Interview with Rex Gregory
Rex Gregory is an extremely talented, but also very disciplined, instrumentalist. He plays with a wide variety of people around town in a number of styles, many of them not fixed genres. Part of this comes from a great talent for getting with the "conversational" style that emerges when groups of players get together to improvise. Basically, he's quick! He's also young (27.) He plays flute, all the saxes, and clarinet and last year he released his first album as a leader, An End To Oblivion. He is very comfortable dealing with ideas both "intellectual" and in music. He enthusiastically tackles areas where he has no understanding and he is quite well read as a result. If you check his blog at http://rexgregory.blogspot.com/ you can see he writes confidently too whether you are in agreement with his opinions or not. I felt this was an entertaining interview because Rex is comfortable with shooting off opinions. His website is at http://rexgregory.com/ The last section of this interview got into some very interesting areas that show a lot of the inner symbolic possibilities that are available in the basic elements of music.
This conversation happened outdoors so there is some wind noise. On the other hand it seems comfortable and you get the sounds of the Marigny on a pleasant late spring day.
Part 1- Rex talks about getting back to jazz and what he means by jazz, jazz competitions and whether there is a place for competition in music, Beethoven and Viennese classical music.