Willie Cantu...and Tony Williams...and Miles and Ornette and

[Bart Bull]

Here's a Part 2 of an interview with Willie Cantu talking about how weeks after joining Buck and the Buckaroos at age 17, he was in NYC to play the Jimmy Dean Show, and went to the Village Vanguard to hear Miles....whereupon Tony Williams took him under his wing.
And then....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSTzItSh4JU

[Mike Neer]

Thanks for posting. Never knew any of this. Willie is deep. I wish the interviewer was a little more attuned.

[Joachim Kettner]

Thanks for posting. Great interwiew!
Hearing him mentioning all those names from the Jazz field, it reminded me of something happening a few years ago:
I was aware of a Jazz fan in my little hometown, following a normal profession, but organised concerts on the side. In the fifties he used to visit the officers' clubs where Big Bands were perfoming.
He had a little cellar club with a stage in another small town and he invited some of the musicians to play there after their regular gig was over. Many came, free drinks, and no restrictions music wise!
Because of this he befriended many of them. They used to eat and sleep in his house when they were on tour in the area.
I first heard of the man because he also organised a gig with a saxophone player, his name escapes me now, I only knew that he played the flute solo on "California Dreamin"
My mother knew him and thru this connection he invited me to his house.
He became ill with diabetes and had a leg amputated in the meantime.
He took two shoe boxes out of a drawer full of black and white photographs! I'm in no way familiar with Jazz, but I'm sure that there were also pictures taken of people Mr.Cantu mentions.
A few years later after his death I went there to revisit the pictures, but his widow told me that she had loaned the photos to somedody who never returnd them. What a thief! The only few left were hangin framed on her wall. She told me who they were. I recognized a few them including Dizzy Gillespie.

[Craig Stock]

Joachim,

The flute player was Bud Shank if allmusic.com is correct, nice story also, and the moral is, never loan your valued possessions out.

[Joachim Kettner]

Yes it was him, Graig.

[Bob Hoffnar]

Thanks for the link ! I think my favorite part of the interview is the end when Willie says “how lucky can you get !”.

[Scott Thomas]

That sounds like someone describing a dream they had. Incredible. Tony was a real class act. What a generous soul. I'm thinking Willy must have come across hip as all get out to get invited to hang like that. He's not going to say it, but you know those cats picked right up on that. And he's like what--17/18 at the time?.

[Bart Bull]

I like to think that maybe Tony Williams so kindly took him to see Mingus and looked after Willie so carefully because Willie had gone out on the town wearing one of his Buckaroos stage suits.....preferrably the pink Carnegie Hall one.

That would explain why the other Buckaroos warned him he'd be mugged...and maybe why Miles skipped his own gig entirely. I like to think about Mingus looking down from the bandstand and wondering if maybe he picked the wrong end of showbiz...

(Actualy, what I really like to think about is all the hidden secrets in Willie's drumming with Buck, the spring-compressed minimalism, the disciplined less-is-more-ism. And then I want to think about whether he and Kenny Buttrey ever got together....)

[David Mitchell]

"What does Buck mean? Play on top of the beat? I'll I've ever played was on the beat. Hilarious! Thanks for sharing!