The Secret History of the KGB.

Show: FRESH AIR
Date: SEPTEMBER 29, 1999
Time: 12:00
Tran: 092901np.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: KGB Spying Techniques
Sect: News; International
Time: 12:06

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not
be in its final form and may be updated.

TERRY GROSS, HOST: From WHYY in Philadelphia, I'm Terry Gross with FRESH AIR.

On today's FRESH AIR, new revelations about the KGB and the techniques it used to spy on the U.S. and spread disinformation. These revelations are contained in documents that were smuggled out of the KGB archives by an archivist-turned-defector. The information in these documents is revealed to the public for the first time in the new book, "The Sword and the Shield." We'll talk with the co-author, Christopher Andrew.

Also, we meet a trumpeter and composer who can't be easily categorized, Dave Douglas. He currently fronts seven ensembles of varying compositional styles and instrumental configurations.

That's all coming up on FRESH AIR.

First the news.

(NEWS BREAK)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

Perhaps you've been following news stories about the eight Brits who have been accused of spying for the Soviets during the Cold War. Those accusations are based on top-secret documents that were smuggled out of KGB files by a KGB archivist-turned-defector named Vasili Mitrokhin. The contents of those smuggled documents are summarized for the public for the first time in the new book, "The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB."

The book details Soviet spying and disinformation campaigns. My guest is Mitrokhin's co-author, Christopher Andrew. He's the chair of the history department at Cambridge University, a former visiting professor of national security at Harvard and author of several books about international intelligence.

I asked Andrew how Mitrokhin managed to get the documents out of the KGB archive.

CHRISTOPHER ANDREW, AUTHOR: What happened was that Vasili Mitrokhin, the archivist, who by the late 1960s was a secret dissident, in 1972 was put in charge of moving the whole foreign intelligence archive from its cramped headquarters in the center of Moscow in the Lubyanka to a nice new green-field (ph) site just beyond the Moscow ring road. He had to check all the files out from his office in the Lubyanka and check them all in at the new office. And during that period and, indeed, for two years afterwards -- it took 10 years to make the move -- he was able to note and copy anything that he wanted.

And at the new end, there was a bizarre but, fortunately, from my point of view, absolutely fatal error of security. Bags were checked; bodies weren't. So he was simply able to take out the notes, which he took every day for 12 years, in his pockets. It was as simple as that.

GROSS: Well, you've described how he managed to smuggle documents from the archive to his home, but how did he get trunk-loads of documents out of the Soviet Union to the West?

ANDREW: Well, he thought of -- after he retired in 1984, he thought of quite a number of methods, none of which actually worked, until the Soviet Union began to fall apart in 1991, 1992. Now, there was then a period in which some of the newly independent states, including the Baltic republics, had really rather easy access to the West, but a period during which the Russian Federation no longer had secure borders against the -- or had yet to establish secure borders with the newly independent states.

So even though it was taking great risk, he decided more or less on the spur of the moment to get on a train with a suitcase on wheels, which contained at the top sausages and then other foodstuffs for his journey and then various changes of clothing and then, at the very bottom, examples of his notes.

Now, he appears of have gone into an American embassy in the Baltic states and, you know, the CIA passed the opportunity up. I mean, I have to say I have some sympathy with them. If I'd been in the CIA station in one of the Baltic republics and somebody had come in and said, "I have been copying the KGB's most secret archives for a period of 12 years. I had unrestricted access, and I've got some just below the sausages," I think I would have been fairly skeptical.

Fortunately, however, he went also to a British embassy. Now, I come from the country of John Cleese, of whom I was an exact contemporary, the country of "Monty Python." We expect life to be bizarre, and so if somebody says "I have the greatest secrets you've ever seen hidden beneath my clothes and sausages," we're perhaps slightly more inclined to take that proposition seriously than people from cultures which run on more rational lines.

The summer of 1992, he came over to Britain for just over a month, was debriefed, discussed during that period methods which he still will not talk about of exfiltrating from Moscow himself, his family and his entire archive. And the exfiltration was so successful that it was a long time before the SVA (ph), the success to KGB, foreign intelligence, even realized that he had gone.

GROSS: Well, let's discuss some of the findings in this archive that was smuggled out of Russia. Let's start with something that's of particular interest to Americans, the Kennedy assassination. You say that the archives show that the KGB wanted to deflect responsibility for the assassination from Oswald. Why did they care about whether Oswald was seen as the guilty one or not?

ANDREW: Well, one of the things that the KGB was always very anxious to do was to think of any way that it could just to discredit American administrations and the way that the United States is governed generally. And it's always been very good at identifying conspiracy theories which play well in the United States. So it was actually the first to produce a book, even before the Warren report came out, you know, within a year of Kennedy being assassinated in 1963 -- it actually published the first book arguing that the JFK assassination was the result of a plot. Later on, it began to see opportunities to smear the Central Intelligence Agency.

So what it did was that it began to forge the correspondence of Lee Harvey Oswald. So one of the consequences that -- - of all this is that we now know that this so-called KGB files, which President Yeltsin handed over to President Clinton early this summer on the JFK assassination and Lee Harvey Oswald -- you know, I think they are real documents, but they just leave out all the really interesting files.

And I suspect that what happened is not that President Yeltsin consciously misled President Clinton, but that on this, as on a number of other occasions, Russian foreign intelligence has actually withheld the truth from the president of the Russian Federation.

GROSS: You say that the KGB planted a story that Oswald had been selected as the assassin by a group of Texas financiers and industrialists headed by Howard Hunt. This was after Hunt was implicated in the Watergate scandal. Do you think that the...

ANDREW: Well, they were -- they got confused. You see, there were two Hunts. First there was a Hunt who was a Texas oil millionaire -- or for all I know, billionaire. Anyway, he had an awful lot of money. And then there was the Watergate conspirator.

And actually, by the 1970s, they'd moved on to attempting to implicate the Hunt who was a Watergate conspirator, and they forged a letter from Lee Harvey Oswald to Hunt which made it appear that he was being used by Hunt to organize the assassination of JFK. And the forgery was so good that -- the KGB are probably the greatest forgers of the Cold War. I mean, they took months, if necessary years, on forging letters.

So before they started forging Lee Harvey Oswald's correspondence, they made an intensive study of both the paper that he used, the way that he wrote. And for example, they noticed that he was dyslexic. Well, it didn't take them very long to notice that. But they made a careful study of words that he misspelled. And in this particular forged letter, for example, they spelled "concerning" "concerding," the "d" instead of an "n," which is something that Lee Harvey Oswald did relatively often.

And then they also got hold of samples of the note paper that he had used in Texas and -- after his return, and they forged the letter on that. And it -- the forgery was so good it -- when it later emerged, it fooled even his widow.

GROSS: Now, do you have any idea from reading through these KGB files what the KGB really thought happened in the Kennedy assassination?

ANDREW: I think the KGB really did think that JFK was killed as the result of a conspiracy, as indeed, many Americans do. But the KGB were themselves the ultimate conspiracy theorists. Whenever anything went wrong that was against their interests or which they were likely to be blamed for, you know, they didn't assume that this was an accident.

You know, it never occurred to them, for example, that American presidents, alas, are not infrequently the result (ph) of attempted assassinations. The KGB's natural tendency has always been to believe that when something happens that it's likely to be blamed for or that it doesn't wish to happen that it is the result of a malign conspiracy.

GROSS: Now, the documents show, you say, that the KGB tried to discredit Martin Luther King. What did it do to try to discredit King?

ANDREW: Well, first why it attempted to discredit Martin Luther King. I think in the whole of the Cold War, there was probably no American that the KGB hated more than Martin Luther King. The reason that it hated him was simply that it was in favor of anything which would destabilize the United States. And in the mid and late '60s, the era of the long, hot summers, or the beginning of the long, hot summers, it based a lot of hope in race war. And the reason why it hated Martin Luther King was that it saw, probably rightly, Martin Luther King as the man most able to reconcile Americans.

So how did it attempt to discredit him? Well, quite a subtle way. It knew that if it planted stories immediately in the American press, they might not have the maximum effect. So what it began to do was plant stories in the African press, which accused Martin Luther King of being an Uncle Tom, someone who was actually secretly being bribed by the White House, and according to one or two versions of it, personally by President Lyndon Baines Johnson, to moderate, to emasculate the just demands of the black community.

And then it calculated that these libels would be played back from African newspapers into African-American newspapers. But at that very point, Martin Luther King in 1968 was assassinated, and terrible, terrible though it is to say it, that was a day of rejoicing in KGB headquarters.

GROSS: You know, as the KGB was trying to discredit him, the FBI was also trying to discredit King. And I guess this might be one of the rare instances where the KGB and the FBI were on the same page.

ANDREW: I'm afraid that's true. But you know, the sorts of themes that were run during Martin Luther King's lifetime -- that is to say, attempts to stir up race war in the United States -- they continued after his death in different ways. I mean, we have quoted in the book the text of pamphlets circulated by the KGB purporting to come from white racist organizations at the time of the Los Angeles Olympics, which are headed "Black monkeys," and which say that, you know, there are lynch mobs out to get black athletes at the Los Angeles Olympics. It was the same kind of appalling race hate propaganda which the KGB had been circulating in one way or another in the United States anonymously since the 1960s.

GROSS: My guest is Christopher Andrew, co-author of "The Sword and the Shield," based on secret documents smuggled out of the KGB archives.

We'll talk more after a break.

This is FRESH AIR.

(ID BREAK)

GROSS: My guest is Christopher Andrew. He's the chair of the history department at Cambridge University and author of the new book, "The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB." And this book is based on many documents that were smuggled out of Russia by a former KGB archivist.

What do you think were the most important anti-American activities that the KGB carried out?

ANDREW: Well, the KGB's main responsibility in the United States was to collect political intelligence, to collect the political, military and other secrets of the United States, and secondly, to steal its technological, scientific and military secrets.

Now, I think that so far as collecting intelligence on what the American government was up to, it was very largely a failure during the Cold War. And the reason it was very largely a failure was that it was tremendously politically correct. It always feared to tell the Soviet leadership, which until Gorbachev never understood the West, anything which disturbed its misconceptions.

So that you know, I think the final judgment on how awful Soviet political intelligence was, so far as the United States is concerned, is when Gorbachev comes to power in 1985, within a few months of hearing all this ridiculous KGB distorted views of American policy, he tells them he doesn't want to hear any more of such rubbish. Will they kindly now start telling him what is actually going on?

Now, the area where it was actually successful and where it, I think, made a real impact on the Cold War, was stealing secrets from American defense contractors. You know, long before Aldrich Ames became a mercenary spy in the CIA, there were mercenary spies in the majority of immense American defense contractors. By the mid-1970s, there are 77 agents reporting on technological secrets of one kind or another from within the United States.

Now, this has a major, major impact. The Soviet Union, in order to remain a state-of-the-art military superpower, was dependent, critically dependent, on getting hold of Western military technology. So it's a reasonable estimate that by 1980, 70 percent of Soviet advanced weapons systems were dependent in great or lesser degree on American technology.

GROSS: Do you think it's fair to say that in some ways, the results from this archive make it seem that the KGB is at the same time both more sophisticated than we might have thought and more ridiculous than we might have thought?

ANDREW: Yes, I do, but I think the fundamental lesson is that it was quite different from a Western intelligence agency. I mean, I think the single biggest way of misunderstanding the Cold War is to assume that there was symmetry on both sides. I think that in any political system, a good rule of thumb for determining the importance that any governing bureaucracy attaches to any piece of information that comes in is this: If that piece of information came in in the middle of the night, would you wake the president? Would you wake the secretary of state? Would you wake the secretary of defense?

Now, if you apply that test to the information obtained by the KGB, you can see that their hierarchy of importance was entirely different. For example, there was usually no higher priority for Soviet foreign intelligence -- and indeed, for Soviet domestic intelligence -- than wrecking the lives of dissidents, all those who attempted to oppose the Soviet system. And that included dissidents who had gone abroad, like the great cellist Rostropovich, like the writer Solzhenitsyn, like the chess player Korchnoi, like the ballet dancer Nureyev and so on.

Now, in November, 1978, the Oslo station of the KGB in Norway, where the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded each year, woke the man in the ruling Soviet Politburo responsible -- chiefly responsible for preserving ideological orthodoxy, Mikhail Suslov (INAUDIBLE) It woke him to pass on the good news that the dissident Yuri Orlov had not won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Now, you know, Suslov didn't say, "Why are you waking me at 3:00 o'clock in the morning with this news?" He congratulated them. Indeed, over the next few weeks, the KGB station in Oslo was showered with congratulations. Of course, in fact, it hadn't, I think, done anything really to secure the fact that Yuri Orlov has not won the Nobel Peace Prize. After Camp David, it was always going to be the Israeli and Egyptian leaders, Begin and Sadat.

GROSS: Now, as a result of this book and a companion movie that's already been broadcast in England, several still-living British spies have been named, people in England who spied for the KGB, including a now 87-year-old woman. How did you feel about naming names of people who were still living?

ANDREW: I had mixed feelings about it, but I think there are only two views that one can take. Either one takes the view that anyone who spied for Joseph Stalin has the right of privacy, at least until they're dead, and if their names have not come out, one shouldn't name them. And the other possibility is, well, actually, they don't have that right of privacy, and it is reasonable to identify them as having done so.

Merlita Norwood (ph) is extraordinarily unrepentant. She has said that if she had her time over, she would do it all again.

GROSS: She's the 87-year-old...

ANDREW: Or something very like it.

GROSS: ... the now 87 -year-old woman who...

ANDREW: Yes. I mean...

GROSS: Yeah?

ANDREW: I think her -- her achievements have been underestimated for a number of reasons. I mean, the "Cambridge 5," the "magnificent 5," so-called, Kim Philby and his friends, they joined the KGB for much the same reasons -- you know, a mistaken belief that Joseph Stalin was the future, represented some kind of hope for mankind instead of, you know, one of the nastiest dictators ever to rule anywhere in modern history. But they didn't carry on for nearly as long as Merlita Norwood.

Merlita Norwood carries on spying for over 40 years and keeps her secrets much more effectively than Kim Philby and his friends. And throughout that period, she provides top-grade scientific and technological intelligence not just about the British bomb, British atomic bomb, but about lots of other things, as well. And by the way, by the end of the Second World War, the most important secret Britain has is the British atomic bomb. It's so secret that the British prime minister at that time, Clement Atlee, didn't even tell most of his cabinet.

So one of the reasons why -- perhaps the main reason why Joseph Stalin knew far more about the making of the British atomic bomb than most members of the Atlee government did in Britain was Merlita Norwood. And unsurprisingly, the KGB gave her a whole series of awards. They really rated her, and I think they were right to do so.

GROSS: Is there a debate going on now in England about whether the people who were just revealed as being spies or former spies should be punished now?

ANDREW: There is a debate. What I think has got rather left sight of -- lost sight of is whether they can be punished. The problems are two-fold. First, we know the contents of the KGB file on Merlita Norwood. We know the contents of the KGB files on quite a number of other people.

But in a British court of law -- and I suspect that it's the same in American courts of law -- if you produce the contents of somebody's file, you know, the court has got to say, "Where are the originals?" And if you can't produce the original file, then it's not admissible evidence. And it's pretty unlikely that Boris Yeltsin's foreign intelligence service, the SVA, is going to release the original file.

The other problem is that it's not enough simply to say, "Oh, I admit it. I used to be a Soviet spy." In order to produce adequate evidence to convict you, you have to be reasonably precise and say, "Oh, well, on or about such-and-such a date, this is the material that I handed over. And on another such-and-such a date, I handed over that material."

So I think the problem so far as Merlita Norwood is concerned, and other recently disclosed Soviet spies in Britain, is that the evidence is either -- though perfectly satisfactory for non-legal purposes, is either non-admissible or too vague for legal purposes.

GROSS: Have you exposed names of Americans who were spies?

ANDREW: Well, what we have done is to identify by code names a great many spies within the American defense industries. And it will require further research to uncover the exact identities of these individuals.

GROSS: Well, I want to thank you very much for talking with us.

ANDREW: Thank you very much.

GROSS: Christopher Andrew is the co-author of "The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB." He chairs the history department at Cambridge University.

I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(BREAK)

TO PURCHASE AN AUDIOTAPE OF THIS PIECE, PLEASE CALL 877-21FRESH
Dateline: Terry Gross, Philadelphia, PA
Guest: Christopher Andrew
High: Christopher Andrew, co-author of "The Sword and the Shield," discusses new revelations about the KGB and the techniques it used to spy on the U.S. and spread disinformation.
Spec: Espionage; World Affairs; Soviet Union; KGB

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Copy: Content and programming copyright 1999 WHYY, Inc. All rights reserved. Transcribed by FDCH, Inc. under license from WHYY, Inc. Formatting copyright 1999 FDCH, Inc. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to WHYY, Inc. This transcript may not be reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission.
End-Story: KGB Spying Techniques

Show: FRESH AIR
Date: SEPTEMBER 29, 1999
Time: 12:00
Tran: 092902NP.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: The Music of Dave Douglas
Sect: Entertainment
Time: 12:30

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not
be in its final form and may be updated.

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

My guest, Dave Douglas, swept the second annual Jazz Awards this year, which are voted by jazz journalists, musicians, and members of the recording industry. Douglas was voted innovator of the year and won in the categories of best musician, composer, and trumpeter.

Jazz critic Francis Davis (ph) has described Douglas as "one of this era's most technically proficient and imaginative soloists, a man whose horn seems to talk even when he's not using plungers or mutes."

Douglas leads several different ensembles in which he works with different compositional styles and instrumental configurations. He's also played in ensembles led by Horace Silver, Don Byron (ph), and John Zorn (ph).

Before we meet Dave Douglas, let's hear music from his recent CD, "Songs for Wandering Souls," featuring his Tiny Bell (ph) Trio. This is his composition "Prolix."

(AUDIO CLIP: EXCERPT, "PROLIX," DAVE DOUGLAS AND THE TINY BELL TRIO)

GROSS: Dave Douglas, welcome to FRESH AIR.

DAVE DOUGLAS, JAZZ INNOVATOR OF THE YEAR: Thank you.

GROSS: You have, what, about seven different ensembles?

DOUGLAS: Something like that, yes.

GROSS: I know you've been asked this a lot, but why do you have so many different working groups running at the same time?

DOUGLAS: I think the short answer is, I just love music, and I hear it in a lot of different ways, and I have a lot of friends who I like to play with. And this seems to be the only way to do that.

GROSS: Does each group bring out a different part of your personality?

DOUGLAS: I think I'd say more as a composer I'm challenged in various ways by the different ensembles, the instrumentation is always very different, and the personalities are so important in this kind of music that I really rely on that as a different compositional voice.

GROSS: I'm wondering if your different compositional styles and the different band configurations that you use are a result at all of having grown up with different kinds of music.

DOUGLAS: I think so. I think that I've tried to -- well, I wouldn't say I've tried, but I was given this idea that all kinds of music are valid and wonderful, and nothing is more serious or important than anything else. And I retain that in my approach to learning music and to creating music.

GROSS: What kind of music did your parents listen to when you were growing up?

DOUGLAS: My father is an amateur piano player, and he actually taught me my first jazz standards when I was probably 8 or 9, something like that. And he also had a Baroque recorder group that would rehearse in our house on Sundays for a while, probably when I was, oh, around the same age, between 7 and 10, 11.

So in the record collection in our house, which wasn't huge, it was just that there was a lot of 18th and 19th century classical music, jazz from the earliest period up until maybe the mid-'60s, and then I had two older sisters who were listening to the pop music of that time. This is the late '60s, so Stevie Wonder, Jackson Five, the Beatles.

And all of that kind of filtered through without any lens and without any feeling that, you know, well this is, you know, I'm going to be a jazz musician, so I will only listen to Louis Armstrong.

GROSS: Who controlled the radio and the stereo in your house when you were growing up?

DOUGLAS: You know, I don't remember so much listening to the radio. I know that's an awful thing to say on NPR, (laughs) but there was -- it was really recordings that I listened to. And I remember very much listening to Stevie Wonder on my own, and listening to the Beatles and to different sides from the Smithsonian Jazz Collection, which my father had bought for the house.

I tended to gravitate towards the later records in that collection which were Cecil Taylor's "Enter Evening," Thelonius Monk, "Mysterioso," Miles Davis playing "All Blues," John Coltrane playing "Alabama." Those were tracks that I listened to hundreds of times and really formed the way I think about music.

GROSS: Did -- (INAUDIBLE) how do you start playing trumpet? Why trumpet?

DOUGLAS: I've often asked myself that question, because for a long time it was very hard for me. I struggled with technique. I began on piano, I think, when I was 5, with piano lessons. When I was 7, my father came home with a trombone from a flea market. And I saw it, and that was it. I was a trombone player for two years until I realized I couldn't reach the seventh position.

GROSS: Were your arms too short?

DOUGLAS: My arms were to short.

GROSS: (laughs)

DOUGLAS: So -- and also, all my friends played trumpet, and they had all the cool parts in the school band. So that was why I switched to trumpet when I was 9, and I just stuck with it.

GROSS: They had the cool parts in the school band?

DOUGLAS: I'd say that's probably -- yes, like a good 80 percent of my answer of why I play trumpet.

GROSS: And this was in, what, a marching band, playing...

DOUGLAS: From -- maybe they should give trombones more cool parts so there would be more trombonists.

GROSS: (laughs) Well, your arms still would have been short, though.

DOUGLAS: That's true.

GROSS: Was there any kind of trumpet cliches that you were either really attracted to or really repelled by? You know, for example, all those kind of, like, really high, long-held notes that Maynard Ferguson was famous for, or, I don't know, you...

DOUGLAS: Well, that's a wonderful, wonderful tradition that I love to hear. But maybe because I've never been able to do it, I've never gravitated towards it. It's -- I think I did have a love-hate relationship with the trumpet for a long time, and I would say as a trumpeter, I'm more influenced by saxophone players and guitar players. The way that I think linearly was never directly influenced by a specific trumpet player. It was always -- I was hearing tenor sax players in my head.

GROSS: In an interview that you did with the jazz magazine "Jazz Is," you once described the trumpet as an obnoxious instrument. And I was wondering what you found obnoxious about it.

DOUGLAS: Well, it can be very brash and too loud, and, you know, I -- for a long time I played at weddings. This was probably until '92 or so. I used to -- that was my living. And I -- there's a very funny story that there are always certain people at weddings that ask the band to turn down, because it's too loud. But the instrument they always go to is the trumpet. "The trumpet's too loud."

But if you listen to a wedding band today, you'll realize that it's electric guitars and electric bass and electronic drums. So there's this tradition of the trumpet being the brash instrument that bothers everybody. Which can be great...

GROSS: (laughs)

DOUGLAS: ... but I also have worked hard to avoid that in my music.

GROSS: Well, it seems to me you've really managed to wring a lot of very interesting sounds out of the trumpet and get quite a wide range of sounds and snarls and all kinds of things. It seems to me you've probably done a lot of experimenting at home, trying to see exactly what sounds you're capable of getting out of the instrument.

DOUGLAS: Absolutely. I think it's important for musicians to try and extend the vocabulary of their instrument and come up with something that maybe nobody's found before, or that, you know, can be unique to their improvising language.

I've also been, you know, driven forward in that pursuit by a lot of the musicians I've worked with, just from being on stage with someone like John Zorn or with Han Benink (ph) or with Mark Feldman. There's an incredible challenge to be constantly surprising in the sounds that you can get out of your instrument.

So I've learned a lot onstage, just from trying really hard.

GROSS: Well, I thought we could listen to the opening of your composition, "Unhooking the Safety Net," from your album "Constellations." And I think there's a lot of interesting trumpet sounds that you get on this one.

(AUDIO CLIP: EXCERPT, "UNHOOKING THE SAFETY NET," DAVE DOUGLAS)

GROSS: That's Dave Douglas.

DOUGLAS: Oh, the band was just about to come in.

GROSS: You know, I know, (INAUDIBLE), I was just showing you off there. (laughs)

It seems to me it must be kind of difficult to be blowing so outside as that, and yet really maintain control of what you're doing.

DOUGLAS: Well, I don't know, I haven't heard that in a long time. That's pretty obnoxious right there, I'd say.

GROSS: (laughs)

DOUGLAS: But also there was a -- there was some late Beethoven thrown in right at the end, I forgot all about that. So I don't...

GROSS: That went right past me, I have to confess.

DOUGLAS: I don't know what's going on there. But it's an introduction to a group piece, and a lot of the themes in there are -- come from the composition which follows.

GROSS: My guest is trumpeter and composer Dave Douglas. We'll talk more after a break.

This is FRESH AIR.

(BREAK)

GROSS: My guest is trumpeter and composer Dave Douglas.

I want to play another facet of your work, and this is your kind of reinterpretation of a Robert Schumann piece called "Vanitatis Vanitatum," am I saying that right?

DOUGLAS: Mm-hm. I think so, I mean, for all I know.

GROSS: (laughs) Right. I guess neither of us are authorities on this. This is from your album "Constellation." This -- the -- you've done this several times, taking a classical piece and reinterpreting it. Can you say anything about what you did with the arrangement with this particular piece?

DOUGLAS: Well, it's originally a piece for cello and piano. And I've been making these arrangements for trumpet, guitar, and drums. So we reorchestrate, initially, the material as it is, and then we figure out ways to bend it and shape it. I usually pick a section, or maybe a small bit of the material, and -- to use as a development section for improvisation. And that often changes the whole form of the piece.

So by the time we're finished working on it, it's turned into quite a different-sounding piece of music.

GROSS: OK, well, let's hear the opening of Dave Douglas's rearrangement of this piece by Robert Schumann.

(AUDIO CLIP: EXCERPT, ROBERT SCHUMANN'S "VANITATIS VANITATUM," ARRANGED BY DAVE DOUGLAS)

GROSS: Well, that's the opening of Dave Douglas's rearrangement of Robert Schumann's "Vanitatis Vanitatum."

You were talking about, you know, creating an arrangement that the musicians could improvise off of. I mean, usually in jazz, or often in jazz, musicians are improvising off the chord changes. And, of course, there aren't chord changes per se in classical music. So talk a little bit about improvising from an arrangement of a classical piece.

DOUGLAS: Well, I think that the language of American improvised music has grown a lot in the last 30 years, so that we're not merely improvising on just chord changes any more. I think one of the most interesting developments in the music is how composers interact with improvisers in the ensemble.

All different kinds of strategies have evolved, from completely free improvisation to very structured textural approaches, maybe -- there's all kinds of different things, pitch information. In fact, it's gotten to the point where certain composers work on the level of complexity of some of the great 20th century composers.

So I think that all of these languages are things that I bring to bear in my rearrangements of so-called classical pieces.

GROSS: You said that in high school, your goal was to play with Art Blakey. Why did you want to play a straight-ahead hard bop, which is really so unlike what you're doing now? I mean, I know you can play that, but you've chosen to play such a wide variety of forms.

DOUGLAS: Well, that music is really exciting. I mean, that -- to me, that was, like, some of the most exciting music that I knew, was that ensemble. And at that time, in the '70s, the group was on tour, and it was killing. It was -- Bobby Watson was playing and Valeri Panamerov (ph) was on trumpet, and James Williams was playing piano.

It was a great band. It was something that I wanted to do. It was like, if you were going to play jazz trumpet, that was the place the be. So that was my goal.

GROSS: Well, you didn't get to play with Art Blakey, but you did go on the road with pianist Horace Silver, who was in one of Blakey's early great bands. Did it affect your feelings about being a jazz musician at all, to be on the road with Silver? What was that experience like?

DOUGLAS: I was -- I feel like I was really blessed to be in that position at that time. And I'm really thankful that Horace Silver put up with what I was trying to play at that time. I feel that I had come in trying to play as much like Woody Shaw as I could, and I don't feel that it was really maybe serving the music as well as it could have.

But it was my first real gig like that, and I wasn't maybe as aware as I could have been of trying to do a good job. But Horace was a wonderful person to work with, and I think he's one of the great composers of the century.

GROSS: Well, were you very shy at that time?

DOUGLAS: I think I'm still shy.

GROSS: Did -- I mean, would -- did that make it hard for you at all?

DOUGLAS: No, not particularly. Because once you get on the bandstand, you know, you just make music. There's no -- there's nothing else going on. And, you know, I had worked really hard to be there, and I was practicing, and, you know, Woody Shaw was my hero, and I've heard a couple tapes of me at that time, and it sounds embarrassingly like Woody Shaw.

GROSS: My guest is trumpeter and composer Dave Douglas. We'll talk more after a break.

This is FRESH AIR.

(BREAK)

GROSS: Now, you studied at the New England Conservatory of Music, the Berkeley School of Music, NYU. And I think while you were at NYU, you for a while played on the street. What went over when you were a street musician? What actually caught the attention of passers by, got them to stop and maybe even put some money in the tin cup or the hat or whatever you had?

DOUGLAS: You've just put your finger on it. That's what the whole thing was about, was figuring out what would make people stop and give you money. So playing the most exciting, fiery music you could at all times was the rule of the band. And that was a really great thing for me. And also in terms of, you know, technique, what we call chops, to have to cut over electric guitar and bass and traffic on 42nd Street in Times Square at rush hour was really the best education you can get as a trumpet player.

GROSS: So what were the fiery things that went over?

DOUGLAS: Well, we would play everything as fast as we possibly could, and as loud as we could. And, you know, whenever it was your turn to solo, you'd have to keep the energy as high as possible for as long as possible.

And then whenever someone was finished soloing, they would pick up the box and go around and collect the money from the crowd that they had drawn with their solo.

GROSS: Dave Douglas, since you have so many different groups that you lead and there are so many different sides of your playing, let me ask you to focus in on something, to pick a track of your many records that you particularly like and introduce it for us.

DOUGLAS: I think it'd be great if you could play just an excerpt from a record called "In Our Lifetime," which features my sextet in a tribute to Booker Little. This was recorded in '94. And if you could play some of the first track, that'd be great.

GROSS: Now, explain to our listeners who Booker Little was.

DOUGLAS: Booker Little was a fantastic trumpet player and composer who unfortunately died at the age of 23 in 1961. But he left four or five records as a leader. And I felt that some of his music was a little overlooked. So on this record, "In Our Lifetime," I've rearranged some of his compositions, and I also wrote a series of pieces that are dedicated to him.

GROSS: OK, well, here it is.

(AUDIO CLIP: EXCERPT, "IN OUR LIFETIME," DAVE DOUGLAS SEXTET)

GROSS: And that's Dave Douglas, from his album "In Our Lifetime."

So what are you working on now?

DOUGLAS: Well, I just yesterday actually was in the studio recording the piece of music that I wrote for the Tricia Brown Dance Company and premiered this summer at the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival. It's called "Five-Part Weather Invention," and they will be performing it with the recording this fall. Next year there are some more live performances. And it's really an exciting new collaboration for me, working with Tricia Brown, and using the ensemble charms of the night sky to make live music for dance.

GROSS: Well, I want to thank you very much for talking with us.

DOUGLAS: Thank you.

GROSS: Trumpeter and composer Dave Douglas, who'll perform October 27 at the San Francisco Jazz Festival.

FRESH AIR's senior producer today was Joan Toohey Westman (ph). Our interview and reviews are produced by Naomi Person, Amy Sallett (ph), and Phyllis Meyers (ph), with Monique Nazareth, Ann Marie Boldanado, and Patty Leswing (ph). Roberta Shorrock directs the show.

I'm Terry Gross.

We'll close with music from Dave Douglas's recent CD, "Convergence." This is his arrangement of Kurt Weill's "Bilbao Song."

(AUDIO CLIP: EXCERPT, KURT WEILL'S "BILBAO SONG," ARRANGED BY DAVE DOUGLAS)

TO PURCHASE AN AUDIOTAPE OF THIS PIECE, PLEASE CALL 877-21FRESH
Dateline: Terry Gross, Philadelphia, PA
Guest: Dave Douglas
High: Award-winning jazz musician and composer Dave Douglas discusses his career and his new CD "Songs for Wandering Souls."
Spec: Music Industry; Entertainment; "Songs for Wandering Souls"

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End-Story: The Music of Dave Douglas
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