TromboneChat

This is a wonderful interview with Bill Watrous regarding his Dad and music.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37l3ZI0PhTU

Thanks for posting! I loved this. Watrous is such a genius.

It gives you insight into the man not just the musician

Being a friend of Bill and having spent many hours with him playing and traveling in a car, I feel that his having an alcoholic and critical father has been a prime factor in Bill's sometime prickly nature. Understand me when I say this that I am not denigrating his character or personality. It's just that sometimes Bill gets a bit gruff when something goes amiss.

Having said that, Bill is also one of the most gracious teachers of the trombone. He will tell you everything he does to make his horn sound the way it does and how he uses his tremendous flexibility to get around the horn. He is also an excellent clinician.

He told me about his father critiquing his "Sentimental" solo when we were in the car traveling. I got a real sense how much that hurt him. Obviously, he didn't let that criticism block his mastery of the horn.

My honest take on the interview when I listened to it was that I wished he had kept his relationship with his father to himself.

There are plenty of times when I don't want to know the back-story and that was one of them.

We all wrestle with demons.

Neither personal tragedy nor great artistry is any excuse for bad behavior by anyone. 

...Geezer

I've been lucky enough to have Bill local and have played with him (as a student) many times.  Later he was a featured soloist with the University band where I worked.  The sound guy was not very good, argued with Bill about this and that, didn't follow very clear and specific instructions...and the show was worse.  Bill and the band played on, but feedback, monitor levels, reverb...were not acceptable.  Through the show, he was professional and polite, and played his ass off.  After the show we were packing up and the sound guy came backstage and said "If you'd only..." and then Bill let him have it, an eloquent tirade of about 30 minutes, poetic, Shakespearian even.  He disected everything and let the tech know about it.  As he was summing up the manager came, and said you can't talk to my sound guy that way...10 more minutes.

Every concert we did after that the theater always asked if the featured artist was a trombone player

I never saw that as a flaw, just a person who doesn't suffer fools.  Whatever his motivation, he is an obvious perfectionist and has a clear idea about what he wants and how to get it.

When I met Bill a few years ago, at The Lighthouse, after a couple minutes conversation, I thought, I knew this man was in the Navy, but now I'm SURE of it!

Quote from: Geezerhorn on Feb 22, 2017, 04:51AMMy honest take on the interview when I listened to it was that I wished he had kept his relationship with his father to himself.

There are plenty of times when I don't want to know the back-story and that was one of them.

We all wrestle with demons.

Neither personal tragedy nor great artistry is any excuse for bad behavior by anyone. 

...Geezer

Bill is a genius, and more than that a nice guy. Not sure where you are coming from in this post Geezer, but if you didn't want to hear you didn't have to watch. Bill was interviewed and asked an honest question about his life and he answered. Why are you holding it against him?  and Bad Behavior? What are you talking about? Bill never mentioned anything about his behavior in the video, he simply opened up to an interviewer and gave an recollection of his childhood.

IMHO (I never met Bill, and I am rather a novice on trombone) we don't get the whole story there about Bill, father and their relationship. Everybody seems to say that Bill is a rather a ordinary, kind guy who has his bad moods now and then. Seem to me like a normal person. But we don't know how charged with negative emotions this father-son relationship was.

Of course, saying that your father freed you when he died is probably an awful thing to say, but we don't really don't know the context. It still kind of brave to open up in front of the whole world and say something that may provoke some criticism.

IMHO (I never met Bill, and I am rather a novice on trombone) we don't get the whole story there about Bill, father and their relationship. Everybody seems to say that Bill is a rather a ordinary, kind guy who has his bad moods now and then. Seem to me like a normal person. But we don't know how charged with negative emotions this father-son relationship was.

Of course, saying that your father freed you when he died is probably an awful thing to say, but we don't really don't know the context. It still kind of brave to open up in front of the whole world and say something that may provoke some criticism.