John Handy
Saxophonist Former
Fillmore Resident

On the Music Played at Bop City

It was exciting to me because it was basically a new music in its developing stages. The music of Charlie Parker, Dizzie Gillespie, Miles, and drummers like Max Roach. Art Tatum came there and I even had the pleasure of having breakfast with him one morning. It was fantastic and challenging because I was a student as well as an admirer, a fan. I was playing many times with my heroes right away. That's what was blowing my mind. I never knew who I was going to play with, who was going to be at Bop City. And I got to know and play first hand with these folks. People like Paul Gonzalez, out of Duke's band, and I told him, he was the first person who played the saxophone so well I actually thought he swallowed it. I'd never heard anybody play on that level. That was when I was seventeen.

On Being Schooled at Bop City

Bop City because of its inclusion of all this new, different music became kind of like a school. It was a conservatory, a classroom, a performance room; it was all that in one. It was also a place where you learned the behavior, the modus operandi of just how to handle yourself in that kind of company. These were thrills that were unspeakable. If people love art and they love music, think of what it does to the artist. It's unutterable. Sometimes people would get up and the world would come to an end because of what they were doing; the music was that good. Sometimes a person would play an idea that you'd like to duplicate or build from. That's how I really learned to play, by watching other people play the saxophone. I was able to compare, in my mind, a creative art like jazz improvisation, especially in the heat of something like Bop City, to being in physical combat. To understand the preparation that you have to have, certain skills and certain knowledge and then what your body can do. We really wanted to prepare ourselves musically, artistically, so we could demand, command, and deserve the audience's attention.