eJazzNews Archive

JazzTrenzz: Between Sets with Mike Longo

Originally published on eJazzNews · · By Karl Stober · Interviews

In November 2004, eJazzNews columnist Karl Stober interviewed pianist Mike Longo for his JazzTrenzz series about Oasis, the new album by Longo’s big band, the New York State of the Art Jazz Ensemble. Longo, who had been Dizzy Gillespie’s musical director for nearly a decade, used the conversation to explain how the album was built and why he thought jazz had lost the apprenticeship that trained him.

Who Mike Longo was

Michael Josef Longo was born in Cincinnati on March 19, 1937, and started formal lessons with a teacher from the Cincinnati Conservatory at four, while also playing in his father’s club-date band. As a teenager he met Cannonball Adderley, then a high school band director, who brought him into his own circle of gigs. In 1961 he spent six months studying with Oscar Peterson at Peterson’s Advanced School of Contemporary Music in Toronto.

Back in New York, Longo worked with singers including Nancy Wilson and led a trio. Dizzy Gillespie heard that trio at the Embers West, with Paul Chambers on bass, and hired him the next day. From 1966 to 1975 Longo was Gillespie’s musical director, and he is the pianist on Gillespie’s Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac (Impulse!, 1967). In Longo’s own words to DownBeat, he worked with Gillespie “nine years straight, full-time, and for the rest of his life on a part-time basis.”

What Longo said about Oasis

Oasis came out in 2004 on Consolidated Artists Productions, the label behind most of Longo’s own records. He described it as contrapuntal music with a forward-propelling melodic force: several melodic lines moving against one another, so that when one rests another carries the music on.

He also explained where two of the tunes came from. “The Godfather” grew out of a James Brown performance he saw in When We Were Kings, the documentary about the Ali and Foreman fight in Zaire. “Bag of Bones” began with a rhythm Gillespie had handed him and saxophonist James Moody on a scrap of paper in the late 1960s, an eighth-note triplet starting on the “and” of one. Longo said it took him about 20 years to work out how to play it, and he named the tune after Milt Jackson, whose groove it reminded him of.

The interview then turned to teaching. Longo argued that the old apprenticeship, playing night after night beside a master and learning from your mistakes on the bandstand, had largely disappeared, and that jazz education concentrated on copying solos instead of the time, touch and concept that produced them. He said he had written nine instructional books and was working on another, The Rhythmic Nature of Jazz, that would set out what Gillespie had taught him about rhythm in the order he learned it.

After the interview

Longo kept leading his trio and the 17-piece New York State of the Art Jazz Ensemble, and from 2004 he hosted a weekly jazz series in the John Birks Gillespie Auditorium at the New York Baha’i Center; like Gillespie, he was a member of the Baha’i Faith. Later albums on his label include Float Like a Butterfly, Sting Like a Bee, To My Surprise and Only Time Will Tell, and The Rhythmic Nature of Jazz became the name of the master class he taught. He died of COVID-19 at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York on March 22, 2020, three days after his 83rd birthday.

For the pianists who shaped Longo, Oscar Peterson first among them, see our guide to the greatest jazz pianists.

Where to start listening

  • Dizzy Gillespie, Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac (Impulse!, 1967): a live quintet record with Longo on piano and James Moody on saxophones and flute.
  • Mike Longo, Talk with the Spirits (Pablo, 1976): a septet date with Gillespie on congas and vocals.
  • Mike Longo and the New York State of the Art Jazz Ensemble, Oasis (CAP, 2004): the big band album discussed in this interview.

Sources

This page is based on an article from the original eJazzNews archive (2001 to 2018), with background and sources added in 2026. The original text is not republished here. You can read the original as it appeared on eJazzNews via the Internet Archive.
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