The Heavenly States
When: 9 p.m. Thursday, June 11
9:30 p.m. Friday, June 12
Where: Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., San Francisco
Tickets: $12 advance, $15 door; www.bottomofthehill.com, 415-626-4455
Online: Listen to “Oui Camera Oui” on iTunes, and “Delayer” on Spotify or other online outlets. “HISS” is available at www.theheavenlystates.com.

By Michael Mayer
mmayer@mercurynews.com

The Heavenly States were on the verge.
The Oakland indie rock band had released its third full-length album, “Delayer,” and it was receiving raves from critics and fellow musicians. Six years of building its brand in Oakland was starting to pay off. They’d been adventurous in their touring as well, becoming the only American rock band to play in Moammar Gadhafi’s Libya.

But existence as rockers just knocking on the door of success was getting tough in the pricey Bay Area. And the Great Recession wasn’t helping matters.
So they packed up the remnants of their East Bay lives and moved to Austin, Texas, in 2012.

“We left ‘Brokeland’ for cheap living and cheaper lovin,” band co-founder Ted Nesseth said in an email interview. “(San Francisco and Oakland) were good to us, and we have strong ties there, so it was hard to leave. But we decided to start up incognito here and try to earn our way into it, and it’s gone well.”

And now they’re making their first trip back, with shows set for Thursday and Friday at Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco, and they’re bringing with them a work they think is a game-changer. It’s their first full-length album since “Delayer,” and it’s an artistic and technical triumph.

The album is called “HISS,” and even though Nesseth and co-founder Genevieve Gagon want you to hear it, you won’t find it on iTunes, Soundcloud or anywhere else that trades in just musical ones and zeros. Its 25 songs are on vinyl, and vinyl only. Three big, luxuriously weighty slabs of vinyl. It was recorded to 2-inch analog tape, assuring the “warm” tones sought by vinyl aficionados. The band employed three different production houses for the snakeskin-embossed cover and full-color interior and inner sleeves. It’s not inexpensive at $50, but considering that some of the major labels are charging close to $30 for single albums, it’s a fair price.

“And limited releases like these, they not only hold their value, they can double or triple in price,” said Vinny Esparza, a buyer for Amoeba Records in San Francisco.
The band’s decision to skip the digital market was not taken lightly.
“We don’t want to reach everyone. We only want to reach people who want to reach it,” said Nesseth, noting the prevalence of “blasé” listeners who dip in and out of music on the Internet, never really committing themselves to the time needed to absorb a major work like “HISS.”

“We wanted to get a very specific thing made the way we wanted it made as our sort of life achievement for ourselves and a few people. If we can’t do it again, then we can’t do it again.”

Musically, it’s an extension of the sound that had propelled the Heavenly States into the taste-making Noise Pop festival, and onto prestigious concert bills with bands such as Spoon and the New Pornographers. Spoon’s Britt Daniel had placed “Delayer” on a personal Top 10 list he compiled for the Pitchfork website, and he sought out the band to open when Spoon landed a three-night engagement at the Fillmore in 2008.

Their sound leading up to “HISS” had been guitar-riff dominant, borrowing from folk rock and power pop, layered with orchestral elements featuring Gagon’s rich keyboards and distinctive fiddle. It was packed with ear-worm hooks but with more sophisticated arrangements than simple pop usually allows. Lyrics were smart, poetic and dense, and Nesseth and Gagon didn’t shy away from provocative political statements. They ripped oil companies and the war in Iraq, and one song on a 2004 EP was simply a recitation of the names of Iraqi civilians killed in the invasion.

“HISS” moves the band’s sound more toward the orchestral, featuring string arrangements by Gagon and a much more prominent use of her piano. Nesseth’s irresistible guitar riffs are still there, but “HISS” feels like the work of a band that has matured, and the 25 songs run the gamut of emotion and intensity. And Gagon, who had mostly served as a backing singer on earlier releases, takes quite a few lead vocals, and the diversity in voice contributes to the album’s richness.

When the first songs on “HISS” were born, the band had been on a path to release a set of coherent shorter EPs, serving almost as chapters in a serial novel, according to Nesseth. The first, “Oui Camera Oui,” featured some of the band’s strongest songs, including “Berlin Wall,” which showcased Spoon’s Daniel on backing vocals. And the band’s sly sense of humor came to play in the final track, “Careful With That Review, Eugene,” in which comedian Eugene Mirman simply reads withering criticisms of the band from typically toxic Internet comments.
But the move to Austin forced a change in plans, and “HISS” eventually came together as one giant piece.

And if you can set aside the time to listen to it all at once, Nesseth thinks you’ll get the biggest payoff.
“It’s interesting that during this time (of writing and recording the album), binge-watching was born for TV series. We’re just bringing binge to aural consumption,” he said. “Deciding to kick it all to the curb to sit down and read a long book or listen to a big record qualifies as a bold move.”

The post The Heavenly States return to the Bay Area appeared first on A+E Interactive.

Here, in its full glory, is my interview with trumpeter Nicholas Payton. In this expanded version, you’ll find him expounding on Charlie Parker, Steve Coleman, Barack Obama and much else that didn’t make it into the version posted on the Mercury News’s website.

With one moaned note, trumpeter Nicholas Payton can telegraph a 100-year tradition. This formidable musician also is a businessman with his own label (BMF Records; you can guess what the acronym stands for) and a pointed essayist, via his Twitter feed (@paynic) and blog (nicholaspayton.wordpress.com). Slyly titled “The Cherub Speaks,” the blog is where he riffs at length, stirring things up, talking about race and the economics of music.

Last week, Payton turned 40 and released his new album, “Sketches of Spain,” a live re-make of the Miles Davis-Gil Evans collaboration from 1959-60. He also penned an essay titled “Why Hiphop Isn’t Cool Anymore,” a sequel to 2011’s “On Why Jazz Isn’t Cool Anymore,” in which he declared that “Jazz ain’t cool, it’s cold, like necrophilia.” Payton wrote that jazz died half a century ago – and that the word “jazz” is a racist term imposed on black musicians by white marketers. He prefers to call it by another name: #BAM, or Black American Music.

I spent two hours on the phone with Payton, who grew up in New Orleans and still lives there. He spoke of his father (the late bassist Walter Payton) and of Professor Longhair (who used to rehearse in the Payton family’s living room). He discussed his “Black American Symphony,” which he composed and recently recorded with his band and the Sinfonie Orchester Basel. He expanded on various Tweets and essays, on topics ranging from Miley Cyrus (Payton isn’t a fan) to Marvin Gaye (he’s Payton’s hero) to #BAM. As soft-spoken and amicable as he is directly opinionated, he also talked about his own surprise at his increasingly public role as a writer, and how he is viewed by some as a rabble-rouser, by others as a truth-teller.

Q When did you get into writing essays, setting down your opinions?
A I’ve been writing a while, since even before I was blogging or before Facebook existed. I used to do these email blasts similar to what I blog about, but not as long form – short aphorisms or what have you. But, yeah, when blogging became more prevalent, it just seemed like a better format and a way to access more people.

Q Why do you have the blog? And has it changed the way people perceive you? Do they now see you as a hero, a villain, a militant? Have you lost any gigs because of your writings?
A I feel it’s important, what I’m doing. It has caused some degree of trouble in certain instances. I have had people not want to give me gigs based on what I’m blogging. But to me that’s really silly. Because to me that should be based on “does the cat show up on time, dress well and show up ready to play?” — and that’s my reputation, for all that. Because I say “mother…” on a blog post, is that any reason to not want to hire me?

My reputation is that I’m a gentleman and I treat people with kindness. But if you disrespect me, then I’m going to say something about it.

Q Do you feel isolated, expressing your opinions publically?
A Artists don’t stand up for themselves these days. They’ve become more like politicians. And they’re afraid of losing whatever — afraid of not getting a gig. And yet things keep deteriorating. The kind of offers that are acceptable now, they wouldn’t have flown years ago. I’ve found out that I’ve had to say, “No, I will not stay at that hotel.” Certain conditions have become unacceptable.”

Q Musicians have told me they’re earning a lot less in clubs these days.
A I just can’t do it, man. It becomes a thing where you do become in some instances a troublemaker. But I’d rather have that and have someone respect me than accept any kind of offer. Because I came up under cats like Clark Terry, Ray Brown, Elvin Jones, and these guys didn’t take stuff from people. They were nice guys, but they set the bar. If they were disrespected, they spoke up.

And I find that in many instances I’m the lone soldier, and I’m trying to keep the bar where they set it. I don’t consider myself an old cat, but with the passing of so many of the masters, I am responsible for making sure that stuff doesn’t go haywire and absolutely out of control. And I’ve come into that role a lot sooner than I’d expected. It’s not necessarily something I do to be a rabble-rouser or a provocateur.

But I have to have a voice. My life would be a lot simpler in some instances if I’d just shut the … up and play the gig. But being an artist is being a lot more than that, so I’m left with a choice. What do I do? Just shut the … up and play the gig, or make a stand for what I was taught was right, and to speak out for the music and its cultural ties in terms of the black community and things that I think are important?

They should actually be taking some of the falls.

Q Who should be taking the falls? Other musicians?
A Yes. It shouldn’t solely be focused on me. A lot of the things that I’m saying are a lot of things that they believe and they know. There are a lot of conversations that have happened in the back of the dressing room. I can’t tell you how many e-mails and talks I have with cats saying, “You’re right.”

Q When we first exchanged e-mails, you told me that I’d misunderstood your #BAM posts – that you’ve never set the goal of removing the word “jazz” from common parlance, as I’d written. You explained that you personally object to the word, but that you’re not trying to get others to deep-six the word.

But you’ve put the word “jazz” in the same sentence as the N-word, drawing a connection between them. So to me, it doesn’t feel like a huge leap to think that you’re trying to create a movement where the music moves forward while the word “jazz” is left behind and replaced with your term – #BAM, or Black American Music.

A First of all, I don’t think it’s realistic or necessary. As much as I talk about racism, do I seek to try and create to live in a world where there’s no prejudice? No, that’s part of the human experience, and I think people should be allowed to feel hate or whatever.

If a musician would like to call what they play “jazz” – okay, and jazz does exist. And most of the music that is called jazz IS jazz. But as far as the real true spirit of music and ancestry, that is not jazz. So if people want to call what they do jazz and whatever comes along with that, I respect that. I’m not trying to change that. Because that deserves to be here, too. I’m not trying to sanitize the world and try to create some kind of utopia where only the good things exist.

Q Will you lay out your arguments for what you object to in the word “jazz.”
A Jazz is the white appropriation of Black American music. It’s a caricaturization of the music that Bolden and King Oliver and Armstrong and others created, and the first documented jazz recording was by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. And as for “Dixieland” — we know the connotation that “Dixie” has to the Confederate South and slavery. And “jazz,” the word itself, is of dubious origin at best. The first documented printed use of the word is tied to baseball.

It had to do with some kind of English or pizzazz that you put on the ball. I think it was like 1913, and was published in the San Francisco Chronicle or some place out there.

And a lot of the early musicians refuted the title. They didn’t want the association with the word. And even cats like Louis Armstrong said, “We didn’t call it that.” It was not called that in New Orleans. It would’ve been “blues” or “ragtime.” And the first band that made a record and called it “jazz,” that was the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. It was minstrelsy. The cats were making animal sounds and a mockery of this beautiful music made by the likes of King Oliver and Louis Armstrong.

I don’t consider those cats (the Original Dixieland Jazz Band) to be historically significant in terms of the true expression of the music. It’s kind of like Miley Cyrus’s shenanigans today, where black people appear almost as props. She wants to adopt a black sound, but all the imagery is stereotypical and what they think is a Negro sound, without really dealing with the people. And the people become objects and you don’t deal with the cultural part.

The most important part to me is the black part. And that’s not to say who can and cannot play this music. But without addressing the community part and who created the music – that’s wrong. Historically, the music was important to break down barriers and establish whatever liberation we’ve been able to craft – that has come through the music, long before the civil rights era and the March on Washington.

Q When you say “the music,” what are you referring to?
A Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong. Louis Armstrong was the world’s first pop star. He was the Michael Jackson of his time. There hadn’t been a star that had existed like that before, because his artistic rise sort of happened at the same time as the rise of the phonograph. So here was the new kid with the voice coming along at the same time as this new technology — sort of like what happened with the music video and Michael Jackson.

It exponentially increased the potential of Louis’s voice getting to as many people as possible.

Yet when these cats started going on the road and traveling, they still had to go to the stage through the back of the kitchen. People were still riding in the back of the bus, if they could get on the bus at all. They had to stay on the black side of town and in boarding houses; couldn’t stay or dine as equals at many of the establishments. And in many cases, they played where black people otherwise were not allowed, like the Cotton Club.

Black folks were not looked at as human beings, and when this great art was created by masters like Ellington and Armstrong and Count Basie, they ran into this white supremacist system. Yet it was undeniable that these people were far more intelligent than given credit — you had to look at them as intellectuals, which we were not treated as at that time. So the music is largely responsible for breaking down those barriers, long before there was the March on Washington.

It broke down the racial barriers long before the actual civil rights movement. Think about integration: white cats and black cats working together. That happened in the music long before the March on Washington. It was already happening in the ‘20s and ‘30s: Benny Goodman hiring Teddy Wilson and Lionel Hampton and Charlie Christian. So this music has been very important.
You can look at the very existence of the music: Congo Square was one of the only places where the enslaved Africans were allowed to practice their traditions — the drumming, the dancing and so forth. The music has roots in that. Its language is part of the African expression.

Q The names you’re mentioning are the names of musicians generally described as jazz musicians. So, again, when you talk about “the music,” are you talking about jazz, or so-called jazz, as you would say, or are you talking about all types of black American music?
A I’m talking about it all, because I don’t make the distinctions. And I don’t think the musicians make those distinctions. Those were categories placed on the music by promoters and marketers.

First of all, just the idea of recording is not a black aesthetic — to think about, “Oh, let’s record.” In fact, some of the early musicians – Buddy Bolden was afraid to record, because he thought it might steal his soul. Black people have more of an oral aesthetic, while we live in a world that is so Eurocentric in thought. I’m not necessarily saying that one is better than the other, but they’re certainly different.

But going back to Congo Square and the roots of the music: The moment you say “jazz” and you appropriate it and you minstrelize it – then you enslave the music and the spirit of it. That’s my whole issue with the word.

When you say “jazz,” or, “I’m going to open a jazz school” – it’s a way of dealing with the surface of the music and not having to deal with the people who created it. For instance, look at how Charlie Parker’s music is taught in jazz programs. Institutions have codified bebop and Charlie Parker specifically into a series of licks. They make Bird’s voice one of harmonic importance, first. But the primary thing about Parker is not the harmony or which specific notes he played, it’s where Bird placed those phrases that set him apart from his predecessors. It’s his rhythmic placement, but you can’t codify free rhythmic thought.

Q In the ‘70s, I wrote a story about a similar discussion: Jimmy Owens, Reggie Workman, Roland Kirk and others were talking about replacing the word “jazz” (along with the word’s early associations with New Orleans bordellos) with the term “Black classical music” or “American classical music.” I always thought that conversation kind of backfired on the musicians, that it led the music in directions they hadn’t intended. You could argue that institutions gradually seized on that “classical” idea and kind of moved in and took over jazz, building programs and codifying the music.
A The “classical” connotation is already European. It’s like saying that the European aesthetic is the standard. So, yeah.

Q Still, a lot of musicians describe themselves as “jazz musicians” with pride, because, whatever the word may have meant in the beginning, they feel it means something different today. And they feel it places them in a great tradition: For instance, to have been a member of the Jazz Messengers is almost to have been a high priest of the tradition. So over the last year or so, I’ve been asking various musicians for their thoughts about your essays and blog posts on #BAM.

Can I read you part of what Herbie Hancock said about it? He’s one of the musicians who feel enormous pride in being “jazz” musicians.

A I’d like to hear it.

Q Responding to the idea that the word “jazz” is offensive and shouldn’t be used, he said, “I think that it’s just like Obama Care. YOU can make it, you can define it. In other words, we don’t have to change the word. We define it by what we create and by our behavior. So whatever the definition that was with `jazz’ when it first started, it is no longer that. So I think it’s more important to focus on the development of the music, and creating a new definition of the word, than changing the word. If you change the word, you don’t change the music. What have you done? Nothing. If you change the word, that doesn’t help the evolution of the music. I don’t think it does.”

He continued: “That’s not what I’m going to focus on, because I don’t think it’s germane to what we offer to humanity in playing this great music. It’s a great music.”

He also said, “America’s funny, because the music isn’t as popular here as it is in France or Germany. You go outside America and you mention `jazz’ and people are ready to give you the royal treatment. And that’s without changing the word. That’s what it means to them.

Do you want to respond to that?

A I’ve heard that argument. I don’t see that. I don’t see saying “jazz” in Europe and getting respect. All you have to do is look at the jazz festivals and see what they program. Most of it is not of the tradition. People have the right to call whatever they do whatever they want. When you have a “jazz” anything, it can be a hodgepodge of anything. Take a look at the North Sea Jazz Festival or any of the others. Anything can be on it.

Q You’re saying that most so-called jazz festivals include a lot of rock and pop and whatnot? That’s true of the New Orleans festival, too, right?
A Yeah. So what does that word mean? It doesn’t mean anything. You can put anything together and say it’s “jazz,” even if it doesn’t have the overt racial connotation.

Q You’re saying that the definition of the word, and what it refers to, has been confused.
A It’s like, now we have a black president, or a president who is black. And he didn’t even address the racial issues in America until he had to, in the wake of Trayvon Martin, when the whole country was in a war over the trial. He had to say something.
And just the hypocrisy of his speaking at the (August 28 commemoration of the) March on Washington.

Q He didn’t speak at the first of the two events at the Lincoln Memorial in August – the one Al Sharpton led (on Aug. 24.)
A Right. If I had to guess, if Martin Luther King were alive today, he would not be pleased with Obama’s politics, particularly the violent bullying that goes on in American politics, and the number of lives of innocent mothers and children that are lost because of America’s policing of the world.
And from what I hear, even Sharpton’s event was lacking something. These events feel – I don’t know, they feel staged. Empty symbolic gestures are not necessarily going to lead us to any growth, any change. Is Obama being of a skin color that is considered black a milestone achievement if the actual politics don’t speak to helping the black community at all? The promises that he made before his candidacy, he hasn’t lived up to. And a lot of the rumblings amongst the black community were, “Let’s just get him to a second term” — and now that we’re into a second term, this is it. And there’s not a lot more time to get things done.

I just think that the definition of who is to be used to keep the forces of supremacy and privilege in place – that definition of whiteness now is being expanded to people of color. You see the same with George Zimmerman, because he’s brown-skinned. So now the name of George Zimmerman is being used as a means of saying that, “Well, this racism that people speak of, it doesn’t exist anymore.”

At one time, Polish or Italians or Jews were not accepted into white privilege. They were viewed as being on the outside. And now it’s been expanded again; certain people of color are being given access, like Clarence Thomas, who was part of the 5-4 decision to strike down the Voting Rights Act. I look at that and think, “Four of these guys are white and one is black. Well, that black guy could have been the difference in fighting for something that Martin Luther King and Medgar Evers died for.”

The new face of racism allows that people of color — black people or Mexican or whatever non-whites — are also able to further supremacy and privilege.

Q What did your father think of the word “jazz”?
A He never really discussed it.
And to be honest, for most of the older musicians, that was never a discussion. They never discussed “jazz” or “let’s play jazz” or “this is jazz” or “this is not jazz.” If anything, at a certain point when I was coming up, he was more open-minded that me. I had a more purist view of what jazz is, and I had to ask him, “Why are you playing all this other music on your gigs, stuff that’s not swinging?”

But before that, when I was coming up, I didn’t like jazz. Because I thought it was old music. I wanted to listen to Run-D.M.C. or whatever.

Q I want to ask you what your mission is as a musician. You recently wrote this blog post. I’ll quote you: “I’m a cultural diplomat who gets out of bed every day, I practice my craft and bear my soul on stage with the mission of imbuing more truth, pathos and beauty in the world. I was born to do this.”
So that’s what it’s about?
A (Pause.) For me, life is bigger than music. Music is just a conduit, and one way in which I express that artistry. I also express it through my blog and how I speak. It’s a holistic approach.

But I would say that I was placed in an ideal position from the start. I don’t want to say “the spirits chose me.” But my upbringing was very ideal for what I do: Born in New Orleans, where this music came through, to two musical parents in an environment that was just very musical. We had rehearsals at the house. Our house was the place where everyone rehearsed. We had a grand piano and a large living room, and so it was sort of ideal.

The greatest musicians were in my living room. I was three or four years old, and here’s Professor Longhair in my living room. I used to love to sit under the piano and hear the music — Ellis Marsalis, all that force.

I didn’t know I would be a musician. It’s just a thing that I did. I loved being around musicians. I loved being around the music. My parents might go to bed at 2 or 3 in the morning, and I’d be up. The cats were rehearsing.

Q Were you playing, too?
A I was a kid. I wasn’t really playing. But there is a story of them having a rehearsal one time, and they were listening to some record and they couldn’t figure out one chord. And I had this little toy piano and I went over to it and laid my hands down on the keys, and played the chord. And how do you explain that?

So it was a great environment, but it certainly was not just given to me. I spent and still do spend many hard hours working and practicing. I rest on no laurels. I work hard to cultivate that experience, to develop and discipline myself.

Q On “#BAM Live at Bohemian Caverns,” your recent album, you play Fender Rhodes, as well as trumpet. I’ve seen you play really great upright bass. You’ve always played a bunch of instruments?
A Yes, I’d take a break and I would jump on the drums or pick this up or that up. My father taught music at the elementary school I went to, and I would often stay after school. And the band room was filled with clarinets and horns, and I would just stay after school and start playing them. And my father saw that I was taking an interest, that I was learning the fingerings on all the instruments and getting a basic sound from them. So after a while it became my job to teach the beginning students.

I didn’t know I was developing the skills to be a multi-instrumentalist. It was very organic.

Also, in the mid-‘80s, I was a big Prince fan, so much so that my parents bought me a piano book, with all the music to “Purple Rain.” And I remember reading that Prince played like 20 instruments. Then there was Stevie Wonder. A lot of my idols were people who made whole albums by themselves being the primary musicians, playing all the instruments.

Q So what’s your mission? To move the music ahead? To support black culture? To re-develop a black audience for the music?

A All those things you just said. One that’s important is that black people know they created this music. In most cases, I’d say black people tend to associate jazz music with white people. That’s who they see in the clubs — Kenny G or whoever.
The other thing to me is that “jazz” is a derogatory term, a nebulous term at best. I don’t think that will ever change. I don’t think you will ever get people to see its roots and acknowledge them. People like Herbie Hancock; he knows what it is. But the average person is not intelligent enough or knowledgeable enough to understand it.

If people play mariachi music, you know you’re dealing with Mexico and you’re going to deal with Mexican culture. Or if you’re going to deal with Cuban music or Haitian music; you’re going to deal with broad cultural aspects. You hear “jazz,” and you don’t have to do that – and it’s actually frowned on. The more the connection to the root and the black community, the less you’ll be celebrated.

Pick up a copy of Downbeat or any of the magazines and see what’s celebrated. Most of what the critics celebrate is listless, or played in odd meters. I don’t have any problem with playing in odd meters, but most of what gets celebrated is devoid of blues, devoid of groove. These things are looked at as old and not important. And the more your music has a black sensibility, the less potential it has to be celebrated.

Q There’s quite a bit of new music that comes at you as a barrage, without a lot of breathing space. It can be incredibly virtuosic; the handling of all the odd meters is amazing. But there also are times when it can feel overly clever and more clinical than grooving. Steve Coleman’s playing isn’t like that, but he’s the guy behind a lot of this odd-meter stuff. His influence is huge.
A When Steve does it, it’s different. He’s coming out of a tradition, and from what I understand of him, he’s very mathematically minded and he’s developed these formulas and an interesting style of notation. Steve and Greg Osby, they’re one thing. A lot of the cats who come after that, who are protégés or whatever, I think they got the wrong idea. The way they analyze and interpret is a lot different.

When I hear Steve, the African-ness – we have a word, “groid,” short for “Negroid” – that’s there. It’s very palpable. And Osby, I hear the same thing. A lot of the people who came after, not always so much.

Coleman, he was a guy who’d hang out with Von Freeman and Sonny Stitt in Chicago. How he relates to his music is way different from someone who’s analyzing that. Analyzing that is not necessarily what it is; it’s similar to what the schools are doing to Bird.

It’s the same thing with Mark Turner and Chris Potter. They’re rooted in the tradition, played with masters. I remember when Mark Turner was living in New Orleans, studying up on his Joe Henderson. Chris Potter came up playing with Red Rodney. They understand and have roots in the tradition. But a lot of the cats who’ve been influenced by them have no roots; a tree without roots can’t stand.

And what I find now is a lot of music is being created for other musicians. And I can’t listen to a lot of that “musician music” for too long because it leaves me cold — and I’m a musician. So you take an audience member who’s not as theoretically knowledgeable, I can’t even imagine what they think.

You can play a lot of notes, you can play in multiple rhythms – Louis Armstrong was dong a lot of that, too, playing five over four and using rhythmic displacements. But when you start to take the music out of the environment and it becomes an intellectual pursuit, it’s problematic. And that’s why it leaves a lot of people cold. I’m a musician and I don’t want to hear it.

Q Is your music ever intended as a response to this?
A To me, my music has always been reverent and irreverent. I don’t feel like I’m playing more “bluesy” just because cats are not dealing with tradition and ancestry. That’s always been the aesthetic.

My idea, even when I did believe in such a thing as “jazz,” it was never devoid of blues and it was never about this kind of super-heady over-intellectualizing. That’s not to me where it springs forth. I want to reach the people and I attribute that to my upbringing in New Orleans, playing in Second Line bands and playing for people who danced. And the biggest difference between musicians now and musicians back in the day is that they played for people who danced.

To me, even if it’s free form or out of time, that dance sensibility should be implied. Even if there’s going to be a meter change in every bar, that feeling and passion should be there. There’s a lot of things that a lot of young cats haven’t figured out. But most of them don’t know what it feels like to swing and to have the audience respond to it. Once you’ve felt that swing and you can connect in that way, it would be pretty hard to leave that. You’re always going to want to connect in that way, because it feels good.

But for them it’s boring, because they haven’t learned how to do it.

How do you learn how to swing? That’s really elusive. Can’t put it in a book. How to establish a really good “two” feel or play a walking ballad in four? A lot of cats don’t understand that — can’t comprehend the art in it that sometimes takes years to develop it, and you never really stop developing it. It’s that feel that makes people want to dance.

Q I read that Marvin Gaye and Miles Davis are your two favorite musicians. Why Marvin Gaye?
A He’s a true artist. Like Billie Holiday, he wore his heart on his sleeve. Whatever he was going through, he put that into his music, fearlessly. A very vulnerable artist, perhaps so much so that it contributed to his demise in many ways. We know about him historically that he tended to the self-destructive. But there’s such an honesty in what he did, which to me is the hallmark of any great artist. It’s about their lives. When they sing a song, that’s what they’re giving you; it’s bigger than the music. It’s about his wife, or someone who was leaving him, or his stressed relationship with his father.

He did a whole record about meeting Anna Gordy – Berry Gordy’s sister, who became his wife — and their marriage, and then their divorce. It’s the whole record “Here, My Dear.”

Q I was looking through your Twitter feed. The other day, you tweeted something about preferring Miley Cyrus to Janis Joplin.
A I don’t like either one. But I can at least sit through a Miley Cyrus song. I can’t sit through a Janis Joplin song for a minute. It just disturbs me. The voice – I just don’t hear it. I just hear an unseasoned, untrained voice.

Q In the same string of Tweets, you say you really like Amy Winehouse.
A Yeah. To me, and this is just my opinion, she is what those other artists are trying to get to. It’s not contrived when she does it. I really feel it when she does it. She is a really great blues singer, without trying to be that. She was one of the great phrasers and interpreters of our time, and I don’t think she’s been totally given credit for doing that.

I dismissed her initially, just because she was so hyped up that, when I heard her, it made it hard for me to hear her musically. It took a couple of years for that hype to get out of mind and for me to hear it for what it is. If you’re going to talk about white singers who are able to sing the blues, Amy Winehouse is a good example. I can’t say that Janis Joplin is.

Q You’ve also had a bunch of critical tweets and blog essays about hip-hop and sampling. You wrote that “hip-hop is a predatory art form… a bastion of cannibalism. … If they’d had sampling back in the day (in Africa), motha… woulda never learned how to play the drums.”
Was this in response to all the discussions about “Blurred Lines” and Robin Thicke ripping off Marvin Gaye?
A I had written about it before, but the current news certainly sparked more conversation. I’ve talked about the flatness of beat-making – this idea now that we have these “beat makers” who are not musicians; they haven’t been musically trained. This is not me looking down at them. I do think some incredible people who have not been trained have done some wonderful things. But after a certain point it becomes limited or limiting. If everybody’s a sampler, then who is creating?

Yes, there is an art to that. J Dilla – Jay Dee — represents the best of those who are able to do that, like Andy Warhol with collages, or Romare Bearden. But everybody is not him; everybody is not a Jay Dee. Everybody does not have the ears that he had.

But even Jay Dee: If those earlier artists had not created the music that he then sampled — what would anyone have to sample? We’re kind of putting the cart before the horse when we glorify the sampling over the actual performers. It’s become backwards.

And then there’s a certain sense of entitlement that you see in the samplers, where not only do they have the right to do what they do, but the artists being sampled should be grateful for being sampled.

Do we really think a bunch of 13 year-old girls listening to “Blurred Lines” are now going to be Marvin Gaye fans? I don’t see that happening. It would be great. More realistically, what that cultivates is another generation that becomes parasitic. It doesn’t create more Marvin Gayes, it creates more Robin Thickes. It’s almost like you keep copying a tape from a tape, and by the time you get to the 20th generation, it becomes a reflection of an illusion and then a reflection of a reflection of an illusion.

Q You’re an eloquent guy, Nicholas. Were you a good writer as a kid?
A Hated it. Hated creative writing. That’s kind of the irony to me, that I’ve become such a writer, because I did not like creative writing at all.

Q I was re-reading “On Why Jazz Isn’t Cool,” your manifesto from a couple of years ago. How long did it take you to write that? It’s filled with memorable lines.
A Under an hour.

Q Come on.
A Actually it was not a piece, or was not intended as one. I was tweeting one afternoon before a gig. And it was a stream of consciousness, and that stream became the blog.

While I was tweeting, some people responded. Some people were getting excited and some people were getting upset. And when I finished tweeting, I just put it together line by line, in sequence.

Q What do you think about the plight of women instrumentalists?
A Before we talk about the music, we would have to talk about the lack of respect with which women are treated in this patriarchal system that we have. And how they’re treated in the music is a reflection of that. They’re not viewed as human beings, really; they’re viewed as “less than,” and it’s problematic.

Q You’ve hired quite a few women instrumentalists, especially in your big band. Are you conscious of creating more of a gender balance?
A I hire who I feel will work best and who I like to play with. Just by virtue of me doing that, sometimes it’s going to be women; just by averages. It’s certainly not “lemme get some women in my band.” I’m hiring who I feel will work best in this concept, and a percentage of them is going to be women.

Q Your recent projects are ambitious. You’ve got your own record label. You’ve been recording albums with a symphony orchestra. How are you pulling this off? I mean, how can you even afford to do it?
A Good question. I believe when you set forth a goal — when I say, “I want to do something” — I don’t necessarily know how it’s going to happen or how I’m going to do it, but you draw that energy to you by sheer will. And failure is not an option. Everything I’ve set out to do, I’ve done.

Q Tell me about recording your “Black American Symphony.”
A After I performed the symphony the first time, I said, “Well, I want to record it,” and it just so happened that my label was in place, so I could release it. I’m just a strong believer in – it’s the power of energy and thought, and what you conjure in terms of just sheer will is amazing if you put your mind to it and if you focus intensely on bringing that to life. I just don’t worry about things too much. Like, failing is not an option. It will happen when it’s time.

Q Will you describe the piece?
A The “Black American Symphony” basically is one that I wrote in the wake of the #BAM movement. It was my symphonic interpretation of creating a work that would use a construct largely associated with the European aesthetic, but without relying on the European language. Instead, I used what Dvorak called “Negro melodies.”

I wanted to use an orchestra, but to have all the language and the aesthetic be of one that’s African and black in nature. And it’s been interesting doing it, because I’ve come away with a much deeper understanding of the black American aesthetic. Because these are not pops orchestras that I was dealing with. These were musicians trained in playing the European classical repertoire.

If I didn’t know the differences before, I definitely know them now.

Q Between black and European aesthetics?
A They’re different languages. Just because you use Arabic letters and the word looks the same, they’re not necessarily the same word and it doesn’t mean the same thing. For instance, you use a dominant seventh chord: That is the foundation of the blues right there, that one chord. “Jungle Blues” by Jelly Roll Morton: That’s one of the first modal tunes, 30 years before Miles Davis. Those are the roots right there. Same thing, McCoy Tyner’s “Passion Dance”… There’s an endless possibility to what you can do with that chord. But in European classical music, that chord doesn’t work the same way.

I was modifying the harp part for my symphony, and the harpist told me, “Yeah, you know I’m not used to playing” – she said the word – “jazz harmonies.” And that struck me, because here’s someone who plays Debussy and Ravel — same kind of sharp-nine sounds that they say Duke Ellington took from Debussy. Yet this harpist says, “I’m not used to these chords.”
That interaction really illustrated that European harmony is not the same as black harmony. Same notes in some cases, but a different language, a different function.

Q Well, how did it turn out?
A I’m happy with the result, but it took some work.
And I was very conscious not to write out any swing rhythms, because I didn’t want the orchestra to have to interpret that kind of feel. Which was very challenging for me, to write the whole 50 minutes and not have anything that was swinging.

Q But a “Black American Symphony” has got to have some swing in it. Who’s swinging? Does your band play with the orchestra?
A Yes. That’s going to be the rhythmic basis. Obviously, the rhythm is going to be important if we’re talking about black music, but I didn’t want to deal with the orchestra having to swing. Maybe they COULD swing; I don’t know. But I wanted the score to be universally adaptable.

You know, there’s this forward motion in black music; that’s the other thing that I’ve found. There were instances where there were time issues with the orchestra, because the way we play time and the way European musicians play time is different. Classical music is more languid and it kind of breathes and it stops. That kind of forward motion that you hear with Elvin and Coltrane and McCoy and Jimmy Garrison on “Chasin’ the Trane” – that doesn’t exist in European music. I always thought that if you wrote it down and handed it to European classical musicians, they’d play it. But it doesn’t work that way.

Q How much time did you have to put the performance together? And who was in your band?
A Three rehearsals. Marcus Gilmore is on drums, Daniel Sadownick on percussion, Vicente Archer on bass. I play keyboards and trumpet, and I sing.

Q And you hope to release the recording later this year?
A That’s the plan. It’s being mixed now.
“Sketches of Spain,” the other one, is out this month.

Q “Sketches of Spain” also is with a symphony orchestra? Or is it with a big band playing Gil Evans’ arrangements?
A We did Gil’s arrangements exactly, same instrumentation that Gil used, so I didn’t rearrange the material. We just reinterpreted the grooves, and the improvisations are different. I first did this at the Hollywood Bowl in ’09.

Q Do you consider Gil Evans to be part of Black American Music?
A I can’t say what Gil would say, but I do, personally — particularly with his work with Miles, and I would even say on his own. To me he’s cut from the same sonic cloth as Ellington. And I believe he even said that’s what he was trying to do, but with different instrumentation.
A lot of what he did with Miles – those basically are orchestrations of Ahmad Jamal. Some of them are direct lifts from Ahmad Jamal trio records. How he would use French horns, how he would punctuate, syncopate – that was Ahmad Jamal’s left hand. And there’s a lot of blues in what Gil did.

Q I used to see Gil’s big band a lot in the ‘70s. That band had some great soloists – Howard Johnson, Billy Harper and Hannibal Peterson, the trumpeter. All great blues players. Have you seen Hannibal play? He’s amazing, but has kind of vanished from the scene.
A My uncle, who’s a sculptor – he and Hannibal are great friends. We just had lunch the other day. That was my first time meeting him.

Q What other projects are in your head?
A I’m going to Virginia to see these young cats who I’ve taken an interest in — a guy who plays drums with me, Corey Fonville. He has a band called Butcher Brown. In an era where a lot of younger cats are playing hip-hop and are kind of obscuring this whole Dilla concept of kind of flamming the beat or pulling back — they’re just funky and they’re just playing in the pocket and it feels good. They’re one of my favorite young bands today, if not my favorite. We’re going into the studio and we’ll see what develops. Devonne Harris (DJ Harrison) also is in that band.

Q What else?
A Man, I have like five albums of stuff that I really haven’t finished working on. And now that I have my own label, I just want to release more of my own product. I don’t have to stick to that model of releasing one album a year.

Q How is the label doing? Are you making any money?
A Greater than I imagined. In a couple of months, I’m already in the profit zone. That would never happen on a major label.

Q Your label’s logo is the Sankofa bird. Will you explain what that is?
A Sankofa is a Ghanaian concept of going back to get the best things of the past, to bring things to the now, to lead a better way to the future. And the symbol is a bird reaching back and getting an egg, and this is really the essence of everything I’m doing.

Everything that I say and play is with extreme respect of the past and the masters and the lineage and the ancestry. And the idea is to get the best things, maybe even learning what some of the things are that we SHOULDN’T do. The idea is to take the best of what works and give them voice now without being so reverent that we don’t stay current — where we become so deferential that we don’t allow for time and change and movement. The idea is to use these things to leave the world in a better state for our children and those who come after us. It’s essentially why I blog, too. It’s for my child. The end result is not necessarily for right now. It’s for now, and it’s for the past; for me this concept of time is a continuum.

For Africans, that separation of time doesn’t really exist. You’re always connected to ancestry.

The post The Complete Nicholas Payton: #BAM, Bird, Barack Obama, more appeared first on A+E Interactive.

This is a Philadelphia band, including saxophonists Elliott Levin, Julian Pressley and Louis Taylor, all longtime Pope collaborators — though the most impressive member of the Saxophone Choir (aside from Pope) isn’t a saxophonist. He is pianist George Burton. Now based in New York, he is a commanding musician — heavily percussive on Thursday, anchoring the Choir and the rest of the rhythm section.

But what I’ve just told you is all a set-up: during the second half of Thursday’s set, saxophonist James Carter came on as special guest. He was staggering — kind of super-human, and I’m not being hyperbolic. There are few saxophonists with Carter’s command of the instrument and hardball commitment to every solo. An aggressive player, he lacks the warmth of, say, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, but he is a showman and a blues man in the manner of Kirk. He was all over his tenor and soprano horns, going inside and outside with incredible force, speed and articulation, and with comic slap-tongued asides. Brawny like Gene Ammons, cosmic like Coltrane, he is a singular virtuoso, laying out the possibilities for his instrument. You have to wonder how the members of the Saxophone Choir were feeling; Carter blew them out of the water. Pope (who wasn’t playing, just conducting) seemed to be eating up each minute of it.

Carter is back again tonight for two shows, at 8 and 10:30; you should go. Saturday and Sunday, Pope has a different special guest: David Sanchez.

The post NY Review: Odean Pope and James Carter at Blue Note appeared first on A+E Interactive.

Performed in Mandarin (with English supertitles), “Journey” lasts 110 minutes (sans intermission) and occasionally tries one’s patience. (Oy, that monkey’s hysterical laughter). But in the end, it’s a charmer — good-hearted, inventive, beautiful to see and hear. Based on the 16th-century Chinese novel “Journey to the West,” it is conceived and overseen by stage and film director Chen Shi-Zheng, whose unlikely collaborators are composer Damon Albarn (of the bands Blur and Gorillaz) and graphic artist/animator/costume designer Jamie Hewlett (also of Gorillaz, its visual side).

Albam’s score to this populist, ambitious, cross-cultural collaboration is quite seamless, touching on the expanding pulses of Steve Reich, while paying homage to Talking Heads, synthy pop, Chinese hip-hop, ’60s samba, droning ritual songs, clangorously percussive processional music and long-arched melodies that seem both new and ancient; as the story moves toward its heart, the music convincingly bears in on traditional Chinese forms, at least to these ears. Catchy and full of imagination, Albarn’s score outshines several of the big-time opera commissions I’ve heard over the last year or two. In its final two scenes, it visits Philip Glass Land — manic, obsessive grooves out of “Music in Twelve Parts” during the fight with Princess Iron Fan’s warriors; gracious pinwheeling arpeggios complementing the dancers’ spinning parasols in the concluding dance/meditation in front of the towering Buddha.

Conducted by Brad Lubman (whose Ensemble Signal is excellent), the production runs through July 28 at the David H. Koch Theater.

The post NY Review: “Monkey: Journey to the West” appeared first on A+E Interactive.

Directed by Gene David Kirk, “The Two-Character Play” is a play within a play, but it isn’t enough of a play. Clare (Plummer) and Felice (Dourif) are brother and sister, washed up actors, whose only hopes for life and career exist as hallucinations. They are tied at the hip, their relationship equal parts devotion and hate. They pet, taunt and threaten to kill one another. They pretend still to be actors, improvising their way through a fitful drama titled, yes, “The Two-Character Play,” in which they play themselves — lonely, paranoid and trapped in the dilapidated home in which they grew up.

One senses the roots of the drama: Williams’ own bouts with mental illness and loss, as well as his obsession with and devotion to his sister Rose, who was institutionalized when the playwright wrote this work in the 1960s. It’s marked by his genius; one can focus in on image and language, on this line and that: “Some necessary things are impossible, and some impossible things are necessary,” Felice observes. But nothing much happens; there’s a revolver lying around the dusty stage, but Clare and Felice can’t even decide whether to off one another before the final curtain. When weary Clare jokes, “I need a month in a Bavarian spa,” this audience member nodded in agreement.

The post Review: Tennessee Williams’ “The Two-Character Play” appeared first on A+E Interactive.

Salvant grew up (and still lives) in Miami and attended a university in France, where she studied law and at age 18 wandered into a jazz class — where a fire was lit. Five years later, her life has changed. On June 19, she makes her Bay Area debut, singing at the SFJazz Center in San Francisco. Later this year, she tours with Wynton Marsalis.

I spoke by phone with Salvant, who described her family’s musical tastes: her Haitian-born father’s folk singing, her French-Guadeloupian mother’s Sarah Vaughan obsession, her own teenage love of grunge:

Q Tell me about the music in your house, while you were growing up. What did the family listen to? Did your parents play instruments or sing?
A My dad has a beautiful voice. He’s not at all a professional singer, and never tried to be one. But he always used to sing around the house – stuff that we would hear on the radio. We would hear a song and we would try to harmonize the tune, or some Haitian songs. And he played the piano, classical piano, when he was a kid, so he still has some chops left over.
My mom is actually the one who was the bigger music lover at home. She would listen to a lot of music, and there were a couple of songs that would come back on the repeat: “Midnight Train to Georgia.” A lot of Nancy Wilson. A lot of Sarah Vaughan; she was a big favorite. Billie Holiday: “Don’t Explain” was definitely on repeat.

But there was a lot of world music, too. Senegalese music; Youssou N’Dour. Fado. Brazilian music. There was Cape Verdean music, Dominican music, Paraguayan folk, American folk, bluegrass, Motown, soul, a lot of Michael Jackson, a lot of Earth, Wind and Fire, Barry White — and I could keep going. Very eclectic, my mom’s taste — and always the best. What she listened to the least was rock, but I listened to rock with my friends – grunge and a lot of things.

Q Out of all that listening, what did you love the most?
A I can’t say there was one thing. There were just those songs. When I was around 14, there was this Sarah Vaughan duet with Billy Eckstine, where they sing “I Love You,” and I was listening to that over and over, all the time, and thinking it was really corny and great. But I also listened to a lot of Pearl Jam at that time; loved Pearl Jam. And who was that guy who was the front man for Soundgarden? I remember going to one of his (Chris Cornell’s) concerts in high school and loving that, too.

And for me there was also classical piano lessons and classical voice lessons. I started piano around four years old and voice around 14, and I would learn the typical repertoire that they teach kids.

But I wasn’t listening to that music outside my lessons, not particularly. I listen to a lot of classical music now, but at that time — I can’t say that I would sit and listen to a recording of classical piano or an opera. It was a very weird relationship that I had with the music; I loved it, but it didn’t go beyond the goals of whatever the lesson was.

Q Are you still doing classical studies?
A I still continue classical voice. And I take lessons in Baroque voice. That’s something that I absolutely love, and that, if I have time, I would like to pursue and possibly do some concerts. I’d have to work on it, but it’s definitely something that I’ve been thinking about. I really like the French repertoire: Rameau, Lully, Gabriel Bataille. And from that period, I also like Monteverdi, Purcell, Dowland. The classics, I guess.

Q Let’s hear about your entrance into jazz.
A For three years I was completely hesitant about even pursuing a career in jazz singing. I met my teacher (Jean-François Bonnel, the saxophonist and clarinetist) and started singing jazz at 18, while I was studying law in France, and also doing classical voice and thinking that I could probably not deal with the lifestyle of a jazz musician and deal with the loneliness that is required to be a good one. Because you spend a lot of time practicing alone and you have to be able to deal with solitude and self-discipline and teaching yourself and I didn’t know that I could handle that.

So for a while I was clinging to this idea of keeping to this academic route or doing classical voice and it wasn’t until 2010 that I decided I might make a go of singing jazz professionally.

Q That’s the year you won the Thelonious Monk Competition.
A Yes. And I’m very happy with singing jazz, but it was really a haphazard thing; it could have gone in many ways. If I hadn’t met my teacher in France, I don’t know that it would have happened.

I speak to my friends who are jazz musicians and a lot of them had a “click moment” where they knew they were going to do it, and I didn’t really have that experience. Or if I did, it was much later.

Q Can you imagine yourself pursuing other paths? YourCecile McLorin Salvant. Photo by JP Dodel singing has a theatrical aspect; are you interested in theater? Anything else?
A I do see myself doing other things. I haven’t ruled out doing Baroque singing. I have ruled out doing law; that’s absolutely for sure. There are other things I haven’ t ruled out: I really like art and drawing. When I perform, I really like to act. There’s a lot of things like musical theater and theater that interest me and that I’d maybe like to pursue.

So I guess the challenge will be to really pinpoint what it is and continue to juggle it with developing as a jazz musician, which you need a lot of time and discipline to do.

Q Are you a mile-a-minute kind of person – a lot of energy?
A No, not energetic at all! I would say I’m extremely mellow and extremely laid back. People who know me — if they heard me say that I’m energetic, they’d laugh.

Q Let me guess: You’re the type who sleeps in late?
A I do like to sleep a lot.

Q You mentioned theater. Were you in school plays as a kid?
A I was in theater class in 8th grade. And every time that I was on stage, acting in character, I was so elated, excited; it was great and I would really get into it. I remember playing the role of this grumpy old lady who was sort of OCD and it was so much fun. But I never really pursued it after school because I had so much on my plate. I was studying French and classical piano and taking dance classes. Every year, my mom would enroll me in some new activity. I was one of those kids -– every afternoon at 4, there was something to do.

So I do remember having that love for it: Musical theater is something that I was absolutely obsessed with. I would watch a lot of those Disney movies: “Little Mermaid,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “Lion King,” “Pocahontas,” and the older ones, “Sleeping Beauty” and “Snow White.” I remember thinking, “I want to be the voice of the princess. I’m so ready. Somebody just needs to call.” I was like 10.

Q Let’s go back to that “click moment” for jazz. Did it ever actually happen? And if it did, did you recognize that it was happening?
A It came about just by meeting my teacher and seeing how much he loved the music and getting to this point where for about six months all I was doing was listening to jazz singers, listening to Billie Holiday and listening to Ella Fitzgerald and listening to Bessie Smith.

I was extremely homesick and had just left the nest and was discovering the joys of living an “independent student life,” quote unquote. So a huge part of the comfort I took at that time was from listening to these jazz records and these great singers and learning all these standards. So I think at that time it all came together and I realized I could take my stab at it.

Q Which singers did you click with most easily?
A I remember Ella Fitzgerald being the most easy and accessible one for me. As soon as I started hearing her, it became inculcated as my way of learning standards, because it was so clear and so precise and it was really a great model.

And Bessie smith — I remember first having a very difficult time of getting into that music. I remember my teacher giving me his whole discography of Bessie Smith recordings, and it was really rough, first of all because the recording quality was not as clear and clean as what you get today, so getting into it took some time. But as soon as I did — first of all, the repertory is absolutely brilliant, and there are such great songs. Second of all, there are all these songs nobody sings, so you can try what you want. And her way of playing with the notes and the pitch was something I found absolutely fascinating. And it’s “just” the blues, with no kind of prettiness about it; it’s the blues, in your face. And also, I’m so into the pianists she used – James P. Johnson is one of my absolutely favorite players and accompanists.

Q What led you to “You Bring out the Savage in Me”? Valaida Snow sang that in the ‘30s.
A My teacher introduced me to Valaida Snow. He gave me a recorded anthology; she probably recorded 40 tracks in her whole life, so you can go through it pretty easily.

Q You were a middle class kid. How do you relate to all this old blues, to Bessie Smith?
A In a sense, it came more easily. What I thought was really fun and interesting about this music was that the people playing it or singing it are in their 20s or 30s; they’re going to parties, they’re hanging out. It’s definitely like young people music. They may have had older people in their audience, but it was raucous, fun.

I think once I realized that, then it didn’t really matter if the music was 100 years earlier, or 300 years earlier. I remember taking a Baroque dance class in France, and our teacher would teach us the moves: These people were getting off their horse or going to a party or drinking and this is how they would dance.

In 500 years, we have all this technology and stuff, but at the root of it we haven’t changed all that much. The way people enjoy themselves and party and appreciate music, to me is roughly the same.

Q This was in Aix-en-Provence, where you went to school? What’s the cultural scene there?
A It has the biggest opera festival in the summer and I would always try to catch something. I caught this absolutely brilliant opera called “Written on Skin” by George Benjamin. Oh gosh. I went crazy. And I had such a great seat because I happened to know the countertenor who was the understudy for the guy on stage, and he said, “Oh, take my seat.”

Q You’ve been portrayed as an outsider to jazz – coming in through the back door, so to speak, having studied in France, and having had the whole jazz thing happen in a haphazard way, as you said earlier.
A I think at the time of the Monk Competition, I felt extremely like an outsider, because I had never performed in the United States. I had never played really with American musicians. I hadn’t had too much of an experience with English speaking audiences. So in a way, I did feel a little outside of the box: hadn’t gone to a jazz school; had one teacher for three or four years, who wasn’t a vocalist; never had a jazz vocal teacher, only had classical voice teachers.

So I did feel a little bit weird, in a way. Maybe now I feel a little bit as an outsider, but I’ve had such wonderful experiences with such great musicians now and have been welcomed in — have been able to sing with some of my idols, people I’d never imagined singing with.

Q Like who?
A Wynton. Herlin Riley. Rodney Whitaker. Aaron Diehl: I remember seeing videos of him and figuring I’d never play with him, and now he’s my friend. I feel sometimes maybe I’m a little bit of an outsider, but not really anymore.

Q You’re feeling more comfortable.
A Yeah.

Q Are you going to move to New York?
A Yes, I’m moving to New York soon. It’s going to happen, probably this year.

Q A minute ago, did you say that you had never performed in the U.S. before the Monk Competition.
A Yes. I think so. I think that’s true. I think I had played with one band in Miami before that. When I was 17 or 18, I came home for Christmas vacation or something. And my dad is good friends with a record producer, and so we set up this band and I recorded four or five tracks for personal pleasure.

Q Who was in your rhythm section at the Monk Competition?
A Rodney Whitaker, Carl Allen and Reggie Thomas.

Q Were you nervous?
A Yes, gosh.

Q Were you ever in classical competitions as a kid?
A No. In piano class, we had this one recital a year, where we would perform two songs or something. My parents would be there and it was so horribly nerve-wracking. I was freaking out. I remember we would go out to this restaurant afterward for a treat, because it was, “Yeah you did it.”

I still freak out when I have to play the piano in public.

So those are my competing experiences. I did one jazz competition in France before the Monk Competition, and I completely didn’t even place — a jazz vocal competition. I did not get close to anything, and I remember thinking, “Gosh.”

And I remember applying to a vocal competition in Switzerland and didn’t even get called to compete.

Q Here’s a real basic question: What’s the essential part of jazz that you love?
A Just on a physical level, the rhythm. When there’s really a groove that’s set in, a swing that’s set in and really feels good – if the music was just that, it would be enough. And then, the element of surprise. When you listen to Louie Armstrong play a melody or sing a melody – a lot of times you’ll hear this humor in the music, which is really beautiful given the amount of struggle and the amount of sorrow that a lot of these musicians were living through day to day.

That the humor is a very important part of it is something that I feel is absolutely brilliant; that you’re able to have this self-derision. I don’t know if that’s only present in jazz, but it’s there — to have this popular quality and this refined quality that are both playing against each other.

There was this great Jelly Roll Morton piece called “Sidewalk Blues.” It’s a wonderful arrangement with his band. And what’s insane is that you hear this part that sounds like this European quadrille, this very refined thing where you can imagine the women in their very fancy 19th-century dresses with their pinkies pointed up. And then there’s this scream of a trombone and it’s a party and you go wild. So to have those two things play against each other is great.

You can sit down with this music and intellectualize it, like the great European repertory, and then the next moment throw the table down and just dance to it – that’s something that I find absolutely brilliant. And it’s so seamless and it’s not a calculated thing and it’s not one person who established it; it’s a group of people and it has a history. It’s very much a community music and at the same time individualistic.

It’s so rich and there’s so much going on and it has so many contradictions. The blues itself – it’s crying and it’s sad. And it deals with depression, and at the same time people are laughing and enjoying themselves. It’s so, so completely rich. It’s not something I necessarily find in other music; to have this intellectualized folk music is something that is absolutely brilliant.

Q What about today’s jazz? Do you find that same sense of rich contradiction and good times and cultural roots?
A I don’t necessarily see it all the time, but there are times when I do feel it. There’s this absolutely great jam session at Dizzy’s Den every Saturday night. It’ll be like 1 a.m. and people will be singing: “Everybody say yeah? Yeah!” And we’re all dancing like crazy delirious, people hopping on stage. I’m happy that still exists and that there is that quality there, if we want it. And this is all like swing, real mainstream straight-ahead. It’s not anybody trying to be gimmicky or anything. It’s chestnuts, and 20 year-old girls are in front, dancing, going crazy. It’s not all the time. It’s rare when you encounter that situation, but the fact that you still can find that gives me a lot of hope.

Q I imagine 20 year-olds aren’t in the front row at all your gigs.
A I remember doing gigs and not one person in the audience didn’t have white hair. You’re like, gosh. I mean, I love these people, but where are my peers? Where are the people my age, and what’s it going to be like in 20 years?

Q Everybody’s asking that question. What do you think needs to be done?
A I think there’s this audience that’s there. I think that we the people in the jazz community and people working with jazz musicians need to figure out a way to just have this music be more included and more popular and to have a younger audience. And there are people out there, I think, that would love it, but they don’t know it’s there and they don’t get the chance.

A lot of people have these stereotypical views of what jazz is. I was just talking to this friend the other day about how on these shows “The Office” and “Parks and Recreation,” where they actually have said, “Jazz sucks.”

Q I remember a movie ten or more years ago, when I first started seeing that happen. This guy in the film was listening to a Mingus tune – “Haitian Fight Song” or something – and that made him a pathetic nerd. That was the message.
A It’s depressing. But there are a lot of fads and trends that come in and out. Just like folk and folksy stuff was revived, I think jazz can easily be revived in the eyes of the audience. But it has to be good. It just needs to be nurtured.

People are very much attracted to the visuals of something. And for a long time people who were in jazz were at the height of the latest fashion, but now jazz is super behind. And that’s a detriment to jazz, and I think we all need to revamp the visuals surrounding jazz – whether it’s outfits on stage, CD covers, web sites — and just try to get people through that.

Q What’s your most important goal as a musician? What’s the essence of what you do?
A I don’t know that I can answer that completely yet. Because I still feel that I’m this learning student – trying to learn this music and do it well. And I haven’t been singing jazz for nearly enough time to get to that level. So there’s a lot that I’m focusing on, just trying to get better at the music.

But I definitely as a performer would like to have a sustained audience that’s my audience, that likes what I do, that’s not there because of hype or whatever. I don’t think that makes for a long career. I want to last and not just have this peak and everybody forget about me. I’d rather have this smaller group that’s really dedicated to what I do, and just build on that.

And I guess as a performer, my first goal is to touch people, to provoke an emotional reaction in people, to make them have a good time, to make them feel happy, to make them feel sad. Sometimes I like to do something where they have to ask themselves questions about their identity. Like with “You Bring Out the Savage in Me” — I’m trying to get people to think a little bit about who they are and how they relate to other people in society and how they think about race or sexism or homophobia or whatever it is. But I’m not trying to be a political artist.

The main thing is to generate deep, deep emotions in people and to get them away from their everyday lives. That’s why I go to great art or great music. That’s what I’m striving for, for people to feel how I feel when I’m in front of a great painting or hearing great music, which makes me feel at a deep level, a level that I don’t even know has words to describe what’s there.

Q What were your parents’ expectations of you when you were growing up?
A There was certainly an expectation in my household for me and my sister to really, really be great at whatever it is that we did. We weren’t raised to be competitive or anything. But if we were the best at something, they were happy — but they weren’t so surprised that it seemed like a surprise.

It was, “Get great grades, do well in school, be amazing at your French class.” Things like that would be expected.

Q Your dad is a doctor, right?
A Yes, in internal medicine.

Q And your mom founded a bilingual French-English school in Miami. Did you ever go to it?
A I did, but only in the fifth grade.

Q Are you and your family at all surprised by the attention you’ve been getting, the success you’re quickly having?
A Yeah, it does come as a shock to me, the great response that’s been coming for the past couple of months or year. We’re all pretty humble people, almost to our detriment, so it takes a couple of times for my mom and dad and sister and me to realize what’s going on. It has been a shock in a way.

Q What’s your sister’s name?
A Aisha.

Q And are you living right now with your family in Miami?
A Yes, living with the folks.

Q Who are your musical mentors right now?
A I don’t know that I have a real mentor right now. Part of the reason might be that I haven’t been long in one place.

Definitely Wynton, whenever I’m with him – when we’ve done gigs, it’s always been a mentoring experience.

Q You’re doing a Christmas tour with him.
A That’s going to be an experience!

Q What about your own songwriting? Are you pursuing that much?
A I’m doing a bit of songwriting, a bit more than I used to, trying to hone that craft. And I realize that songwriting, like a lot of things — your first thousand tries are kind of like crap, until you really get to the meat of what you do.

Q Who right now fascinates you as a songwriter?
I really, really like Frank Ocean as a songwriter, really like his whole universe, his whole atmosphere that he works with. And I really like Fiona Apple. I like James Blake, too – less the song and the songwriting than how he sets everything up electronically and how he layers everything. Because his songs at the same time are very repetitive and very abstract.

And Lauryn Hill; she hasn’t really done anything lately. But “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill” – that CD was something that I absolutely loved.

Q So what’s next? San Francisco is June 19. What’s the rest of the summer hold for you?
A I’ll spend a lot of June and July in France. I’m doing a couple of things with Archie Shepp, which is going to be amazing. He lives in France and he’s re-doing his big band and basically was looking for singers to do the background vocals. So I’ll be working with Archie Shepp, also with Jacky Terrasson, and then the rest of the time with my band.

France is a country where I maybe have a bigger audience than in the U.S. And my CD is being distributed over there through Universal and they’re really going all out, and my CD has been playing on a lot of radios in France.

Q I predict that you’ll be on television soon, here in the U.S.
A I don’t know about that.

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“Blueprints of Jazz, Vol. 2 (Talking House, 2008)

“In Concert: Live from Poland” (Arkadia DVD, 2007)

“Soul of an Angel” (Metropolitan, 2000)

“If Our Hearts Could Only See” (DIW, 1997)

“Somalia” (Evidence, 1995)

“Destiny is Yours” (Steeplechase, 1989)

“The Believer” (BayState, 1980)

“The Awakening” (Marge, 1979)

“Trying to Make Heaven My Home” (MPS, 1979)

“Billy Harper Quintet in Europe” (Soul Note, 1979)

“Love on the Sudan” (Nippon Columbia, 1977)

“Soran Bushi-B.H.” (Denon, 1977)

“Black Saint” (Black Saint, 1975)

“Capra Black” (Strata-East, 1973)

With Randy Weston:
“Spirit of Our Ancestors” (Polygram 1992)
“Tanjah” (Verve, recorded 1973)

With McCoy Tyner
“Turning Point” (Verve, 1994)

With Max Roach:
“The Loadstar” (Horo, 1977)
“Live in Amsterdam (BayState, 1977)
“Lift Every Voice and Sing” (Atlantic, 1971)

With Gil Evans:
“Svengali” (Atlantic, 1973)
“Where Flamingoes Fly” (Capitol, 1971)

With Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Big Band:
“Potpourri” (Columbia, 1974)

With Charles Earland
“Intensity” (Prestige, 1972)

With Lee Morgan:
“Lee Morgan” (Blue Note, 1971)

With Art Blakey:
“Live at Slugs” (Trip, 1968; also issued as “New World”)

The post Saxophonist Billy Harper at 70: a discography appeared first on A+E Interactive.

By Richard Scheinin
Mercury News

News flash! The most amazing tenor saxophonist on the planet is coming to the Bay Area this weekend. Want to guess who? Sonny Rollins? No. Wayne Shorter? Uh-uh. Michael Brecker? Don’t think so. Joe Lovano? Try again.
The correct answer is Billy Harper, whose name — due to random jazz injustices, racial politics in the music marketplace, and any number of other factors that make or break careers, including plain luck — is known only to a relatively small number of hard-core jazz fans.
I can hear the gathering chorus of naysayers, so I’ll protect my back by stating the obvious: Rollins and Shorter are jazz gods, going back to the ’40s and ’50s, respectively. And Brecker and Lovano are outstanding players, to be sure.
But for my money, no other tenor player — and few musicians, period — has performed with the sort of diamond-hard brilliance and melt-your-heart poignancy that Harper consistently has brought to the bandstand for 35 years or more.
When Harper is on, which is often, his playing is supercharged, swinging and swirlingly soulful. Which is why you should hotfoot it over to Yoshi’s in Oakland, where he is part of an all-star septet performing tomorrow through Sunday.
An underrated crew
It isn’t the ideal Harper setting; that would be with his own band, performing his own unique compositions.
But the “Night of the Cookers” septet, as it’s dubbed, will do: It includes several other exciting and severely underrated players of Harper’s generation, including trumpeter Charles Tolliver, alto saxophonist James Spaulding, and pianist John Hicks. There’s a lot of history wrapped up in this band, assembled to evoke the “cooking” nightclub atmosphere of jazz in the ’60s.
Harper, 62, knew that milieu intimately. Raised in small-town Tyler, Texas, he was playing rhythm ‘n’ blues in Houston nightclubs at 16, and, after graduating from North Texas State University, moved to New York in 1966.
Almost instantly, things happened: (1) His second day in town, he was robbed of all his possessions (except his saxophone); (2) an NBC TV producer heard about him through the jazz grapevine and put him in a local documentary called “The Big Apple, ” chronicling the struggles of four new Manhattanites. (Jerry Quarry, the boxer, was one of the others). For his segment, Harper, not lacking in confidence, convened a band that included several legends: pianist McCoy Tyner, drummer Elvin Jones and trumpeter Freddie Hubbard.
Already, he was making a name for himself. Gil Evans, the arranger and big band leader, hired Harper and made him one of his group’s key soloists for nearly a decade. In 1967, drummer Art Blakey, patent keeper of the big beat, hired Harper into his Jazz Messengers.
A natural on stage
If you’re curious to know what young Harper sounded like, track down a 1968 bootleg recording of Blakey’s band performing at Slug’s, the Lower East Side nightclub, and give a listen to Harper on “Angel Eyes”: He swoops, soars, dances, pleads and cries, and goes gunning through the ballad’s chord changes. He was all of 25.
I first heard Harper in 1973, also in New York, at Columbia University, where I had a jazz radio show on the school’s FM station. Harper was performing (on the same bill as Tolliver, coincidentally) in an auditorium below the station; I peered through a window at his group and felt magnetically drawn to the music, though only its outlines were audible.
Still, it hit me: regal and stunning. The tune was Harper’s “Priestess, ” which unfurled like an anthem from antiquity, but swirled like Coltrane, and was carried along by a gripping, almost Pentecostal power.
Yet for all its spiritual intensity and formal complexity — amazing basslines, rhythms piled on rhythms, and deep surprising harmonies — it held out a hand of invitation; if you listened hard, you could tell that Harper had grown up listening to the Impressions.
Like so many great jazz players (and like the Impressions), Harper grew up in the black church and his playing bears a gospel stamp. But more than most, Harper can convey an almost unbearable beauty, mostly because his sound is filled with such yearning.
But I also hear the affirmation and jubilation, and the sense of soaring possibilities, all of which are part of Harper’s sound — and the sound of jazz, in general, when it’s really happening.
First-class pedigree
Harper’s jazz credentials are impeccable. He spent all of the 1970s with drummer Max Roach’s quartet and functioned as clean-up hitter with the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra; when it was time to clear the bases with a big solo, it was time for Harper.
He also was the final saxophonist in the band of the late Lee Morgan, that most soulful of trumpeters. To this day, in addition to leading his own quintet, Harper performs with bands led by Tyner and pianist Randy Weston, another mainstay of the tradition.
With this pedigree, why isn’t he better known? For one thing, Harper first hit his stride when jazz was stuck in economic doldrums. Blakey didn’t have a record contract during Harper’s three years as a Messenger. Roach was mostly recording for obscure European labels, even though his group with Harper was among the most important of that era.
For another thing, the jazz media have a way of ignoring many significant jazz innovators who are black. Not long ago, Downbeat magazine, the jazz Bible, had a cover story featuring the photos of three great saxophonists — Brecker, Lovano and Dave Liebman — who were characterized as keepers of John Coltrane’s flame. It isn’t that these musicians, who are white, don’t deserve recognition.
But when was the last time Downbeat, or any other jazz publication, featured the faces of Harper, the late John Stubblefield, Benny Maupin, Sonny Fortune, Gary Bartz, Andrew White, Abraham Burton or Odean Pope — black players who are really baptized in Coltrane’s innovations? They are roundly ignored.
A longtime admirer
You could say I’m biased. I’ve known Harper for years, have written liner notes for a couple of his albums, and — as if you can’t tell yet — am scandalized by this state of affairs. Since 1966, only one American label — Manhattan Records, which you’ve probably never heard of — has bothered to put Harper in a recording studio. Blue Note, where are you?
Still, there’s an international underground of Harper admirers. They know the saxophonist has never sold out one iota, and that, for him, the music is its own reward. In an interview years ago, he put it in perspective for me:
“I have this gift of music, and my goal has always been to tell the truth in artistry, ” he said. “Nobody ever told me, ‘You’re going to have this gift, and you’re also going to make a lot of money.’ I feel if I go for the money, I may lose the gift — the ability to create music.
“When I am inspired, it seems like a bolt of truth from above. It’s like an opening up and a connecting with a higher being. When that happens, and it doesn’t happen all the time, the truth is happening!” Harper said, laughing. “Fame is not quite my goal. It’s the message in the music. If the message gets across, I don’t even have to worry about anything else. Fame? I’m not doing this for fame.”

Recommended listening: The best of Billy Harper (as of 2005)
Billy Harper’s recordings are full of great songs and searing intensity. Here are some of his best. Many are available commercially or can be purchased through his Web site, www.billyharper.com. Finding a few of them, however, requires serious Internet sleuthing and just plain luck.
As a leader: “Soul of an Angel” (Metropolitan, 2000); “If Our Hearts Could Only See” (DIW, 1997); “Somalia” (Evidence, 1995); “The Believer” (Bay State, 1980); “Trying to Make Heaven My Home” (MPS, 1979); “Billy Harper Quintet in Europe” (Soul Note, 1979); “The Awakening” (Marge, 1979); “Soran Bushi-B.H.” (Denon, 1977); “Love on the Sudan” (Denon, 1977); “Black Saint” (Black Saint, 1975); “Capra Black” (Strata-East, 1973)
As a sideman: with Randy Weston: “Spirit of Our Ancestors” (Verve, 1992), “Tanjah” (Verve, 1973); with McCoy Tyner: “Turning Point” (Verve, 1994); with Max Roach: “The Loadstar” (Horo, 1977), “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (Atlantic, 1971); with Gil Evans: “Svengali” (Atlantic, 1973); with the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Big Band: “Potpourri” (Columbia, 1974); with Art Blakey: “Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers. Live” (Black Label, 1968), “Moanin’ ” (Laserlight, 1968); with Lee Morgan: “Lee Morgan” (Blue Note, 1971); with Grachan Moncur III: “Exploration” (Capri, 2004); with Piotr Wojtasik: “Quest” (Power Brothers, 1996)

The post Billy Harper at 70: A profile from 2005 — the music “unfurled like an anthem from antiquity, but swirled like Coltrane, and was carried along by a gripping, almost Pentecostal power.” appeared first on A+E Interactive.

By Richard Scheinin
Mercury News

When Miles Davis asked tenor saxophonist Billy Harper to join his band in the early 1970s, Harper did something many musicians would have considered insane. He told the trumpeter “No.”
Harper was a member of a very special, long-working quartet led by the drummer Max Roach at the time, and he “wasn’t just going to leave Max because Miles said to play with him, ” Harper says. “Miles was cool: ‘OK.’ It might have been another story money-wise, playing with Miles, but it was probably good for me soul-wise to stay with Max.”
If you’re looking for a musician who stands for something — say, integrity — Harper is your man. The sound of his saxophone also happens to be among the wonders of jazz: probing, piercing and positively explosive.
His flat-out solos can induce panic attacks in a listener, so watch yourself next week when Harper brings his quintet to Yoshi’s in Oakland for four nights beginning Thursday. It’s the saxophonist’s first major club engagement in the Bay Area in about 20 years, since the old days at San Francisco’s Keystone Korner, where he used to leave audiences in a sweat. Harper’s unit includes the celebrated trumpeter Eddie Henderson and is one of the best working bands in the music: tight, swinging, bursting with emotion.
If you call yourself a jazz fan, you really shouldn’t miss it. Harper, 58, is a jazz touchstone. Over the past 35 years, he has lifted the bandstands of drummers Roach and Elvin Jones, trumpeters Lee Morgan and Donald Byrd, pianists McCoy Tyner and Randy Weston, and big-band leaders Gil Evans and Thad Jones, to name a few.
To hire Harper is to baptize the bandstand with a purity of expression that’s missing from the rounded-off-at-the-edges sounds of many players today. The late drummer Art Blakey, who set Harper loose in his Jazz Messengers in the late 1960s, used to tell him, in his famous scratchy voice, “Billy, I’m your favorite fan!”
Harper takes part of his vocabulary from the experimentation John Coltrane was working through during the 1960s, but he’s no Coltrane clone. He long ago evolved his own special language on the horn — an incantatory force informed by the black church, where this grandson of a Methodist minister spent his formative years.
Embedded in the blues
Wynton Marsalis talks about the “majesty of the blues.” Well, Harper’s music has embodied that sense of nobility for decades. It is at once virtuosic and full of abandon as Harper reaches for “a touching the soul kind offeeling, ” he says, speaking from his apartment in New York. “I like to have the group be very together and very tight and very swinging. But I also like for my sound to be kind of raw and cutting. . . . I’m trying to let the real truth come through, from the source.”
I met Harper close to 30 years ago in New York, when I was a college student hosting a jazz radio show and he was one of the young gunslingers on tenor. Over the years, I’ve heard him explain where different tunes come from: this one handed to him in a dream; this one arisen from the rhythm of his footsteps on a morning jog; this one inspired by a flash of memory of his grandmother, Pearl Simpson, who raised him in Texas.
Last year, after recording his CD “Soul of an Angel, ” Harper explained the origins of a tune titled “Let All the Voices Sing.” It began as a melodic fragment that he whistled. He took notice — “Hey, maybe that’s a song” — jotted down the notes and went to work. First, he heard the tune as a march — akin to pianist Bud Powell’s “Glass Enclosure, ” which has unusual march-like rhythms. But as the melody evolved it “started reminding me more of ‘Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing, ‘ which is the black anthem we used to sing a lot in church, ” he said.
Harper sang a few lines from James Weldon Johnson’s century-old “Black National Anthem”
Lift ev’ry voice and sing,
Til earth and heaven ring.
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty…
Harper’s boyhood church was Ebenezer African Methodist Episcopal Church in Tyler, Texas, near Houston. By age 16, he was playing the blues in Houston night clubs. His uncle Earl Harper Jr. was a friend of Kenny Dorham, the seminal bebop trumpeter, and from the beginning Harper was influenced by Dorham’s sound: “It’s why I play the way I do, ” he says. “I hear my saxophone in relationship to voice and trumpet. The trumpet has such a brilliance, so it kind of awakens people, and that’s what I’m trying to do on the horn.”
In 1961, Harper entered North Texas State University, where he was one of the few black students on campus. He practiced eight hours a day and held down a chair in the school’s big band. On weekends, he might head to Fort Worth to play with Dewey Redman and Julius Hemphill, two saxophonists headed for fame as avant-gardists in New York. At the time they played “straight bop, and good, too, ” Harper says.
Proving ground
Dallas also was a weekend proving ground. Harper played regularly with James Clay, a legendary saxophonist. He remembers “a special jam session on Sundays with four or five saxophones: Clay and sometimes David ‘Fathead’ Newman would come off the road. There was Fred Smith, another good player, and a guy we called ‘Worm, ‘ ” he says, laughing. “I never knew his real name.”
In 1966, Harper headed for New York. On the second night, all his clothes were stolen. He phoned Charles Moffett, a drummer from Fort Worth who put him up in Brooklyn. Texas-raised Dorham also came through, though at the time he didn’t realize he was helping Earl Harper’s nephew.
Dorham told a television producer about a new saxophonist he’d heard about, Billy Harper. That’s how Harper became part of a television news documentary about four newcomers to the Big Apple: “There was a model, a business person, and a boxer — Jerry Quarry, ” who later fought Joe Frazier for the heavyweight title, Harper says.
Professional success came as a result of talent and circumstance. One day, Harper spotted Gil Evans, the arranger, on a midtown street and introduced himself. Evans took a chance and brought Harper into his big band, which included Elvin Jones on drums.
Jones is the most titanic of jazz drummers, the force behind John Coltrane’s earthshaking quartet. He was among the first drummers in New York to admire Harper’s rhythm-charged improvisations. Next came Blakey, who took Harper to Finland and Japan, and then Roach.
By the early ’70s, Harper was climbing the saxophone popularity polls in Downbeat magazine, the jazz bible. One year, he and Michael Brecker — one of today’s big-name players — were side by side in the Top 10.
Somehow through the years, Harper missed out on the celebrity status thatsome of his fans expected for him in the United States. But you know what? He really doesn’t care. He travels with his band to Poland, Japan, Malaysia and Brazil — or Baltimore, for that matter — and the music rarely fails to move people. Never annointed by the major labels — Harper isn’t one to follow the whims of the industry — he has still managed to record a couple dozen albums and CDs. (Many are available through his Web site jazzcorner.com/harper or via e-mail through the Billy Harper Fan Club at explorejaz@aol.com.)
Success in the recording industry “is a contrived kind of thing, ” Harper says. “I don’t focus on particular material goals. My goal is to make sure that the music really touches people and that I am doing all that I can musically. I was granted this gift, and I realized a long time ago that I should share it with people, whether I was making money or not making money.”
It’s possible, he concedes, that record company executives labeled him early on as a musician “who will not bend. And I don’t care. I’m just trying to tell the truth. There’s not any bending about that.”

The post Billy Harper at 70: A profile from 2001 — Art Blakey told him, “Billy, I’m your favorite fan!” appeared first on A+E Interactive.

By Richard Scheinin
San Jose Mercury News
IT’S BEEN 30 years since the tenor saxophonist Billy Harper arrived in New York City and began to turn heads with his urgent, wailing sound. Meticulously dressed in black, head to toe, on the bandstand, his saxophone skills honed to a dangerous edge, Harper cut a charismatic figure. Before long the young Texan was performing and recording with the finest in the business: the legendary arranger and big-band leader Gil Evans, Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, the soulful trumpeter Lee Morgan and drummer Max Roach, in whose quartet Harper spent eight years.
A ‘cleanup batter’ on sax
He was the man of the hour. The trumpeter and big-band leader Thad Jones used Harper like a cleanup batter; once the music hit a promising level of intensity, Harper was sent to the plate to bust the game wide open, romping through the difficult harmonic signposts of Jones’ compositions and lifting the music to a new mountaintop. Frequently, Harper left crowds screaming; his playing was, and remains, excruciatingly beautiful – at times too much to handle. At once regal and charged with the blues, Harper’s improvisations soar. He has led his own quintets and sextets for much of the last 20 years, and the music is almost always questing, filled with a sense of expanding possibilities at one moment, the most profound sorrow the next.
With this sort of pedigree, one might assume that Billy Harper would be a celebrity of the jazz world, and yet his new album, “Somalia” (Evidence), is his first solo American release since 1973. (He has recorded and toured extensively in Europe and Asia.) Luckily, it arrives as a new generation of listeners has discovered jazz’s ecstatic side, in particular the high-energy improvisations of the late tenor saxophone virtuoso John Coltrane.
Anthem-like announcement
Harper, 53, is among the greatest tenor players to emerge in Coltrane’s wake, and one of the few to create his own language on the horn. An ingenious composer whose oeuvre deserves mention at least in the same conversation as Wayne Shorter’s, he adds several tunes to the canon here. “Somalia, ” like so many of Harper’s pieces, announces itself like an anthem. The aptly titled “Quest” opens with bugle calls and drum rudiments – a throwback to Harper’s youthful marching-band days in Houston – before segueing into a graceful North African dance rhythm and finally a Blue Note-ish groove. “Light Within” might have been written for the Spinners. (Years ago, Harper, who can sing, almost succeeded in selling a vocal version of one of his most memorable tunes, “Priestess, ” to the Fifth Dimension).
Best of the lot is “Thy Will Be Done, ” a dramatic, slowly unfurling composition on which Harper and trumpeter Eddie Henderson – another unsung hero – sound awestruck, as if they’re witnessing the Creation. This is one of Harper’s best recorded solos: pleading, leaping back and forth between registers to build grand melodic lines that give way to cascading sheets of sound that spiral to the horn’s bottom.
He is a dancing improviser, who enjoys going one-on-one with strong drummers. (Harper used to fill in for Roach behind the traps, on occasion.) A technical wizard, he’s never slick. When Harper appeared at a Greenwich Village nightclub last month – his first weeklong gig in his adopted hometown in 14 years – the New York Times called the music “intense and raw, as if water coursing through a pipe under pressure had suddenly been uncorked.”
Yet Harper also understands the ballad. His “Angel Eyes” recording with Blakey from 1968 is classic, and more recent versions of “My Funny Valentine” open up new possibilities in that well-explored tune.
Achingly lovely ballad
Pianist Randy Weston’s new CD, “Saga” (Verve), matches him with Harper on an achingly lovely ballad called “The Beauty of It All.” Weston, of course, is perhaps the greatest living heir to the pan-African muse of Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk. Harper is one of his favorites; they’ve played together on and off for about 25 years. To hear Harper in this setting, as part of a three-horn line in front of Weston, is a treat. The tenorist’s dense lines give way to the billowing solos of alto saxophonist Talib Kibwe, and then the well-seasoned trombone of Basie veteran Benny Powell. Behind all these pros sits the great Billy Higgins with his exuberant, dancing drumsticks. The spirit of jazz is alive here.
Perhaps Harper’s time is now. His profile is rising; there have been recent tours and recordings with pianist McCoy Tyner. But Harper probably isn’t concerned, one way or the other. “I have this gift of music, and my goal has always been to tell the truth in artistry, ” he said in 1991, prior to his quintet’s most recent Bay Area tour.
“Nobody ever told me, ‘You’re going to have this gift, and you’re also going to make a lot of money.’ . . . Fame is not quite my goal. It’s the message in the music. If the message gets across, I don’t even have to worry about anything else. Fame? I’m not doing this for fame.”

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