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Ellington and Pharoah Sanders and, I mean, everybody in New York, and he came to Denmark,
and he joined the band. The beginning was that a friend of mine, another African American bass
player that taught me how to play salsa actually, he took me to a jam session because Emmanuel
was there, and he just had arrived in Denmark and Ray was very interested in him.

He said you gotta meet this guy. He's very interesting and then when we were jamming, Ray said
to me, hey, it’s one of your compositions because I had made many compositions in this salsa
style. We did that and Emmanuel was very nice. Then a couple of days later he called me and
said, these songs you write, do you put them down? He meant on notes. I didn't know how to
write notes. I didn't even know how to read notes.

BiTS: Yeah, yeah.

KL: And he said, would you like to learn? Yes. That was when I lived at home at my parents, and
he came like every day for some weeks.

BiTS: Wow!

KL: And taught me, and he would come like 10 o’clock,
before noon and stay all night, all day. And yeah, and just
talk, talk, talk and taught me all kinds of things about the
rhythmic patterns and all the connections to Africa. He was
a nation of Islam guy, like Muhammad Ali and Malcolm
X and those guys. And he knew all of these people, and he
taught me a lot about this. That was very interesting
actually, and he was a Freemason, and he told me a lot of
that, what he could tell me. Then one day I said today we
have to stop at 5:00 because I have to go to a rehearsal
with my band, and he said, could I come? And I said sure.
And he came and he was playing with us and after the
rehearsal, he said, am I in the band? [Laughing] We all said
yes. And from then he was teaching all of us. That was for a year or something like that, to the
point where I meet Jack and stop playing, I could hear all the rhythm patterns that he taught me
in like 76/77.

BiTS: Yeah.

KL: Jack was playing it, all of it because he was from New Orleans and New Orleans is a big

melting pot of African American and Indian music and African music and Puerto Rican music
and Cuban music. And all of it was in Jack’s playing style, actually, so all his rhythmic patterns
were no problem for me. And I quickly found out because so many Danish, especially jazz
musicians, they told me, he’s impossible to play with because he never played the same and he
never played the right part. Like Jack said once, he said, he was in a recording session, and
somebody said to him “you don’t keep to the bars!”. And he said, “I only know one bar and that's
where I'm going now to have a beer!” [laughs].

BiTS: [Laughing] Tell me something, that leads me to a question that I wanted to ask you, was
Jack a drinker?

KL: He was a social drinker.

BiTS: Oh, okay.