The Michael Carvin Interview

Houston is the city where the shuffle beat came from. When you play the shuffle with a back beat or a double back beat, that’s what I grew up playing.

​Houston also created a great tenor-sax sound. We came out of marching bands and we had to learn how to project our sound. We’re not talking sound, we’re talking projection, which is a difference. In Texas everybody had a strong sound, so they could play slower notes. Horn players today don’t work with those long tones. If you don’t have long tones, then you have to play a lot of notes. That’s why The Crusaders had that open sound. They were spreading sound over the rhythm.

​What I loved about growing up in Texas in the late 1940s and early 50s was the love. There was so much love, so there was so much music. I would lie in my yard at night and stare up at the big sky. I would dream about what was around the world and I would tell my parents, “One day I’m going to go around the world.”

​My uncle was Don Robey, who managed Jesse Belvin and Bobby “Blue” Bland. He had Sam Cooke when he was singing gospel with Lou Rawls and Isaac Hayes singing background. My father was the studio drummer.

​When I heard Bobby’s “In the Ghetto,” that to me was bebop. It was the sound of his voice and how his voice would ride the rhythm like a wind blowing across the Texas plain.

​Music is understanding the space of the beats, letting it breathe. Bird didn’t let the music breathe, so if I’d listened to him, I would have killed myself, because I couldn’t take a breath. It was moving too fast and it didn’t touch me, because it didn’t have earth connected to it.

​I hadn’t seen New York then and I didn’t realize that New York was cement and steel and little vegetation, so there was no oxygen. You had to move fast or you’d suffocate.