Photo courtesy of dharmabox on Flickr.
I got a reputation for my trenchermanship early in life, and when I was going to school down in Tallahassee one of the guys in our group wanted to call me a cannibal; but he mispronounced it as “can-i-bol.” So the other guys’ in the band would call me Canibol more to tease him than to tease me. But of course other folks, not being in on the joke, distorted it and it became “Cannonball.”
I got into jazz when I was a high school teacher in Fort Lauderdale. I had matriculated to New York University. I was in graduate school there in 1955 but I never did go to class. It happened through Oscar Pettiford: he’s been gone for some time and a lot of people don’t know anything about him,don’t know what his contribution has been, but Oscar had a group playing in the Cafe Bohemia in the Village, not far from New York University. I went there to hear the group, because he had a classic group: Kenny Clarke playing drums, Horace Silver playing piano, and he was playing bass, that was enough. Plus Jerome Richardson and Jimmy Cleveland were in his band, but Jerome was on a record date. There’s this courtesy factor among professional musicians, if a guy’s got a record date or a studio date or a pit gig, he’s permitted to do that gig and somebody else can sub for him. But Jerome’s sub hadn’t come in. My brother Nat, and the Cooper brothers: Buster Cooper who formerly worked with Duke Ellington, and Steve Cooper, were there; we’d had a rehearsal and we were there to see Cleve and hear the band. Charlie Rouse walked in and the band hadn’t started playing, because Pettiford was one of those guys who was a stickler at getting the sound he wrote for, and he asked Rouse to sit in. Rouse said, “Man I don’t have a horn” and Pettiford said, “Man, there’s some guy in the back with an alto, you can transpose these tenor parts.” All of us had our instruments with us, because you don’t leave your instruments in cars in New York City. So instead of Rouse asking me if he could borrow my horn, he asked me if I wanted to play. I immediately was scared to death: to be able to play with those cats, heroes of mine. I’m a Floridian, a schoolteacher, a player of rock music, lounge music and that kind of stuff. I said, “Certainly,”
So I went up to the stand, and I guess O.P. wanted me to prove myself, because we kicked off with I Remember April at what I thought was a fast tempo, because I’d never played it that fast, But I played it fairly well,and they were satisfied that I could play, so they invited me to play the evening with them, even when Jerome came in.
My brother Nat and I had heard all these stories about the New York Musicians’ Union; how they would fine you for sitting in, so when the clubowner came over to them and said “Who’s that guy playing saxophone?” rather than give him my name, Nat said, “Well, that’s Cannonball,” So I became known as Cannonball once again, after so many years of being just plain Mr. Adderley, schoolteacher.
— Julian ‘Cannonball’ Adderley from an interview with Jack Winter, KCFR in Denver Colorado. 1972.
‘I’m On My Way,’ by Nat Adderley, Jr. Performed by the Cannonball Adderley Quintet on their record, Why Am I Treated So Bad!
Julian ‘Cannonball’ Adderley, alto sax | Nat Adderley, trumpet | Joe Zawinul, keys | Vic Gaskin, bass | Roy McCurdy, drums
