Interview: Nathan & Kevin Haines Keep It All In The Family

Nathan Haines has just been added to the lineup of this month’s Elemental Festival.

Thinking quick, Nathan has developed Songs With My Father, which, surprise, surprise will feature his father Kevin Haines , a renowned jazz bass player himself.

So we at 13th Floor were thrilled not only at having the chance to talk to Nathan, but his dad as well.

So, listen in as Nathan and Kevin tell The 13th Floor’s Marty Duda what to expect on October 18th at Hopetoun Alpha

Listen to the interview with Nathan and Kevin Haines here:

 

Or, read a transcription here:

M: Today we have with us, Nathan and Kevin Haines. How’s it going guys?

N: Hey Marty. Great man.

M: Thank you for coming by.

N: Pleasure.

M: The reason that we have the two of you here is because you guys are doing a show together, Songs With My Father, and [Kevin], I’m assuming you’re the father…?

K: I think so (laughs).

M: Excellent. I mean, two New Zealand jazz icons in one place is very humbling here. I can’t say how exciting it is. Where did the idea for the show come from?

N: Well my agent said, “I’ve got some slots so come up with a new concept”. So I offered him stuff I was already doing and he said, “no, Live Nation doesn’t want to go for that they want something new.” I said, “well actually, I’ve been recording with my Dad,” and I was working with a guy over the UK, a wonderful guitarist, and he sent me a version of God Bless the Child for me to play on and we had been talking about it. Then I got Dad in to record it. Dad did such an amazing job of it. It had been in the back of my mind for years that we should finally record some stuff together.

M: Is this the first time you have?

N: No, no. Dad plays the track on Squire for Hire – on my record – and Radio New Zealand use it every day. What program is it?

K: It’s the afternoon – no evening program.

N: Evening. So that’s the theme music that they’ve been using for about coming up twenty years.

K: I hope you’re getting paid.

N: Oh, royalties, modest royalties.

M: I’ve got to say, you’ve got to be flying high with that!

N: (Laughs) I wish. Then in 2015, sorry, 2005, we did an album with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and so that was the first time we had really done an actual album together. So, from my point of view this is what this show is about, really, I guess, taking the opportunity to work on the songs that we’ve already started. But then I came up with the idea of, why don’t we look back at our relationship in music and have a look and how and why we started playing music. Present that as a show and Dad can tell some witty asides.

M: Oh there’s going to be witty asides?

K: Witty asides.

M: Have you been writing them down or are you going to make them up as you go along?

K: (Laughs) I’ll make them up.

N: You know pithy quotes; all the rest… but Dad’s got a lot of tales which I grew up listening about. Then, of course, I joined him at the London Bar, which was where myself and Kevin Field learnt how to play.

M: Oh yes, and Kevin’s going to be on this show too right?

N: Yes. So personally that is where I really learnt how to become a musician. I was playing at the London Bar on the stage with Tommy Adderley and Dad. Murray McCabe, lots of other people. Tony Hopkins. Frank Conway. Most of those guys are not with us anymore, unfortunately.

M: So, it wasn’t a given from day one that you were going to be a musician?

K: Well, there’s a picture that I’ve got of the two of them sitting on the floor and Joel I think, Nathan’s brother, would have been two probably, he’s got a ukulele and Nathans got a recorder, and that’s how they ended up basically playing those instruments. So there was something going on there.

M: It was destiny.

N: So in a nutshell that’s the general idea. The last few weeks we’ve been sort of talking about the songs that we’ve played together and I said to Dad, “What are some of your favourite musicians? What are some of your favourite songs?” So maybe you want to tell Marty about that.

K: Yeah well, it was basically, we did a television programme some years ago called Jazz Scene that used to be on, and they offered us an hour-long programme and Joel was 13 and you [Nathan] were 15. They were so young and yet we did this hour-long program, no problem at all. We brought in a couple of guests, Phil Broadhurst, and Martin Winch at the time.

N: Both of who which are no longer with us.

K: But the interesting thing is that it worked perfectly. A lot of the tunes that were on there were the tunes that we used to do as a quartet while I was sort of the in ‘gestation period’. So were going to do a couple of those which is great because that will be a real blast going back to that.

N: The first time! In over thirty years.

M: Hope you remembered it all right.

N: Well, to be honest I’ll probably have to relearn them.

K: Yeah, well probably true. I mean they were tunes from very early times.

N: That Dad chose.

M: What are some of the tunes?

K: There’s one, actually we were just talking about death, we’ve just had another Gary Peacock, a very, very famous American bass player that has just died, and we are doing a tune of his called Vignette. It’s gorgeous.

N: He used to play with Keith Jarrett.

K: Then Bill Evans, were doing a tune of Scott LaFaro, which was his bass player at the time, called Gloria’s Step. We are just sort of throwing things in there.

N: Were doing some from that album I did with the NZSO, which is called Life Time. That was an amazing experience doing that album and Alan Broadbent did most of the arrangements. There’s some of Joel’s [too].

K: Maybe doing one of Kevin’s too.

N: One of Kevin’s. Two songs that I wrote that Alan arranged.

K: And you’re doing some off your album with Lady Lywa.

N: Yes, one of mine from Vermillion Skies which I wrote for Mum. Then we’re doing a Pat Metheny tune because Dad was a big Pat Metheny fan, along with millions of others in the eighties.

M: He was very popular – that’s not common for Jazz.

N: No. I went to see him and I saw Graham [Reid ] there. We were both leaving actually after over two hours, and I said it’s too long. He went “I know, not even I can take that much Pat Metheny!”

Apparently it went for over three hours. I really got into Pat Metheny because although Dad had the traditional Jazz, he also had stuff like Stevie Wonder, Sly, Jean over nelly, crossover artists like Pat Metheny, and of course I was very much into early synthesizers and Dad bought a rolling Juno-60.

K: No it was a six wasn’t it?

N: Sorry a six, a Juno-6. So I started my life long fascination and love with analog synthesizers. So those Pat Metheny records were very, very influential. And you know I can still hear a lot of Metheny in my brothers playing, even though my brother is more into rock. There’s still a lot of Metheny in there, so we had to include some Metheny, didn’t we?

M: [Kevin], how did you feel about synthesizers?

K: Oh, no a problem. I mean when I first started playing – actually I played just down the road from here. I can actually see the building, the church down there. When I was 16, I used to travel on a bus, would you believe with my bass, from Pukekohe.

M: Did they charge you double for the bass?

K: No they didn’t, not in those days.

N: Must have been a slow bus tour I’m sure.

K: I used to play two nights a week down there with a big band for people dancing, but the interesting thing out of that came all of this other stuff, of being able to listen to varying kinds of jazz, but also pop music of the day. So that’s why I started playing bass guitar at that stage as well but that went out the shoot pretty quickly.

N: Dad actually had Revolver so I’ve always loved that album. Funnily enough, when my son was born and was about 2 I started playing The Beatles and he really loved it so I bought all – not the two early ones – the original mono pressings and every Saturday we play Lego and put some Beatles on and he knows so many of those songs.

M: Its amazing – children’s reactions to The Beatles. I have two daughters, my older daughter, when she was four years old she could tell which Beatle was singing which song.

N: Yeah, Zuke is the same man!

K: I’ve got a wonderful story about Zuke, Nathan’s son, he’s really cool. One night he was at our house and there was a blackbird outside singing and I said, “jeez listen to the blackbird.” Zuke said, “blackbird singing in the dead of night…”

M: Oh I love it.

N: Yeah so you know there wasn’t just jazz, there was…

K: We are going to be doing a Stevie Wonder song too.

M: Which one?

N: Golden Lady.

K: It will be different.

M: Well, that’s what makes it special.

N: Well funnily enough, both Dad and I have taught at Auckland Uni on the Jazz course, Dad a lot more than me. A few years ago one of the students suggested Golden Lady but the Kurt Elling version. I didn’t even know about it so I started playing it.

K: Oh great, that’s wonderful. It will be wonderful to do. A bit of a challenge.

M: So the rest of the band, tell everybody who’s playing on this?

N: Steve Thomas is the drummer, a relatively young guy. Joel [Haines] is doing half a show. Dad’s good friend and my old friend Dixon Nacey. Dads got a band with Dixon.

M: Dixon has been busy, he’s been doing all sorts of stuff.

N: So Dixon is going to play the Pat Metheny song with us.

K: Yup, that’s right and probably God Bless the Child. That will be nice.

N: Also a percussionist. I think I’m going to bring in for a couple of numbers as well.

M: Is Kevin Field playing?

N: Oh yes, and Kevin yeah.

K: We go back a long way with Kevin. My goodness.

N: The three of us really at the London Bar. Kevin’s been on many of my records, several of them. He’s a Doctor now – Doctor jazz.

K: I’m not going to say anything.

M: He can raise his rate now right?

K: That’s right!

N: He’s a formidable musician. He’s invented his own language, a melodic language, which is what his thesis was all about. He’s an amazing guy.

M: What does it take for you guys to prepare to do a show like this?

N: Emails, and then rehearsals. We’re starting the first rehearsal on Thursday. To be honest I think we are such a part of each other’s DNA that it just happens anyway, however for this concert I wanted to make sure that we were going to do some different stuff. Sometimes we do friends weddings, or corporate things, and we can just turn up and play but I want this concert to be something special, something different.

K: And that’s why we need the rehearsals to be able to make sure that it’s happening all the way that it should be happening.

M: But I would imagine, I’m not a musician so I don’t know what I’m talking about, but you have to find the fine line between rehearsing enough to know what you’re going to do, and over rehearsing so you don’t come across as being too…

K: Well, I’ll tell you what. Prince made a wonderful statement about that. I heard this years ago and thought, boy, how accurate this is. Apparently there was a bass player and he was fooling around with his bass and came into the session, and then he said to Prince, when do we practice? Prince said, “we don’t practice, we rehearse”. I love that, because that’s what we’re doing. We don’t practice because we’ve got that sorted but we rehearse so we will have our tunes sorted.

N: Miles was the opposite. He will get everyone together but you’ve got to leave room for the magic to happen. But we do have to [rehearse].

K: There’s got to be a form and shape to the whole thing. Not only the music but even the concept.

N: The whole show how it runs is really important to me as well. Then the witty asides Dads going to do.

K: Well, we will see about that.

M: No, you’ve got to have them. You’ve promoted it now. People will want their money back if they don’t get it.

K: Yeah, yeah…witty asides. That’s going to be interesting, but anyhow I’m full of them.

M: I’m sure you are, fantastic. Well thank you guys for coming around on a Friday afternoon.

N: Thank you Marty, such a pleasure.

M: It’s fantastic just to see anybody these days we’ve been in lockdown for so long.

N: I know. I’m so looking forward to playing; I’ve done one or two gigs since March. Personally, it’s the least amount of playing I’ve done since I was a child. I’ve always gigged and it’s been really hard, so yeah, it’s going to be great to just play.

M: Excellent, well thank you, gentlemen.

K: Thank you so much Marty.

N: Thanks Marty.

M: My pleasure, we will see you at the show.

– Nathan and Kevin will be joined onstage with Joel Haines, Kevin Field, Stephen Thomas, and Dixon Nacey.

– To buy tickets, visit Moshtix.co.nz.