Bennie Maupin has played with Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock for a start
At the Cheltenham Jazz Festival, I'm sitting face to face with Bennie Maupin, the American jazz flautist, saxophonist, pianist and bass clarinetist. We're not alone. Jazz on 3 producer Peggy Sutton crouches between us with the audio kit. From a bench to the left of the benevolent-looking Maupin stares a supercilious-looking pantomime camel; on a shelf to his right is the papier-mache head of a disconsolate panda.
It's a somewhat surreal location in which to meet a man with some of the most glamorous credentials in the jazz world. The telltale sound of Maupin's ghostly bass clarinet was a key ingredient in the sound of one of the most famous of all jazz-fusion albums, Miles Davis's Bitches Brew. Maupin was also a founder-member and cornerstone of Herbie Hancock's Headhunters, whose hit Chameleon still gets constant airplay and which has wound up in the book of just about every borough youth big-band and tentative teenage-funk ensemble you come across.
"Working with Miles was a dream come true for me," Maupin says. "On one side, there he was. On the other side, Wayne Shorter. Two of the most creative thinkers jazz has ever known. And me."
But on one side of Maupin now is the uppity-looking camel, on the other side the gloomy-looking panda. It's the way things go if you're trying to catch passing legends for radio interviews at jazz festivals. We're not in a hotel suite, fussed over by anxious PRs, the way it might be in areas of the music business awash with spare cash and personnel. It's the wardrobe room of Cheltenham's Everyman Theatre, after Maupin's triumphant quartet set on the festival's Sunday programme, and it's the only quiet corner we could grab for a 20-minute rewind through his fascinating life.
But if it doesn't sound like a relaxed location, the quick intimacies of the jazz world make it so. More by luck than judgement (tune titles having a pesky tendency to get elusive just when you need them), I tell Maupin I caught his Porgy and Bess quote from My Man's Gone Now in his opening solo, and from the swing classic Lester Leaps In in his quirky, Latin-inflected bass clarinet tribute to sax legend Lester Young.
Maupin looks pleased, and from there - amid the animal heads, Victorian gowns, and boxes mysteriously marked "Bum Rolls" - we race through his life. Maupin talks of early stardom with legends like Lee Morgan and Horace Silver, his informal education with world-jazz pioneer Yusef Lateef and John Coltrane's wife Alice, the Miles/Herbie Hancock period, and out through personal crises and reassessment to the renewed music he makes today. It isn't arcane information, for jazz insiders only, but the story of a life - like most lives - with all its surprises, reversals, discoveries, construction, deconstruction, loves, losses.
Bennie Maupin's Cheltenham concert and our camel-witnessed conversation goes on on Radio 3's Jazz on 3 on Friday May 18, and you can hear much more from the festival's opening days here.
