mg Why did you go there?
jz   Music, food, film, friends. I was invited to play for three months. I really loved it, and stayed on. And I still go back every year.

mg And you got to speak the language.
jz   I learned to speak the language and to read it. I became well versed in a lot of the underbelly of Japanese culture. And that was a real learning experience. It helped me figure out who I was. Learning another language helps you, really, with English. It helps you focus your communication in a very real way, and that was great. And being hit front on with a completely different culture helped me appreciate my own culture. I wouldn't have gotten into Jewishness as much as I did if I hadn't been in Japan.

mg Did it have something to do with the death of your parents, too?
jz   The death of my father, going to Germany a lot and experiencing that whole thing, and then, thinking how many close friends and colleagues were Jews. It began to be kind of remarkable. Eventually, it came out in my life, like anything else that we think about that's real.

mg See, I don't feel myself very Jewish, unfortunately. I wasn't raised that way.
jz   But it's part of who you are.

mg I'm aware that I'm a Jew. I have no problem with that.
jz   Did you ever talk about it, like with Rothko? Or Feldman?

mg Not really. I've been talking about it with my dentist recently. My dentist, who I'm quite friendly with, is a French Jew. A very elegant man who has become more aware of his Jewishness and has been receiving instruction a couple of days a week.
jz   He's been going to a rabbi.

mg Exactly. So he and I have been talking about that. He had been the dentist for the king of Morocco, and the harem. They used to send the jet over for him, he had a clinic there. He's got a lot of funny stories. So I guess I'm becoming a little more aware of what it means to be a Jew.
jz   You must be incredibly aware, growing up through the forties.

mg But you see, my experiences with anti-Semitism–
jz   With the name Goldberg?

mg I was 17 when I went into the service, I needed my parents' permission. And I went into paratrooper training after basic training, down in Fort Benning. One night this guy from Oklahoma, a big guy who had "King of the Ozarks" shaved into his hair, says to me–this from behind–"Here's our New York Jew!" and lifted me into the air by the elbows as I came out of the shower, with a towel around my waist–wearing clogs. So that night, we slept in double-decker bunks; he was in the upper bunk, and I took a brick and broke both his kneecaps.
jz   (laughter)

mg Then they put him in the hospital. I went into the hospital and gave him a concussion with another brick. So that was my reaction to anti-Semitism.
jz   That's a good, honest reaction.

mg Precise, it was precise. When you started playing the saxophone, you probably started playing bebop right away?
jz   Within a year, I started to play bebop. It was the literature of that instrument at that time. You have to come to grips with that music.

mg Do you still practice?
jz   No, I haven't practiced in over 20 years. Since 1981, that was it. I think of myself as a composer who happens to play–it was a way of communicating with musicians, a functional way of interacting, but I'm not a player.

mg You play other instruments beside piano and sax?
jz   Not really. I mean, when I was younger, I studied all the different things, guitar, played bass in a surf band, trombone, flute, clarinet. Learned everything for compositional purposes.

mg You ever play with that trombonist Ray Anderson?
jz   Yeah, I know Ray! But I never played with him. He's, I think, firmly in the jazz world, and I'm not the kind of guy who can call someone up out of the union book, put my music in front of them and say, "Hey, check this out."

mg I used to be close with Morty Feldman.
jz   That must have been amazing.

mg He had these eyes, he looked like Dr. Cyclops.
jz   He had those thick glasses.

mg And he was a big fatty. I was going around with a painter named Joan Mitchell, and we had a date to meet our friend Barbara–an absolutely gorgeous woman, with blond-red hair–out at Coney Island. So we asked Morty to come along with us. Seeing Morty in swimming trunks was like a horror movie.
jz   Oh my God. (laughter)

back continued