There's a real control thing happening in the business. A lot of the musicians who should have had the opportunities -- I'm one of them, but I don't usually like to talk about that -- (the record business people) didn't really push those musicians so you'd have a whole historical channel, and a continuum. Nobody kept using them or giving them the chance.
" But to the hard bop leaders and audience, Harper was (and is) a treasure who could play with the fire of Coltrane, but who had his own Texas in-the-pocket thing. He was a top-choice tenor man for not only Blakey but the drummers Max Roach and Elvin Jones. "They probably liked the drive I have, and I like rhythm," Harper says.
"I can feel what the drummers are doing." Trumpeter Weiss, 42, who put together the new Cookers band and is one of the pre-eminent young hard bop scholars, says he can't understand why Harper, who has about 15 albums out, isn't better known. "Billy Harper is a true mystery," he said while in San Francisco recently.
Weiss was here to provide his transcription of Monk's 1959 "Orchestra at Town Hall Concert," which pianist Jason Moran performed on May 19 for SFJazz's Spring Season. "Billy writes his own music, he plays with such passion, why doesn't he sell? He's always tried to be a bandleader, he works pretty regularly, he has a cult following, but he hasn't crossed into the big time.
" Nor have any of the Cookers, for that matter. But one musician who couldn't make the Cookers' Healdsburg show -- trumpeter Hubbard -- did get pretty big there for a while. Hubbard, whose career Weiss has managed to resurrect, was the leader of the 1965 Blue Note record date "Night of the Cookers," on which the current band is based.
That record isn't one of the landmarks of hard bop, but it does sum up its soulful, hard-charging ethos. "The bar was set a lot higher back then," Weiss says. "It was 'the land of the giants.
' You were up against John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Lee Morgan. You had to work a lot harder. They all learned from each other.
The level of what these guys achieved was amazing -- the seriousness, the passion they brought to the music each night." Harper says it was a sign of the times. "It was a period in jazz history when people were definitely cooking, really burning.
That music was heavily influenced by everything that was happening in life at that time, which meant the integration-movement meetings, the desegregation, all that stuff. That caused the music to be a certain way. That caused the cooking to be a certain way, which is not like any other period of cooking.
" The continuum that Harper says was broken is about to be mended, at least for a while, in Healdsburg, thanks to Weiss' diligence and especially thanks to the festival's artistic director, Jessica Felix, who's been keeping the hard bop flame burning since she began booking shows in Oakland in the '80s. Cables, a remarkable pianist who has played with Blakey, Sonny Rollins, Dexter Gordon and dozens of other jazz stars, is a Healdsburg mainstay who happened to perform on Harper's first album, "Capra Black" from 1973. Henderson, best known for his stint in the '70s with the Herbie Hancock Sextet, is another Blakey veteran with whom Harper has worked often, and drum master Hart, who also was in the Hancock Sextet, has played many Healdsburg festivals as well.
"Billy Hart's one of my favorite drummers. I wanted to hire him for my band, but he was busy working for Stan Getz -- making money," Harper says, laughing. The continuum also is heading in new directions, thanks to younger players.
Weiss has two well- received CDs out and a third on the way, and Handy, 44, yet another Blakey graduate, worked with Harper, Weiss and bassist McBee on hard bop trumpeter and occasional Cooker Charles Tolliver's celebrated big band comeback, "With Love," which came about -- surprise -- at Weiss' instigation. On Sunday's headlining gig, the continuum becomes a circle when elder statesman Cables and another hard bopper, altoist Gary Bartz, perform with two of the most talented players to emerge from the Marsalis camp: bassist Eric Revis and drummer Jeff "Tain" Watts. That show may not make the evolutionists jump for joy, but you can't please everybody.
Who's playing in Healdsburg For tickets and information, call (707) 433-4644 or visit There's a real control thing happening in the business.
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