The great jazz trumpeter Jon Faddis, longtime lead for Dizzy Gillespie’s bands, among others, puts down the phone so he can change his son’s diaper. That explains a lot of his current reading. Faddis performs this afternoon at the Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island.
BOOKS: What was your last great read?
FADDIS: I read books like “The Day the Crayons Quit” by Drew Daywalt, which I really liked. I did order “Between the World and Me” by Ta-Nehisi Coates. I also go back and visit some of the jazz histories and autobiographies, such as clarinetist Clark Terry’s “Clark” and saxophonist and composer Jimmy Heath’s “I Walked With Giants.” Because the festival is celebrating Miles Davis, I reread some of his autobiography, “Miles.” Miles put some funny stuff in there. I know some of his contemporaries didn’t agree with his version of things. I like Dizzy Gillespie’s “To Be, or Not . . . to Bop,” which he wrote with Al Fraser, the best because I was so close to him. Dizzy read everything and was very knowledgeable on any subject from politics to religion to African history.
BOOKS: Were there any books that were pivotal to your music career?
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FADDIS: I always liked Bill Evans’s liner notes for Miles’s album “Kind of Blue.” That’s one thing that is missing now. Since all the music technology shifted toward download and streaming we don’t get liner notes or the things on the back of the albums, the writing that helped you understand the music better.
BOOKS: What other kind of books do you read?
FADDIS: Usually when I do some reading it will concern music or some type of spirituality or alternative medicine. There’s a book by the Sufi master Hazrat Inayat Khan called “The Mysticism of Sound and Music” that I often recommend to my students. It talks about the responsibility of musicians and the deeper meaning of music.
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BOOKS: How long have you been reading books with a spiritual bent?
FADDIS: From when I was in my late 20s or so. I used to go to East West Books on Fifth Avenue here in New York and just hang out. “The Metaphysical Bible Dictionary” by Charles Fillmore was an early book I read that set me on this path. It talks about the, which upsets a lot of people, but it is what it is.
BOOKS: Do you read about history?
FADDIS: I have a lot of books on JFK’s assassination — I have Mark Lane’s books “Rush to Judgment” and “Last Word” about the CIA’s possible involvement. I like Jim Garrison’s “On the Trail of the Assassins.” When I was in the fourth grade, President Kennedy gave a speech at the University California, Berkeley. Our whole school walked a few blocks to watch his motorcade pass. I’ve always thought, “What if what happened in Dallas had happened in front of us?” When I was 15 I tried to get through the Warren Commission report and couldn’t. Twenty years later, I started doing a lot of reading and searching for answers.
BOOKS: Did you grow up in a house full of books?
FADDIS: My father was a history teacher. He had a radical political bent and had marched with Dr. Martin Luther King in Mississippi. He’d leave stuff around the house, but it was a little bit too advanced for me. I liked sports biographies about Jackie Robinson, Ted Williams, and Willie Mays. One book that was a big influence on me was Leo Tolstoy’s “Writings on Civil Disobedience and Non-Violence,” which I read in high school. That influenced me to become a vegetarian for 37 years. Now my wife, who has a literature degree, recommends books for me, and I can hardly get through those. I read John Kennedy Toole’s “A Confederacy of Dunces” because I love her, but I had a rough time.
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