For the 37th birthday of drummer-composer Kendrick Scott, I’m posting a pair of interviews that I conducted with him in 2007—the latter one, specifically conducted for a DownBeat “Players” article, comes first. At the bottom of the post is a “directors’ cut” of the article.
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Kendrick Scott (Aug. 15, 2007):
TP: I want to talk about your New York experience, and I want to talk about your career as it is now and the label — I won’t have room to go through a lot of personal history, though I want to address some of it, since I want to discuss you as a composer and how you accumulated vocabulary. But first, let’s talk about how you joined Terence. Also, have you played sideman with other major bands besides Terence?
KENDRICK: Actually, the first band that I left school to go with… Well, when I finished Berklee, I went out with the Crusaders. So I was booked to go with the Crusaders, but while I was in my cap and gown, Terence called me and asked me to join the band. So I had to turn him down and say, “Well, I’ve got these gigs with the Crusaders coming up.” So I played with the Crusaders that whole summer, and then when October came, I started with Terence. That was 2003.
TP: Was the Crusaders hookup a Houston hookup?
KENDRICK: It was a Houston hookup. Joe Sample had moved home in I think 1998, and me and Walter Smith and Mark Kelly, a great bass player who played with Scofield, we had played for his homecoming back in Houston, and Joe sat in with us, and Joe remembered me from then. So through Walter’s father, who is also a tenor player… He was asking Walter’s father, “Who is that drummer?” So he asked about me, and then he called me up while I was at Berklee, and he flew me out to L.A. and auditioned me for like three days.
TP: This was during your final year at Berklee?
KENDRICK: Yes. The end of my final year at Berklee.
TP: But he met you while you were in high school.
KENDRICK: He met when I was in high school. He remembered me from high school.
TP: That’s when Terence met you, too. At a jazz camp.
KENDRICK: Terence met me I guess in 1999, my second year at Berklee. The alliance was so strong between the Houston drummers, I always hung out with Harland, whenever I could go to see him. Especially when they were in Boston or any other city where I was, I would go hang out in New Orleans… At IAJE a lot of times. So it was great to meet Terence with Harland, and then, with the Betty Carter Jazz Ahead, that was in ‘99 at the Kennedy Center. That’s actually where he met me and Aaron Parks at the same time.
TP: So he called you while you were on the stand, and you had to…
KENDRICK: I was in the line.
TP: So you missed gigs with him over the summer.
KENDRICK: Yeah, I missed a lot of gigs. The Crusaders were booked solid until then, so I couldn’t really…
TP: And I’m sure they paid good, too.
KENDRICK: Yes, they did!
TP: But apart from the pay, what was the value of the experience?
KENDRICK: Well, the initial draw for me was to take myself out of the kind of straight-ahead barrier that I had kind of…well, I wouldn’t say consciously put myself in, but that I kind of just got in by being talented at what I do. I started getting so much work just playing straight-ahead stuff that I didn’t get any work playing more groove-oriented things, and I thought it was a huge blessing for me to be able to play that type of thing, and especially with those type of people and that type of stage. So I couldn’t deny that. To this day, that’s been a great experience for me.
TP: There’s a groove aspect to your playing, to your flow certainly with Oracle. I was hearing that at Christopher Street, that you’ll do beats, and then you have interesting ways of playing the beats, and timbral things you would do. Is that a correct observation?
KENDRICK: It is. I’m really in tune to space, dynamics, and groove. Those are the things that I love. When I listen to great drummers, it seems like they all have that. I concentrate on those type of things more than I do actually facility or those type of things.
TP: Did playing with the Crusaders burnish your feeling for grooves, or the way you think about them?
KENDRICK: It definitely did, because they have their own way of thinking about the groove, which is so specific that it really helped me in channeling my energy to the groove first, and then everything else lays on top of it. That’s what I try to do even with using space. So that’s one of the things that I always work on, trying, without playing notes or anything, to have the groove there. Most all the great drummers that I listened to did that. They didn’t have to play so many notes to play a strong groove. That’s what I love about drummers like Blade or Tony, and people like that. I really love that they can just leave it up in the air, but the groove is so strong. But the Crusaders were on the other side, “play a strong groove and then let us float over the top of it.” I really thought that was interesting.
TP: During college, did you do any summer sideman work, or outside of Houston…road work with established bands?
KENDRICK: Not really when I was in Houston. When I got to Boston, I had been playing with Darren Barrett, and we did a few tours here and there. While I was at Berklee, Joe Lovano was named one of the artists-in-residence, and we did some gigs with Joe, with another band I played with called Califactors. I did some other things… Actually, I played with Terence. That’s when the relationship really started with Terence… The summer of 2002 is the first time I played with Terence, and we went to Japan for 3 weeks. We played all the Blue Notes in Japan. That’s when it started. It was a rough thing. I’d just been in school, and you get taught how to play in school, but you don’t know how to play unless you’re playing the gig. It was on-the-gig training. Actually, I don’t know if Terence really liked me at first. It was definitely on-the-gig training. I just learned how to use everything that I’ve learned, but then totally abandon. At that time, I was struggling with holding on to those things, like trying to play like Max. “Oh, this section, I should play like Max.” Trying to play like Philly or trying to play like Al Foster. Really, I’ve come to such an enlightenment, actually letting what comes out to come out instead of filtering what I think I would play.
TP: Did Terence encourage you?
KENDRICK: Terence encourages that a lot with us, even now. He encourages mostly about honesty, which is what I try to center my music around nowadays. I don’t ever want to cloud my judgment on what I play by thinking about what the listener wants to hear, or how can I impress someone. I just try to do what I feel in my heart, and if it’s acceptable, cool, but if not, whatever.
TP: You talked about the intense connection with the Houston drummers, spending a lot of time with Eric Harland. Is there an approach to drums that comes out of Houston, in your opinion? Or are there commonalities that you and Harland and Chris Dave…
KENDRICK: Mark Simmons and Jamire Williams. I think the commonality is that we all came out of the church. Gospel music has such a feeling to it that I think the vocabulary that we have actually reflects… It’s funny, because it’s true of a lot of drummers nowadays, especially in the Afro-American community, that we come out of the church, and our vocabulary reflects people that we have been listening to, and these are people who maybe jazz people wouldn’t be listening… People like Marvin McQuiddy(?) or even people like Dennis Chambers. So we kind of fused that gospel mentality with jazz, and it created a fresh sound for us. At the time, I wasn’t thinking of it that way. I was just trying to emulate what Chris Dave and Harland were doing while I was playing. But the tricky part about it is, every generation has started to do that. Chris Dave looked up to Sebastian Whitaker, who is a great drummer. Actually, he’s a blind drummer in Houston. If you see him play, if you see the way he sets his drums up, you can see similarities between him and all of us. We all sit high and play low, into the drums. I felt it was so empowering but it was also so practical, because it means that all the instruments are down here and ready for me to play. It’s a better thing for your posture and all that type of thing. So learning that from a blind man… That passed on down from Chris to Eric to Mark Simmons to me, and to Jamire…
TP: That’s also a New Orleans thing, no? It’s a parade drum posture. That’s how Idris plays, how Blackwell used to play. Now that I think of it.
KENDRICK: Yes. It provides your body so much… You can put the momentum into the drums, instead of you sitting underneath them and going up to them.
TP: So it was less about Sebastian Whitaker’s vocabulary than the way he addressed the drums.
KENDRICK: Yes. Because his vocabulary was thoroughly rooted in Art Blakey. One of his records is One For Bu, which is a good record. We definitely took from that vocabulary, but us being church musicians, we were always hearing different guys coming out of church and we were like, “Well, what if we play these church type of ideas within our idiom.” For me, I got in a lot of trouble in high school trying to set up the band playing church fills, which didn’t work. But eventually, when I learned how to use them better, they did work.
TP: Was it one particular church, or a network of Baptist churches in Houston?
KENDRICK: No, it was just a network. In Houston there are a lot of mega-churches.
TP: Were the music directors in those churches sympathetic to a jazz attitude, or was that a thing you had to keep quiet…
KENDRICK: Not really. Especially with youth and young adults, I found it very encouraging that they would let us… They wouldn’t censor us, but they would definitely keep their eye on us and make sure we weren’t going too far. But they allowed us to express ourselves, how we felt, which was great, and which is what I see in music now. Sometimes I think we’re on the edge and we go too far, but I think that level of expression is something that is needed.
TP: It’s a very interesting thing, not just with drummers, but overall with the African-American sector of the jazz community under 40, how many people do come out of the church experience. Do you have any observations on why that is? Is it because that’s where instruments are available, whereas in inner city high schools they’re not so readily available?
KENDRICK: That’s definitely a part of it nowadays, with arts being gone from the schools. But for me, when I went to elementary school, I can’t even remember… I think we had music, but it wasn’t music where we had the instruments to play. We would go in and play on small little tambourines or something. But for me, I was always going to church, so the instruments were always at church. My mother was an instrumentalist also, so I would always be at choir rehearsal… She plays piano. The way my family worked is, my mother played, my brother also played piano and organ (he’s ten years older), and my father was the sound man. When we went to the rehearsal, my mom was playing and my dad was working the sound for the choir. So when rehearsal was over, my dad would be wrapping things up, my mom would be talking to the director, and I would go jump on the drums. I would bother the drummer, whose name was Roderick (or the other drummer, Eric), and say, “Man, let me play!” Of course, there were four or five other kids there who’d want to get on the drums, too. But they would let me get on, and eventually my father asked Roderick to give me lessons. That’s where it started. I was around 6 or 7.
TP: You were just feeling it.
KENDRICK: I was just feeling it early on. I just love my parents for readily being there and saying, “Just go for it.”
TP: Forgive me if this is stretching it too much, but one notion in the African-American church is the idea that when you’re playing music there’s a testimony going on, a very personal statement…
KENDRICK: Oh, yeah.
TP: Which I think has had a lot to do, whether directly or indirectly, with the nature and course of innovation across the jazz timeline. I’m wondering if you feel in any way that’s something else you got from the church background.
KENDRICK: I never tried to push religion on people. But for me, musically, that is my homage to God. When I play my instrument, that’s like the highest form of thanks that I can give for everything in my life, period. That’s why I take music so seriously, and that’s also why I think honesty is so key when you’re playing. When you start putting ego and things like that in your playing, that cuts you off from actually getting your blessing from playing.
TP: Do you play with churches in New York?
KENDRICK: I should. I don’t play with churches in New York, though.
TP: Back to Terence. You said you had to get rid of what you knew. That was the biggest challenge?
KENDRICK: It still is.
TP: When you were learning, people are telling me that you’d obviously mastered a lot of vocabulary… One thing you said is that you were very blessed to be good at what you do, which is a straight-ahead drummer, so you were happy to be able to play the groove with the Crusaders. For a 27-year-old guy, what does being a straight ahead drummer mean in 2007?
KENDRICK: To me, nowadays, being a straight-ahead drummer just means the ability to get to the essence of what the master played. I’m still in a quest daily to get to that. But I feel I was talented enough to not only feel it, but get to playing it more, or get to the feeling of Max Roach or get to the feeling of Shelley Mane, rather than… I mean, other than other people who were able to get to the feel of Bernard Purdie before I could. Studying Bernard Purdie is something I’m doing now, whereas I just got so enthralled with listening to straight-ahead music as a kid, when I was 14, which I think was kind of a blessing and a curse at the same time, because now I’m kind of going backwards listening to other music. I think that’s what definitely helped me out.
TP: Did you get to straight-ahead music through your parents? Your teachers at school? So many kids of your generation are just into what’s around them, what’s popular with their peer group. For instance, my daughter isn’t allowed to watch MTV or VH-1, but she knows every song and all the accouterments. It’s in the air.
KENDRICK: Through my family life… My mother went to University of North Texas, and there she studied classical piano. Her classical training allowed her to do things in gospel music that were a little bit out of the realm. She would also play weddings and different engagements where she would pull out the Real Book and play around with stuff. I always thought, “Wow, that sounds kind of cool.” At the time, she didn’t have many jazz records per se, but she had a lot of things that were open… She had Stevie Wonder playing sometimes on the radio. I’d think, wow, it’s not jazz, but the way the chords were moving, it really drew me in. Then at age 14, I guess, I was graduating from middle school. I was telling you that mega-churches are big in Texas, but the biggest thing behind mega-churches is Texas football. I wanted to join one of the biggest high school marching bands in Texas, which was Willow Ridge—the Willow Ridge Marching Band. So for me, I wanted to play snare drum, because those were the most flashy guys, their chops were killin’, and they were twirling sticks, they were dancing. My decision came when my mother said, “Look, I want you to go to this performing arts high school; I think you’re really talented and you might be able to do something with it.” But my head was, I want to play snare drum and then go on to Prairie View University, where my father went to school, which is right around the corner from Houston, because they had an awesome drum line.
TP: That’s an all-black school.
KENDRICK: Right, that’s an all-black. My Mom was like, “Look, you need to go and get with a teacher,” so she got me the teacher at Texas Southern University, which is another black school which is in Houston, and she got me with the teacher. He sat me down and he just showed me “Seven Steps To Heaven.” He showed me the record. Then I was like, “Wow, who is that?!” Then he said “Tony Williams,” whatever, blah-blah-blah. I said, “Okay, that’s kind of cool.” It wasn’t a hard decision. It wasn’t a point of decision. But it was definitely a point in my life where I could see the turn I was turning towards. So what I did for my audition for the performing arts high school is I played “Seven Steps to Heaven” on the drums. I had 5 toms, and I said, [SINGS MELODY]. I played the solo. That’s when it started. I had them tuned to that…
TP: So your mother was able to give you really intelligent critique from early on.
KENDRICK: Oh, a lot. She’s a great musician and also a great mother, to let me do what I do.
[END OF FIRST SOUND FILE]
TP: I’d like to talk to you about the group of musicians who…I guess we could speak about the people who are on your record. Apart from your compositional abilities and the overall arc of the record, it’s interesting how you to deploy everyone’s different sound. Just the guitar players, Lionel, Mike Moreno, and Lage, are three of the most creative and distinctive of the new guitar players. What’s different about them. What’s in common? What made you think you could use all of them?
KENDRICK: I actually was talking about this with somebody. I think The Source actually turned out to be a snapshot of myself at one moment. But actually, the people that I used were…it shows you the timeline from high school all the way up until that point. I had been playing in high school all the time with Mike, and to be honest, Mike was always on the cutting edge, before any of us were. He would show us the records, and we would be, like, “Oh, okay,” and we would go check it out. Mike’s sound is so lush. Guitar is one of my favorite instruments, and partly why I had the three different guitarists is… I love texture, and each of them plays texture a certain way. Mike can float and sting like a butterfly. His things can be ethereal and on top.
I started playing with Lage right when I got to Berklee, and because he’s great friends with Jaleel, and I played with Jaleel a lot. I could always hear in Lage the influences of Grant Green and George Benson, and I always was drawn to those type of things with the jazz purist attitude I had at the time in school. For me, Grant Green and Wes…that was IT for me. So Lage’s sound draws me to that mindset. So I always played with Lage in school.
The funny thing was, Lionel and I played less than five times during my whole time at Berklee, though we knew each other. So when we got in Terence’s band, rhythmically, as a drummer, I’m still lost—I’m still trying to figure out where he is. For somebody to play the guitar in that way and involve all the rhythmic aspects that he uses, I was always flabbergasted.
So those were the parts of each person that I wanted to use, and if I could have killed each one of them and taken an attribute from all three, I would be a badass guitar player.
TP: You used Aaron Parks and Robert Glasper.
KENDRICK: Again, they represent two aspects of my growth. Robert and I grew up in the gospel community. His mother was a singer, and a blues singer, and a choir director also. She ran the gamut.
TP: She sounds like quite a woman.
KENDRICK: She was. Robert’s personality is very much an indication of how she was. She was a great young and inspired mother. The last piece on Robert’s recent CD, the eulogy that Joe Ratliff gave about her was so fitting, because when she lived, that was the best part. Like I said, she went from being a blues singer on Saturday night, and then a few hours later she was up at church. Robert came up in that, and he learned how to adapt. That’s really what drew me to Robert, because he knew how to adapt before I did. When I was a jazz purist, he was in the gospel thing, and he was more bringing his gospel into the jazz stuff, whereas I was kind of keeping them separate.
Aaron’s talent was so natural on the instrument, and I always thought that he had studied the instrument classically, although he actually hasn’t. For me, again, I am drawn to harmony and chordal instruments. Robert can run up and down the piano spontaneously, and he can create different cascading lines and so on, but I thought Aaron could lay down certain harmonic motions that would touch me in a certain way where he I could play… He would make me play something different every time. I always love that feeling, because I always felt that from a person like Herbie or Keith Jarrett or somebody like that. Again, that’s probably the way I would play if I were able to really play the piano, and I felt that Aaron could instantly read the chart and go beyond the page. That was like the top thing. Which everybody does, but I felt he could really sit down and read the music, and instantly hear other textures and other things that you weren’t even thinking about.
TP: Were most of the tunes written for the record?
KENDRICK: They weren’t written for the record. A lot of those pieces are really old. The piece “VCB:” was written in high school. I was hanging out with Robert one day, we were about to go to a party or something, and I said, “Rob, I’ve got this melody and I’ve got this form of this tune that I want to do—can you help me?” He said, “Sure.” At the time, we were seriously watching TV. He went to the keyboard, he was still watching TV, and I was singing the melody, and he was like, “Oh, oh!” Then I would touch a few notes, I’d be like, “This is kind of what I’m hearing,” and then he would play a chord and say, “That’s what you’re hearing?” I’d say, “Oh, yeah-yeah-yeah!!” He would literally watch the TV, came up with all the chords, and then I was like, “Rob, wait. Let me write it down.” He said, “Come on, man, I’m trying to watch this TV…’ That’s the way that tune got written—me singing and him being like, “What are you singing?” That was one of my first experiences at writing.
After that, I did a lot of writing in college. That was my junior year of high school. It subsided a bit my senior, with school and everything. I wasn’t hearing anything. Then when I got to Berklee, I started hearing a lot more things, just being exposed to so many different people and vibes. I’m mostly a singing composer.
TP: Elaborate on that.
KENDRICK: For me, the message, especially in gospel music, always takes precedence over everything else. Even when I went to church and I’d hear someone sing a cappella by themselves, and they would sing a message and they would hear the note, that would just hit you. That always gave me more goosebumps than when a drummer played the most flashy thing he could play. So I’ve always been drawn to that, and I’m always singing while I’m playing. When I’m sitting around, I’m always singing melodies and hearing melodies, and I think that’s partly the way I play and partly the way I write.
TP: So you hear the drums melodically.
KENDRICK: I hear the drums melodically. The funny thing is, I’m a drummer but I hear the drums subordinate to the music, to the band. There are times when I think… I definitely believe in give-and-take. That’s one of the biggest things I use in my playing, is give-and-take. If I’m going to play time for this much, then I’ll give you no time. If I’m going to play colors, maybe I won’t play any colors—I’ll just bash. The give-and-take is a great thing to use for me personally. But I’ve always had that feeling, and I think harmonically and melodically, stuff moves so well together that rhythmically you just have to give it a little push. I think that’s why my drumming is what it is—because I give it that little push. However, I’m working on becoming more of (I don’t know how to say it) a drummer’s drummer, and I’m always practicing those things…
TP: By “drummer’s drummer,” do you mean having certain technical things and signature things?
KENDRICK: Having more technical things and my signature things. The crazy thing of it was, I was teaching a lesson to a guy, and he was asking me about those type of things, and I told him that I practice all of that stuff. So I started playing some of it for him. I’ve been practicing claves like El Negro or Antonio would play, and I started playing those things, and he said, “Wow, what are you doing?” I said, “I practice this stuff all the time, but you would never know it because I don’t use that stuff.” That’s partly because of the honesty thing that I talked about—if it doesn’t honestly come to me, I’m not just going to throw it in there just to play it. I’m still trying to work at that balance of bringing in new things, but being honest… Just because you practice it doesn’t mean you have to play it.
TP: But you could write it. Do you write to give yourself things to play also?
KENDRICK: That’s what I’m working on now, is getting myself to write to feature myself. That’s one of the hardest things I’ve had to do, is just say, “Okay, I want to write an up-tempo, I want it to feature the drums, I want it to do this and that.” It’s just one of those things that dove across my mind.
TP: Are you working on another body of…
KENDRICK: Right now I’m writing, and most of the tunes are coming out to be… It’s funny. I’d probably be one of the only drummers that would write a ballads record. I don’t think this next record will be a ballads record, but the ballads are coming to me first. That’s all I’m hearing. It’s weird.
TP: Another thing about the cast of characters on the record is that it’s such a diverse group of people, ethnically, geographically and the whole thing, which is a sort of microcosm of the jazz world today in many ways. For someone who grew up in New York City and saw how politicized and cliquish things got in the ‘80s, one got a sense of a certain ethnic-racial polarization that translated into musical style. But I notice that less with musicians over the last 15 years. A lot of people seem to be crossing those boundaries. Does that seem to be a fair statement to you?
KENDRICK: For me especially, and for most of us from Houston because we all went to a certain high school. Our high school ranged from everything from Vietnamese to African-American to Indian to Caucasian—everything. So from age 14, and even before that… I went to a magnet school in elementary school that had so many different types of people. From an early age we were exposed to so many different types of people and cultures that we learned to embrace it at an early age—not really think about it, but just embrace it.
TP: Does that translate to musical choices. Does Bjork or Radiohead mean as much to you as it might to…
KENDRICK: To everybody else. I don’t know. I think it does. I think it does because… Maybe one of the reasons I would listen to Radiohead in high school is because one of my friends, whose music I wasn’t readily going to listen to, listened to it, and it opened my ears to that type of shit. I think I definitely benefitted from that, especially being around different artists from different genres. Because a lot of times, to be honest, maybe they weren’t listening to jazz. When they were doing their thing, they had different things on—maybe Joni or Rolling Stones or whatever. But I think that type of shit definitely translates to how we come together nowadays.
TP: It seems like a very blended record. But on the other hand, Terence has that quality of being able to take in information from a lot of different places and create a unified sound out of it. It sounds like you were predisposed to do that, but that you learned a lot of the techniques…
KENDRICK: I did. The funny thing about it is, when we were doing the record… Glasper’s just a funny guy. When we were in the studio, he was calling the record “The Terence Blanchard outtakes.” It has the feeling of some of those things that Terence does. I’ve always been in love with the cinematic approach to writing and to music, and with the singing thing as well, it’s perfect to the way I want to write music. So that was funny, because I had all those people at the studio at the same time, and Robert was cracking jokes. So before it was Kendrick Scott Oracle, it was called “Noah’s Ark,” because I took three of every instrument and tried to have it on my record. That was some funny shit, “Noah’s Ark.”
TP: Any other sideman gigs over these last four years with major bands besides Terence?
KENDRICK: I’ve been playing with David Sanborn of late as part of a trio of musicians. What’s funny is, when I first came out of Berklee, that whole summer the Crusaders and David Sanborn were doing double bills. He heard me then, and finally later we got to hook up and play. I was fortunate enough to play with the late, great Don Alias before he passed, which was a true honor for me. At the beginning of this year, I played with John Scofield in a trio with John Patitucci. We went to Uruguay and Argentina and other places. I played with Diane Reeves at the end of last year; we did some orchestra things with her. I played with Maria Schneider’s Big Band once. That was awesome. Her writing is awesome. I’m just drawn to writers.
Speaking of writers, with Terence we played with the Metropole Orchestra at Northsea, and Vince Mendoza was with them. Vince is a real hip cat. The way he writes is amazing. Now I’m listening to a few of Joni Mitchell’s records where he did the orchestration and conducting. Jimmy Greene…
TP: Another Eric Harland connection.
KENDRICK: Yes. Well, that’s the blessing of coming from that line of musicians. Harland got me in contact with Terence, and then Chris Dave got Harland in touch with Kenny Garrett. Everything kind of happens like that. Harland also got Jamire Williams with Jacky Terasson.
TP: You’re talking about practicing montunos, playing with Don Alias. Another dynamic of jazz over the last 10-15 years is bringing all these rhythms into the mainstream of the music rather than being exotic. Not that it’s anything new, but it seems that a much larger percentage of working musicians need to know all this stuff to be able to function. So it sounds like you’re spending a lot of time listening to music of other cultures and Afro-diasporic music.
KENDRICK: I definitely do. The thing I feel about Latin and World music that I find very interesting is that the music we’re studying is actually popular music in their cultures. So I’m trying to figure out a way to make jazz have the popular type of thing without necessarily making it too simple or dumbed down. That’s what I practice at home, is using those elements from those rhythms and actually making them sound in a way where people can accept them but also be challenged to listen to them. Latin and African rhythms are paramount.
TP: Do you play hand drums, skin-on-skin?
KENDRICK: I really don’t. I dabble a little bit, and I have a feeling for them, but I don’t…
TP: I notice you use your hands on the drumkit.
KENDRICK: Yes. I definitely have a feeling for the sounds. But actually making them, I leave that to the bad cats.
TP: Tell me your impressions of Max Roach as someone you heard early on and were thinking about.
KENDRICK: Early on, listening to jazz, I always listened for the bounce in the music. I noticed that certain drummers had that bounce. Roy Haynes was one of them and Max was the other. Listening to bebop, Bud Powell and Bird… I thought the bounce that he created while he was playing actually created the hump, so to speak, in the music, and that really grabbed me the first time I heard Max Roach.
Not only did it do that, but he’s always called a melodic drummer, and I think that is definitely so. The way he approached the drums, not only just the way he played them, but the tuning… The tuning of the drums and the cymbals that he used were all very important in his sound. I think that doesn’t get as much attention as it should, because those type of things separate the good drummers from the great drummers. He’s playing the hell out of the drums, but he’s also approaching them and tuning them a certain way, to really make it melodic. So he’s not only playing melodic; he’s making it melodic. That really affected me in a certain way, so that when I go home and practice patterns, that’s what I’m going for—to achieve a certain melodic flow within the drums like he had. You can get the feeling that he practiced figures, and later on, when he played, they became shapes. They became octagons and triangles when he played, but when he was actually at home practicing it, it might have been very simple—simple rudiments. I think he was just a master of creating shapes on the drums.
TP: Are you familiar with his solo drum compositions?
KENDRICK: Yeah. “The Drum Also Waltzes.” That stuff is amazing to me, because he was a pioneer in playing ostinatos. It’s different now… It’s funny how these two things tie in. If you think of “The Drum Also Waltzes,” the type of ostinato he was playing—which was kind of simple, but not simple the way he played it—it’s the same type of ostinato you would hear when Antonio plays the claves and he’s soloing over the top of them. I think the lineage of drumming is still coming from Max and all the masters, which it should. I think that’s the great thing about drumming right now, is that we’re expanding, we’re going more outside, but it still keys in on things that the masters that we look at were doing.
[END OF CONVERSATION]
*_*_*_
Kendrick Scott (WKCR, June 28, 2007):
TP: Kendrick’s record features a slew of musicians… [ETC.] Kendrick Scott is performing with Oracle, with different personnel, at Iridium at midnight as part of the Round Midnight series they do there. Let’s bring you to the audience through the mundane path of having you introduce the personnel.
KENDRICK: Oh, no, that’s good. On piano we have Fabian Amanzar. Mike Moreno on guitar. John Ellis on tenor saxophone and bass clarinet. Matt Brewer playing bass.
TP: You’ve been playing with Terence Blanchard since 2003, four years. There’s a recording you did with him called Flow, where he seems to have tuned in to a lot of ideas that strong young musicians in their twenties are paying attention to—world rhythms and sounds, melodies from very highbrow contemporary pop music, and so on.
KENDRICK: Right.
TP: You on this seem to have brought in a lot of similar information and somehow filtered it into your own way of seeing things.
KENDRICK: Right.
TP: I’m sure you’ve garnered a lot from watching a master like Terence Blanchard in action, but this date doesn’t particularly sound like him. How did the pieces for this recording fall into place?
KENDRICK: I’ll start with Terence, because it was interesting joining his band. I came at the time when Terence had just moved to Blue Note, and he was starting to branch out and get a lot of young musicians. I noticed more and more that Terence’s film career and the sound of things he would do in films was creeping into the writing for the band—the ethereal sounds, the drums, the beats, some of the world rhythms he was using. When we did Flow, that kind of happened on that CD. Then when I was doing my own CD, I started… I’ve always been drawn to those type of sounds. The writing on the CD actually spans from my college days, where I was in Berklee College of Music, and some of them even from high school, Houston High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, and up to about a few years ago. So I started compiling all of the songs together, and I actually went in and recorded a few times. I liked the first day and I didn’t like the second day. So a year later, I came back and fixed it all up and put it all together, just an amalgam of all the music.
TP: Was a lot of the music written for the musicians involved? There are three guitarists—Lionel Loueke, Lage Lund and Mike Moreno; Myron Walden, Seamus Blake and Walter Smith are the saxophonists; Gretchen Parlato sings; Aaron Parks more and Robert Glasper less are the pianists and keyboardists. A lot of different sounds and tonal personalities…
KENDRICK: Not all of it, but most of the music was written with a sound in mind. I’ll take, for instance, Lage, some of the songs that he played on—“The Source’ and also on “Psalm”—were written with his sound in mind. When we were at Berklee, we would have sessions and play as a band all the time with some groups. So everybody had a clear part to play in all of that music.
TP: Was the record workshopped live at all?
KENDRICK: No.
TP: So it all came together in the studio.
KENDRICK: As you can see with all the talent I had on there, it’s kind of hard to get everybody… I’d always heard that, but as a bandleader I see what that’s all about.
TP: And on Saturday night you’ll be playing primarily material from this recording?
KENDRICK: Yes, primarily material from that. Just a few different things from other live shows that I’ve done.
TP: Let’s hear “The Source,” which you mentioned. Robert Glasper plays fender Rhodes and Aaron Parks plays acoustic piano, Kendrick Scott, drums and voice, Myron Walden on soprano sax, Walter Smith on tenor sax, and Derrick Hodge on acoustic bass… [PLUS “Between The Lines”]
You and Mike Moreno attended high school at the same time, the same high school that Robert Glasper and Jason Moran attended, as did Eric Harland, from whom you inherited the drum chair with Terence Blanchard. Also on the track were John Ellis, Aaron Parks, Doug Weiss and Kendrick Scott. [ETC.] There seems to be something about the way music is taught at this high school in Houston that produces not only technically proficient musicians, but musicians who seem equipped to approach this business with their own point of view.
KENDRICK: I think what mainly set our high school apart was the chances and opportunities we had to go and hear music, and to play music. As high schoolers we had 3 or 4 gigs a week, which is something people usually don’t do until they get to New York. Our high school teacher, our band director, Robert Morgan, got us gigs. You had to keep your grades up, and you can do some gigs. If you made a D or an F, no gigs this week. So it was an incentive. We were making a little bit of money, too. We learned so many things about going to the gig and being on time, those small things, but the greatest thing is that we were playing music so much.
TP: Were they gigs of all kids from the high school, or gigs with experienced musicians?
KENDRICK: They were all combos from the school. But the other great thing at the school was that a lot of artists-in-residence came through. While I was there, Kenny Barron and Cyrus Chestnut and so many other people came through the school week by week.
TP: So it took the music off the paper.
KENDRICK: It took the music off the paper. Everybody was self-motivated to practice on their own. So the practicality of playing was actually the best thing for us. That’s what I really appreciate about the whole experience, that I wasn’t so caught up with practicing in my little bubble. It was more about getting to play with people and learning the experience.
TP: Did you play a wide spectrum of music back then, too.
KENDRICK: Yes. My parents are gospel musicians, so I started playing drums pretty much in the church. Throughout high school I was playing church and I was playing a few other gigs here and there, but mainly jazz stuff. It was a great experience to be exposed…
TP: Was it basically a backbeat sort of thing, or a more contemporary style of drumming?
KENDRICK: The church where I was playing was pretty traditional. We did a few other things that were out of the normal traditional realm. But I would say modern gospel music, not too far removed.
TP: Were there any sacred-secular issues in playing jazz for you as a young guy, or did they not come up so much?
KENDRICK: It didn’t come up. Sometimes I would invite some of my church members to come see me play at the school, and they’d be like, “I don’t know, I don’t know about jazz,” and this and that. I’d be like, “Well, you know…” I don’t separate the two, because for me, my gift doesn’t have one place or venue that it’s supposed to go. I think it can be used for good in all venues.
TP: When did jazz begin to come into your consciousness? When you entered high school?
KENDRICK: Yes, at age 14. Before then, my main goal in life was to play the snare drum in a marching band. Because in Texas, marching bands are huge, so I was always like, “I want to play the snare drum in the marching band!” There was a great high school band called the Willow Ridge High School band, and they had all of these snare drums… The drum line was excellent, and I wanted to be a snare drummer. At that point, my Mom (bless her for doing this) said, “Look, you’re going to go to the Performing Arts High School; go in there and practice.” So what I did was, I got with a teacher and I learned how to play “Seven Steps To Heaven” on the drums. I tuned the drums a certain way to play it. And I got in somehow! Then that was that right turn. We’re going this way, not…
TP: How did you know about “Seven Steps To Heaven”?
KENDRICK: I had been listening to jazz on and off. I had a CD by Lionel Hampton called Ring Them Bells. Every now and then, I would hear jazz, and to tell you the truth I wasn’t totally sparked by it right away. But when I got into PVA, which is Performing Arts High School, it was amazing. I couldn’t believe it.
TP: At a school like that, I suppose that you’re not going against peer pressure in playing jazz. It would have been a status thing, and not an oddball thing to be doing.
KENDRICK: Not at all. Actually, the whole school embraces anything like that. We go to the theater department, and they’re studying all kinds of things. Talking about Terence, we actually did an artist-in-residence program in Moline, Illinois, for two weeks. I noticed that you get more inspired by being around people who are doing similar things to what you’re doing. Even though all of them weren’t actually musicians, being with artists and people in theater, all the people in the arts, really inspires you to do your thing. Also, it took the veil away from being this weird thing to just being open.
TP: As a young guy in high school (1994-1998), who were drummers you were using as role models, picking up ideas? Were they the iconic older drummers, or people from the generation that came up in the ‘80s and beyond?
KENDRICK: The most amazing thing to me about Houston right now is the amount of drummers coming out of Houston. The local drummers were like the big drummers now. Chris Dave, who played with M’shell Ndegeocello and Kenny Garrett, and Eric Harland, who’s playing with everybody, and also Mark Simmons, who plays with Al Jarreau, and then Herman Matthews, who plays with Tom Jones. So many people. But the biggest guy of all in town was Sebastian Whitaker. He pretty much taught us all. In that environment, all I had to do was just look around and go to a random place in Houston, go to the Convention Center or something, and I’d see Chris playing or somebody else playing. Those were my main inspirations at the time. Then I started listening to DeJohnette and Shadow Wilson and Roy Haynes, all these different people, and those were my big idols.
TP: So you were plucking ideas from all across the timeline.
KENDRICK: All across it. That was the great thing about our music library at the school, too. We had a lot of different things available to us.
TP: You’re pretty busy. On the road with Terence Blanchard, playing in a lot of people’s bands, obviously doing a lot of composing, and running a label. Apart from the obvious reasons, why did you decide to take on this responsibility?
KENDRICK: The label itself came along because I noticed a need for younger musicians to take snapshots of themselves, to take those pictures of their growth. I noticed that big labels aren’t doing that well now. So pretty much, it was one of those things where I felt that we shouldn’t wait for anybody to do anything for us—we should take the initiative.
TP: A notion you share with countless jazz musicians before you. But actually putting that together, producing dates, recruiting artists, etc., is a lot of to do. Did you see it as an investment in the future?
KENDRICK: It’s definitely an investment in the future. For ourselves… I feel if we start making these snapshots now, and making these records now, they’ll only get better with time. We need to document our actual growth and our writing at each moment. I realized that’s what all of my heroes did. I listen to Art Blakey, and he has all these records. I’m like, “wow, if I could just make half of these records, what can I work on between each one to take a new snapshot of myself and to develop my talent?”
TP: Could you speak briefly about your interest in composing. You seem to be thinking about the whole ensemble as you’re playing. Everything seems to be covered. Does composing go back to high school?
KENDRICK: Composition has always been so unconventional for me, because… I wouldn’t say that theoretically I’m the best composer. But most of my songs come from me singing, actually, like me sitting at the drums and singing a melody. I think that my songs are more singable than anything, and I always felt like if I wanted to go hear myself play, I would want to go away from the gig singing something and remembering something. So I always try to make the songs in some way singable. Coming from the background I come from in the church, all it takes is one line or something that will catch you in a certain way. I also think compositionally on the drums that way, to leave space, so the messages can come through, and not totally bombard the music with drums themselves, but try to develop the band as the whole vibe and develop the message. That’s part of the reason why the band is called Oracle.
TP: So a lot of the counterpoint would be coming out of a call-and-response attitude.
KENDRICK: Yes, always call-and-response. But I always try to make the message simple.
[END OF CONVERSATION]
*_*_*_*_
Kendrick Scott (DownBeat Players Article, 2007, “Directors’ Cut”:
“I noticed a need for younger musicians to document their growth and writing at each moment,” said Kendrick Scott, explaining why he decided to launch World Culture Music, his imprint label, in 2007.
By evidence of his debut release, The Source, the 27-year-old drummer, a Houston native, is more than ready for prime time. Each of the eleven tunes, ten composed or co-composed by Scott, contain strong melodies, which he sets off with ethereal sounds and an array of world, contemporary and hardcore jazz beats. Although he barely solos, Scott asserts his footprint throughout, orchestrating the individualistic tonal personalities of a diverse cast of twenty- and thirty-something New York A-listers—guitarists Lionel Loueke, Mike Moreno and Lage Lund, pianists Aaron Parks and Robert Glasper, wind players Seamus Blake, Myron Walden and Walter Smith, bassist Derrick Hodge, and vocalist Gretchen Parlato—with sure-handed grooves across the tempo spectrum, impeccable dynamics, and a penchant for informed call-and-response. It sounds like anything but a first attempt, and it takes you on a journey.
“Kendrick is great at orchestrating, but he’s even better at trying new things every night,” said Terence Blanchard, who hired Scott out of Berklee in Fall 2003 after a three-week tryout the previous summer, featured him extensively on the 2005 release Flow, and continues to retain his services. “He experiments at being creative within the framework and context of the situation. He has amazing technique, but that’s not what he wants to display as a musician. He’s also a gentleman, with a lot of class, which translates into his musical personality.”
“I hear the drums melodically, as subordinate to the band,” said Scott. “I believe in give-and-take. I’ll play time for this much, then give you no time. I’ll play colors, then maybe just bash. I’m working on becoming more of a drummer’s drummer, having more technical things with my own signature, but if something doesn’t come honestly to me, I won’t play it. For me, the message always takes precedence over everything. Most of my songs come from sitting at the drums and singing a melody, and I like to leave space so the messages can come through—you don’t need a lot of notes to play a strong groove. When you start putting ego into your playing, it cuts you off from getting your blessing.
“With Terence, I learned how to use everything I knew, and then totally abandon it. Early on with him, I’d think, ‘This section, I should play like Max Roach,” or play like Philly Joe or Al Foster. Really, I’ve come to such an enlightenment, actually letting things come out instead of filtering what I think I ought to play.”
Scott developed the notion of music as testimony during formative years—his mother and older brother played keyboards professionally on Houston’s church circuit, and, as he puts it, “I was always at choir rehearsal.” It’s a background he shares with such fellow Houstonians as Glasper and drummers Eric Harland, Chris Dave, Mark Simmons and Jamire Williams, all established professionals, who came up during the ‘90s under Robert Morgan at Houston’s High School for the Performing and Visual Arts. Scott nailed his high school audition by playing “Seven Steps To Heaven” on a drumset containing five tuned tom-toms.
“Kendrick already had a deep understanding about the music’s history,” Harland recalled. “Early on he could emulate Philly Joe, Max Roach, Lewis Nash. Later, he checked out different things and opened up his sound.”
“We fused a gospel mentality with the jazz idiom, and it created a fresh sound for us,” said Scott of his Houston cohort.“We also looked up to Sebastian Whitaker, a blind drummer with deep roots in Art Blakey. Through him, we all sit high and play low, into the drums. Then also, our high school—and my elementary school—had many different types of people, from Vietnamese to African-American to Indian to Caucasian, so we learned to embrace diverse cultures from an early age. For example, a friend listened to Radiohead, and opened my ears to that type of thing, which I benefited from.”
On down time from Blanchard’s band, Scott does not lack for employment—his recent c.v. includes engagements with David Sanborn, John Scofield, and Maria Schneider. Off the bandstand, he oversees his label; joining The Source in the World Culture Music catalog are Between The Lines by Moreno, Scott’s PVA classmate, and The Wish, by singer Julie Hardy. “It’s an investment in the future,” Scott said. “We shouldn’t wait for anyone to do anything for us. If we start recording these snapshots now, they’ll only get better with time.”
Today Is The Question: Ted Panken on Music, Politics and the Arts 