Roland Prince
One of the biggest influences on my jazz guitar journey was Roland Prince, an Antiguan guitarist. I first saw him perform at a concert in 1976 called "Three Generations of Jazz Guitar" at Livingston College. The lineup included Tiny Grimes, Jim Hall, Ron Carter, and Roland Prince, who was new to me at the time. He was promoting his debut album "Color Visions" on Vanguard and was seen as a representative of the younger generation of guitarists. His style of playing is considered one of the most modern in jazz guitar, blending elements of funk and long improvisations on single chords. While I have a great admiration for Jim Hall, I can't imagine him playing alongside Elvin Jones like Roland Prince could.
He was the first guitarist I ever heard who recorded Giant Step. I talked to him after the show and asked if he offered lessons. From his reaction, I could tell that teaching wasn't his main focus.
He mentioned he lived in the Bedford Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn and assumed I wouldn't travel there. However, when I insisted, he agreed, and we developed a long-lasting friendship until he moved back to Trinidad around the year 2000.
Bedford Stuyvesant was a rough neighborhood, and he lived in a project near DeKalb Street, close to the J train Kosciuszko St. I remember this because I was curious about the street's name and looked it up. Kosciuszko was a Polish General who fought alongside Washington in 1776.
My first lesson with him involved analyzing Jordu. Roland admitted he wasn't sure what to teach me, but I expressed my interest in jamming and watching him play. He then showed me a chart of Jordu, which is a set of complex changes involving the circle of 4ths with Dominant 7th chords that switched every 2 beats. Unlike the usual 2-5 chords where you could use the same scale, with the Dominants, you had to play different scales or arpeggios similar to Giant Steps.
While we were playing music together, he began writing down his ideas. I regret not bringing a full notebook to his lessons because I can't find the paper where he wrote them. We went through some of the Coltrane tunes from the Giant Steps phase, such as Countdown, Satellite, Central Park West, and the alternate changes he made for But Not For Me and Body and Soul. We also practiced tunes he was preparing for Elvin Jones, with whom he was performing at the time. During the two years of bi-weekly lessons, Roland recorded an album with James Moody called Timeless Aura, featuring some funky jazz that was different from Moody's usual style. However, Roland became very busy trying to launch a solo career and ended up leaving Elvin's band for a year. I had the opportunity to see Roland Prince lead his own group when he promoted his second Vanguard LP "Free Spirit" in 1977. Unfortunately, his solo project didn't take off, and Vanguard didn't renew his contract, so he returned to Elvin's band in 1978.
Elvin Jones was a hardworking musician who often performed live, which exhausted his bandmates. As a result, Roland was frequently on tour, and I was just starting to break into the NYC funk scene. This meant our music lessons became less frequent, but we kept in touch over the phone. During this time, there were no answering machines, so businesses had to hire real live people that would run the answering services. I learned a little about Roland's background during our lessons. He grew up in Antigua, a small island near Barbados with a population of 95,000. Barbados, although three times larger, was still too small for ambitious musicians. Many musicians moved to Trinidad, with a population of 1.4 million, known for its Steel Drum music culture. However, Trinidad did not have much of a jazz scene. I ended up touring in the Caribbean, playing shows in Trinidad, which was mostly rural. When we landed in Barbados, it looked incredibly small when looking at it from a few thousand feet above. Roland initially moved to Toronto, like many British Caribe Island residents, due to easy immigration policies. After a year, he relocated to the USA after being recruited by Brother Jack McDuff. He played with jazz legends and became a prominent figure in the NYC music scene. He tried to capitalize on the Fusion movement by forming a band called Compost. However, the Jazz Fusion era was one of the most short-lived periods in music and eventually gave way to a lighter funk genre known as "smooth jazz" by 1978.
During my lessons with Roland, I mostly watched him improvise while I played the walking bass chord accompaniment style that Harry Leahey had taught me. Roland mentioned that I already knew all the technical theory from Harry. I introduced Roland to Harry's LPs, and he became a big fan. Eventually, our lessons became so enjoyable for him that he stopped charging me. We started jamming at his guitar repairman's small shop in the Village, although I can't recall the repairman's name. Even after I moved to LA in 1984, we stayed in touch and would occasionally call each other. I had his phone number until he moved back to Antigua in the mid-1990s. His last recording in NYC was with David Murray on a small label called Red Baron in 1991. It was at Murray's gig in the Village that I got to see him perform one more time when I visited my family on the East Coast. By the 1990s, smooth jazz was the thing and increasingly became popular, and Roland would complain that all of the real jazz session work was declining, with the focus of "jazz" shifting to colleges. Roland was not going to go to college to prove he was a master and he made it clear he disliked smooth jazz”, so he started talking about moving back to his hometown. He always hated the weather in NYC and the East Coast.
Roland continued to make music and became the most famous jazz musician from the Trinidad/Barbados/Antigua region. His final album, "Pop Goes the Zazzle," featured his wife on bass. Surprisingly, the album included a Caribbean tune called "Antigua," which became a jazz classic and was widely covered, despite the Zazzle project being relatively unknown. My time with Roland Prince enriched my life and musical knowledge, and I encourage everyone to learn more about him and listen to his music. He is truly one of the great jazz guitarists.
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