeared first on Spinterview.

It’s hard to argue with the legacy of Blue Note Records. The venerable label has spent much of its 75 years delivering some of the best jazz in the history of the medium, wrapped in some of the most evocative packaging of the LP era.

The list of Blue Note alums is astounding: Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Art Blakey and Sonny Rollins are just a few of the liminaries who released albums on Blue Note, and the label has managed to remain relevant into the 21st century, releasing last year’s Elvis Costello/Roots collaboration, “Wise Up Ghost.”

It’s a label that writer and drummer Robin Tolleson grew up loving, along with just about every other kind of music, in one of the most musical cities on the country.

“I grew up in San Francisco,” Tolleson says, “and as a kid, my dad was trumpet player and arranger and a big-band leader. So I saw music as a way to make a living. And there was a ton of great music. On the radio, you could hear everything from the Rolling Stones to the Charles Lloyd Blues Quartet to Santana. There was just a ton of music going on out there, so I guess I got the bug.”

Tolleson started playing drums, but developed a love of writing as well, which led him onto his ultimate career path. “In 1977 I decided to pitch a couple of music magazines on story ideas. I was studying with a drummer named Narada Michael Walden, who played with the Mahavishnu Orchestra, so I pitched a story about him, and got an assignment. Then I pitched a record review to ‘Down Beat,’ and they bought that, so I was kind of on my way to a writing career by the end of -79 and I’ve been writing ever since.”

Tolleson estimates he’s written over 1,500 articles, all while amassing an impressive collection of vinyl.

“It’s been a really amazing career, and when I first started writing in San Francisco, people would send me albums,” he says. “I was receiving some really great vinyl, by all these fantastic artists I was writing about; my record collection was going crazy. I had about 10,000 albums at one point, about 3,000 of which I brought with me when I moved to Hendersonville. So I had a lot of classic vinyl and a lot of interviews with these incredible artists who helped shape jazz, funk and rock over the last 20 or 30 years.”

Which brings us to the “Spinterview,” a concept Tolleson developed that combines his albums and interviews.

“Over the last few years, more and more of these people started passing away,” Tolleson says. “And it made me want to get the interviews out there and let people hear these voices and this music. I got a couple of turntables and got this idea about spinning these classic tracks and then lowering the volume and bringing up the best parts of the interviews in 30- to 60-seconds spurts. The idea is that I’m part DJ, part music historian.”

By coincidence, Tolleson realized after he came up with the Spinterview concept that Blue Note Records was celebrating an auspicious occasion.

“It’s Blue Note’s 75th anniversary this year, and they’re a label I’ve always enjoyed,” Tolleson says. “In fact, my first jazz album was a Blue Note album. And I realized that I had 15 or so interviews with Blue Note artists like Tony Williams, McCoy Tyner, Max Roach, Bobby McFerrin, Joe Pass, Questlove and Herbie Hancock; all these great artists. So I spoke with [owner] Gene Berger at Horizon about the idea of coming in and doing a salute to Blue Note records. It’ll be a change for people to hear some great music and get some insight into what these artists sounded like, too.”

The post Robin Tolleson Keeps Blue Note Spirit Alive with ‘Spinterviews’ appeared first on Spinterview.

Originally published by J.M. for Bold Life Magazine
May 1, 2014

Music journalist and drummer Robin Tolleson provides an entertaining inside look at some of the iconic musicians he has interviewed over a 30—year career including Ginger Baker, George Benson, David Byrne, Bela Fleck, Herbie Hancock, Whitney Houston, Lionel Hampton, Bobby McFerrin and Carlos Santana.

Part DJ and part music historian, Tolleson mixes musical selections from his collection of classic vinyl along with recordings taken from actual interviews with the artists, creating what he calls, the “Spinterview.”

Tolleson has written professionally since 1979, authoring over 1,200 features for such music magazines as Downbeat, Modern Drummer, Billboard, Mix, Guitar Player, Bass Player, Wind Player, and Strings.

Spinterviews take place on Thursdays, May 8, 15, 22, and 29, at 4pm at Trinity Community Music Center, 900 Blythe Street in Hendersonville. $5, Students free. 828—692—6114.

The post Aural History appeared first on Spinterview.

Rob Tolleson dates his start as a music journalist to age 10 when he was growing up in San Francisco in the Sixties.

“They would have these great concerts and I’d just run out the door,” he said. “I’d tell my mom, ‘I’m going to the park to a concert.’ And she’d say, ‘OK, be back before dark.”

The concerts at Golden Gate Park attracted the up-and-coming greats of the rock’n’roll and jazz scene. Walking behind the stage, he spotted a cluster of shaggy musicians.

“I said, ‘Hey fellas, what are you guys doing?’ And Jerry Garcia looks up at me and says, ‘Oh, we’re just sitting around smoking bananas.'”

After his debut Q&A with the legendary leader of the Grateful Dead, Tolleson would hone his interviewing skill. A jazz drummer by night, Tolleson has always done what he loved. He has stitched together drumming in three or four ensembles at a time, going on the road and playing Asheville and Greenville clubs. By day he interviews and profiles great musicians of the era for music magazines including Modern Drummer, Bass Player, Guitar Player, Wind Player, Strings, Downbeat and Mix, which covers the recording industry.

As a musician himself, he knew the terminology, the vagaries of the recording business and the burdens of the road. He landed tons of great interviews. He knew the secret of a good interview: Shut up and listen. And he did one very smart thing. He saved the tapes.

“I knew,” he said. “I always knew. I carted them across country.”

He realized the interviews, like vintage wine, got more valuable with age.

“One of the things that got me going on this is how many people that I interviewed years ago are no longer with us,” he said. He’d read about the deaths of greats he had known — keyboardist George Duke, for instance, or jazz woodwind player Chico Hamilton — and remembered the time backstage when they told of a great piano riff or an important mentor. “It made me realize what I had.”

Analog to digital

‘He got out all his old tapes — cassette tapes and minicassettes ~ and went to work listening, sorting and taking notes.

“Then I had the mammoth job of transferring all these old analog tapes into digital and putting them on another CD,” he said. He made 13 CDs containing more than 60 interviews. He catalogued every quote with notes on the topic and the length of the excerpt. The interviews go back decades.

“When I was living in San Francisco everybody came through there and it was easy to get face-to-face interviews,” he said. “Since I’ve been back here I’ve probably done more of them by phone.”

He has stories to tell.

Ginger Baker, the great Cream drummer, could be volcanic. Once he walked out of a restaurant and left Tolleson stranded. Another time, when Tolleson was interviewing him at his ranch in California, he bolted from the porch to confront neighbors he thought were bothering his horses.

Covering the Free Jazz Festival in Rio de Janeiro, Tolleson spotted George Benson playing ping—pong in a hotel and challenged him to game. Having the quick hands of a drummer, Tolleson is pretty good. Good enough to win Benson’s respect if not the game. “I ended up at the bar getting plastered with him,” he said.

Now Tolleson has put the tapes to good use. He created the “Spinterview,” his own term for mixing snippets of interviews with the songs the artist is talking about. He uses two turntables and a mixer to spin classic vinyl albums while blending in the interview excerpts. He carries the whole setup in sturdy metal cases. A lava lamp adds to the Sixties look.

“I have a little percussion,” he says. “I just can’t help myself.”

Off to the side are his snare and conga drums, cabasa, woodblock and cowbell.

Last week he launched a 10-week Spinterview series on Thursday afternoons at his church, Trinity Presbyterian. The premiere went well except when he put on a rock’n’roll interview “and here comes the F—bomb three times.“

‘The Spinterview has begun’

Spinterview subjects include hornmen Wayne Shorter and David Sanborn, keyboardists George Duke, Herbie Hancock and McCoy Tyner, vocalists Bobby McFerrin, Whitney Houston and Al Jarreau, guitarists Joe Pass, Joe Satriani, George Benson and Carlos Santana, jazz legends Lionel Hampton and Max Roach, banjo visionary Bela Fleck, classic rock bands Yes,‘Jethro Tull, Genesis, Journey and Cream, world beat groovemaker Sly Dunbar, legendary record producer Arif Mardin, and many others.

The soundtrack to the interviews he spins on old-fashioned records.

“There’s something about vinyl,” he said “I love the sound of it. It has a warmth that digital doesn’t have. I have hundreds of CDs in my office and I hardly ever play a CD anymore. I was thinking I could just throw them all away except I have to use them for my articles.”

He’s done a couple of Spinterviews at bars and he imagines the form as a perfect fit for radio. He is finalizing plans to do his Spinterview show at Horizon Records in Greenville for Record Store Day on April 19, and he is booked to do one at Barleys Tap Room in Spindale on May 1.

At first he thought he would group the interviews by musical genre but he has found by doing the shows that a random approach works well. A Spinterview could go from drummer Terry Bouio talking about Frank Zappa to David Byrne talking about the Talking Heads to Whitney Houston sharing a story about her start in the industry.

“We only got through three people and it was really a variety of stuff‘.“ he said on one of his first public performances. “So I kind of feel like the Spinterview has begun and it‘s just going to keep going. For now the 50 I’ve got ready, I‘m just going to go with it. It’s a great cross-section and I think people will like it.”

The post Veteran Drummer Creates ‘Spinterviews’ of Music Greats appeared first on Spinterview.