JI: No, I never met him.

RM: Well, he was something else, Eric. He walked over to the bar and he was holding court. And there was one of the local saxophone players there, a gentleman by the name of Sil Austin. I had played with Sil. I had done some gigs with him when I first came to Atlanta. And I walked over to the bar and said hello to Sil. I said, “Hey, man, introduce me to Jimmy.” So Sil introduced me to him, he said, “Hey, this is a young, up and coming guitarist, Russell Malone. I’ve been hearing great things from him.” He was very complimentary. So Jimmy looked around at me and says, “You play guitar? Where’s your box? You call yourself a guitar player? You come here without your box!” Well, I said, “It’s out in the car.” Jimmy said: “Go get it!” I said, “Does that mean I’m going to sit in with you?” He said, “You ask too many questions. Go get your box.” So, anyway, I was really excited. I went back to my car and got my guitar. He went on the bandstand, played a couple of tunes with the band, and after that he called me up. And I was feeling really good that night. I was so excited that I was going to get this chance to sit in with this legend. And I had a couple of buddies with me, and I had my girlfriend at the time with me. So I was just on top of the world. So, I get on the bandstand and the first tune he calls is, “The Sermon,” which is a blues. First of all, I made a very foolish mistake. I felt that since I had listened to all of his records, I felt that I was just going to go up there and I was just going to sleepwalk my way through it. And I was cocky and he must have sensed this. So he played this blues, and I played all of my licks, all of my crowd-pleasing licks. My little entourage, they went crazy. They were back there cheering—you know, my girlfriend, she was smiling. She was cheering me on. Jimmy must have been paying attention to this because immediately after we ended the tune, he went into this Johnny Mercer tune, this Johnny Mercer/David Raksin tune called “Laura.” And you’ve heard that tune.

JI: Yes!

RM: That’s not one of those tunes that you can just hear your way through. You have to know that tune.

JI: Especially, the last four bars of each of the A and the B sections.

RM: Exactly. So he stated the theme and I’m listening very closely trying to figure what the heck is going on. I’m totally stumped. And then he motions to me to solo. And I was just…I sounded so bad on that tune! I sounded so bad (laughing). And he didn’t make it any easier. The more I struggled, the more difficult he made it for me. He started to throw in all of these weird-sounding chords, sounds that I never heard before. I mean, he made the organ pray and curse at the same time. That’s what it sounded like. So, anyway, after I finished making a fool out of myself, he got on the microphone—I’ll never forget this—he got on the microphone and said, “Now, whenever we let youngsters sit in with us, we always like to make sure that they learn something.” And he looked over at me and he said, “Now, did you learn something, young man?” And I said, “Yes.”

JI: That was pretty diplomatic the way he handled that.

RM: Well, there’s more. So check this out. He said, “Russell Malone, ladies and gentlemen, give him a hand.” I sat back at my seat with my girlfriend. And I was so embarrassed; I wanted to cry, so embarrassed. He played one more tune. Closed out that set. Went over to the bar again. He’s holding court. So I was going to leave, but I said, “Well, you know, I should, at least, go up to the old man and thank him for letting me sit in with him.” So I walked up to the bar and I tapped him on the shoulder. He looked around at me and before I could get the next sentence out of my mouth, he got in my face and poked his finger in my chest, like this, and he said, “Let me tell you something. All of these guys that you’re trying to play like”—and he named Pat Martino, Wes Montgomery, George Benson, Kenny Burrell, this long list of guitar players—“all those guys that you’re trying to play like, I taught them too.” And he said, “So don’t ever get on my bandstand with that bullshit again.” So I said, “Oh my god, man!” So I hung around. At around 11:45, he finished his drink, and he motioned for me to come with him. He said, “Bring your guitar. Come with me.” So I went up to his room with him. We hung out from almost 12 o’clock till like six a.m. in the morning, just the two of us. I had my guitar, and he wanted me to play for him. And I would play the few tunes I knew like “Skylark” or “Body and Soul,” tunes like that. So I’d be playing the tunes, and he’d put his hands on the neck and then he’d start to make suggestions on how to approach it from another harmonic angle. And he talked a lot. Now the funny thing about Jimmy—you probably heard the stories of him being irascible and a little nuts, which he was—but I got to see another side to him. He talked a lot about his life. I would ask him questions and then depending on the question, he would just go on and on and on and on. So he talked about—I’ll never forget, I brought up Wes Montgomery—those records he had done with Wes. And this happened on more than one occasion, when I brought up Wes, when he talked about Wes, he would get really emotional. He would tear up. He said that his association with Wes was like a beautiful marriage. He talked about Bud Powell. He talked about Art Tatum. He would get real emotional when he talked about “Lockjaw.” It was just very touching to see that. But, I got to see that a lot whenever we would be on a one-on-one situation. When he talked about Wes Montgomery, you could just see and feel the love he had for him.

JI: And I’m sure you’ve listened to all those albums, him and Wes.

RM: Yeah, yeah. Growing up in a small town like Albany, Georgia, you couldn’t get a whole lot of jazz, because it’s a small town, but you could always find those records. There were certain records you could always find. You could always find some Oscar Peterson, some Jimmy, some Cannonball, some Grover Washington. You could always find that music. And it’s funny, man, when I first got into jazz, there were certain guys I would listen to them and I had to listen to them over a period of time to acquire a taste for them. Then there were those guys like the ones we just named—Jimmy, Cannonball, Wes, Erroll Garner—you didn’t have to listen to them over and over to acquire a taste. Certain guys, they just make that immediate connection. You didn’t have to think about it. You just knew.

(Article continued in Jazz Improv Magazine Volume 5, Number 4)