Urbane. Now, there's a word. In jazz it's usually applied to the great, veteran alto saxophonist, Benny Carter, a sophisticated gentleman famed as much for his courtly unflappability as for his myriad and well-ordered gifts as a musician. Yet it's a double-edged word, because Carter, who happens to be black, isn't always as unflappable as it suggests.
There's a celebrated story that, while leading his band at a servicemen's dance at the close of the second World War, he tried to ignore a white soldier who yelled at him: "Play Stardust, Sambo". Unwisely, the soldier repeated his request twice, more loudly and unambiguously each time. Finally, Carter quietly unhooked his alto, jumped down on the dance floor, flattened the soldier with a few punches, and resumed his place on the bandstand. "The whole incident," reported one band member, "took about eight bars in a medium bounce tempo."
The story is relevant because urbane is a word that readily comes to mind to describe saxophonist, composer and arranger Benny Golson. At 72, laden with honours, he's seen and done it all. As a player, he has been up on the bandstand with such leading members of the jazz aristocracy as John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, Tadd Dameron, Lionel Hampton, Johnny Hodges and Art Blakey, as well as co-founding the fondly-remembered Jazztet with the late, great Art Farmer.
And composing and arranging? Apart from his brilliant craftsmanship in the jazz world, everyone and everything from Sammy Davis Jnr and Mama Cass Elliott (of the Mamas and the Papas) to the Monkees, Mickey Rooney and Dusty Springfield in the field of popular entertainment has benefited from his talents. He's even found space to compose for the classical field; currently, he's working on his second symphony. And - in his spare time - he lectures and teaches on music and occasionally on sociology. Despite this daunting CV, he's a relaxed, friendly man, precise if a trifle circumlocutory in his speech. He oozes the kind of charm that conjures up that word urbane again. Yet there's no doubting the passion behind that urbanity when he talks of things that touch him deeply.
He's not likely to jump off the bandstand and thump anyone, but music, artists he respects, the death of friends, are all things that subtly charge his voice when he talks about them.
Nowadays, though, does he find composing more satisfying than playing? "It's like having two wives. I'm a musical bigamist. I can't decide, so I just go on with both of them."
So how did he come to composing? "I guess I was a composite person, because I liked this from this one, that from another one. Because in the beginning we're all eclectic.
"What did I have to draw upon? I had nothing. I was a beginner, a novice. I had no history to draw upon, so I had to imitate. But it helped me and after a while, hopefully, we leave that and go on with our own creations," he says. "And it's not that I was looking for glory. I'm looking for my own creations. If glory came, the way I felt, fine. If it didn't come, I was compelled anyway. I had to get these things out, no matter what happened."
He has composed some of the most distinctive, haunting and celebrated tunes in the jazz canon. Pieces such as Killer Joe (he says, delightedly, that he broke the rules writing that one), Whisper Not and I Remember Clifford long ago confirmed him as one of the supreme melodists in the field. And though the mathematics of harmony can be learned, melody is a gift that has to be there in the first place; no amount of teaching can instil it.
"I had good role models for melodies, like Chopin and Brahms and Puccini. I call them 'melody maestros'. I was one who didn't fancy ditties too much, because the ditties you play today and forget tomorrow.
"But there's one exception when you mention ditties: Thelonius Monk. He was a master of ditties; profundity in his ditties. Misterioso, Friday the 13th, In Walked Bud, simple things. Some of them are monotonous, but they have something about them that other people don't have."
His own "ditties" have also stood the test of time. He wrote I Remember Clifford, a paean to the memory of the great trumpeter, Clifford Brown, who was killed in a car crash at the age of 25.
"This tune took me the longest time to write. The shortest tune I've ever written in my life is Whisper Not; I wrote that in 20 minutes. But this tune took me more than two weeks to write, because what I did when I wrote this tune - I don't think anybody's ever asked me this - is I tried to write that melody the way Clifford Brown played his trumpet.
"I actually cried while I was writing that tune at the piano, because he was a dear friend, apart from being a great musician."
He recalls hearing the Max Roach-Clifford Brown Quintet in his native Philadelphia when he took a piece to them at rehearsal.
"When he started playing, I felt as though it was a physical thing taking place there. It was as though something had taken hold of me and I couldn't move. I never experienced that before or after.
"This nice, quiet guy, even temperament, he was the world's greatest lover when he picked that trumpet up. Or he was the most savage, wild beast when he picked it up. He could be either or. He had the fire, he had the love and the passion. He had it all."
Why does he lecture in sociology? "It was a racial issue; disparity between blacks - what they're trying to do and how it's accepted, or not accepted - and whites; what they do and what's happened over the years. Sort of like a documentation.
"Racism is still alive. It's certainly much more subtle now than it was when I was a kid. When I was a kid, it was right out there. You could reach it and paint it if you wanted. But now you see it in isolated instances and with isolated people, rather than across the board.
"Being black, I know it when I see it. But it doesn't disturb me and it didn't disturb me when I was coming up as a kid. Racism? I wanted to play the music. I turned a deaf ear to all that stuff."
Well, not quite. He had a quartet in Italy not long ago, with a white bass player, Todd Coolman. "This magazine wanted to interview me, so I said OK. After the first question, the interview was over because his first question was: 'Why do you have a white bass player with you?' I said the interview is over.
"I hate that. When I hire a person, I hire him for what he's doing on the instrument, not for what colour he is. My piano player now, Mike LeDonne, he's white. And Joe Farnsworth, the drummer. So if anybody asks me why I've got a white piano player or a white drummer, I don't want to talk to them. They don't really appreciate jazz. Their mind is somewhere else."
He divides his time equally each year between the US and Europe. Does he therefore think that, perhaps, more interesting things are going on in jazz here than back home in the US? "No, I don't feel that's necessarily true. But the level of musicianship is far, far higher than when I first came over in 1958. And musicians are doing things earlier. You'll find an 18-year-old piano player or trumpet player who's playing fantastically. I was a slow comer. I came into my own in my late 20s, I guess. Even John Coltrane. When we were in our teens, we didn't do it that early. We were in the same band in Philadelphia and we got put out of the band for poor musicianship."
Apart from the rise in playing standards everywhere, what does he think of the increased willingness of jazz musicians to seek other flavours in ethnic music? "That grows out of a spirit of adventure," he says. "As creative people, we don't want to keep eating the same warmed-over dish. Let's change the menu a bit. Let's go to another restaurant. Let's see what they've got. And hopefully that will take us forward and help us to discover new things.
"When that happens, it doesn't negate the things that came before. It's as though these things are on a shelf, and the new things come, so make room for them. And one day those things will have passed and we make room on the same shelf for other things. But we don't throw anything off the shelf. It just gets larger and larger. And it helps to know the past. Use it as a reference, but don't have a love affair with it."
It's not a mistake that this genial, charming man is ever likely to make.
Benny Golson and the Keith Copeland Trio (Tommy Halferty, guitar; Ronan Guilfoyle, bass; Keith Copeland, drums) play Vicar Street on September 22nd as part of the ESB Dublin Jazz Festival (September 17th-23rd). Booking at Tower Records, Wicklow Street, Dublin 2. Tel: 01-6725666. Check ticket availability at www.esb.ie/jazz