Herbie's Man: The Pat Rebillot Story
Profile of a storied jazz pianist who happens to be my neighbor
A few years back, the novelist Josh Ferris texted me to ask if I wanted to attend a small living-room concert in a private home down by the river.
I live in a village of a few hundred in the Hudson Valley, and I had no idea a jazz pianist of any repute lived near me. My youngest sister was visiting and the three of us arranged ourselves on a couch to watch Pat Rebillot play. At 85, he was slightly stooped, twinkly-eyed, a knit cap propped on his head. His gleaming Steinway faced bay windows looking out on the Hudson River and Catskill Mountains, a veritable Thomas Cole painting. Rebillot was accompanied by bassist Ray Kilday, who played with Blossom Dearie during her latter years in New York clubs. The two moved through a handful of compositions from Rebillot’s 1974 solo album for Atlantic Records, plus a gorgeous, searching reading of the standard, “My Ideal.” Rebillot had not performed publicly in years but his improvisational skills remained vital, his playing both elegant and restless, melodic lines wandering away from what you expected and then returning. The experience was utterly magical. My sister would never forget his version of “Angel Eyes.”
Afterward, I asked if he would sit down and talk with me about his career in jazz.
From roughly 1968 to 1999, Rebillot (pronounced Reb-eh-low) had been among the most called-upon session pianists in New York, for Atlantic, for film scores, and for a procession of celebrated singers. He played on Barbra Streisand’s Songbird album and on Bette Midler’s “Hello in There,” and backed Flora Purim on her 1975 album, 500 Miles High, recorded live at Montreux. He also played Fender Rhodes on Steely Dan’s Gaucho (on “My Rival”). Before that, he was the house pianist at the old Half Note on Spring Street, and he spent most of the 1970s as Herbie Mann’s musical director while remaining, to the outside world, essentially unknown. One night at the Houston Astrodome, when Thelonious Monk failed to appear with the Giants of Jazz, the 1970s supergroup, Rebillot was pressed into service as his substitute, jamming with Dizzy Gillespie and Art Blakey.
Rebillot’s playing is unhurried, subtle, with lyrical touches and flashes of surprising verve. He came up listening to Bill Evans and Duke Ellington, Monk and Horace Silver, and something of each of them settled into him without displacing the others. The Evans voicings gave him a harmonic spaciousness; the Ellington gave him a sense of refined accompaniment; Monk taught him to leave things out. He doesn’t overplay and never has.
He grew up in Louisville, Ohio, a town of three thousand people, in a house his father built by hand. His father worked at Republic Steel in Canton and was, Rebillot says, an amazing craftsman. His mother was a teller at the local bank, and everybody lined up for her window.
“The music began in the church choir. It was a beautiful Gothic church. They’d anticipated a bigger congregation than ever showed up. My duty in the choir was double: sing, and when the organ ran out of air, run around to the back and pump it back up. Then when I was about twelve, I ended up with the church organ gig. They thought I might be the youngest organist in Ohio. I just took it for granted. Dumb and naive. My father was the one who really started me on the road. I was playing through a Scribner’s Miscellany book one day, and Fats Waller’s ‘Handful of Keys’ was in it. I finished it and he said, ‘I like that,’ and he put a fifty-cent piece on the piano. That was a lot of money to me at the time. I thought, ‘Oh my God, I can make money doing this.’
“I didn’t know what jazz was. At the conservatory in Cincinnati, after a year of studying harmony, some friends who I’d been accompanying on classical stuff said, we don’t have a piano player for our gig, we’re desperate, you can read chords, just come by. And I loved it right away. They were playing jazz. I said, ‘Oh, let me get into this.’
“But the army is really what got me into jazz. I was drafted—this was between wars, luckily—and I managed to get the one Military Occupational Specialty for piano at Fort Knox. Which caused problems, because the higher-ups kept pulling me out of my platoon to play dances at the officers’ club, and my platoon sergeant developed a very strong dislike for me. He tried to have me court-martialed. It didn’t work. But that’s how tense it got.
“Eventually I got into a show they called Rolling Along, an Ed Sullivan–type revue that toured the world. Tokyo, Munich, Paris. The core of the band used to play jazz together after hours. First night in Paris, we went to the Blue Note and Bud Powell was playing. I was seated right to Bud’s left, looking over his shoulder. It was great, except you had to feel for Bud. They had to point him to the piano and come take him off afterward. That was sad. But he could still play. After [club owner] Ben Benjamin heard we had a group, he hired us for the next night. So there we were, still in the Army, playing the Paris Blue Note. We hardly ever had to wear uniforms.”
Rebillot came to New York in 1960 and lived in a walk-up apartment on Broadway between 81st and 82nd Street. The building next door was full of musicians. Woody Shaw lived above him. He began playing the jazz clubs in the Village, working the Half Note and the Vanguard and Birdland, piecing together a living from any gig that offered itself.
“One of my fondest memories is being in the audience at the Half Note and hearing Coltrane and Elvin Jones do one of those duets that lasted half an hour. Other-worldly. It took you to places you didn’t know existed. And while I was on staff there, I got to work with Anita O’Day, Zoot Sims, Al Cohn, Roy Eldridge. They accepted me and took me under their wings. Roy Eldridge asked me to go to Chicago with him. I couldn’t make it, but that’s the kind of acceptance I mean.
“The best was Jimmy Rushing. The Half Note had the bar in the round and the stage at the top, so you’d climb up to play, and the bar was all around you. Jimmy, by the time he’d get to the shout chorus, you’d feel like the whole room was rising. Very few musicians gave me that feeling in all my years of playing. He used to tell his saxophone player, Rudy, ‘Listen to Pat.’ He was like my jazz goddaddy. And he was right out of the Basie world.
“I worked opposite Ornette Coleman at Slugs, with my trio and his group on the same bill. That was probably the first half of the Sixties. I became friendly with Charlie Haden, and we ended up working briefly with Benny Goodman. I remember once Charlie was playing in my apartment on Broadway, I forget what tune, and afterward he said, ‘I didn’t know you could play like that.’ He was excited because I’d taken it ‘outside,’ and that’s where he was interested in going. Benny, on the other hand, told a bass player friend of ours that he wished I didn’t play so modern. So there it was: Charlie wanting to go further out, Benny wanting to pull it back. The whole argument about jazz, right there in my apartment on Broadway.”
He paused and looked out at the river. Duke, his dog, trotted across the room.
“I saw Monk a lot in New York. When he’d finish a solo, he’d get up from the piano and do his drunken bear dance. Backwards and sideways, feeling the rhythm through his body. That was part of the experience. He was loose. Monk didn’t follow anybody except Monk. When I was traveling around the world with Herbie [Mann], I used to buy hats like his, big pork pie things, and they’d call me Monk.
“My influences were Monk, Ellington, Evans, Silver. Combining all of that let me go a lot of places. Monk came out of Duke, you know, the connection is right there. Duke was the blueprint for everything that followed. I wasn’t sophisticated enough in the army to fully appreciate him yet. It took years on the New York scene before I realized where Monk had come from, and all the things Duke had done. I have a Duke Ellington channel on Pandora. I have a Monk channel too.
“Bill Evans revolutionized the idea of what you could do. Sunday at the Village Vanguard is one of my favorite records. I talked with him once at the Vanguard when I was there with Chris Connor. He was very sweet. He said, ‘She’s very lucky to have you.’ So he appreciated what I was doing for her.
“I ended up being what I’d call a diva specialist. Not exactly by design. Joan Baez, Liza Minnelli, Barbra Streisand, Bette Midler, Gladys Knight, one after another. I finally joined Accompanists Anonymous.”
A lot of them were difficult, but not all.
“I caught Barbra on her good behavior. She’d just come back from California and seemed a little intimidated by New York. They laid a platinum record on me afterward. I’ve since found out that no eye contact is a rule. That’s why I never worked with Peggy Lee. Richard Davis told me they had to go kiss her hand before every show, paying homage to the Queen. They’d call me every year and I’d tell them no every year.
“Bette Midler, we were friendly for a while. She used to call from California just to chat. I made the ‘Hello in There’ record with her, which they put on a reissue, and it’s a nice record.”
The great exception to the divas, in Rebillot’s accounting, was Anita O’Day, whom he had been listening to back in Ohio before he knew what jazz was, and with whom he finally played for a week at the Half Note in the early sixties.
“She could play around with time like you wouldn’t believe. And she did something that even Sarah Vaughan couldn’t do: she could tell you the bridge changes if you didn’t know them, in between singing, throwing the chords to you mid-phrase and then catching back up with the time. That’s some intellectual work to do while you’re performing. I’ve worked with maybe a million singers. She’s the only one who could do that.
"Sarah Vaughan was a different case. Nobody sang like her. But she'd gotten locked in. She sang 'Get Happy' every night, her bebop showpiece, exactly the same way every time. They were calling me for weeks to go on the road with her. I didn't want to do it. In her early time, she was such an improviser, such a fighter against the expected. It was sad that it had become that."
He met Brazilian singer Flora Purim, along with the percussionist Airto, when they first arrived in New York in the 1960s. “Eye-ear-toe—that’s how Airto would explain how to pronounce his name. He used to lug his drums to this little club I worked in midtown Manhattan called La Intrigue and sit in with my duo. My bass players were either Teddy Kotick or Andy Muson. I went on an early gig with Flora and Airto to Ottawa for a week.”
His only memory of the Montreux gig in 1976 was riding through the Alps on a bus and Ron Carter reading the New York Post while the scenery went by.
He joined Herbie Mann’s band around 1972, at Herbie’s invitation. They had been working at Atlantic in overlapping sessions (Rebillot played on “Las Vegas Turnaround (The Stewardess Song)” from Abandoned Luncheonette by Daryl Hall and John Oates). Rebillot became Mann’s musical straw boss: built the band, brought in the players he liked, wrote the arrangements, and shaped a newly electrified sound. Herbie flew first class; the band was in coach. He stayed for six years.
“He was a kind of a diva in his own right. He liked being a star. He couldn’t write music, so he’d come up with these little ditties and I’d try to make them harmonically interesting underneath. He hopped on the Brazilian bandwagon big time, and then the tango, and he was good at hopping on bandwagons. He was ahead of his time with those minimal chord progressions, just one change [in] the whole tune, which would drive me crazy at the time. That’s practically all you hear now.
“He loved going to Japan. He’d be introduced over there as ‘America’s Number One Fruit, ‘ and he never tired of it. We went once or twice, and those trips were the high point for him.
“There’s a recent biography of Herbie in which the author calls that stretch the best and happiest time of Herbie’s career. Which was true, and would have been nicer to hear at the time, and nicer still if the royalties had reflected it. I had a B-side on the disco hit, and I never saw anything from it. When we made our records out west at the same time, he billed me an equal share of the costs, which wasn’t quite fair. He wasn’t good with money that belonged to other people.
“Cissy Houston sang with us for about a year. She could sing. I never heard Whitney sound all that different from her mother. She learned everything from Cissy. The last time Cissy sang with us was at the end of a long engagement in a big hall in Kansas City, and it was as if she’d been saving everything and let it all go at once. One of the best singing performances I’ve ever heard in my life. When she bore down a hundred percent, I don’t think anyone could touch her.”
“One night at the Houston Astrodome, we were playing opposite the Giants of Jazz. Dizzy, Sonny Stitt, Kai Winding, Al McKibbon, Art Blakey. Monk didn’t show. Herbie talked them into letting me sub. It went well. The next day I had a flight out, and they were all high-fiving me. I still have the pay stub. It says: “Substitute — T. Monk.”
“I figured it was Art Blakey who tilted the decision in my favor. He was always talking up the younger guys, a real mentor. You could tell they were testing me occasionally, but it all worked out.”
Rebillot made his own record while he was out west with Herbie, in 1974, in a studio that he remembers as a kind of cathedral of synthesizers built by the engineers Bob Margoloff and Malcolm Cecil. Herbie was the nominal executive producer, which meant he was in the building.
“The songs were a mixture of things I’d written in the sixties and seventies. I think of them as songs rather than anything else, because they have melodies. You could put words to them. My friend Pat Kirby, a singer, worked on some of them with me. I wrote them all down because some of the baselines were tricky. I wasn’t modeling the record on anything specific; I was just trying to find a good way to present what I’d written.
“We had three backup singers, which I really enjoyed. Did you ever see Twenty Feet from Stardom? That’s how I feel about backup singers. And the synthesizers gave it a treatment that was probably in vogue at the time. I wanted to take advantage of what Malcolm and Bob could do.” [Note: the late Malcolm Cecil, inventor of the T.O.N.T.O. synthesizer, lived directly across the river from Rebillot, near Saugerties. I was fortunate enough to befriend and interview him.]
“Herbie billed me an equal share of the costs, which wasn’t quite fair. And I never saw anything from the royalties.”
He left Herbie around 1978, after recording the Brazil: Once Again album. Ron Carter told him later he’d probably stayed too long, and he was right. Rebillot moved deeper into studio work, where he stayed until the end of the century. The work eventually thinned and changed. His future wife Kathy had been a booker at one of the biggest jingle houses in the city, and she had called him so often, and he had answered so briefly—yes or no, nothing more—that when she appeared in the studio one day and greeted him like an old friend, he says, it frightened him and he left the room. They were married in 1982.
One day, he was walking in Central Park with his dog Ragtime and realized he’d rather be walking through a park than making overdubs in a studio with a synthesizer. He and Kathy moved upstate for a quiet life on the Hudson River. He plays more intermittently now.
“Ray [Kilday] comes once a month or so. He gets a lot of last-minute Broadway calls, so the schedule is tentative. But I’m playing again.”
Rebillot turned to the piano, not as though he intended to play, but from a sense of habit. The light off the river caught the side of his face. Duke was asleep on the floor.
I’ll be spinning some choice Pat Rebillot tracks, including the entirety of Free Fall, on Sunday, March 8, from 9 to 11 AM, on radio station WXTI 97.3 FM, out of Tivoli, NY, which streams HERE (click the play button). Join me!
Who are those mofos with hair on the left????
Tangentially related… my dad and H. Mann: https://youtu.be/-s6BdLEBXBg?si=tDfz8xvQxIBAztVZ