NYU Steinhardt Jazz Interview Series

This Friday @ 7PM: Medeski, Martin, & Wood

2010-04-14T07:25:00.000-07:00

Medeski Martin and Wood's story is - like most great stories - one of humble beginnings, friendship, determination, a happy ending and a very bright future.

The trio of keyboard/organ/piano player John Medeski, drummer/percussionist Billy Martin, and bassist Chris Wood formed not in some vastly creative alternate universe, but rather in the neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, known as D.U.M.B.O. (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass) in 1991. Medeski and Wood, students at Boston's prestigious New England Conservatory of Music, decided to move to New York City, with intent to explore the late-night underworld of the city's burgeoning jazz scene.

John Medeski, Billy Martin, and Chris Wood were looking to create music that reflected who they were, individually and collectively. The trio began experimenting with contemporary hip-hop beats that could swing as hard as jazz rhythms, yet remained essentially simple and propulsive, giving the musicians ample room to create hypnotic textures and sounds that were brimming with both improvisation and harmony. "In the beginning, as it is now, we went by gut instinct," says Wood. "We have a natural connection between us, as people and as musicians, and we just let things flow in whatever direction they went."

Gigs turned into multiple engagements, dates at small clubs led to performances at legendary New York City downtown hotspots like the Village Gate and the Knitting Factory, and soon the band was packed into Billy's van, traveling up and down the North Eastern United States. The next step was a natural one for any band - capture the music for posterity - and so MMW recorded their debut, "Notes From The Underground," which they released independently on hap-jones records in early 1991.

More gigs followed, and soon it was time for another release. This time, Medeski Martin & Wood inked a deal with Gramavision, a larger but still independent label that afforded them substantial freedom to create music the way they felt it should be played. In the summer of 1993 they released "It's A Jungle In Here," purchased an R/V, and hit the road for nearly half a year.

Communal, on-the-road living has broken up many bands, but true-to-form, MMW thrived in this potentially treacherous situation. Their secret was a unique combination of individual personalities, with each band member taking on additional roles that suited their own aptitudes and interests. As always, nothing was planned out; it just happened.

John, with his love for cooking, was the band's chef, preparing incredible meals that made life on the road more bearable. Billy, who worked well with his hands, could fix anything up to and including the band's RV. And Chris, with his head for business, took care of the group's accounting. As it was with the music, Medeski Martin & Wood balanced each other out perfectly.

"We have a certain chemistry between us, musically," says Martin, "and in addition to that we have a strong friendship that goes beyond the music. Even when we have ups and downs, the music and our friendship carries us through."

1994 saw the release of "Friday Afternoon in the Universe," and by 1995 it seemed like MMW was truly touring the universe, as their concert itinerary spread out and around the entire United States, and into Europe and Japan. In 1996, the band released their final Gramavision disc, "Shack-Man," which they celebrated with an 8-week Monday night residency at New York's Knitting Factory.

With much fanfare, the band then signed with another record label - the legendary jazz imprint Blue Note Records. At the turn of the new millennium, they released their all-acoustic album "Tonic," named for the Lower East Side club (and former kosher winery) where it was recorded. The band's affiliation with Blue Note resulted in three discs (plus a best-of set), and found them again pushing their sonic boundaries, incorporating percussionists, horn sections, and turntables into their already potent sound.

Which brings us to the here-and-now. Medeski Martin & Wood are no longer signed to anyone else's record label; they have come full circle by establishing their own label, Indirecto Records, as an outlet for their music. Which, quite happily, brings them neatly back to the way they did things in their formative years. Releasing their own music, their own way, in its own time.

The trio's first Indirecto release, "Out Louder," is a four-way collaboration with guitarist John Scofield, which true-to-form is heavy on group improvisation, irresistible grooves, rich harmonies, and strong melodies. While nothing definite is planned - as always, the band are taking each day and each opportunity as they come - it is possible that "Out Louder" could be the first in a series of independently-released projects that Medeski Martin & Wood will do in collaboration with other artists.

"By having our own label, we can make music however we want, and make as much as we want," explains Medeski. "In the history of man, recorded music is just a blink of the eye, just a small part of that vast history. The real thing is playing music live, and that is what we do. Beyond that, we'll be putting out recordings as often or as infrequently as we want."

The band also plan another first - a disc of children's music titled "Let's Go Everywhere" - set for release in early 2007 on the Little Monster/V2 label that promises to be as engaging for their established fan base as it is for the kids. "It's got everything, instrumentals, vocal songs, our kids are singing on it" says Wood.

Plus, there are the usual side projects going on, creative outlets which all three band members say serve to strengthen and add to the sound of the trio when they converge. Medeski Martin and Wood live in our world, playing music that reflects their surroundings and communities. At the same time, they are a small world unto themselves, where creativity and spontaneity are honored, revered, and encouraged. And the world-at-large is a much better place for it.

Chris Potter: The Obsessive Musician

2010-04-13T08:45:00.000-07:00

Chris Potter has long been touted as one of his generation's most talented performers. Even as a teenager, well before he moved to New York, he was named an heir to the traditions of Charlie Parker. In spite of the praise, Potter has been a self-driven individual striving to satisfy his own preoccupation with music.

Music was a constant part of Potter’s life growing up. He was born in Chicago, but by age three he moved to South Carolina. He grew up in the south, but the influence of the big city remained in his household. His family had a "quality record collection” including, among others, Bob Dylan, Buddy Guy, and the Beatles. These became Potter's earliest influences.

For Potter listening was never enough. He was interested in creating music. "I always had to play it." Whenever his family went somewhere where there was a piano, he had to noodle around on the instrument. He would figure out the melodies he'd heard on records being played at home, but Potter was also keen to figure out his own ideas, improvising long before he had any formal training.

As he got older, he discovered the more obscure parts of his parents' collection: Miles Davis, Charles Lloyd, and Dave Brubeck. Potter says it was the tone of Paul Desmond's saxophone on the Brubeck Quartet's legendary album Time Out, which inspired him to take up the instrument.

By age ten he began playing alto saxophone because, at the time, he “was a little small to play the tenor. As soon as I got it I tried to figure out how to play all those tunes on Time Out, and I had some really helpful people early on: my elementary school music teacher and my first saxophone teacher. They were very happy to show me they were improvising over a form and what notes were in a scale and the basic stuff, and I was off and running. I was just obsessed.”
At this point, Potter's saxophone influences were primarily the early figures of the Ellington band: Johnny Hodges, Paul Gonsalves, Ben Webster, Harry Carney. “I wasn’t really hearing Charlie Parker. I didn’t understand what he was doing. I didn’t really like it.”

Those early Ellington influences can still be heard in Potter's fat tenor sound, but by the time he was twelve, he started getting into Parker and diligently worked to emulate his sound. “It was like a light went off, and I spent a long time trying to figure out what is he doing, how is he getting that sound? A lot of what I would do would just be to play along with the records, not even necessarily write anything down, sometimes not even knowing the tune, but just trying to play along, just trying to play like they did, sound like they did, phrase like they did, figure out what notes they were using.”

By the age of thirteen he was already becoming an acclaimed musician, praised by renowned jazz educator Jamey Aebersold as a "reincarnation of Charlie Parker." At one particular Aebersold camp, he was singled out to play with the instructors instead of his peers, as they saw him as a player on their level. Looking back on it, Potter recalls it being "a little weird. The Charlie Parker reincarnation thing kind of freaked me out. There was another one of the teachers that asked me about it in private once, and I told him ‘I have no idea whether it exists or not. I certainly have absolutely no feeling that I was Charlie Parker in a previous life,’ and he said ‘yeah it’s probably just a bunch of junk, but if you are Charlie Parker, don’t take drugs this time.’"

Back in South Carolina he was a regular at a local jam session. “On Tuesday nights these guys didn’t want to hear anything except bebop, just total bebop heads, and then Wednesday nights would be just anything goes. We’d do an old standard, but then we’d play free, and then we’d play a Rolling Stones tune. So it was good to have both of those things, and then a lot of weddings. I drove all over South Carolina as soon as I could drive.”

After high school, Potter moved to New York where he began studying at the New School, and within a few months, he was invited to join Red Rodney's band. The former Parker bandmate made Bird's music a central part of the repertoire, and Potter found this to be among the best parts of his training. “It was great having the chance to play all of these Charlie Parker tunes with the guy on the record.”

Rodney was quite a character as well. By that time, Rodney had stopped smoking cigarettes or doing any drugs, but he still had a penchant for “getting away with stuff. There was something about the whole having to ‘score’ something that he still just had to do. It took the more innocuous form of, if we were getting on a plane, he would fake a limp so that he could get on first and everybody would be really really nice to him. It was that kind of stuff, but just constantly. There was always stuff like that going on.”

Rodney was also famous for posing as an Army inspection officer. This rumor grew to myth in the jazz community over the years, and Potter recalled hearing the story from Rodney “a couple times with slightly different details each time. There must be a nugget of truth in there somewhere, but it sounded pretty deep. He saw an article in the paper about this general who dropped in on Air Force bases unannounced and he thought, ‘wow, that guy looks just like me only with gray hair.’ So he died his hair gray, and he got a uniform, and he showed up at Army bases and inspected everything. That was his thing. I don’t know what exactly he got from it.”

After three or four years in Rodney’s band, Potter began to work around New York in other capacities as well. He was still just twenty-two when he began playing in the Mingus Big Band. One night, Steely Dan's Walter Becker happened to attend a performance and loved Potter's playing enough to seek him out for the upcoming Steely Dan tour.

Suddenly, Potter was thrust into huge performance venues playing for thousands of people a night. He remembers one of the interesting things about his experiences in that group was, while the band was extremely experienced, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, the group's leaders, hadn't toured since 1972. They had since scored a number of hit albums and singles and amassed a large fan base, but they had always stayed in the studio up to that point, and they looked like "deer in the headlights" performing for such large numbers of people every night. It was the leaders who were stunned.

Fagen and Becker wanted to tour, "and they knew at this point they could ask for first class everything. The leaders were used to working in the studio, and that was about it, so to go out there every night, it’s hard for me to imagine. They were kind of like deer in the headlights looking at sold out twenty-thirty thousand people. It was very exciting and very good music. That was music that I listened to growing up to. I was familiar with most of the tunes, I just wasn’t ever expecting to actually play it.”

As Potter found himself suddenly in the top-tier of the music community, he was humbled by the people he began to work with, including Randy Brecker, Jim Hall, and Ray Brown. “Any time you have a chance to actually work with somebody you’ve listened to a lot, and to hear how they react to you. It takes a little getting used to, and it’s such a learning thing too, not just the music part but getting to know them. You start to get to know people as people as well as how they play, and it all starts to make sense. My experience also is the really great musicians are all very humble about what they’re doing because making music on the highest possible level takes a lot of dedication.”

When he was given the chance to make his first album, it was an all-star effort, featuring Jack DeJohnette, Dave Holland, and John Scofield as his sidemen. He hadn't even played with Holland before and was pleasantly surprised to see that they all showed up for the session. "I remember I was flying in from somewhere else and I was late, so those guys were sitting around for hours waiting for me. I was completely terrified for about five minutes and then we started to work on the music, and I realized it’s just like playing with my friends. We’re looking at the tunes. We’re trying to figure out what’s the best form, what should we do with the solos, what kind of feel, just completely working on the music, no weird stuff at all. It just felt completely at home. It wasn’t foreign at all. It was just a guy trying to figure out what’s the best part to play on this tune, and it just happens to be John Scofield and he has a tremendous amount of experience and a real unique voice, but that doesn’t help him when he just walks in and he’s trying to figure out what to play. He has to sit there and figure out what to play just like anyone else."

At the interview, Potter performed two solo pieces, Thelonious Monk’s “Ruby, My Dear” and the old standard “It Could Happen To You.” He has never performed a full solo concert, but it is something he’d be interested in doing and practices all the time. Playing alone informs the way he approaches improvising in a group. “You don’t want to feel like you’re relying on these other people and you’re floating over the top of it. The way that really great jazz is made is when everyone knows what’s going on and can add something informed and interesting to the conversation. The more everyone in the band has control of every aspect of it, the drummer knowing the form and the saxophone being able to take care of the rhythm without needing help, it just frees everything up.”

Potter compared group improvisation to citizenship within a community. Jazz “is the only kind of music that I know of, in history, that’s ever really had that group improvisation aesthetic. It’s really special. Philosophically too, it requires everyone to be very well informed about what the situation is, and to be considerate, but not to be wishy-washy, to jump in when needed. It’s all the kind of things that, if you look at it in another situation, can make a good citizen or a good family-member. This is the big thing behind what this music means to me. It’s a whole way of life, and the more that I’ve had a chance to work with people on the highest level you realize that’s really where it’s at. That’s the way they’re looking at it.”

While Potter’s take on improvisation was illuminating, his advice for upcoming musicians was to just keep at it. “Everybody has a different path, a different story, and that’s how it should be. Being a jazz musician, there's nothing cookie-cutter about it. It’s obviously not an easy thing to do. It’s not an easy way to make a living. I’ve been very fortunate, but I know a lot of people that are very talented. It’s not that easy, but it’s the kind of thing that if you need to do it, you need to do it. That’s how I felt from the very beginning. There wasn’t even any question really. It was just what I needed to do.”

Potter's journey follows one of those unique routes. He has been a consistent figure in jazz for nearly twenty years, garnering great admiration even as a teenager. He continues to churn out memorable performances, and as his obsession with music continues, there are sure to be many more in the decades to come.

Here are Chris Potter's two performances from the interview:

This Friday @4PM: Stefon Harris

2010-04-07T17:41:00.000-07:00

Vibraphonist-composer Stefon Harris is heralded as “one of the most important young artists in jazz (The Los Angeles Times).” He is unquestionably developing what will be a long and extraordinary career.

A graduate of Manhattan School of Music, Stefon received a B.M. in Classical Music and an M.M. in Jazz Performance. He is a recipient of the prestigious Martin E. Segal Award from Lincoln Center and has three consecutive Grammy nominations for Best Jazz Album including the 2003 release of The Grand Unification Theory (Blue Note), Kindred (Blue Note) and Black Action Figure (Blue Note). Harris.. 2004 recording, Evolution (Blue Note) features his band Blackout and was voted by Jazz Times as one of the Top 50 CDs. His forthcoming 2006 CD combines arrangements of rarely performed Ellington music with an original suite, The Gardner Meditations commissioned by The Wharton Center at Michigan State University. North Sea Jazz (Netherlands) named Harris for the prestigious International 2002 Bird Award for Artist Deserving Wider Recognition. He has been voted Best Mallet player by the Jazz Journalist Association (2005, 2004,2003, 2002, 2001 & 2000), Debut Artist of the Year by Jazz Times and Chicago Tribune, Downbeatís Critics Poll Winner for Vibraphone & Rising Star, Vibraphone (2004) Newsweek..s Best Jazz CD, Best New Talent and 1999-2000 Readers Poll Best Vibraphonist by Jazziz Magazine.

Mr. Harris has performed at many of the world’s most distinguished concert halls, including Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, The Kennedy Center, San Francisco’s Herbst Theater, UCLA’s Royce Hall, Chicago’s Symphony Center, Detroit’s Orchestra Hall, and The Sydney Opera House. He has toured and recorded with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and performed his original compositions with the Dutch Metropole Orchestra in Den Hague. An active educator Mr. Harris conducts clinics and lectures worldwide, teaches at New York University and has been Artist in Residence at San Francisco Performances and at the Isabelle Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. He has received special commissions from The Wharton Center at Michigan State University (debuting April 2005) and The Troy Savings Bank Music Hall, which spawned The Grand Unification Theory (Blue Note).

Harris performs here in a sound check with Greg Osby at the Jazz Standard:

Lionel Loueke: The Unimaginable Tale Of One Jazz Musician

2010-03-27T14:42:00.001-07:00

On the surface, Lionel Loueke would seem to be one of the least likely people to enjoy a successful career in the American jazz community. He rose from modest beginnings in West Africa and has now become a regular collaborator with icons like Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter and an essential part of the modern jazz world.

Growing up in the former French colony of Dahomey (now the Republic of Benin,) Loueke knew music as an integral part of everyday life. Like a pickup game of basketball or football, Loueke and his childhood friends would meet up to play in drum circles. He insists that nearly everybody played an instrument, and if they didn’t, they danced. “We play music to celebrate birth, death; any occasion, music is always there. Even as a kid, I remember playing music with other kids, but in my head it wasn’t music. It was just a part of life. At nine years old, I remember we had a percussion ensemble with nine to ten kids and one dancer, and we just played to get some coins from street to street.”

As a teenager he was first exposed to American jazz, and he remembers appreciating the openness of the music. “I liked the parts, the improvisation, the freedom in jazz. [At first,] I didn’t see the connection with African music, but I saw it later. I realized when I was playing in Afro-pop bands, I wasn’t always playing the same lines like you’re supposed to, and I was getting in trouble sometimes. My friends told me ‘you’ve got to play the same line.’ I always liked to have that freedom.”

At eighteen he moved to Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast) to study at West Africa’s only conservatory: The National Institute Of Art. There he learned music theory, solfège, classical music history, and how to notate music. Then in 1994, after two years in Côte d'Ivoire, he moved to Paris to pursue jazz at the American School of Modern Music before moving again to America where he’d received a scholarship to study at Berklee College of Music.

It was at Berklee that he first met bassist Massimo Biolcati and drummer Ferenc Nemeth, who would later form the Lionel Loueke trio. Both Biolcati, raised in Sweden from Italian descent, and Nemeth, from Hungary, had studied African music extensively and the three were drawn to each other and to making music that melded their various influences. Together, they began to fuse jazz technique with motifs from Loueke’s African heritage.

In 2001, after graduating from Berklee, Loueke had an opportunity to audition for the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz in Los Angeles playing for a panel that included Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, and Terence Blanchard. Of course he was nervous, but mostly because he felt he didn’t have a strong background in jazz to draw on and thought it unlikely he’d be selected. Rather than try to prove he was something else, Loueke simply played the music he knew. He remembers thinking, “‘man, just be yourself because I can’t impress those guys. That’s not the point. It’s about music, so I’m just going to do my best, if they like it or not,’ and they liked it.”

The audition committee was very impressed, and in selecting Loueke—along with Biolcati and Nemeth—they stood to learn as much from him, given his unique background, as he was from them.

It took Loueke a long time to synthesize the different styles of music he was exposed to and develop his own sound. While in Los Angeles, he took a semester’s worth of classical guitar lessons to refine his playing technique and he began to use his fingers much more. This allowed him to play more complex rhythmic patterns, as he now had several fingers to play at once rather than one pick, reflecting much of the popular Spanish and Puerto Rican music he remembered hearing in Benin. He began to play nylon-string guitars at this time as well, giving him a more earthy sound. “Even at Berklee I still was getting so much information and trying to digest it all. At the Monk Institute I was still getting information, but they were helping me to develop my own voice.”

Loueke’s playing went through several other transformations as he sought create sounds that mimicked instruments from Africa. One came through the use of effects pedals. “I use my musicality, of course I use my pedals, and most of the time I use pedals that are not made for that type of sound. Because I try to imitate a lot of instruments, especially African instruments, there’s no pedals made for that, so I can use a wah-wah or wammy pedal to get that sound.”

(During?) At the interview, Loueke was kind enough to demonstrate his particular style of playing, which included a piece of pink paper placed between the strings by the bridge of his guitar, dampening the resonance of the instrument. “I came up with that because I wanted to get a sound close to the kalimba—thumb piano—so the paper between the strings makes the strings vibrate differently, and before I got to that, I used a plastic bag, a comb: I like to try different things. I was playing in Philly, and in the dressing room they had pink paper. Usually before I get on stage I get ready and get a piece of paper. That paper worked so well, I asked them if I could take the whole block, and they said yes, so I’m still using it.”

Singing is another major element of Loueke’s sound. “I don’t consider myself a singer, but I do use my voice like an effect, like a pedal device on my instrument. Because every single note I play I always sing, it helps my phrasing to play better. A few years ago I realized that everything I was playing and singing, after a solo I couldn’t breathe. I questioned myself, and the answer was there: I was playing too much.”

In between singing notes, Loueke will often add click noises with his mouth, which serve the function of a percussion instrument. He says that the click sounds came about in “the most natural way. I used to listen a lot to music from South Africa and it’s part of the language. I don’t speak that language, but I get inspired by the language. If I sing one note, a click, and have a different thing going on the guitar, I can have three parts going on at the same time. For me it is just percussion because I don’t speak that language.”

As Loueke develop personally, so did the sound of his trio. Coming from an institutional background, he used to always notate his music for the other members of his group to read as they were learning new pieces. Sometimes the time would be written with thirteen or seventeen beats a measure, and they were not all on the same page about how to feel that. Each of them had their own interpretation, so now he tends to teach his music by (‘rote’ is the word) wrote, harkening back to his roots. “When you play music, it’s not about the paper. It’s not about the chart. It’s about the ears. That’s how we grew up in Africa. Of course, it’s important to learn music, to learn how to notate, but I think the most important thing is to develop your ears.”
Loueke finds that his music also translates well with audiences. “Talking is not my thing. I like to play. That’s what I do. That’s how I connect with people. Even when people don’t even speak my language or don’t understand what I’m saying, they still can get a feeling, get an idea. People always go home with something in their mind. It’s important, as an artist, to be able to share that without words. Of course, I can do that with words, but I personally prefer to let the music talk.”

Amidst the wide variety of music available today, Loueke’s truly sticks out, and his path to that destiny could have never been planned. “I never thought I would meet one day Herbie Hancock: I mean even shake his hand, or Wayne Shorter. I want to say it’s a dream come true, but I can’t even say that because it wasn’t even part of my dream.”

Unlikely as seems, even to Loueke himself, he is now an established member of the jazz community, with two solo releases for Blue Note Records, and an appearance on Herbie Hancock’s Grammy-award winning effort: The River. He has an open mind about music, believing that “every music has a message, even if you don’t get it.” He is sure to be around, influencing those within and outside the jazz world for many years to come.

Here are the two pieces Lionel Loueke played at the interview:

This Friday @ 7PM: Dave Holland

2010-03-24T12:38:00.000-07:00

Born in 1946 in Wolverhampton, England, Dave Holland was a steady figure on the London jazz scene when Miles Davis saw him at the fabled Soho jazz club Ronnie Scott’s in1968, playing in a combo that opened for the Bill Evans Trio. “Miles heard something in his sound and his ideas," recalled Jack DeJohnette, who was Evans’s drummer on the date. A month later, Holland was on the bandstand with Davis at Count Basie’s Harlem nightclub. He then joined the rhythm section on Filles de Kilimanjaro, and the revolutionary In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew sessions. It was a heady two years, but Holland was quickly developing his own ideas about music.

Eager to pursue his own radical new sounds, Holland did what many of his peers would not have contemplated. He quit Davis’ band, giving up the arena gigs at vast venues like Madison Square Garden to commit to the creation of his own music. And then he got even busier. The 1970s found Holland prolific. Solo, and in collaboration, he became a dominant voice in the new music. Along with fellow Miles alum Chick Corea, he formed the shortlived supergroup Circle, and then joined Rivers for the epochal Conference of the Birds. The 1972 album, one of Holland’s first for the ECM label, was a quartet session that also featured multi-reedist Anthony Braxton and drummer Barry Altschul (both of Circle). Inspired by the birds that frequented the yard of Holland’s London home, and a 12th century Persian epic written by Farid ud-Din Attar, the album became a classic: outward-thinking music that made the avant-garde swinging and coherent, suffused in feeling yet attentive to form. Holland also explored the essence of his instrument in the duo record with Barre Phillips, Music for Two Basses (1971) and the remarkable solo album Emerald Tears (1977).

It was Holland’s strengths as a collaborator that marked many of his most notable efforts of the decade. His ongoing association with Sam Rivers, Anthony Braxton and trumpeter Kenny Wheeler saw Holland’s presence on a slew of important sessions, including a pair of improvisatory duets with Rivers and multiple credits on Braxton’s Arista recordings, such as the splendid New York (Fall 1974). Joining forces with DeJohnette again and guitarist John Abercrombie, Holland joined the collective Gateway trio from 1975-77 recording a pair of albums for ECM. (The trio recorded twice again in the 1990s and continues to play the occasional concert).

Ever versatile, Holland also recorded with folk and rock musicians. As the only acoustic bassist living in Woodstock, NY, at the time, the Englishman was in demand. Michael Cuscuna, who produced several Braxton sessions with Holland on board, solicted his talents for Bonnie Raitt’s Give It Up. Holland also got in the studio with bluegrass legend Vassar Clements and John Hartford. (It was in the same spirit that Holland found himself jamming with Jimi Hendrix one fleeting night in 1969 with drummer Buddy Miles).

Holland formed his first working quintet in 1983, featuring alto saxophonist Steve Coleman, trumpeter Wheeler and trombonist Julian Priester. A series of albums recorded over the next four years – including Jumpin’ In, Seeds of Time, and Razor’s Edge – laid the foundation for Holland’s songbook.

Subsequently, he formed the Dave Holland Trio (with Coleman and DeJohnette) for the 1988 album Triplicate, and teamed with Coleman, electric guitarist Kevin Eubanks and drummer Marvin “Smitty” Smith for Extensions in 1989.

The bassist also continued to enjoy strong collaborations with a vast range of his peers, often connecting with celebrated figures from the previous generation of jazz icons. The following year, Holland got together in a unique trio of jazz legends, drummer Billy Higgins and pianist Hank Jones to record The Oracle – a genuine power summit. Other stellar projects included Question & Answer with Pat Metheny & Roy Haynes as well as Like Minds with Gary Burton. This has been a consistent pattern in Holland’s career. During the ‘90s, he renewed an affiliation, begun in the 1970s, with Joe Henderson, joining the tenor saxophonist on So Near (So Far), Porgy & Bess, and the Joe Henderson Big Band. Likewise, Holland reunited with vocalist Betty Carter, touring and recording the live album Feed the Fire. Fellow Davis album Herbie Hancock invited Holland to tour with him in 1992, subsequently recording The New Standard, Holland joined Hancock’s band again in 1996 and, more recently, was part of the sessions for River: The Joni Letters, winner of the 2008 Grammy for Album of the Year.

Holland also formed his current quintet, which includes tenor saxophonist Chris Potter, trombonist Robin Eubanks and, a more recent addition, drummer Nate Smith. Among their notable recordings are Not for Nothin, Prime Directive and Extended Play.

In 2005, Holland formed Dare2 Records, after a 34-year relationship with ECM Records, the label where he became a signature artist. Originally, Holland created Dare2 Records as an imprint “to have more control over the entire process of releasing an album,” he says. “But in the long term, there’s a lot of promise in making music this way, especially with the changing environment in the recording industry.” Sharing the bandstand with the best of a younger generation of players in his fan-favorite quintet, he now has three albums out on Dare2: the Grammy-award winning Overtime (2005), Critical Mass (2006) and Pass It On (2008). The debut recording from the Dave Holland Octet, entitled Pathways, will be released in the fall of 2009 on Dare2 also. As he has in his music, Holland has embraced change and new ideas in business like few of his generation or younger.

Here is a clip of Dave Holland playing at the Montreal Jazz Festival with his quintet, including our interviewee from two weeks ago, Chris Potter.

This Friday @4PM: Chris Potter

2010-03-08T13:32:00.001-08:00

A world-class soloist, accomplished composer and formidable bandleader, saxophonist Chris Potter has emerged as a leading light of his generation. Down Beat called him "One of the most studied (and copied) saxophonists on the planet" while Jazz Times identified him as "a figure of international renown." Jazz sax elder statesman Dave Liebman called him simply, "one of the best musicians around," a sentiment shared by the readers of Down Beat in voting him second only to tenor sax great Sonny Rollins in the magazine's 2008 Readers Poll.

A potent improvisor and the youngest musician ever to win Denmark's Jazzpar Prize, Potter's impressive discography includes 15 albums as a leader and sideman appearances on over 100 albums. He was nominated for a Grammy Award for his solo work on "In Vogue," a track from Joanne Brackeen’s 1999 album Pink Elephant Magic, and was prominently featured on Steely Dan’s Grammy-winning album from 2000, Two Against Nature. He has performed or recorded with many of the leading names in jazz, such as Herbie Hancock, Dave Holland, John Scofield, the Mingus Big Band, Jim Hall, Paul Motian, Dave Douglas, Ray Brown and many others.

His most recent recording, Ultrahang, is the culmination thus far of five years’ work with his Underground quartet with Adam Rogers on guitar, Craig Taborn on Fender Rhodes, and Nate Smith on drums. Recorded in the studio in January 2009 after extensive touring, it showcases the band at its freewheeling yet cohesive best.

Since bursting onto the New York scene in 1989 as an 18-year-old prodigy with bebop icon Red Rodney (who himself had played as a young man alongside the legendary Charlie Parker), Potter has steered a steady course of growth as an instrumentalist and composer-arranger. Through the '90s, he continued to gain invaluable bandstand experience as a sideman while also making strong statements as a bandleader-composer-arranger. Acclaimed outings like 1997’s Unspoken (with bassist and mentor Dave Holland, drummer Jack DeJohnette and guitarist John Scofield), 1998’s Vertigo, 2001’s Gratitude and 2002’s Traveling Mercies showed a penchant for risk-taking and genre-bending. "For me, it just seemed like a way of opening up the music to some different things that I had been listening to but maybe hadn’t quite come out in my music before," he explains.

Potter explored new territory on 2004’s partly electric Lift: Live at the Village Vanguard (with bassist Scott Colley, drummer Bill Stewart and keyboardist Kevin Hays) then pushed the envelope a bit further on 2006’s Underground (with guitarist Wayne Krantz, electric pianist Craig Taborn and drummer Nate Smith). As he told Jazz Times: "I've wanted to do something more funk-related...music that seems to be in the air, all around us. But also keep it as free as the freest jazz conception."

He continued in this electrified, groove-oriented vein with 2007’s Follow The Red Line: Live at the Village Vanguard (with guitarist Adam Rogers replacing Krantz in the lineup). Says Potter of the adventurous new path he’s carved out for himself with his bass-less Underground quartet: “There was a point where I felt like the context I had been using before wasn’t quite working to express what I wanted or to move forward in some kind of way. My aesthetic as a saxophonist has always been based in Bird and Lester Young and Sonny Rollins and all the other greats on the instrument. What I’ve learned from them in terms of phrasing, sound, and approach to rhythm I’ll never outgrow. However music’s a living thing; it has to keep moving. I’ve been touched by many forms of music, like funk, hip hop, country, different folk musics, classical music, etc., and for me not to allow these influences into my music would be unnecessarily self-limiting. The difficulty is incorporating these sounds in an organic, unforced way. It helps me to remember I want people to feel the music, even be able to dance to it, and not think of it it as complicated or forbidding. If I can play something that has meaning for me, maybe I’ll be able to communicate that meaning to other people, and the stylistic questions will answer themselves.”

Looking back over his 20 years since arriving in New York, Potter says, “I’ve had the chance to learn a lot from all the leaders that I’ve worked with. Each gave me another perspective on how to organize a band and make a statement. It’s taught me that any approach can work, as long as you have a strong vision of what you want to do.”

Christian McBride: Pushing Himself & Inspiring Others

2010-03-05T08:23:00.000-08:00

Christian McBride is only thirty-seven, but he's already made a remarkable impact on the jazz community. He's been a high profile musician for nearly twenty years, and at this point, he could do just about whatever he wants. He came into the interview looking savvy, dressed in a dark suit and twirling a cigar as he nonchalantly answered questions about his illustrious career, but he'd rather not sit back and rest on his laurels. He continues to push himself and those around him in a range of styles and roles, as performer, teacher, creative chair for jazz with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and co-director of the National Jazz Museum in Harlem.

McBride, who grew up in Philadelphia, has always had music in his blood. His father and great uncle were both professional musicians. "My dad, up until the time I was six or seven years old, was primarily an electric bass player playing in a lot of the great legendary Philly soul groups like Blue Magic, and The Delfonics, Billy Paul, Major Harris--and by the time I got old enough to really appreciate what he was doing. He started working with Mongo Santamaria, so he kind of left the R&B world and started getting into the jazz scene."

His great uncle was playing in a very different setting with avant-garde jazz musicians such as Khan Jamal, Sunny Murray, and Byron Lancaster. On his mother's side, he had another uncle who worked for one of the city's popular African-American radio stations: WHAT. "Between seeing my father play with Mongo, hearing my great uncle playing with the guys from Sun Ra’s band, and then going to an R&B show, I was just surrounded by music every minute of the day.

When he was nine, McBride's mother bought him an electric bass. "I knew the minute I touched it, that’s what I was going to do for the rest of my life." His father, who was often on the road, came by to give him his first lesson, showing him how to play 'Papa Was A Rolling Stone.' "I remember thinking, 'wow, this isn’t too difficult. Show me something else.' He showed me a few more songs, and I think I had that electric bass on my body for the next three days straight."

For the next two years or so, McBride’s approach to learning was mostly picking up bass lines he could hear on the radio. When his mother saw that he'd become passionate about that instrument she made a point of sending him to Pepper Middle School, which had one of the better music programs in the city.

When it came to picking an instrument to play in the school orchestra, McBride applied the logic of an eleven-year-old, and decided it would be dumb to take up the acoustic bass. "Why would I want to play two basses, I already play the electric bass." Instead, he tried the trombone, but when he couldn't produce a single sound from the instrument, the teachers suggest he give the acoustic bass a try. After scoping out the instrument, he realized it was just the same as an electric bass, only twice as big and turned on its side, so he started playing the bass line to “Beat It,” and all the teachers looked around and said, “He can play that!" to which Christian quipped, “It’s just a big electric bass, it’s nothing.”

Shortly thereafter, McBride began his formal training on the instrument. His first teacher, Margie Keefe, was actually a cellist, but she introduced him to the beginner books like the Simandl Method and he started learning to read music and the rudiments of music theory. "Slowly but surely I fell madly in love with the acoustic bass, and I'm forever grateful that [my teacher] took that trombone out of my hands."

It was in middle school that McBride also first got into jazz. All his teachers were "professional musicians, and they would bring their Real Books to school. One of the teachers, Mark Johnson, showed me how to read a chord sheet. He brought in Satin Doll, Misty: easy songs like that, which I could pick up quickly."

Once it became apparent that McBride had taken a real interest, his great uncle called and said, “get over here right now. I’ve got something for you.” As McBride recounted, "I went over to his house, and, I’m not exaggerating, his record collection was about as big as this store. He had every record known to man, so he said, 'you know who Paul Chambers is?' 'No.' 'Well I’m going to show you right now.'”

It was 1983, and like every other eleven-year-old, McBride was listening to Michael Jackson, Prince, Cindy Lauper, and everything that was hot at the time. Unlike many jazz aficionados, who can be "dogmatic about what the music is and what other musics aren’t," McBride's great uncle was encouraging of him enjoying all different kinds of music. He remembers being told, “I know you love Michael Jackson, I know you love James Brown, Prince. They’re ‘bad’ too, but just add this on so you can see where it all comes from.” It was this strong influence that led McBride to embrace all different styles of music.

The following year, Ms. Keefe had him audition for the all-city and Settlement Music School jazz bands, which were usually reserved only for senior high school students. McBride showed an exceptional ability on the instrument though, and he made it into both.

It was in the Settlement group that he first met Joey DeFrancesco. McBride remembers, "he was a year older than me, and for the next year, we became inseparable. He was about my earliest musical compadre. We played together every day, and the way he plays now, he played like that back then."

Once they reached high school, attending Philadelphia's High School for Creative and Performing Arts, the two still felt like outsiders, listening to jazz, and constantly conversing about "the Basie band, or Lester Young, or Sarah Vaughan, or Miles, or in Joey’s case a lot of Jimmy Smith, Jack McDuff, and Charles Earland. I probably know about more organ players than I do bass players hanging out with Joey."

Soon McBride also became friends with Ahmir Thompson [commonly known as ?love, drummer of the popular hip-hop group The Roots], but the three fledgling musicians never hung as a trio. "It would have made sense that we do that, but Joey was a hard-core jazz-head, Quest, was a hardcore funk-head, and I was always caught in the middle philosophically anyway. So, I would hang and play standards with Joey, and then I’d hang with Ahmir, and we’d talk about James Brown all night long."

Around that time, McBride also began playing regular gigs with an old Philadelphia stalwart:, Joe Sudler. Sudler had actually replaced Harry Carney in the Ellington band after Carney passed away and then went on to lead a local big band in Philly, "which was like a rite of passage for all the young cats growing up in Philly. The band was mostly made up of the members of the MFSB band: guys like Zach Zachary...Uri Caine…John Swanna, Bob Howe. All of these local Philly legends were in that band, so Joe started using me just after my fourteenth birthday. It was great because it was real life. I really had to learn how to be a professional quickly. We played a lot of parties, weddings, bar mitzvahs. The experience of that band was unprecedented."

As McBride began to find success as a young musician, he had a team of mentors and teachers who helped him achieve. Among them were such respected Philadelphia educators as Lovett Hines, who drove him to and from all of the gigs with Joe Sudler's band, and Dr. George Allen, the musical director at Overbrook High School, who first introduced him to Wynton Marsalis. Then there was Robert Lamdon, the current baritone player in the Ellington band, who became McBride's "number one mentor." Lamdon turned him onto more modern jazz like Woody Shaw, Wayne Shorter, and McCoy Tyner, and helped him to remember harmonic progressions without a Real Book.

By the time McBride was graduating from high school, he found Philadelphia stultifying. "I've always said this with great trepidation, but it bothered me a lot--it still bothers me to a certain extent--that a town like Philadelphia, which has such a strong and great legacy of jazz, [was full of musicians that] to me, didn't think big. They were satisfied playing the same songs on gigs. It felt like nobody was really thinking about showing how great they really were. So, I was in Philly just biting my fingernails off just thinking, 'I can't wait to go to New York because I want to see just how good I can really be. I want to see the baddest cats who can challenge me, and make me feel bad, so I can work harder and get better.'"

In 1989, McBride moved to New York and began studying bass at Julliard with the legendary instructor Homer Mensch, but his studies were soon pushed to the backburner, as he was offered a position in Bobby Watson's band. He had been in New York for all of two weeks, "and Bobby came and literally pulled me out of school one day and said, you're working at Birdland this weekend with James Williams and Victor Lewis. I thought, 'oh man, no warm up gig, no minor league game. I got called right to the bigs.' I started working around town a lot, and needless to say, my schoolwork suffered because I'd be playing at the Village Gate, or Bradley's, or the Angry Squire till three, four o'clock in the morning, and I had to be at orchestra rehearsal at eight. It was very tough."

McBride continued to attend classes, but by the end of his freshman year, he dropped out to begin a career, working with Freddie Hubbard, Sting, Joe Henderson, Herbie Hancock, Carly Simon, James Brown, Chick Corea, and countless other luminaries.

Ray Brown was a particularly big influence. "The first time I went to see Ray Brown play live I was with Benny Green, and we went to the Blue Note. He was so nonchalant, dancing with the bass, looking around, giving verbal instructions, and he got this big fat woody sound from the instrument, which was coming mostly from the instrument, not the amplifier. He didn't seem to be straining himself, yet he was still putting a nice muscle into the instrument. That floored me. When he said he was going to put together a band specifically for myself and John Clayton called SuperBass, that was the ultimate honor. "

He is quick to point out that not all his great memories were with legends over sixty-five. "Some of my greatest moments as a musician have come with my peers. For many years, the Christian McBride Band, with Ron Blake on saxophones, Geoff Keezer on keyboards, and Terreon Gully on drums, we felt like superheroes every time we went on stage because we could morph into straight ahead guys or into grunge-rock guys in the same tune. We would all look at each other and give our Green Lantern ring flash."

Playing in Freddie Hubbard's band was a particular thrill; or, putting it in terms any ‘video gamer’ would understand, like "playing Madden for the first time on the ‘All-Madden’ level. It's like everything's moving fast, more interceptions, you can't bust those eight, nine-yard runs. You're getting stuffed at the line of scrimmage. That's what it was like playing with Freddie Hubbard. To hear somebody play a trumpet like that was just mind-boggling. You listen to him and you go, 'well, are we supposed to match that? Are we supposed to play like he plays? That's not going to happen.'"

McBride did love the challenge though. "I enjoy music that makes me sweat a little bit. I've seen a lot of musicians do this once they get to a certain place in their careers. They'll try to manage the music to make it so they don't have to work so hard. I plan on never doing that."

While he continues to challenge himself, McBride always wants to give back to others. "I always made a very conscious decision that if I was ever in a position where I could help to inspire some young teenager like all those guys did for me: that's a no brainer for me. I can't tell you how important it was when all those great Philly musicians took the time to hire me at fourteen and fifteen and let me come out there and make mistakes, and stumble, and learn, and give me another shot two, three, four, or five, or six times over. I keep them in my heart every single day, so I'm more than happy to pass that on to some up and coming cats."

Christian McBride has already established a legacy to be proud of and a lasting impression on both jazz and the larger musical world, but as he continues to challenge himself, those of us lucky enough to encounter his playing and vivacious personality should look forward to plenty more exciting projects over the years to come.

Here are some extra anecdotes from the interview, with McBride discussing moving to New York, his process for composing, and working with such jazz icons as Ron Carter, Hank Jones, Joe Henderson, and Illinois Jacquet:

This Friday @7PM: Lionel Loueke

2010-03-03T08:30:00.000-08:00

Lionel Loueke grew up in what he has described as a family of poor intellectuals in the West African country of Benin. He began playing percussion instruments around the age of 9, but was influenced by an older brother who played guitar, which he began playing himself in his late teens. It took Loueke a year to earn the $50 he needed to buy his first guitar. However, he could not afford to replace the strings, which had to be special-ordered from Nigeria. Instead, he soaked his strings in vinegar to keep them clean. When the strings broke, he had to replace them with bicycle brake cables that were very hard on his fingers. Loueke got his first professional job by accident; when a club manager heard him playing a guitar he had grabbed off the bandstand during a break and offered him work. He played African pop music, but discovered jazz when a friend returned from Paris with a copy of an album by jazz guitarist George Benson.

This inspired Loueke to study jazz in Paris. He then won a scholarship to study at the Berklee School of Music in Boston. In 2001, Loueke auditioned for the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz at the University of Southern California. He was selected in a worldwide search by a panel of judges including jazz musicians Herbie Hancock, Terence Blanchard and Wayne Shorter. He attended the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz until 2003.

In 2002, while still at the Thelonious Monk Institute, Loueke began playing with trumpeter Blanchard. Loueke was featured on two albums with Blanchard for Blue Note Records, Bounce (2003) and Flow (2005). He subsequently has had a prolific career as a sideman. He has performed on jazz pianist Herbie Hancock’s albums Possibilities (2006) and River: The Joni Letters (2007), and also worked with Kenwood Dennard, George Garzone, Bob Hurst, Alphonso Jonhson, Angelique Kidjo, Dianne Reeves, Cassandra Wilson, Wayne Shorter, Jeff 'Tain' Watts, Charlie Haden, Richard Bona, Nathan East, Vinnie Colaiuta, Marcus Miller, Sting, Brian Blade, John Patitucci, Terri Lyne Carrington, Kenny Garrett, Roy Hargrove, Santana, Dennis Chambers, Magos Herrera, and Gretchen Parlato.

Loueke formed the trio Gilfema with Massimo Biolcati (bass) and Ferenc Nemeth (drums), classmates from the Berklee College of Music, and released two albums on the ObliqSound label: Gilfema (2005), and Gilfema + 2 (2008), featuring clarinet players Anat Cohen and John Ellis. Under his own name, Loueke recorded the live album In a Trance in 2005, and Virgin Forest, which was released by ObliqSound in 2006.

Loueke made his major-label debut in 2008, when Blue Note released his album Karibu. NPR.org praised the guitarist for his fusion of traditional African music with modern jazz harmonies, unique vocal inflections, and complex time signatures. The album features Biolcati and Nemeth, as well as guest appearances by Hancock and Shorter. His latest album, Mwaliko (2010), is a collection of duo and trio performances that mixes traditional West African music and jazz. Guests include fellow Benin native Kidjo, Cameroonian bassist and singer Richard Bona, bassist Esperanza Spalding, and drummer Marcus Gilmore, doing a version of Shorter’s classic composition "Nefertiti".

In early 2008, Loueke's "Kponnon Kpété" won in The 7th Annual Independent Music Awards for Best Traditional World Song.

Jack DeJohnette: Spreading Joy Through Music

2010-01-18T10:51:00.000-08:00

Though Jack DeJohnette may be known to most as one of the preeminent jazz drummers, making notable contributions to groups led by Charles Lloyd, Miles Davis, and Keith Jarrett, he sees himself as a messenger of peace and joy. Whether on drums, piano, or any other instrument, DeJohnette would most like to give people the inspiration to relax and find happiness in life, if only for the time they’re listening.

He originally fell in love with music through his uncle, Roy Wood, one of the first African-American disc jockeys in Chicago. He fondly remembers sitting by his uncle’s Victrola: cranking it up and then dropping the needle, with an “arm that weighed about ten pounds.” They’d listen to the great big bands of Duke Ellington, Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, and Count Basie.

By the time DeJohnette was in high school, his uncle had moved to a jazz station, and he got to hear all the latest records as they came out. By that time, Jack had been singing lead in a doo-wop group, regularly competing in talent shows and playing in local dives, but he was inspired by the hip new jazz he heard through his uncle. DeJohnette remembers that back then, “it was cool to have jazz records in high school.”

As he became more invested in music, Jack found new outlets for his talent, playing piano in jazz and dance groups; and, in a real stroke of luck, the drummer from one of these bands left his kit at DeJohnette’s house once for several months, and he began to mess around on them in his spare time. He’d always been interested in the instrument and studied the drummers at jam sessions. With his interest growing, he got a few books and began to practice rudiments while watching television.

The work soon payed off as he started getting hired to play gigs on both piano and drums. It was after playing a bit with Eddie Harris that he finally decided to make drums his primary instrument. Harris told him one night after a gig, ‘you play good piano, but something else is happening on the drums. I play all the other instruments too, but I have to make one instrument be my voice. If you decide to stay with drums, make drums your main voice. You’re gonna be something and go somewhere.’

Working around Chicago and hanging at the clubs, DeJohnette took every opportunity he could to hang with the major artists who came through the city. Among these was John Coltrane, who played at a small club where DeJohnette regularly went to jam. When Elvin Jones didn’t show for the last set, the owner suggested the DeJohnette sit in. Coltrane and the other musicians didn’t bat an eye, and DeJohnette fit right in on “I Want To Talk About You” and “Mr. P.C.” During the set, he realized why Jones was so forceful on the drums, as Coltrane just “soaked up all of the energy and barreled forward like a train.” To his dismay, Jones showed up just in time to play “My Favorite Things,” thanking the young drummer for filling in.

It was Muhal Richard Abrams who pushed DeJohnette to take the leap and head to New York in 1964. As DeJohnette recalled, “a lot of people were afraid to come to New York because it was the big apple and really rough, and he just said ‘don’t worry. It’s just like Chicago, only more of it.’”

With that, DeJohnette took off on a Greyhound bus, taking only $27 and a Gretsch set of drums and cymbals with no cases. He’d initially only planned to stay for a weekend, but in that weekend, he went to Minton’s, jammed with Freddie Hubbard--whom he’d met when the Jazz Messengers came through Chicago–and was noticed by organist John Patton, who offered him a gig on the spot. With that boost to his confidence, DeJohnette felt he could make it, and decided to stay in New York indefinitely.

He became a regular at plenty of jam sessions, and as word got around that there was a hot new drummer in town, he began to get regular work. Within a few weeks, DeJohnette had enough money to get his own apartment on the Lower East Side.

His first big gig was in Jackie McLean’s band, playing week-long stands around the country in cities like Baltimore and Pittsburgh, promoting McLean’s latest record release.

DeJohnette soon got a chance to play with Coltrane’s new avant-garde group featuring Coltrane’s wife Alice, Pharoah Saunders, Jimmy Garrison, and Rasheed Ali. It was one of the most intense gigs he played in his life, and he found that Coltrane , and others of that generation, like Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, and Thelonious Monk, never gave much direction. “Not that much was talked about in the music. There was just an inner-knowing about things. The younger generation now is more accessible, but guys didn’t talk that much about it because they figured if you talked too much about it, you’d de-mystify it.”

Even on groundbreaking material like Bitches Brew, he found the music was a continual work in progress. Miles Davis would come in with a few sketches, or he’d ask DeJohnette to play a beat, and if Davis “didn’t say anything about it, it was okay. Most of the time he didn’t say anything.” Once the groove was where Davis wanted it to be, he’d direct somebody else to join in, and the music slowly came together in a free-flowing environment before being spliced into it’s final form by producer Teo Macero.

While Davis was putting together a distinct new sound, DeJohnette credited concert promoter Bill Graham for spreading their music to a wider audience by placing the Davis group on mixed bills at the Fillmore with such acts as Janis Joplin and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Then at the same time there was the advent of FM radio, which in those days was “wide open, and they started mixing up the music. They would play some Miles. They would play some Laura Nyro. They would play Jimi Hendrix.”

In fact, DeJohnette became a real admirer of the Jimi Hendrix Experience. He extolled the talents of drummer Mitch Mitchell and praised his use of brushes on tunes like “Up From The Skies,” from the Experience’s Axis: Bold As Love. He even got a chance to jam with Hendrix “about a week before the Isle of Wight,” less than a month before his death. Sadly, DeJohnette wasn’t really in the mood at the time, and he passed on the opportunity, which he has been kicking himself for ever since.

Some of DeJohnette’s most memorable music has come playing in piano trios with Bill Evans and Keith Jarrett. Having started as a pianist himself, hiring drummers to play with him, DeJohnette gained an understanding of what drummers can do for a soloist. “I kind of know what the drummer’s supposed to do, at least for myself anyway. It’s just about learning how to wait, and listen, and letting the music carry you, rather than trying to force something to happen.”

DeJohnette has also gotten into producing music through his own imprint, Golden Beams Productions. Inspired by Coltrane’s readings of Eastern philosophy and beliefs that music had a power for good, DeJohnette has used the label to put out music to be used as a healing force. “When you’re playing music, it’s more than entertainment. It has the ability to transport the player and the listener to some other places, so you can for an hour or so, relieve people of some stress and lift up their spirits through the music.”

The label has allowed DeJohnette the chance to experiment with genres and musicians he likes outside of the jazz idiom. The first of these recordings was Music In The Key Of Om, an hour-long synthesizer-driven piece, which has since been well circulated through yoga classes and hospitals throughout the country, helping people to relax. The second was Music From The Hearts Of The Masters, with Gambian kora player Foday Musa, a more groove-oriented album of duets soothing duets.

As DeJohnette continues to pursue new endeavors in music, he hopes to spread joy to all willing listeners. “If you can find a way to have joy when you make the music, you’re going to have something to give to the people to lift them up.”

Here are some extra anecdotes from the interview where Jack DeJohnette talks about playing with Sting and going to see Charles Mingus:

This Friday @ 4PM: Christian McBride

2009-12-15T08:17:00.001-08:00

Christian McBride was born on May 31, 1972 in Philadelphia. Electric bass was Christian's first instrument, which he began playing at age 9, followed by acoustic bass two years later. His first mentors on the instrument were his father, Lee Smith (a renowned bassist in Philly) and his great uncle, Howard Cooper (a disciple of the jazz avant-garde).

While intensely studying classical music, Christian's love for jazz also blossomed. Upon his 1989 graduation from Philadelphia's fertile High School for the Creative and Performing Arts (C.A.P.A.), Christian was awarded a partial scholarship to attend the world-renowned Juilliard School in New York City to study with the legendary bassist, Homer Mensch. That summer, before making the move to the Big Apple, the already in-demand bassist got his first taste of touring, going to Europe with the Philadelphia Youth Orchestra, and traveling the U.S. with the classical jazz fusion group, Free Flight.

McBride never had a chance to settle into his Juilliard studies. Within the first two weeks of the semester, he joined saxophonist Bobby Watson's band, Horizon. He also started working around New York at clubs such as Bradley's and the Village Gate with John Hicks, Kenny Barron, Larry Willis and Gary Bartz. After one year at Juilliard, McBride made a critical decision to leave school to tour with trumpeter Roy Hargrove's first band, electing "experience with as many musicians as possible" as the best teacher. In August of 1990, he landed a coveted position in trumpeter Freddie Hubbard's band, which lasted until January of 1993.

In 1991, legendary bassist Ray Brown invited the young wunderkind to join him and John Clayton in the trio SuperBass. After being hailed “Hot Jazz Artist” of 1992 by Rolling Stone, Christian continued to prove it as a member of guitarist Pat Metheny's "Special Quartet," which included drum master Billy Higgins and saxophonist Joshua Redman. While recording and touring with Redman the following year, McBride signed to Verve Records in the summer of 1994, recording his first CD as a leader, Gettin' to It. He also graced the big screen playing bass in director Robert Altman's 1940's period piece, Kansas City (1996).

Christian recorded three more career-shaping albums at Verve: Number Two Express (1996), the soul-jazz fusion project A Family Affair (1998 – featuring Christian’s first two songs as a lyricist), and the critically acclaimed SCI-FI (2000), marking the inaugural execution of Christian’s concept of music being boundless by genre. The following year, he continued to expand his audience with two endeavors. He dipped into hip hop with a side project dubbed The Philadelphia Experiment, a “jam band”-inspired CD that reunited Christian with his high school friend, drummer Ahmir “?uestlove” Thompson (leader of The Roots) and featured keyboardist Uri Caine and guitarist Pat Martino.

Later that year, pop star Sting invited Christian to become a key figure in his 2001 All This Time CD, DVD and tour. Then in 2002, Christian supported George Duke by becoming a member of his band and recording on his landmark album Face the Music: the legendary keyboardist’s first album on his own recording label, BPM. “Christian is a monster on that bass,” Duke states with pride. “It isn’t often these days to find a young musician so dedicated to his craft. Christian is my kind of musician, one that is open to new ideas, good at playing different styles, reads music prolifically and is dedicated to furthering the growth of music not only as a musician, but as a young representative of his profession. There isn’t anyone better. And besides that, he’s a great cat!”

There have been very few artists who truly embody the genuine, heart-felt passion for music in all areas as has Christian McBride. By boldly continuing to leave his mark in areas of musical performance, composition, education and advocacy, he is destined to be a force in music for decades to come.

George Garzone: Shedding New Light On Coltrane

2009-12-15T08:09:00.000-08:00

Since the landmark release of Giant Steps, musicians have struggled to explain how John Coltrane created his trademark "sheets of sound." In his new DVD, George Garzone, successfully does just that with his "triadic-chromatic" approach to improvising.

Garzone's new concept for improvisation is a product of more than twenty-five years of teaching at such institutions as the Berklee College of Music, The New England Conservatory, The Manhattan School of Music, and New York University. While his playing today may be classified as avante-garde, Garzone came from modest beginnings, learning the art of swing in the back of a pizza parlor.

Growing up in Boston, Garzone began playing to carry on the family tradition, including a fat sound that he credits as an heirloom of his Calabrian descent. His earliest influence was his Uncle Rocco, a successful tenor saxophonist who'd worked in various big bands during the thirties and forties but gave up music to settle down. In order to support his family, Rocco set up a pizza shop, (Rocco’s Pizza, located at Norfolk and Geneva in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood,) which went on to become a Boston institution unto itself.

George would come by every week, and his uncle would school him in the fundamentals of music, and introduce him to artists like Stan Getz, but it was the Italian culture of romantic music, which so influenced the "family sound" he inherited. Garzone still repeats the words of his uncle, who spoke of "romancing the instrument" and “sensualizing the sound.” As he told the audience, the "sound comes from life experience," likening his uncle's vibrato to something "that you could cut cheese with.”

Eventually, Uncle Rocco realized that his student had outgrown his instruction, and convinced his old friend Joe Viola to take the 15 year-old under his wing. Viola had founded the Berklee College of Music’s Woodwind Department, and taught only their most advanced students, but the relationship was immediately fruitful. “Joe was a guru,” Garzone said. “You could learn just by sitting next to him.”

Garzone officially enrolled at Berklee in 1968, encountering young hotshots like Kenny Werner, Dave Liebman and Steve Grossman, but it was a seventeen year-old Joe Lovano who really blew him away. He first saw Lovano playing in Herb Pomeroy’s band, and recalled, "I never heard anyone play like that before. Joe was playing, and we all left literally crying. I was in tears because I had never experienced music like that."

Shortly thereafter, the two were practicing Coltrane's "Giant Steps" in adjacent practice rooms at Berklee when Lovano literally kicked open the door and grilled him, asking, 'man, what are you practicing?' Garzone, stumped for how to respond, replied with the same question, at which point Lovano introduced himself, beginning a lifelong friendship.

A few years later, fresh out of college, Garzone went on tour with Tom Jones, stopping in Cleveland, where Lovano invited him over to his family's house for a wonderful Italian meal. Garzone "can still smell the tomato sauce" from when he walked in the door.

After the large meal, Garzone was ready to plop on the couch and watch television, but Lovano invited him down to the basement where they jammed along with Lovano's father, "Big T," one of Cleveland's top tenor players. "It was Joe on one side and Big T on the other. We started playing bebop tunes and blues, and they were so intense that they just squeezed me out of there. I couldn't hang with it, and I watched father and son go at it. It was a spectacular moment for me, to see something like that: dad and son, schooling the kid."

After a year in Tom Jones' band, Garzone was stuck back in Boston and in need of work. There he formed his long-running band, The Fringe, with drummer Bob Gullotti and bassist John Lockwood, who also got him a gig teaching at Berklee in the ensemble department.

Eventually he worked his way into teaching saxophone department, and there he began to develop his triadic chromatic approach to improvisation. "This concept, the triadic-chromatic approach, is really coming from Coltrane, but it's something the students really helped me develop because they would come and listen to my band The Fringe every week, improvising freely, and they would ask me, 'how do we do this?' So I had to figure out how I could give them a very layman's version of how to do something that I didn't even know how to do."

As Garzone's reputation grew, he began teaching at multiple institutions in New York and Boston on a weekly basis. It was in his regular drives between the two cities that Garzone listened more closely to Coltrane and discovered "subliminal messages that he left in his improvisation that were very triad-oriented."

Teaching at these schools, Garzone worked with many young virtuosos, whom he needed to give new material to. "When you have students like Mark Turner, Seamus Blake, Donny McAslin, Branford Marsalis, they're already playing, so you need to go in and find something that challenges them, and that's what I did through figuring out this concept because of these high-level players I've had. These kids can really play. Especially today, I'm dealing with people that can go neck and neck with me on a gig, but the only thing that gets them is this: major triads with half-steps in between, random inversions, don't repeat yourself. That gets them."

It was one student, guitarist Chris Crocco, who really pushed Garzone to clearly formulate and organize his triadic chromatic approach. Crocco studied with Garzone every week for seven years during the nineties, and in Garzone's estimation, he is the only other person, besides himself, who is really fluent in the triadic chromatic vocabulary. The two demonstrate and outline this concept in a brilliant lesson format on Garzone's new DVD: The Music Of George Garzone & The Triadic Chromatic Approach.

While his name may not ring out in the pantheon of jazz tenor players in the way that John Coltrane's does, Garzone's influence on the jazz scene, through the proliferation of his ideas, is immeasurable.

George Garzone plays the standard "I Want To Talk About You," inspired by John Coltrane's rendition, and then speaks about his approach to saxophone and unraveling Coltrane.

This Friday @ 7PM: Jack DeJohnette

2009-11-30T17:06:00.000-08:00

Born in Chicago in 1942, Jack DeJohnette is widely regarded as one of jazz music's greatest drummers. He began studying classical piano at the age four, continuing until he was fourteen before starting to play drums with his high school concert band.

In his early years on the Chicago scene, he led his own groups and was equally in demand as a pianist and as a drummer. He played R & B, hard bop, and avant-garde and was active with the experimentalists of the AACM in its early days, with the likes of founder Muhal Richard Abrams, Roscoe Mitchell, and Joseph Jarman. In 1966, he drummed alongside Rashied Ali in the John Coltrane Quintet.

International recognition came with his tenure in the Charles Lloyd Quartet, one of the first jazz groups to receive cross-over attention, also alerting the world to Keith Jarrett's skills. Jack DeJohnette has collaborated with most of the major figures in jazz history including John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, Sonny Rollins, Sun Ra, Jackie McLean, Thelonious Monk, Bill Evans, Stan Getz, Keith Jarrett, Chet Baker, George Benson, Stanley Turrentine, Ron Carter, Lee Morgan, Charles Lloyd, Herbie Hancock, Dave Holland, Joe Henderson, Freddie Hubbard, Abbey Lincoln, Betty Carter and Eddie Harris, who is responsible for convincing DeJohnette to stick with drums because he heard DeJohnette's natural talent.

It was in 1968 that DeJohnette joined Miles Davis's group in time for the epochal upheaval marked by Bitches Brew, an album that changed the direction of jazz. In his autobiography, Miles Davis said, "Jack DeJohnette gave me a deep groove that I just loved to play over."

Miles also brought about collaborations with John McLaughlin, Chick Corea and Dave Holland. In 1968 he recorded his first album as a leader on the Milestone label, called The DeJohnette Complex, where Jack played melodica along with his mentor Roy Haynes on drums.

Jack began to record as a leader for ECM, with each of his successive groups Directions, New Directions, and Special Edition making important contributions to the evolution of jazz. The New Directions band featured two musicians who would have long-term associations with DeJohnette: John Abercrombie and Lester Bowie. A friend from his Chicago days, Bowie played intermittently with DeJohnette until the end of his life. Most notably, Lester and Jack collaborated on a duo album called Zebra, which was a world beat influenced video soundtrack and CD.

While continuing to lead his own projects and bands, DeJohnette has also been a 25-year member of the immensely popular Keith Jarrett/Gary Peacock/Jack DeJohnette Trio and appeared on more ECM albums than any other musician.

DeJohnette’s latest release is Peace Time, an hour-long continuous piece of music composed and performed by Jack: “flights of flute, soft hand drumming and the gently percolating chime of cymbal play, moving the piece along a river of meditative delight. Subdued layers of overtone singing and the distant drones of sitars waft in and out like comforting and familiar spirit guides that manifest themselves in sound.” (eMusic)

Here is a clip of Jack DeJohnette playing with Keith Jarrett and Gary Peacock in 1985:

John Abercrombie: Searching For A Sound

2009-11-25T13:34:00.000-08:00

John Abercrombie took quite a while to find his way in the musical world. A defining artist of the ECM record label, best known for his work with Billy Cobham , but growing up in Greenwich, Connecticut in the 1950's, it wasn't until around the age of nine that he started consciously listening to music.

It would be several more years before he discovered jazz, but he was first drawn to artists like Fats Domino and Chuck Berry. Years later he realized a connection. ”The thing about that music that I always found interesting was, when I went back to it, years later, I still found that I liked it because there was something still connected to jazz about it that I thought later music wasn’t. Some of the players were really good. Some were probably aspiring jazz players at the time and they wound up in these rhythm and blues bands.”

Right from the start, Abercrombie found he was particularly “attracted to the sound of the electric guitar... I didn’t know the difference between an electric and acoustic guitar. I didn’t even know what electricity was, but I know there was something about the electric guitar, or that sound I was hearing on records that drew me in.”

Noticing his interest, John’s parents bought him a cheap acoustic guitar for forty-nine dollars, but the steel strings always hurt his fingers. He says it was such an awful instrument that he "actually used it to play baseball a few times. I didn’t have a bat; 'well, I’ll use my guitar.'”

Surprisingly, Abercrombie's first encounters with jazz came through the Perry Como television program. Como “was a very low-key kind of a singer. He looked like he was going to die as he was singing. He was beyond mellow, but he had kind of a nice quality to his voice, and there was always a section of his show that was called ‘Dear Perry: Dear Perry would you be so kind to fill a request and sing the song I like best.’
Perry would waddle out, and behind him there was a guitar player on a stool with just a Gibson guitar plugged into an amplifier, and the guy was Tony Mottola.”

What grabbed John’s attention was the pretty chords that Mottola was playing, and he asked his teacher to show him what he was hearing. Note for note, he learned chord-melody renditions of standards like "Tenderly" and "Misty." He recalled that, he didn’t really know what he was doing, “but, like most guitar players, I just knew that if I put my fingers like this, and I did that, I got a sound.”

Eventually, jazz came along as a revelation when some friends played him Barney Kessel. To John’s ear, Kessel's bluesy bebop wasn't a big stretch from the Chuck Berry licks he was familiar with. From there came the music of Dave Brubeck and Miles Davis, which he found equally inspiring.

As the 1960's began, Abercrombie started making regular pilgrimages to New York to see jazz at the legendary Birdland club, even though sometimes he wasn’t quite ready for what he was hearing. Once he saw a double bill of the Bill Evans Trio (possibly with Scott LaFaro) and the John Coltrane Quintet with Eric Dolphy in 1961, and John remembers thinking at the time that Evans was "too tinkly: like cocktail lounge music," while Coltrane was "too far out." Of course, later on, both became great influences of his.

Abercrombie's first serious study of jazz came at the Berklee School of Music, where he worked with first-year teacher Jack Peterson. Just as John was trying to find his way in the music, Peterson was still searching for the best way to teach. "He was kind of scatter-brained as a teacher because it was his first year of teaching, and it was my first year of learning," but each week, the two would get together and Peterson would tell him, 'well, I don't know what to show you Johnny. Here, try this.'

The next week, Abercrombie would come back and say 'I tried this,' and Peterson would reply 'oh, forget about that. Look at this thing. Have you seen this thing by Ravel?'

Every week was a new adventure, but Abercrombie was making progress and getting exposed to new kinds of music and new schools of thought.

By his second year of college he was gigging regularly with a variety of groups, playing mostly incidental music at restaurants and lounges. There was one memorable stint with a Tijuana-styled brass band where he’d have to dress up in an outlandish frilly yellow outfit. He recalled the bass player joking one night, 'I feel like an explosion on the surface of the sun.'

Eventually, John got to be a regular at a supper club named Paul's Mall, which featured a range of acts including singers, dancers, and comedians. The club was right next to Boston's famous Jazz Workshop, and was owned by the same person, so Abercrombie would take his breaks, walk through the kitchen, and take in a set by John Coltrane or Horace Silver.

It was rare for the kitchen traffic to go the other way, as most of the touring groups never bothered to see what was going on at Paul's Mall, but John remembers the Brecker Brothers stepping in one night during a break in their sets with Silver's band. As Abercrombie recalls, "they liked something they heard, and they invited me to come to New York and audition for a fusion band called Dreams."

He landed that gig, and started making regular trips down to work in New York, gradually meeting more and more of the top musicians on the jazz scene. He took a job with Chico Hamilton, playing in the breaks at a discotheque for two or three months, and though it might not sound like much, it afforded Abercrombie the chance to take his "girlfriend, guitar, and one pair of shoes" down to New York.

John finally made the move there in 1970, got a place in the East Village, and it marked a turning point in his career. As he happily told the audience, "once I moved to New York, I never played another wedding or bar mitzvah."

From there, everything he did was either in the jazz idiom or influenced by it. As Abercrombie recalls, "it was a different time than it is now. There really wasn't a lot of competition for what people wanted me to do. It was the seventies, so it was the Mahavishnu Orchestra time. Everybody wanted to make a record that sounded kind of like Mahavishnu, and there weren't that many guitar players who could sort of cover that--believe it or not. Not that I could, but it was myself, Joe Beck, Sam Brown, and Steve Khan.”

As Abercrombie remembers it, those four guitarists found themselves on nearly every record date because “there was just nobody else. We were the only guys that could sort of cover that [sound,] yet still understood harmony and were more or less jazz musicians. We were just trying to break in, make a living, and meet people, and this is what we got hired to do."

While it might have been a chance to play, learn, and grow, it was not a period John sees as a proud achievement in music. "I think I did some of the worst recordings known to man from about 1968 to 1973." Years later, he heard the late Joe Beck recall the same thing, telling Abercrombie “I made so many shitty records back in the seventies.” The two vowed to someday get together, dredge up all of the horrible music, and see who actually won. Sadly, Beck passed away before that could happen.

Still, those times weren't all bad. "It was kind of fun. In those days, you almost couldn't take it seriously. We were [serious,] but when I go back and listen to some of that stuff I realize we sucked and a lot of the music that was being played sucked, but that was just the times. The sessions were done so quickly and so haphazardly that they couldn't possibly have turned out that well. I think there was something about this fusion kind of music that, this done-in-a-day session didn't work. The music needed more production to make it sound halfway decent."

Besides the production methods, Abercrombie felt the music was "a little superficial. You never heard a drummer go ding-dinga-ding and try to play a swing jazz feel. You never played with an acoustic bass player, and you never played over chord changes, except one."

Abercrombie was getting regular paychecks, playing on a lot of recording dates, but his stature on the national stage really took off when he joined Billy Cobham's band. Abercrombie and Cobham had worked together in Dreams, Cobham moving on to become a founding member of the Mahavishnu Orchestra, and this new group would continue in that vein. Abercrombie felt the music was "quite good," and said Cobham was "a force to be dealt with, and I loved playing with him."

In those years, Cobham’s band was playing arenas and opening for acts like the Doobie Brothers, The Average White Band, and Chicago. The pay was great, and, "you were on a retainer too, so they would give you money for even the weeks you didn't work. It wasn't a lot, but it was enough to keep you going, and you didn't have to find a whole lot of other gigs. You were kind of always on call."

"It just felt really unreal in a way. When you start to play for that many people in those kind of venues, something happens, and there's just no audience contact. You just see these thousands of people out there and there's no connection, and the kind of music you're playing is so loud that there's no intimacy, there's no interaction going on that I was interested in. It was a physically fun music to play. It was more physical than anything. You just felt good to try and play fast, and then Billy was so amazing, he could make anything I played sound good."

After a while, though, Abercrombie began to feel like something was missing. There was very little harmony and no swing feel in the music. "I finally realized this isn't what I set out to do... After years of not getting to do [the kind of music] I had originally fallen in love with, I realized I had to do something, and I had a savior. His name was Jack DeJohnette."

Though they’d never met, DeJohnette had heard of Abercrombie, and called him out of the blue to play some music. Abercrombie went to Jack's house in New Jersey where they played outdoors under the trees with bassist Miroslav Vitous. Saxophonist Steve Marcus, who lived across the valley, heard the music and walked across the field to come play with them as well.

His work with DeJohnette led to a chance meeting with Ralph Towner, one of the pioneers of ECM, who introduced him to Manfred Eicher, founder and owner of the European record label. On his first encounters with the label, Abercrombie said, "I was amazed that this kind of music existed. This was something completely different. It wasn't ding-dinga-ding jazz, and it wasn't bebop. This was something else that I didn't quite know what it was. I was transfixed. I loved the music, but I was also mystified. I felt stronger classical influences and folk influences and things that I hadn't dealt with yet. I was still dealing with earlier jazz and then fusion jazz, and then, just coming out of that, trying to find my way, all of a sudden I heard all this stuff, with strings, and it wasn't chord-change oriented at all."

The new music was revelatory for Abercrombie, and he recorded his first album for ECM in 1974. That record, Timeless, featuring DeJohnette and former Mahavishnu keyboardist Jan Hammer, was received incredibly well.

The music Abercrombie was exposed to through ECM opened up new possibilities. As he said, "I was getting in touch with different ways to play improvised music. Yeah, there was swing music, there was Dixieland, and there was bebop, and whatever Miles did, and then here were all these guys without that American tradition, but they'd listen to American jazz. They'd play some of it, but they were also writing their own music, and some of it didn't sound anything like what we do, yet they were improvising, and they were playing, and it sounded really good to me, so I got thrown into some of those situations."

Abercrombie is still very proud of his relationship with the Manfred Eicher and ECM. As he told the audience, "that label has persevered for forty years. That's amazing. There's not many labels that can attest to having this longevity, and also with the kind of music Manfred puts out, it's not, and never has been geared towards the mainstream."

Abercrombie has been a part of ECM for most of those forty years, and his recently released album, Wait Till You See Her, marks his twenty-seventh effort for the label as a leader.

He was eager to talk about the new project where he worked with violinist Mark Feldman. As he pointed out though, "it doesn't have as much to do with Stephane Grappelli and Django Reinhardt as somebody might think. As much as I like that music, that was not the inspiration for this particular band. This was more, thinking of Mark Feldman's pure beautiful sound to play my melodies."

Wait ‘Til You See Her, marks the fourth record with this lineup which includes Joey Barron on drums and Thomas Morgan on bass. "They were all done with about one rehearsal: one three-hour rehearsal. Then we head into the studio and take two days to record it, one day to mix. We have a pretty good idea of how we're going to approach a tune, but that can change in the studio because nothing's written in stone. It's a lot of improvising going around all over the place, not only from the musicians, but also the recording engineer, Manfred, and the producer. Everyone's involved when we do one of these records, which is really nice because I've done plenty of record dates where no one's involved."

Over the years, Eicher has given Abercrombie the freedom to experiment, but always pushed him to find sounds that came to define the ECM style.

John has always gravitated to guitarists like Wes Montgomery and Jim Hall because their notes seemed to sing a little more. In his own sound, Abercrombie was much more reliant on his equipment to develop a unique singing voice though. As he said, "I see the guitar and the amplifier as one."

"Basically the guitar is a piece of lumber. Some are made of a little better lumber than others, but it almost doesn't matter. Once you put an electronic pickup in the guitar, and you have a cable, and you plug it into an amplifier that sits outside of you, your sound's coming out of there... I can understand why the rock 'n' roll players need to use stacks of Marshall amps. This gives them what they want. They need to play that loud. They have to. That's part of the sound. I didn't need to play that loud, but I needed a sound, so I just had to try different things until I came up with it. I realized the guitar was the least important part in my sound. A lot of the possibilities come from whether it's just a single amplifier with no reverberation, or whether it's a stack of Marshalls, or whether it's some sophisticated setup."

It may have taken John Abercrombie some time to find his place in the musical world, but he’s certainly left his imprint on jazz. His unique voice on the guitar can be heard on well over 200 recordings, but he’s far from finished saying his piece.

Here are some excerpts of John Abercrombie speaking at the interview:

This Friday @ 7PM: George Garzone

2009-11-18T06:34:00.000-08:00

George Garzone (born September 23, 1950) is a renowned saxophonist and jazz educator residing in the Boston, Massachusetts area.

Garzone is a member of The Fringe, a jazz trio founded in 1972 that includes bassist John Lockwood and drummer Bob Gullotti, that performs regularly in the Boston area and has toured world wide. The group has released several albums. A veteran jazzman, Garzone has appeared on over 20 recordings.

He began playing the tenor saxophone when he was six, played in a family band and attended music school in Boston. In addition Garzone has guested in many situations, touring Europe with Jamaaladeen Tacuma and performing with Danilo Perez, Joe Lovano, Jack DeJohnette, Rachel Z and John Patitucci among others.

Garzone has pioneered the triadic chromatic approach and students of his have included Joshua Redman, Branford Marsalis, Teadross Avery, Luciana Souza, Mark Turner, Donny McCaslin and Danilo Pérez, to name a few.

In 1995 he recorded a fine tribute to Stan Getz on NYC called Alone; Four's and Two's followed a year later with compatriot Joe Lovano, which earned him four stars in Downbeat magazine, and in 1999, Garzone returned with Moodiology. Fringe in New York was released in summer 2000.

Garzone is a member of the Grammy-winning Joe Lovano Nonet, and performed and recorded with this group at the Village Vanguard in September 2002.

Here is a clip of Garzone playing with The Fringe in 2006:

Benny Golson: Exceeding Even His Own Expectations

2009-11-13T13:21:00.000-08:00

To the average person, Benny Golson might be most recognized as “that guy who appeared in the end of that Tom Hanks movie.” This would, of course, be a reference to the cameo Golson made as himself in the pinnacle scene of Steven Spielberg’s 2004 feature, The Terminal. To jazz enthusiasts though, he is known as the man behind such standards as “Killer Joe,” “I Remember Clifford,” “Along Came Betty,” “Stablemates,” “Are You Real?,” and “Whisper Not,” while establishing a unique voice as a tenor saxophonist in such groups as Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, the Dizzy Gillespie Big Band, and his own Jazztet with Art Farmer.

When he first began playing music, Golson did not foresee a career in the jazz world though. At the age of nine, Golson started playing classical piano, and for the next five years, he “went at it assiduously.” He hoped to become a concert pianist, which, of course, “got a few chuckles in the ghetto. You know, everybody’s playing the blues but I’m talking about Chopin.”

It wasn’t until he was a teenager that Golson was converted to jazz. As he recalls, he went to see Lionel Hampton at the Earle Theater. At that point, Golson had never seen a live band and “it was so exciting. It was like a whole revelation. Something new was happening to me... I was like a Beatles groupie, but silently, ‘cause my heart was pounding and I was bungee-jumping and sky-diving inside.”

As the curtains opened, saxophonist Ornette Cobb walked towards the front of the stage to take a solo, and Golson recalls, “when he started playing this solo, right there the piano started to fade.”

From that point, Golson was hooked, and after doing his homework everyday, he would “turn on the radio and listen for saxophone solos.”

Golson may have been a real innovator in terms of listening technique though. He recalls that in science class one time, his teacher hit a tuning-fork, and then placed it on his forehead. He was amazed to find how the sound enveloped him, so he found a way to listen to records with that same intensity, placing the stylus from the phonograph in his teeth, which he then dropped to the record surface. Golson told the audience, “I think I discovered stereo because man, that band jumped in my head.”

He had one problem though: synchronization. It took some work to move with the record at the right speed, but once he got it, he started showing some of his friends. Golson remembers, “we could always tell who was doing that because they came out on the scene with smudges on their faces.”

His mother soon caught on to his appreciation for saxophone and asked him whether he wanted to play one. Golson said “yes,” so she continued, ‘well, what kind would you like?’ At the time, he did not know the correct nomenclature, so he told her, “the kind that’s got the curve in it,” referring to the tenor.

Golson recalls that his family “was still on welfare,” but the next day, his mother came home carrying a long case in her hand. He was hoping maybe he’d get “an old, dirty, greasy” saxophone from the pawn shop, but when she opened the case it was a brand new tenor. The only problem was, he thought it would come together, but the instrument came in a set of pieces.
Thoroughly confused, Golson’s mother suggested they take the instrument down to a neighbor who played the saxophone. After he had demonstrated how to put the instrument together, the neighbor put on a recording of Duke Ellington playing “Main Stem,” and he proceeded to play along with Ben Webster’s solo. Golson couldn’t believe the sounds coming out of his own saxophone.

The neighbor then handed the instrument to Golson, who had no idea what to do, and he remembers it sounding like “an animal being led to slaughter.” Being that it was summer, when he started to practice his saxophone everyday, all of the windows were open, and he recalls, “everybody on the block could hear me, and everybody wanted to kill me.”

Before long, he gained a reputation as a saxophonist though, and he knew he was getting better when he would go to the market and people would ask whether he knew “Stardust” and “Don’t Blame Me.” In order to get the neighborhood on his side, while he was “doing all of the horrible stuff,” he learned the melodies to those tunes.

Golson learned those pieces, but he was more interested in emulating his idols, including Don Byas, Ben Webster, and Coleman Hawkins. In particular, he remembers transcribing Hawkins’ hit recording of “Body & Soul” from 1939. Hawkins became one of his greatest influences, and Golson learned this solo so well, he ended up playing it at several school functions. He gained a reputation as the kid who played “Body & Soul.”

As he got older, Golson became close friends with John Coltrane, another young musician in Philadelphia, and the two worked together to figure out the music scene. Golson remembers they went to see Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie play in town once, and Parker “was so different.” They went to get his autograph and then walked with him to another gig he had at a jazz club three or four blocks away. Coltrane carried Parker’s case on the left, and Golson walked along the right quizzing Parker about what kind of horn he used, “what kind of reed, what kind of mouthpiece.”

The two starstruck teens went home and tried to mimic what Parker was doing with a new reed and mouthpiece. Coltrane called up Golson a few weeks later asking, “did anything happen?” Golson said, “no,” and Coltrane replied, “me neither.” Looking back, Golson said, I guess it “was more than the mouthpiece and the reed, but he was playing so different, I didn’t try to grasp the style, it just sort of opened my mind up to other possibilities.”

Not long after, the two fledgling musicians drove up to New York for the first time. They figured they would see famous people everywhere, but they could not pick out a single recognizable person on the street, so they thought they’d head up to the Apollo Theater. Unfortunately, it happened to be a rhythm and blues revue that night.

Just when they were about to give up hope, Golson spotted Thelonious Monk walking down the street towards them. The two looked at each other, struggling to think what they might say to him when he passed. Golson, sixteen at the time, figured he was hip, so he took the appropriate stance, dropping his right shoulder and letting his arm dangle by his side. When Monk finally approached, Golson asked, “Mr. Monk, can you tell us where something is happening?” Monk scoped out the two and then replied, ‘you kids are too young to be messing with dope.’

Afraid he’d blew his chance, Golson inquired, “no, we want to see the musicians,” to which Monk replied, “you’re not going to see the musicians. Everybody’s sleeping. They worked last night.’

Golson and Coltrane returned to Philadelphia, a bit disappointed at their lost opportunity, but when all of their friends asked ‘what happened?’ Golson would told them, “yeah we went up to New York. We were hanging out with Monk.’

Back home, they still had trouble sometimes getting recognized for their talents. They thought they were doing well playing for a local group called Jimmy Johnson and the Ambassadors, but one night, Johnson sent his son over to tell the two saxophonists their gig that night was cancelled. Golson’s mother, realizing that the job couldn’t have possibly been cancelled only two hours in advance of the show encouraged them to head down to the theater anyways and see if it had gone on without them. Sure enough it had, and the two sulked back to Golson’s house. Golson told the audience he was just about ready to cry—although he and Coltrane were “too hip to cry in front of each other”—but his mother was waiting there to comfort them, and she told the boys, ‘don’t worry, one day the two of you will be so good they won’t be able to afford you.’

Only a few years later, the two would indeed make their mark on the jazz world. At the recommendation of Philly Joe Jones, Coltrane was called up to join Miles Davis’ band. About a week after Coltrane went up to New York to start rehearsing, he called on Golson to see if he had some tunes, as Davis was short on material. Golson had a knack for writing even then, and he’d been handing pieces out to people whenever he had the chance. He did not want to be too cocky though, so he just sent up one new composition of his, which had an odd lilt to it. To Golson’s shock, Davis ended up recording this piece, the now standard, “Stablemates.”

This was quite a boon for Golson, as many of the people whom he’d given charts too before realized they had other compositions by this young writer who was recorded by Davis, and he started to gain a reputation as a budding composer.

According to Coltrane, Davis really dug the new tune, but years later, Golson got to meet Davis himself, at which point Davis simply asked him, “what were you smoking when you wrote that?”

Golson was restless to get out of Philadelphia himself, so he took the first gig he could find that would get him on the road, joining Bull Moose Jackson and his Bufallo Bearcats, a rhythm and blues group in which Tadd Dameron was playing piano at the time. Dameron took Golson under his wing, teaching him some of his thought process behind composition and arranging. Before too long, fans began giving credit to Dameron for Golson’s arrangements, as he so matched his style. Golson happily told the audience, “I owe my beginnings as a composer to Tadd Dameron.”

It may have been a small beginning, but this got Golson well on his way, and throughout the 1950's he had the opportunity to play as a sideman in several notable groups, such as Lionel Hampton’s Jazz Orchestra, the Dizzy Gillespie Big Band, and Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, where he brought in several fellow young Philadelphians, Lee Morgan, Bobby Timmons, and Jymie Merrit.

Speaking about Blakey, Golson told the crowd Art was “the biggest liar in the world, but the best drummer I’ve ever played with in my whole life. That man did not know how not to swing, and he was didactic. He was a natural teacher: intuitive. He was not academic, but he knew all the right things. He just had the ability to swing, and he could sound like Art Blakey no matter whose drums he was playing and whose cymbals he was using.”

In the early 1960’s, a few years after leaving Blakey’s group, Golson decided to put together a sextet with Art Farmer that eventually became know as the Jazztet. It was Golson’s responsibility to bring in the piano player, so he called a young guy he’d heard down in Philadelphia recently: McCoy Tyner, who was himself eager to hit the road at that time.

As Tyner drove up to New York for the first time though, his car broke down on the New Jersey Turnpike. Golson did not have a car at the time, so he couldn’t meet him, but he called a friend to go pick him up. Eventually Tyner made it and played with the Jazztet for about a year, but it was John Coltrane who had been gracious enough to pick up Tyner in the middle of New Jersey, and before long, Tyner left to join Coltrane’s group.

Looking back, Golson is happy that Tyner went to play with Coltrane though, because with “the way McCoy was playing, he really belonged with John Coltrane.”

As the 1960’s progressed, Golson started working more on orchestration under the tutelage of Henry Bryant. He did not have much use for it on the New York jazz scene, but soon Quincy Jones and Oliver Nelson convinced Golson to join them out in Hollywood, working in the movie business. Before long, he was writing music for such landmark television programs as Mission: Impossible, The Partridge Family, and M*A*S*H.

In fact, it was because he lived in Los Angeles that Golson became subject for The Terminal. When the project was first proposed to him, he was a little leery. He’d auditioned for movies a few times before. Twice Woody Allen had asked him to come play a part, but each time he got to the audition and found it was a cattle-call, which left a bad impression.

Spielberg specifically sought out Golson though. In the film, Golson plays the only person from the famous photograph “A Great Day In Harlem,” which the main character, played by Tom Hanks, does not have the autograph of. He is seeking out Golson to complete his collection. As Golson told the audience though, “at that time, Sonny Rollins was still alive, Hank Jones, Horace Silver, Marian McPartland, Johnny Griffith.” He had to ask Spielberg, “why me?”

Spielberg had plenty of people he could have used to fill the role, but he told Golson he had wanted to use him because he used to go and see him play when he was a student at California State University Long Beach. Golson was surprised to find that Spielberg and Hanks loved jazz as much as he did, and he continues to keep in touch with both of them.

It is safe to say that Golson’s mother made a fair prediction as to the careers of those two teenage boys. John Coltrane, of course, went on to redefine the direction of jazz with touchstone albums such as Giant Steps, My Favorite Things, and A Love Supreme, creating his famous sheets of sound, and giving prominence to the free jazz movement. Golson, oddly, the more talkative of the two, took a quieter route to the top, but he has nonetheless made a profound mark on jazz with both his compositions and blissful tenor playing. Golson himself has become an idol to which others aspire to follow.

This Friday @ 7PM: John Abercrombie

2009-11-11T08:39:00.000-08:00

Over a career spanning more than 40 years and nearly 50 albums, John Abercrombie has established himself as one the masters of jazz guitar. Favoring unusual sounds (he played electronic mandolin on McCoy Tyner's 1993 album 4x4) and nontraditional ensembles, Abercrombie is a restless experimenter, working firmly in the jazz tradition while pushing the boundaries of meter and harmony.

Born on December 16, 1944 in Port Chester, New York, Abercrombie grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, where he began playing the guitar at age 14. Like many teenagers at the time, he started out imitating Chuck Berry licks. But it was the bluesy music of Barney Kessel that attracted him to jazz. Abercrombie enrolled at Boston's Berklee College of Music and teamed up with other students to play local clubs and bars. One of those clubs, Paul's Mall, was connected to a larger club next door, the Jazz Workshop, where Abercrombie ducked in during his free time to watch John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk.

Abercrombie's appearances at Paul's Mall led to several fortuitous meetings. Organist Johnny Hammond Smith spotted the young Abercrombie and invited him to go on tour while he was still a student. During the same period, Abercrombie also met the Brecker Brothers, who invited him to become a new part of their group Dreams, which would become one the prominent jazz-rock bands of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Abercrombie appears on the group's eponymous debut album.

After graduating from Berklee, Abercrombie headed to New York, where he quickly became one of New York's most in-demand session players. He recorded with Gil Evans, Gato Barbieri, and Barry Miles, to name a few, and he was also a regular with Chico Hamilton's group.

It was in Billy Cobham's band, which also featured the Brecker brothers, that Abercrombie first started to build a following though. He was featured on several of Cobham's albums, including Crosswinds, Total Eclipse, and Shabazz, all of which staked new ground in fusion jazz. The group was booked into large concert halls and arenas, appearing on bills with such top rock attractions as the Doobie Brothers. It was not, however, the direction Abercrombie had hoped his career would go. "One night we appeared at the Spectrum in Phildelphia and I thought, what am I doing here?" he said. "It just didn't compute."

In the early 1970s, Abercrombie ran into Manfred Eicher, who invited him to record for ECM. The result was Abercrombie's first solo album, Timeless, in which he was backed by Jan Hammer and Jack DeJohnette. Abercrombie's second album, Gateway, was released in November 1975 with DeJohnette and bassist Dave Holland; a second Gateway recording was released in June 1978.

Abercrombie continued on this path, playing in a variety of settings for ECM over the next 30 years, recording with the likes of Ralph Towner, Peter Erskine, George Mraz, Adam Nussbaum, and Joey Barron, continually pushing the boundaries of jazz and music as a whole.

Here is a clip of Abercrombie playing with the Kenny Wheeler Quintet, also featuring Peter Erskine (drums), John Taylor (piano), and Palle Danielsson (bass).

Lenny Pickett: Pushing The Boundaries Of Music

2009-11-06T11:38:00.000-08:00

For Lenny Pickett, the path to success and notoriety as director of the Saturday Nigh Live band was not at all clear, but the experiences he gathered along the way helped to shape a very unique musician who consequently redefined the role of the saxophone in popular music. Over the course of his career, he has played with such diverse acts as David Bowie, Frankie Valley, Meatloaf, The Talking Heads, Elton John, The Rolling Stones, Cindy Lauper, and Paul McCartney, often as a member of the Tower Of Power Horns. It has been a career that has often lacked definition, but in Pickett’s opinion, that’s exactly the way it should be.

His first musical inspiration came from an Art Linkletter television program. Picket remembers “the theme song had a clarinet in it.” He was drawn to the sound of that instrument, and so he told his parents he wanted to play it, only at the time, he didn’t know what it was called. He recalls it having that “sort of oodly oodly sound,” so he called it the “oodlehorn.” Of course, nobody around him knew what he was talking about, so several years went by before, in elementary school, he was demonstrated all of the instruments. When it came to clarinet, he knew it was “that one. That’s the sound I want to play, so I got my folks to rent me a clarinet for a while and proceeded from there.”

Pickett’s parents, who split when he was young, exposed him to a broad range of music. His father “was never a musician, he was a mathematician, but he felt like classical music was something he should like.” On the other hand, his mother, a beatnik, “lived a sort of bohemian existence.” At her house, Pickett would always find “jazz on the radio,” and she would take him to barbecues where they listened to R&B. She would take him to poetry readings and jazz festivals, and at the age of eight, he saw John Handy play at Stern Grove in San Francisco.

At the time, Pickett did not see himself as a musician. “I just was aware that they existed.” This would begin to change when his mother remarried to a jazz musician. His new stepfather would encourage Pickett to practice. Before long, Pickett would accompany him to jam sessions, playing with people who may not have been “well known, but they understood the music as well as anybody did.” On one particular occasion, when Pickett was thirteen, he remembers improvising together with the other musicians and thinking, “you know what? I can’t ever do anything else. This is my universe from now on.”

In junior high school, Pickett had a teacher who could sense he was looking for something in music, and she let him take home a tenor saxophone the summer after 8th grade. When he first started playing the instrument though, he tried to use his clarinet technique, forcing the instrument to “do things that it really wasn’t intended to do.” This led to Pickett’s comfort playing in the altissimo register of the instrument, a unique quality that set him apart throughout his career.

A few years later, his mother moved to a new neighborhood where Pickett would meet his mentor, avante-garde jazz saxophonist Bert Wilson. Wilson had polio when he was young, and the two formed a bond, as Pickett would run errands for Wilson and help him get outside more, while Wilson would show Pickett more “esoteric aspects of jazz harmony” and got him transcribing Charlie Parker solos. Pickett found that for anything he asked, Wilson “had something to offer.”

Pickett would not follow Bert Wilson’s path though, and his playing hardly resembles Charlie Parker. He had always been an honors student, but by the middle of the ninth grade, Pickett dropped out of school and began to support himself by playing saxophone in rock bands. As he explains, “it was kind of tough for a fourteen-year-old white kid to break into the jazz business... I just didn’t look the part.”

Pickett’s mother also picked up and left when he was sixteen, furthering the need for a job. Having grown up listening to Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin along with the rest of his peer group, he got into bands playing that music. Pickett told the audience, “it was an automatic way to make a living. We were playing fraternity parties, and dances, and bowling allies, and what have you. Whatever you could find, we got jobs.”

In addition to providing Pickett with an income, he found that these bands were “fun. I really enjoyed it because you were playing for people dancing, you were playing for your peer group sometimes. It was pretty exciting.”

Practicing upwards of six hours a day, Pickett soon became “notorious for being this kid that played the saxophone.” His reputation from various groups and his association with Bert Wilson got the attention of Tower Of Power, who eventually asked him to join them on tour. It was not simply his playing that got Pickett the gig though. As he told the audience, “I think they hired me mostly ‘cause I was just so odd... and I could play these crazy high notes, and I could do this dance, and they liked it, and they thought, ‘well, we’ll hire him.’”

Pickett may have been an enigma to some, but he sees himself as simply the product of a very particular upbringing. He would tell the audience, “when I’m playing, I’m just playing the sum total of all of my influences at the moment.”

Those influences were more diverse than just the artists introduced to him by his parents and mentors though. Growing up in Berkley, California, Pickett was also exposed to a lot of gospel, blues, and early rock, which he would find on 78's at the Salvation Army. As he explained, nearby Oakland “was a ship-building area, so during the wars, when they started building a lot of ships, a lot of people came up from the south to work in those shipyards,” and their records, like anybody else’s, eventually ended up in the second-hand shops which Pickett frequented.

His exposure and love of a diverse array of music informed the choices Pickett made over his career. This, coupled with his willingness to say “yes” to any gig led him down a very particular path. Pickett noted, this approach “may have gotten me into a few places I shouldn’t, but I like the adventure.”

The adventure, through a notably odd series events, eventually took him to Saturday Night Live. Pickett recounted the “series of happy accidents” as starting because he wrote some music, which he played “at a little place called Dance Theater Workshop.” A woman there, named Marta Renzi, asked if he would record the piece, and the engineer he eventually found to help him record recommended he play a benefit show at the Apollo Theater. The benefit turned into a triple-platinum selling album and an HBO special featuring David Ruffin and Eddie Kendrick of the Temptations. They liked the way he played, so he went on the road with the band, which included guitar player G.E. Smith, who happened to be married to Saturday Night Live cast member, Gilda Radner. Not long after, Howard Shore, then musical director for the television show, was looking for someone “who could make that saxophone sound [they] used to have on the show.” G.E. recommended him, Pickett auditioned, and the rest is history.

Twenty-five years later, Pickett is now himself musical director for the program, a job he admits often has little to do with making music, as he spends much of the week sitting through meetings. He likened the band’s work on the show to “rodeo clowns,” as they try to keep the live audience involved while nothing else is going on, diverting attention away from the cameras and behind the scenes work of the show. The job has allowed him to settle in New York though, giving him a chance to raise a family.

Looking back, Pickett realizes that if he hadn’t said “yes to Marta Renzi to make her music, for this dance piece that she wanted to do, [he] would be doing something completely different.” This alternate path may have led to more recording–to this day, Pickett only has one album, Borneo Horns, to his credit. That album featured an odd instrumentation of three saxophones and drums, and as Pickett explained, “it was really hard to get people to take it seriously, but its what was I was hearing in my head at the time.”

There is no doubt that Pickett will continue to push the boundaries of music though. As he told the crowd, “I get bored really easily, and I like to do things that are different.” Surely Pickett will continue to shape the course of music, just as he has over the past forty years, venturing into unclassifiable territory.

Here are some video clips from the interview:

This first one is a performance on tenor saxophone with a recorded track which Pickett put together of different sampled pieces of music.

Pickett later played solo clarinet, which can be heard in this clip.

Here Pickett speaks about his childhood and the music that informed his career.

Pickett discusses his time with Tower of Power and on Saturday Night Live.

This Friday: Benny Golson

2009-11-05T19:05:00.000-08:00

Multitalented and internationally famous jazz legend, - a composer, arranger, lyricist, producer - and tenor saxophonist of world note, Benny Golson was born in Philadelphia, PA on January 25, 1929.

Raised with an impeccable musical pedigree, Golson has played in the bands of world famous Benny Goodman, Dizzy Gillespie, Lionel Hampton, Earl Bostic and Art Blakey.

Few jazz musicians can claim to be true innovators and even fewer can boast of a performing and recording career that literally redefines the term "jazz".

Benny Golson has made major contributions to the world of jazz with such jazz standards as: Killer Joe, I Remember Clifford, Along Came Betty, Stablemates, Whisper Not, Blues March, Five Spot After Dark, Are you Real?

For more than 55 years, Golson has enjoyed an illustrious, musical career in which he has not only made scores of recordings but has also composed and arranged music for: Count Basie, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Sammy Davis Jr., Mama Cass Elliott, Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Goodman, Lionel Hampton, Shirley Horn, David Jones and the Monkees, Quincy Jones, Peggy Lee, Carmen McRae, Anita O'Day, Itzhak Perlman, Oscar Peterson, Lou Rawls, Mickey Rooney, Diana Ross, The Animals (Eric Burden), Mel Torme, George Shearing, and Dusty Springfield.

Come to listen and ask questions of Benny this Friday at 7:00 at Barnes & Noble (86th & Lexington).

Here is a clip of Benny Golson playing his classic "I Remember Clifford," when it was still a new composition, with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, featuring Lee Morgan on trumpet and Bobby Timmons on piano:

Lenny Pickett Live Interview At Barnes & Noble (NYC)

2009-10-30T12:32:00.000-07:00

On Friday, October 30th at 7:00 p.m. Lenny Pickett will be joining our interview series at Barnes & Noble. Lenny Pickett is a saxophonist, flutist, clarinetist, composer, arranger, music director and teacher, and one of the most unique and talented musicians on the scene today. He was a member of the Tower of Power Horns from 1972 until 1981, and since 1985 has been the tenor saxophone soloist with the Saturday Night Live band. He has served as the Saturday Night Live band's musical director since 1995. He is known particularly for his skill in the altissimo register (executed by using a combination of embouchure control, air stream control, and alternate fingerings), which can be heard during the opening credits of each episode of Saturday Night Live.

Pickett grew up in Berkeley, California. He has no formal musical training, did not attend high school beyond the ninth grade and did not attend college. Except for a brief period of study with the jazz saxophonist Bert Wilson (another player known for his facility with the altissimo register) after dropping out of high school in Berkeley, he is completely self-taught in the saxophone. While with the Tower of Power Horns, which he joined when he was 18 years old, he performed with Elton John and many other rhythm and blues and soul groups. He has also worked as a saxophonist and an arranger for artists including David Bowie, Talking Heads, and Laurie Anderson. As a composer, he has written for his group, the Borneo Horns, and has received a number of commissions to write works mixing classical and popular idioms for a variety of musical ensembles, including the New Century Saxophone Quartet, as well as music for theater and collaborations with dancers, poets and filmmakers.

Barnes and Noble
150 East 86th Street
New York, NY 10028

Chico Hamilton: Still Swingin' His Keester Off

2009-10-30T12:06:00.000-07:00

You may have never heard of drummer Chico Hamilton before, but chances are you’ve heard him play. He has worked with the likes of Lionel Hampton, Slim & Slam, T-Bone Walker, Lester Young, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Charlie Barnett, Billy Eckstine, Nat King Cole, Sammy Davis Jr., Billie Holiday, Gerry Mulligan and Lena Horne, with whom he spent eight years before striking out on his own as a band leader in 1955. Over the years, he also discovered many talented young musicians and introduced the jazz world to such notables as Jim Hall, Eric Dolphy, and Charles Lloyd.

Now 88, Hamilton looks a bit frail, but his wit is as sharp as ever. In this interview, he took over before Dr. Schoeder could get in even a word, telling the crowd, “you can ask me anything you want to ask me. First of all, I was born.” This got a slight chuckle from the audience, but after a long pause, he continued, “upstairs by the kitchen sink. And how do I know? I heard the water running.” Discontented with the mild response to his joke, Hamilton told the audience “I ain’t gonna be no funnier than that.” The crowd responded much more heartily to this last comment, although the stated fact was false.

Hamilton had many more one-liners throughout the afternoon. When a member of the audience got up to leave halfway through the interview Hamilton was quick to ask whether he was “boring” him, insisting “you’re gonna miss the best part.” Again, he milked the scene, pausing before telling the crowd “I’m gonna take my clothes off.”

It was Hamilton’s wealth of stories that held the audience’s focus for more than an hour though. He told the gathering about one occasion, when he was about ten years old, he got a gig playing with a few of his young peers and one their fathers, who led them on trumpet. Every time he’d go to pick up his sticks to play with that group though, the elder trumpeter would look at him and say, “put them sticks down boy, get them brushes.” This was revelatory for Hamilton, who claimed that on every gig he had since then, the most money he ever made was when he kept “time with those brushes, playing for them girl singers.”

Throughout the afternoon, Hamilton was full of such wisdom. He was grateful to the people that helped him rise from being a “lowly street urchin,” and in return, he hoped to pass on some of the lessons he’d learned to the next generation of musicians.

Not all of these lessons came easy though. Hamilton got his first big break at the age of 16, dropping out of school to join legendary vibraphonist Lionel Hampton’s band. Within three weeks, he had been fired though. As Hamilton explained, “I could play, I could swing my keester off, I had a hell of an ear, but I couldn’t read music.”

Around that time, the Count Basie Orchestra came to town, and he got a chance to meet his hero, Basie’s drummer Joe Jones. When he finally got a chance to talk to him though, Jones simply told him ‘stay in school.’

His approach to drums was changed when he first saw Art Blakey playing with the Billy Eckstine band. He told the audience, “I never heard anything like that before in my whole life. I didn’t believe this guy. This guy was kicking, keeping time with his right hand. His left hand was doing something. His left foot was doing something different. His right foot was doing something, dancing all over the place, but that rhythm, that thing was there. It shook me up.”

Hamilton was quite the revolutionary himself though, leading one of the first jazz groups not to feature a piano. As he explained, “all the piano players I wanted to play with had their own thing happening.” Consequently, he went into the studio to record with guitarist Howard Roberts and bassist George Duvivier. The resulting 1955 album is one of the first examples of a jazz group where “the rhythm section instruments became the solo instruments.”

He continued to break ground in terms of instrumentation when he formed a band with flautist Buddy Collete, guitarist Jim Hall, bassist Carson Smith, and cellist Fred Katz. In speaking about that group, Hamilton explained that the instrumentation was the least of their problems. The group was racially mixed, and their regular gig was at a bar in Long Beach, California, a highly prejudiced Navy town. The place “wasn’t clean. It was nothing but hookers and sailors.” Hamilton asked the crowd, “could you imagine us going in there and playing? These two black dudes and these three white dudes with a cello?” Hamilton and his group did get to play though. The one week gig lasted for six months and the group “turned Long Beach completely around.” Hamilton tacked on, “we even started making money.”

The group gained enough notoriety that Hamilton was soon able to secure a job at Paramount Pictures working as the house drummer, “keeping time for Marilyn Monroe, Sheree North, and all those dance directors.” The Chico Hamilton Quintet was even featured in the 1957 Burt Lancaster classic, Sweet Smell Of Success.

Hamilton insisted that he’d been in the movie business since he was a kid though, beginning as one of “those little jungle dudes” in the Tarzan movies. In those films, Hamilton was able to get fifteen dollars for a day of work. The studio wouldn’t allow anybody back for more than one day though. Hamilton told the audience, “once you’d get painted, I used to hide, so I could get more than one day.” This was a running theme through Hamilton’s career, as he told the crowd later on, “if I didn’t have a gig, I’d go out and make one.”

Hamilton really got the crowd going though, when he demonstrated “the oldest drum beat.” He then handed his microphone over to Dr. Schoeder and began a simple repeated pattern of two claps. He soon began to chant, “Charleston,” right along to his rhythm. Hamilton then got the audience to join him in clapping and chanting the Charleston beat. Before long, he brought the room to a halt, telling the crowd to do it one more time so he could “blow a little bit.” This time he started up the rhythm by singing a great vaudeville-style introduction, and after helping the audience get the beat started once more, he took a wonderful solo, scatting a little melody overtop the beat.

Throughout the afternoon, Hamilton happily recounted story after story, each one making up only a sliver of his long and brilliant career. He continues to make music at a high level, going out on the bandstand and swingin' his keester off. He even put out a new album recently, Twelve Tones Of Love. As the interview came to a conclusion though, Hamilton was asked whether there was anything left for him to accomplish. In his response, Hamilton found an opportunity to get in one last zinger, telling the crowd, “I was thinking about becoming a zillionaire.”

Here are some clips from the interview:

Ron Carter: Finding The Right Notes

2009-10-23T17:29:00.000-07:00

Ron Carter was the subject of a recent interview at Barnes and Noble on 86th Street, hosted by Dr. David Schroeder, Director of the NYU Steinhardt Jazz Studies Program. Although he has been heard in numerous settings, Carter is most notable as the bassist in Miles Davis’ famous “second great quintet” of the mid 1960's. With that group, he was at the forefront of a movement in jazz, altering the course of music history, and eventually leading to the advent of electric instruments in jazz. The innovations and music of that group continues to be studied and analyzed by jazz musicians throughout the world.

Following his stint in the Davis group, Carter went on to an illustrious recording career as both a leader and sideman to numerous artists including Freddie Hubbard, McCoy Tyner, Jim Hall, Milt Jackson, Joe Henderson, and George Benson. He can be heard on more than 2500 recordings, making him one of the most prolific musicians ever recorded. Recently, Carter has released an album dedicated to Miles Davis, called Dear Miles, and is the subject of a new biography entitled Finding The Right Notes, both of which he promoted at the jazz interview series.

Before a question could be asked though, Carter serenaded the crowd with a couple of duets he played along with guitarist Russell Malone. While the tunes were simple in form–the first loosely based on rhythm changes and the second on the blues–the chemistry displayed by the two musicians was something to behold. The two have played together semi-regularly over the course of the past decade in the Ron Carter Trio along with pianist Mulgrew Miller. That group will play a week long run at The Blue Note in New York beginning October 27.

Carter and Malone had an obvious appreciation of one another. Malone’s guitar was barely amplified. He relied on an acoustic sound so as not to “overshadow Ron.” As a guitarist, Malone had plenty of opportunities to play overtop of Carter’s accompaniment, but he continually relinquished the spotlight to Carter, playing on an even plane with him as the two interwove their lines together. Speaking directly after the performance, Carter mentioned that he “trusts Russell.” The trust was mutual, as the two had a unique chemistry. With both instruments amplified minimally, the audience was treated to a special performance where both musicians could be heard communicating in their most stripped down form.

During the interview, Carter expanded on his astounding resume. Originally a classical musician, Carter attended Eastman School of Music as a cellist in the 1950's, where he learned “the value of discipline, how to practice, and a solid understanding of the rules of music.” Carter found this training an important foundation for his career, as, he said, “it's hard to break the rules when you don't know what they are.”

Carter moved to New York City in August of 1959, where he soon switched to the bass out of necessity. Joining an active jazz scene, Carter spoke of his fellow young musicians at the time, saying, "we were all looking to play, all the time. It didn't matter when, where or with whom..." He insisted that the experience was invaluable, and urged young musicians today to "find your own places to play, because you need to find out what you don't know."

After joining Miles Davis' group, Carter was thrust to the top of the jazz world, but he noted that his relationship with Davis began on surprisingly even terms. Carter was playing a two week gig with Art Farmer at the time. Davis was insistent that Carter join him on tour immediately, to which Carter replied, "Mr. Davis, you'll have to talk to Art. If he says it's okay, I'd be happy to come with you, but if he says ‘no,’ I'd be just as happy to stay here." That honesty and respect between the two men would shape their relationship for all the years that followed.

Carter gave the crowd a few other tidbits about his time with Davis, but more often than not, he pointed to the new biography as a way to find out those stories.

As the consummate sideman, Carter had plenty of advice about working with other musicians. Responding to an audience member’s question about his association with drummer Lewis Nash, Carter noted, “I always insist that the drums be tuned properly so that they are tuned to my bass. That way the drummer can hear all of the frequencies and can really hear the pulse.” According to Carter, it was an aspect that Nash had rarely thought of before, but the two were really able to open up and compliment each other when their instruments were tuned to complimentary frequencies.

Responding to another audience question, Carter brought the discussion back around to his performance with Russell Malone. Speaking about the relationship the two have on the bandstand, Carter said, “I try to hear everything, and I try to anticipate where Russell is going. I trust his judgment and that he will take me someplace that I wouldn't have thought of, but I also want to make him play something that he wouldn't otherwise play at his house, so I need to start listening to where he's going even before he starts playing.”

Carter pointed out that each person he encounters “plays differently, and what I want to do is find the notes that fit with each player, to make that player sound better than he really is!”

Although Carter seems to have accomplished more than any musician could dream of, he continues to go out on the bandstand each night “trying to find the right notes.”