Richard Grossman: “It all falls together. And that’s I think when it becomes dangerous—when you start leaving your factional camps and you start putting on tuxedos, and David Murray or somebody goes out and plays ‘Honeysuckle Rose.’ It’s like Max Roach told me once that Lester said to him, ‘You can’t join the throng till you’ve played your own song.’ The fact that some guy puts on a tux and plays a standard doesn’t lend credibility to, uh, like ‘Oh, he’s making important music‘—y’know—’admiring his ancestors and his heritage.’ The guy’s just playing a tune! You just can’t, uh, look at all the other arts, I can’t go out and paint a crappy painting and say like I’m a ‘nouvelle painter,’ it doesn’t work like that. And the guys in the ’60s, man, they uh. . .”

Rob Scheps: “At least they went out on limbs that were really limbs, and they. . .”

R.G.: “They did. And they totally disassociated themselves with chord changes and all those other things prior. That’s where the real revolution in music starts—that’s where the whole Punk thing started! Y’know totally disassociating yourself with everything that went before, but then these hack critics try to say, ‘Well, this is like the eroticism of so-and-so, the urgency of blah-blah’—that’s where it becomes dangerous.”

R.S.: “Absolutely.”

Rob Scheps plays About the Music. 9 p.m. Sat., Dec. 28-Sun., Dec. 29. $19/$14 adv.