The meeting with Paul Motian - in Dublin a few weeks ago to play in the final concert of The Improvised Music Company's OpenJazz 2000 day - came with a health warning. Blunt and direct, the great drummer didn't suffer fools gladly and, whether or not I fitted that particular bill, I was told, sometimes he hardly suffered anyone gladly. There were people who knew, they said. And stories.
This, I asked myself, is a guy who was born in Philadelphia, The City Of Brotherly Love? Could it be the culture shock of living in New York, home of "can you tell me the way to Carnegie Hall, or should I go f*** myself?", where irascibility has been raised to an art form?
Well, so much for the stories. We had a great time. At 69, he has the energy and enthusiasm of someone a third his age, waxing lyrical about the young musicians in his Electric Bebop Band, naming the influences on his own playing style, talking philosophically about the ups and downs of being on the road, where he spends as much as four months every year, and explaining what keeps him going at an age when most of his nine-to-five contemporaries walk the dog and keep the slippers by the armchair. I liked him. A lot.
His track record is awesome. He's probably best known for his work with the great Bill Evans Trio of the 1950s and early 1960s, where he helped re-write the language of drum use in trio performance. But there are other seminal figures on his CV - pianists Lennie Tristano and Thelonious Monk, saxophonists Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh, almost every great bass player of the past 50 years, including such departed giants as Paul Chambers, Oscar Pettiford and Scott LaFaro, and contemporary masters of the instrument in Charlie Haden, Steve Swallow and Marc Johnson.
He may be a milestone, but this is one that believes in moving along the road. And in the Electric Bebop Band he is surrounded by musicians who, being young, would have a low boredom threshold if the music were simply idiomatic retreads of past glories.
The band has been around, with some personnel changes, for nearly 10 years, but its genesis goes back even further. "I had the idea one day to play bebop," he said, "but to play it with electric guitars, somehow thinking maybe I could turn on some young kids to this great music. It started out at a rehearsal in my house, with Bill Frisell and Mike Stern on the two guitars. The bass player was Mark Egan. We didn't even play bebop. We were playing some of my songs."
Nothing came of it. Years later, he mentioned it to bassist Charlie Haden and Haden's son while they were on tour and the son liked the idea. "Charlie's son didn't work out," he added, "and I think I met Kurt Rosenwinkel then." Rosenwinkel, now one of the busiest and most acclaimed young guitarists around, has been with him longest, but had to bow out recently. He's just one of several notable players who have shared guitar duties together in the band; others include Wolfgang Muthspiel and Brad Shepik (now part of trumpeter Dave Douglas's Tiny Bell Trio).
The band is beginning to seem like a university for young talent, much as Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers used to be. "I kind of lost Chris Potter, because he now got really busy and he's with Dave Holland, with this one, with that one, he's got his own band and everything," he said ruefully. Potter, a remarkable saxophonist, will tour with him and bassist Marc Johnson later this year.
"So for the last tour I got Pietro Tonolo, who's from Venice. He was really helpful and turned me on to something. I don't usually want soprano saxophone but he started playing it on some of those Bud Powell songs and it sounded so good I said `great'. So now I got him and Chris Cheek" - yet another highly regarded young tenor player. The band is completed by Steve Cardenas and Rosenwinkel's replacement, Ben Monder, on guitars, and a Danish bass guitarist, Anders Christiansen. "He's about 25 years old and the sound of the electric bass is kind of like an acoustic bass. It's beautiful."
A good bass player is a core value for him. "I had Steve Swallow for quite a while. It was great. I mean Steve played some great solos and stuff. The range was so big. He could sound like a guitar on some things, bass on some things. Whereas what I have now is really more towards the actual bass sound than guitar. I played with a lot of bass players, man, and to me it's really important."
What made him go for the repertoire of Thelonious Monk and that era? "Well, I love Monk," he answered. "I played with Monk - not much; a little bit, and I just love that music. It's fun for drummers the way that music is structured, the rhythmic parts and everything. It just seems to fit. Now I'm starting to introduce my music into the Electric Bebop Band." It might be strange to do this, given the band's name, but his attitude is "I don't care. Music is music."
It's a philosophy which has made him a key figure in the evolution of jazz drumming, fit to rank with acknowledged historical greats as Kenny Clarke and Philly Joe Jones. The link was clearly a pleasure to him.
"Those are the people that influenced me, you know," he said quietly. "The thing is that people don't think about drums. They think about drums as drums. I don't. I think about drums as a melodic instrument. I think about music. I'm playing from what I'm hearing and the sound of the drums is really important to me. It's got to be musical. I don't want to just play like, for instance, rock 'n' roll drummers; they all sound the same. I'm not into that. I'm into music.
"And I'm not into big drum solos either. One time I was thinking `gee, maybe it's not good I'm not into drum solos. People aren't going to like me'. Then I read where Sid Catlett didn't like to play drum solos - and he was tops, man, he was one of my favourites. That's enough for me, man."
I asked him the origin of his name and unearthed a charming story. "My parents were Armenian," he said, "born and raised in Turkey, and the marriage was an arranged marriage. My father was already in the US. He came around the early 1900s - he was twice my mother's age. Then my mother came with her sister. They did some trip from Turkey to Syria to Lebanon to Egypt, Alexandria, from Egypt to France to the boat to Havana.
"Then my father was sent to Havana to marry my mother and get her to the States. It was just supposed to be that kind of thing, and then they were supposed to be divorced, right? But they stayed together. That's when I arrived. They were married in July 1929 in Havana and then I was born in Philadelphia!"
His own travels since then have made his mother's epic journey seem minor. One tour with his quintet which included Lee Konitz and Motian's longtime colleagues, tenor Joe Lovano and guitarist Bill Frisell, involved 35 flights in three weeks. "I had to go to hospital when I got back. My ears were so messed I could hardly hear. When I turned my head to the right all I heard was treble sounds. When I turned to the left all I heard was bass sounds. That was maddening.
"But back in the days with Bill Evans I never left New York. I remember playing nine weeks in the Village Vanguard with Bill and Gary Peacock, three months at the Half Note with Lennie Tristano, Lee Konitz and those guys. Then you were up to Birdland for two weeks. And there was a place called the Showplace; we played there for one month. Now we hardly play in New York."
The mention of Bill Evans, who died, much too early, 20 years ago, caused a moment of reflection. "We were buddies," he said quietly. "We hung out."
But he doesn't dwell on the past. "The other day I was thinking `if and when I lose my imagination, I'll quit'. And I haven't lost it yet. Man, I'm still learning stuff. The music - that's the saving grace, that's the saviour. I mean, you do all this travel, then you get on the stage and for an hour you play some music and if it's happening - I mean, maybe it's not happening all the time, but when it is, that's what makes it all worthwhile."
Paul Motian and the Electric Bebop Band play at Vicar Street next Friday.