A Little Deeper: Bob Rockwell, Natural Life, and Androids (2024)

A few months ago, I arranged a family reunion in my dad’s hometown of Minneapolis. Prepping for the trip also meant mapping out the local record shops and reinvesting in some of my fav Minnesota recordings. You may have come across some of my musings on Instagram or Facebook. If not: What is wrong with you?

One record that I keep coming back to is saxophonist Bob Rockwell’s fusion masterpiece, Androids, from 1974. While I was living in Amsterdam, I arranged an interview with Rockwell to talk about the album for a potential edition in Wax Poetic’s Re:Discovery series.

Well…. The interview has sat for a few years and the album had a brief resurgence after it was reissued in 2022. So, I thought I’d finally get a piece together with Bob’s interview about his early career and how Androids came about.

Robert Rockwell III was born on May 2, 1945, in Miami, Oklahoma, though his folks lived in Nowata, a small town with no hospital. His father was originally from Detroit and was a training pilot for the Army Air Force in Oklahoma, where he met Jo, Bob’s mother.

It wasn’t long before the young family moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota, where Robert, Sr. got a job as a commercial pilot for Northwest Airlines. While he was introducing the world to intercontinental travel, Jo raised Bob and his two younger siblings. It was through his mother that Bob got his first thrills with music.

BR: “In those days, the radio was a huge source because they played everything. Also, there was jazz on television. On the variety shows and stuff. They had things all the time.

“There would be big bands with singers, yeah…. That was part of it. But, also, Elvis Presley. All of that. It was amazing. I liked every kind of music and jazz was just part of it. My mom dug music and had the radio on all the time. I got into just everything.”

Rockwell’s firsthand experience with music began at the Kenny Elementary School in their South Minneapolis neighborhood.

“I was singing in choir in school when I was eight years old. I was playing what they called a Flutophone. It was like a plastic recorder. I got a clarinet when I was ten. Then I was in the elementary school band program. I took private lessons. I was lucky, you know, to get private lessons on clarinet. I just got into it.”

With the support of his mother, Rockwell dove headfirst into music and jazz.

“She encouraged me. She could see that I was going to be a musician. From the time I was 12, I was pretty well hooked and by 13, 14, I was definitely hanging. I had a couple friends in school whose father was a professional jazz musician in a Dixieland band.

“I couldn’t go into a bar, but they were over at my friend’s house all of the time. My friend’s father sold pianos out of his house and the guys hung out over there in the daytime and played piano duets and had battles on piano, man. They could play things in every key. They were incredible players, man. They were real cats.

“The band leader, who I didn’t know, but got to meet at their concerts was a guy named Doc Evans, who played cornet. He also played cello in a chamber music ensemble. These were real cats.”

These musicians were the first to introduce Rockwell to the principles of jazz music, showing him the basics of structuring chords and managing harmonic progressions. But they weren’t for contemporary jazz in the least.

“They had no interest in that. That I got into with another school friend, whose sister was an airline stewardess and flew with all the cats, like Miles Davis. She had their records and stuff. That was going on simultaneously. I was hanging with him.

“I started with the Dixieland thing first. It was probably not until I was like 15 when I started hanging with him and listening to the stuff that was modern then, like the Miles Davis Quintet and (Thelonious) Monk. I was a big fan of Gerry Mulligan.

“I was a big Gerry Mulligan fan, so I worked for my friend’s father, the musician. I worked for him re-finishing pianos one summer. Then he gave me a baritone saxophone. That was my first saxophone. Later, I started playing tenor when I was 16. They had instruments at the school, so…. You could just borrow one, you know? Those were the days.”

While attending Washburn High School, Rockwell performed in the school orchestra, playing his bari over the bassoon parts. During the summer, he would play in a concert band at the University of Minnesota.

“By the time I was 16, there was a guy, a professional saxophone player named Don George, that had a big band that met every Sunday in his garage out in Bloomington. Those were all the top kids from all the white schools. The first Black kids came to our school when I was about 16.

“I was lucky that my parents weren’t bigots. Coming from Oklahoma, man…. One half of my mother’s family down there hated everybody. I was really lucky that I could make contact. The Black school in south Minneapolis was Central High School and it wasn’t very far from Washburn.

“I started going over to their afterschool concerts that their students put on. That was a huge difference from Washburn, man!”

It was at Central that Rockwell met the talented pianist Bobby Lyle, a player who would go on to make a name for himself in fusion jazz and contemporary R&B in the late 1970s.

“I went over there and Bobby Lyle, the piano player on Androids, that is where I first met him. I think he is a year older than me. They were playing at this afterschool concert and they were playing like Art Blakey and the Messengers. They were burning, man. They were smoking. I remember the first tune that I recall right away was ‘It’s Only a Paper Moon.’ They were playing the Blakey arrangement of that.”

Shortly thereafter, Rockwell was attending jam sessions in the Black clubs of South Minneapolis.

“They were really nice to me, man. They were really great. They could see that I was very interested in learning and that I was serious. I was quiet and I didn’t play on shit that I didn’t know. And they would tell me, too. They kinda kept an eye on me.

“They’d say, ‘Bob, do you know this tune?’

“And I’d say, ‘No. I don’t know.’

“They’d say, ‘Go home and learn this. Don’t play now.’

“I was accepted. Later, I met guys who didn’t dig white cats playing their stuff and I could understand that. I had no problem with that. It was very fucking rare, man. I’ve run into that in the United States.”

During high school, Rockwell had played in a handful of bands, mostly performing rock & roll and Dixieland at pizza parlors. His garage rock & roll band performed behind caravan artists, like Bobby Vee, Paul and Paula, Ray Stevens, and Chubby Checker.

“I was underaged, but I walked the bar. I did all the stuff, man.”

After graduating, he moved out of his parents’ house and started working the club scene of Minneapolis.

“Then when I was 18, I got to audition for a famous midwestern rock band, kinda shuffle beat thing, with a guy named Augie Garcia at a place called the Key Club, which was a real night club. I wore a tuxedo. It was over on Washington Avenue. It was a real club, a night club. That was my first gig. That was with Augie. He was Mexican and the drummer was Jessie Lopez. He was Mexican. There was a Hammond organ player, who also played great piano, who was named Tommy Mustachio. They called me ‘The Kid.’

“Everything was shuffle beats, man. Almost everything. There was a Black singer, a chick who sang. She came up a did like ‘Time After Time,’ that would be straight ahead. That wouldn’t be shuffle. She had her things and Augie had his big hit, a blues called ‘Hi Yo Silver.’ He wore a red tuxedo with Bermuda shorts.

“So, that was my first gig and that folded. The club didn’t make money. Soon after that folded, I got a call from a band from New York that was playing rock& roll covers, Joey Strobel and the Runaways. They were in town at a club right on Hennepin.

“They had an agent in New York. A company called Jolly Joyce that booked bands. So, they were traveling.

“In those days, the gigs were at least two weeks long in the same club. If business went well, they’d through you an extra week. At the end of the first week, they’d let you know if you could be there three weeks.

“That lasted quite a while and then they went on the road. I went with them. They were really good musicians. The leader was a great doo wop singer. He had a great falsetto. The lead singer from Brooklyn. Later, his brothers joined the band at different times, too. They could all sing. They could sing in harmony. This cat had a voice, man.

“There were two drummers from that era named Willie Shuffle. This was one of them, Billy Fernandez. The original Willie Shuffle was a cat in New York who worked with Joey Dee and the Starlighters.”

When the Runaways returned to Minneapolis, Rockwell was able to secure his first real jazz gig: Playing in a strip club. The gig was a good one, as it allowed the trio of sax, piano, and drums lay whatever they wanted. They decided to explore the sounds of Herbie Hancock’s Empyrean Isles.

“We worked at this place called Augie’s. Augie was a former lightweight or bantamweight boxing champion. We needed a piano player and we wanted to hire this cat, Hubert Eaves. We had to convince Augie. Augie was like, ‘Ah, man. A Black dude? I don’t know.’

“I said, ‘It will be okay. Don’t worry.’

“So, Hubert was the first Black dude to work in that club. The other clubs already had Black guys working. There was always a color thing. You know how well Minneapolis is doing now!”

It was while playing with the group at Augie’s that Rockwell came up with his plan: To move up the jazz echelons and, eventually, get to Europe.

“I had this whole plan, man. When I was working at Augie’s, it was like 1968. It was when they killed Martin Luther King. Back then, there were race riots all over the country because all the racial shit was really fucking exploding, man. The Freedom Marchers…. Everything in the United States was a fucking nightmare. I was really tired of that shit.

“I made a plan. I wanted to play jazz, right? But I knew that I had to do something like go to Vegas or L.A. and become a really good fucking player and make a lot of money. Then I would eventually get to New York, where then I would get on a famous fucking band and go to Europe. And move to Europe.”

Though he didn’t attend college, Rockwell got an education from all the musicians that he hung with. The easiest way for the skills to develop was to have recordings recommended to him with hip songs or technical things that he would practice until he had them. But his most important mentor came while he was in Bobby Lyle’s group.

“Later when I got to playing with Bobby Lyle, he got a trumpet player named Sam Bivins who had a music degree from Memphis. This cat was a real dude, man. He played with Sonny Stitt and everybody. He was bad, man.

“He taught me everything about harmony and chord substitutions and to play piano well enough. At that time, I was playing. I didn’t have any technique, but I could play piano a little bit. I could play through a tune, kind of. I understood what was going on.

“He came out to my house, man. We were working together every night and he was telling me stuff all the time. He’d just come to my house and he sat down at the piano and started one tune. It might be ‘I Close My Eyes.’ Anyway, he sat down and said, ‘Watch this.’ And he played for a half hour, man. He never repeated the harmonies. Then he said, Now, I’ll show you what I’m doing.’”

Though he was making a ton of money working the gigs that he had, enough to rent a house in Bloomington, Rockwell decided that he really wanted to get his sight reading together to expand his opportunities and make more money.

“I end up leaving Augie’s and I got a gig with a big band that worked at the Prom Ballroom in St. Paul about five nights a week with cat named Jules Herman, who had been a trumpet player with Lawrence Welk’s band.

“They played corny shit, you know. What we call stock charts. They played waltzes, mazurkas, and polkas. I got on that. I couldn’t fucking read really well. I couldn’t sight read, man. It was really not good. So, the lead alto player after I was there on the third night, he turned around to me and he said, ‘Well… I guess if you are going to sit next to me every night, I’ll teach you how to read music.’

“He was a beautiful cat, man. Roy Johnson. I started going over to his house two or three times a week. He taught me everything, man. How to do shows…. Everything. And he taught me how to sight read.”

Work followed in a deluge. Rockwell picked up gigs with a number of big bands, including ghost bands playing the music of Tommy Dorsey and Bob Crosby. He even began to delve into the world of jingles, where he met composer/arranger Herb Pilhofer, a German musician who set up shop in Minneapolis, eventually starting the Sound 80 Studio with engineer Tom Jung.

In the summer of 1969, Rockwell went to the East Coast to play in Chris Fiorito’s Louis Prima cover group, saving up enough money to make a move to Las Vegas. The jazz scene in Vegas at the time was expansive, with show bands and rehearsal groups plentiful enough to keep a musician busy 24 hours a day.

“I was in big bands all the time. My first gig was at the Sahara Hotel. I bought a baritone saxophone when I got out there, so sometimes I worked on the baritone. Plus, I would do after hours gigs at the Black clubs or other clubs. I was in a real hip band that covered Chicago and did out shit, like when Miles did Jack Johnson. Stuff like that, too.

“I could have a day, like, for example, at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, I would go play with some rehearsal big band. There were so many arrangers and composers out there in Vegas who wrote for these acts. I’d go do that and then I’d go home and maybe sleep for a minute and eat. Then, I would go to my hotel gig. The first show would be at 8 o’clock. I’d do that. Then I would have two hours free where I could either go home and practice some more, which I did a lot, or we’d go hang out with some cats at somebody’s house to wait and go back to our gigs. Or you could pick up a lounge gig. The lounge gigs ran in between the show times in the main rooms.

“Then, I would go back and do the midnight show. After that, I would go to the after-hours gig. The midnight show, you’d be done at 2 o’clock and just make it over to the after-hours gig. I would play until at least 5 o’clock in the morning.”

His stay in Vegas proved to be a fruitful gamble. After five years, Rockwell had saved some money and decided to move back to Minneapolis to a healthy jazz scene.

“I was in Vegas for almost five years, so it was probably ’73 that I went back to Minneapolis. 73, 74.

“I went back and would start playing. I was writing a lot of music. From the late 60s, the music had changed so much. There was electronic shit, like Miles and Weather Report came along. Everything was changing. I was influenced with what was going on at the time. I wasn’t influenced to be a bebop player. I was influenced in being a creative musician and doing my own music and playing my own style. So, that’s what I developed.”

Upon his return, Rockwell hooked up with his friend, drummer Kenny Horst.

“He was really good at booking rooms. He had a steady gig at a place called the Downtowner Hotel. A jazz gig. That was like four nights a week. Then there were all these other gigs that you could do on other nights. By that time, I had quite a bit of money, so I didn’t have to do anything anymore except play when I wanted to play.

“One of the gigs I started going with, besides the Downtowner with Kenny Horst…. There was a band called Natural Life that was working a jam gig. It was a jam band with Billy Peterson on bass, pianist Bobby Peterson, guitarist Mike Elliott, a drummer named Bill Berg, and a percussion player, Steve Kimmel. I hooked up and started doing that with them.

“We were all writing music. I was composing…”

The Peterson family were the “it” family in the Minneapolis jazz scene. Rockwell had known brothers Billy and Bobby since they were teenagers. He had also played with their other brothers: Saxophonist Tommy and saxophonist/trumpeter Russ Peterson.

Natural Life and gigs with Bobby Lyle became Rockwell’s outlet for his more progressive music. Ultimately, he decided to get his music recorded. The collection would eventually be released as his debut album, Androids.

“They were things I wrote for the date. I didn’t even have the date, but I decided I would just…. I wrote all the time. I had just been composing off and on. I got really into composing in Vegas, I think. I was around guys who were good composers. I was so influenced by what was going on in music at that time. It was such a big change, man. It was socially based for me. It was going on out there was a mirror of society, of that time.”

For the recording, Rockwell enlisted Natural Life as the core ensemble, minus Bobby Peterson and Mike Elliott, though the guitarist does appear on two tracks. Old friend Bobby Lyle was enlisted to man the piano and Fender Rhodes. In the cold of the winter of early 1974, the group began recording Androids with Tom Jung at his Sound 80 Studio.

Sound 80 came together in the late 1960s as a joint project for Jung and Herb Pilhofer. The studio and the label it birthed would go on to become kind of a mythic status in Minneapolis, as it hosted many important sessions, including those of Bob Dylan and Prince. It has long since closed as a recording studio but still houses the world’s quietest room, that you can experience for a solid fee.

The first tune on the record is “All of Us (Todos Nosotros),” which features an assortment of added percussionists, including Steve Kimmel, Bill Buchen, and Victor Lewis, along with Bruce Wintervold and George Avaloz on congas. Kimmel, Wintervold, and Buchen were avant-gardists. Kimmel led the wildly experimental The Whole Earth Rainbow Band, in which Wintervold was also a member. Buchen soon left Minneapolis for New York City, where he’d play with avant-pop legends Laurie Anderson, David Van Tieghem, and Bill Laswell.

Soon to find his place at the top of the jazz drumming world, Victor Lewis was living in Minneapolis at the time and was a regular at the Natural Life jams. George Avaloz had already had a career in jazz, playing with Billy Eckstine. He also moved to New York where he played with Ronnie Boykins, Joe Lee Wilson, and Monty Waters.

“The drummers were good. It wasn’t a problem for them to do that. Each drummer had a certain thing they were supposed to play. I pretty much assigned everyone a certain rhythm.

“It was just a ‘make believe’ Latin feel. Just a straight 8^th thing. I don’t know, man. I just wrote the stuff, man. I had a piano at my house. All I did was practice and compose.”

It is hard not to love the buoyancy of the rhythms the band creates as Rockwell’s tenor soars over them in an Azar Lawrence or Gato Barbieri vein. Making “Todos Nostoros” a killer track.

“On The Edge” follows with an urgency that is reminiscent of a Joe Henderson record of that time. It also has a modal feel a la McCoy Tyner perfect for the quartet of Rockwell, Lyle, Peterson, and Berg.

“McCoy, man, was a big influence on me. It came from when I was in Vegas and listened to McCoy’s record with Sonny Fortune, Sahara. That one really moved me. That put me in a place, man. Sonny Fortune made me say, ‘Okay, man….’

The b-side begins with the title track, “Androids.” The tune begins atmospherically with a waterphone, chirps, whistles, and a mysterious piano. Rockwell’s soprano blasts in with Berg’s drums, bringing in a cacophonous free section before Rockwell reigns in the expanded ensemble (Buchen, Kimmel, and Elliott are added here) in on a descending melodic pattern. Then comes the extraterrestrial funk….

“I wrote that funky bassline. I think it is some weird thing. It is like 15/16 or something. It drops a 16^th note.”

The effect of the dropped note is jarring once heard but the tune doesn’t lose on ounce of its momentum on head-bobbing ostinato. Writing in odd time signatures had become stock and trade for Rockwell since his time in Vegas.

“Here is the deal, man. When I was in Vegas…. Do you remember a big band led by a trumpet player in LA called Don Ellis?

“Don Ellis had a trombone player named Ron Myers. Ron lived in Vegas and had a 10-piece band. Everything was in odd meters. Everything. I became very adept at playing in strange times and began composing in strange times. When I got to Minneapolis, I was the only dude doing stuff like that.

“I think that is what got me into…. I just wanted to do my own thing and that was where I was at. I could do that. I was part of my background.”

The quartet returns for “Elvin’s Waltz,” a modal piece dedicated to the great drummer and former Coltrane bandmate, Elvin Jones. The drummer came to Minneapolis a number of times.

“I had heard Elvin a lot. I also heard McCoy and Elvin a lot. Elvin came a couple times to a Black owned coffee shop in Minneapolis called Café Extra-Ordinaire. There was no alcohol. It was on like Nicollet and Lake.

“They would come and would stay for a week at least. I saw Elvin a couple times with Joe Farrell and Wilbur Little on bass. One time he came with a band with Frank Foster and George Coleman together. I’m telling you, man.”

Rockwell’s soaring soprano is laser sharp and the rhythm section plays with an easy forcefulness. The tune also puts Lyle’s tremendous piano playing on display.

The concluding piece is “Pentandria,” a dancing piece with a winding bass clarinet melody over an active rhythm section. The piece shows the group’s ability to switch between structure, free playing, and straight up, finger snapping swing.

Rockwell produced and paid for the date himself. The members of Natural Life came together to start a label to release Androids and Natural Life’s self-titled debut album. Celebration Records came to life with wild jazz fusion on the wax and beautiful, abstract drawing by Billy Berg on their sleeves. Berg would soon move to California, where he would begin his career as a Disney illustrator.

Androids provided some good professional returns for Rockwell.

“I was really lucky with that because I got a five-star review in Downbeat. Plus, Downbeat was based in Chicago at that time. The gig that I did at the Downtowner Hotel was with Elliott on guitar…. Elliott wasn’t there at first. We had a Brazilian piano player from Sao Paulo, Manfredo Fest. He was blind and he was a mother fucker, man.

“‘Androids’ we played on gigs with Natural Life. We played a lot of other stuff that I wrote that was weird. I performed ‘Todos Nosotros’ down in Chicago and recorded it. But I don’t know where that ever went. It was for a Japanese American girl singer. She had a band with percussionists that Manfredo used, the drummer Alejo Poveda. I think the bass player was from New Zealand, Thomas Kini. That was Manfredo’s band. There were all these offshoot things happening all the time.

“He wrote stuff, but we mostly covered all of Chick Corea’s stuff. He moved down to Chicago and I started to go down and work Chicago with him. Plus, I had gotten that review in Downbeat. Downbeat then interviewed me and then got voted into the Critics Poll on soprano saxophone in Talent Deserving Wider Recognition.”

Natural Life became Rockwell’s regular gig in Minneapolis. The band found a regular home in Jay’s Longhorn Bar, where they played weekly and booked the gigs. Celebration proved to be too much work for the group as they struggled to find distribution and promotion. This led Mike Elliott to approach Audiotek Systems, Inc. to take over.

“We got tired of running the label. We were doing everything. Promotion and getting distribution. It was too much. So, we got an offer from ASI. I don’t know how that happened. Elliott hooked that up.

“ASI leased our existing stuff. They didn’t take Androids, which I’m really glad for. That turned out to be a really good thing for me. ASI took over and they don’t exist anymore. The owner died a long time ago.

“The things were just smoking, man. The band got an agent. We were doing the right thing at the right time. That music was really original. We were getting booked as an opening act for things like Charles Mingus. All over the country. College concerts were big.”

When Berg picked up and headed West to work for Mickey Mouse, the group tried a few drummers.

“Berg split, man. He got a job with Disney Studios, man. When he left, we didn’t have a drummer.

“This is far out. Before Bobby Lyle went to L.A., we put together a concert at the Tyrone Guthrie Theater. He put together a band with me and Billy and he hired…. I don’t know how he got it together…. But he got Eric (Gravatt) in because Eric had just left Weather Report and was out in San Francisco. So, Bobby brought in Eric Gravatt. That’s when I met Eric, when we did this concert together.

“So, we knew Eric Gravatt. I just called Eric and said, ‘Listen, man. Do you want to come back to Minneapolis? You can stay at my house until you find something. We have steady work and the money is okay.’

“He wasn’t doing anything and said, ‘Okay, man.’

“So, he came and he lived with me for a year and a half or something. He joined Natural Life. The music completely changed, too. His drumming is more African based. Berg was a real fusion drummer. A really outstanding, original thing.

“We had these great drummers. Then, Gravatt left and then we got a drummer out of LA, a guy named Paul Lagos, who was a completely different drummer. Lagos came in through Art Resnick. Paul wasn’t really a fusion drummer. Those guys didn’t really exist then. Berg was a forerunner. He was like a creator of a certain kind of drumming, man. Paul didn’t have that. Paul was a funk player and a bebopper. He had been a protégé of Philly Joe (Jones). I think Paul was from Philadelphia.”

WATCH A SHORT 1977 DOC ABOUT NATURAL LIFE FT. PAUL LAGOS HERE

Originally from Minneapolis, keyboard player Art Resnick began his recording career in the psychedelic rock band, Salvation. Resnick returned to Minneapolis in the early 1970s and ended recording a quartet record, Jungleopolis, with Rockwell, Billy Peterson, and Lagos.

By the time he got to Minneapolis, Lagos was already an industry veteran. In Los Angeles, he had been a member of psych bands Pure Food and Drug Act and Kaleidoscope and had recorded on tons of blues and blues rock albums, including seminal albums by Johnny and Shuggie Otis, John Mayall, and Sugar Cane Harris.

But the good times didn’t last for long.

“All this was going on. Then it all fucking stopped. When Reagan came in and the economy changed. Oil prices went way up. The funding for the college gigs went away. Natural Life had our own club in Minneapolis (Jay’s Longhorn Bar). We didn’t own it, but it was our place. We booked it and worked there. But we started working there all the time and people got tired of us.

“The whole scene fell apart, man. I was confronted by going back to playing shows or whatever. Weddings and shit in Minneapolis. I wasn’t going to do that. I was going to continue being a jazz guy. That’s when I moved to New York.

“I just left. I sold my car during the last winter in Minneapolis. I just couldn’t take that anymore. I told Resnick that I was going to split and he said, ‘Well…. Can I go with you? We can go out in my car.’

“I was just going to fly out and look for a place. I knew a few guys had heard me in Minneapolis with Natural Life. Bob Mintzer knew me. We had hung out and jammed at my house in Minneapolis. Rufus Reid knew me. He had heard Natural Life. Victor Lewis knew me. Dick Oatts knew me.

“I first became aware of Rufus Reid listening to an Eddie Harris super slow blues on a record when I lived in Vegas. And it was sloooow…. And said to myself, “I have to play with this guy!’

“So, later in Minneapolis at the Longhorn, he came in and heard Natural Life. And we talked and I told him about the Eddie Harris slow blues.”

“When Resniick and I got to New York, Rufus was the bass player on Thad Jones and Mel Lewis Band. Resnick´s agent had Hooked up a five-week tour of Alaska for the Alaska State Arts Council. So, I got Rufus and Victor Lewis to do the tour with me and Art. Rufus came up with the name for the band: Expedition. We stayed together and because Rufus and Victor were established guys in New York. We started gigging in New York and touring clubs on the East Coast, Chicago, and the Midwest. Colleges and clinics.

“It was great. Great guys!

“Mintzer and Oatts were on the Thad Jones and Mel Lewis Band. Mintzer was hooked up with a lot of stuff. He turned me on to a lot of things. When I got out there, there were gigs that Mintzer didn’t want to do and he turned me on to instead. One of them was the Thad and Mel thing when they were looking for a saxophone player to go to Europe and Mintzer didn’t want to do it. So, he sent me down to a saxophone section rehearsal for Thad and Mel. Just the sax group. I went down there in the Vanguard. So, I did that. I could still read better than anybody else in that sax section. I hadn’t been reading in almost five years, man. But I could still handle it.

“I wasn’t really thrilled. I wasn’t interested in being in a big band, but I was interested in getting to Europe. That was the big thing.”

It was through the Thad Jones & Mel Lewis Band that Rockwell finally got to Europe. On tour, the group enlisted a Danish bassist, Jesper Lundgaard. Lundgaard wasn’t prepared for the leaders’ demands, so Rockwell took him under his wing. They became tight and, after the tour, Lundgaard invited Rockwell to Denmark to teach at Brandbejerg Højskole, a summer music school that covered all kinds of styles. This is where Rockwell began to meet the entire music world of Denmark.

For a few years, Rockwell flew between New York and Denmark. But in 1983, he decided to make Copenhagen his home, where lucky listeners can still hear him perform regularly.

“It is like perfect for me, man, because it is not too big. New York. I was so glad to get out of there. It was too much.”