No master of hardcore jazz expression — not Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea or Keith Jarrett, not Pat Metheny or John McLaughlin, not Wynton or Branford Marsalis, not Joshua Redman or Brad Mehldau, not even Harry Connick, Jr. — boasts a higher Q-score than Kevin Eubanks. This became evident last spring from the mainstream media dish that followed the guitarist’s announcement that he would leave The Tonight Show after an 18-year run, the last 14 spent as Jay Leno’s bandleader and sidekick.
Augmenting boilerplate coverage in the jazz trades and a New York Times overview of Eubanks’ oeuvre was an interview in the “Walter Scott” column in Parade, the 75-million circulation Sunday newspaper supplement. Speculation and snark on Eubanks’ motives and intentions ran in supermarket tabloids Entertainment Weekly and Us Weekly, showbiz insider pubs Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, and Hollywoodnews.com; and e-gossip sites Gawker and “Perez Hilton.” Celebritynetworth.com cited an annual $5 million salary and a $25 million personal net worth. Much coverage parsed the Leno-Eubanks relationship, codified in a five-minute “best-of” roast that aired on Eubanks’ final Tonight Show episode, including a middle-schoolish bit on which Eubanks was tricked into referencing his “tiny member,” a clip in which he denies ever masturbating in a tree, and a vignette that showed Eubanks, a vegetarian who occasionally eats fish, paying off a lost wager by eating a corn dog previously licked on camera by actor and former Los Angeles Laker Rick Fox.
Branford Marsalis, who hired his Berklee College classmate when he became the Tonight Show bandleader in 1992, had found it impossible to tolerate such antics, leaving in 1996 to concentrate full-time on jazz and classical music performance. On the other hand, Eubanks — whose political views can be inferred from a Twitter reference to “Republiklans” — was able to compartmentalize, and he fulfilled his middlebrow responsibilities with an unfailingly unflappable smile while devoting off-hours to maintaining the high level of artistic production that had characterized his activity before his celebrity years.
“It was a corporate job,” Eubanks explains patiently over the phone from his Malibu home. “A not-so-traditional corporate job, but still corporate. Nobody held a gun to my head — or anyone in the band — to do this. I had to learn how to get from Point A to Point B, and as I got smarter and more aware, things got easier and better. You don’t take things personally, because it’s just the way things are in a corporate situation. I had a job to do, and I knew the show’s demographic was basically a classic-rock audience. I like the Stones and Zeppelin. I like Sly and the Family Stone and Aretha Franklin. We played those songs great. All these delineations between one thing and another are false. I never impugned anything I was doing before.”
There would have been scant reason to do so. At the time he arrived in Los Angeles, Eubanks had carved a niche as an immediately identifiable guitar voice — he eschews a pick to allow him greater harmonic flexibility, without sacrificing precision of execution in his attack — within various dialects of jazz expression. As a GRP recording artist, he became best-known for well-crafted “smooth jazz” dates that sold in the high five figures, but he also played hardbop with Art Blakey, Slide Hampton and Roy Haynes; chamber jazz with New York piano professors like James Williams, Kirk Lightsey and Ronnie Matthews; free-form improv with Sam Rivers; audaciously contrapuntal, groove-rich songs in Dave Holland’s visionary quartet with alto saxophonist Steve Coleman and drummer Marvin “Smitty” Smith; and — with the latter two musicians, as well as Gary Thomas and trombonist Robin Eubanks, his older brother — hybrid projects under the aegis of Brooklyn’s post-funk M-Base scene, on which he skronked out and played unplugged with equal authority. Over the years, he honed a style that blended jazz vocabulary — he’s refracted, in a highly sophisticated way, the dialects of Charlie Christian, T-Bone Walker, Oscar Moore, Wes Montgomery, Jim Hall, John McLaughlin and Ralph Towner, among others — with Euro-classical, flamenco, blues, Indian and multiple African lexicons.
On three Blue Note studio dates recorded between 1992 and 1994, Eubanks coalesced these flavors into a mature compositional voice, steamy and contemplative, adding flute and trombone to the front line and deploying Holland and Smith or Charnett Moffett with either Gene Jackson or Mark Mondesir to propel the flow. For most of his fan base, the Blue Notes and the contemporaneously released World Trio [Intuition], an elegant session with Holland and percussionist Minu Cinelu, were the last sighting of the guitarist at his unmediated best.
That changed in November, when Mack Avenue released Zen Food, which features Bill Pierce on saxophone, Gerry Etkins on piano, Rene Camacho on bass and Smith on drums, Eubanks’ band-of-choice for weekend flyaway and vacation-time gigs at rooms like Yoshi’s and Blues Alley. Somewhat more swing-oriented than its ’90s predecessors, it’s an exceptionally accomplished, energetic date that reflects both the high-gloss professionalism and creative abilities of the first-call personnel. “Smitty and I have a heavy jazz background from when we moved to New York,” Eubanks says. “But we also intensely love electric music from the ‘70s when Fusion was something new, before people started turning it into a technical exercise, and playing loud and fast and furious. Fusion was in our present, we breathed the same air at the same time, and you can feel that pure fusion energy on Zen Food.”
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Most admirers for whom Eubanks was a nightly presence in their late-night rituals know nothing, and could care less, about his hardcore jazz bona fides.
Which perhaps is why, over the course of our conversation, Eubanks launched several unprompted soliloquies disputing the notion that Zen Food, which wears its erudition lightly, denotes some sort of radical break from his post Blue Note discography. “It’s not like I decided to dust off the guitar, start putting the band together, and record for Mack Avenue,” he states with beleaguered asperity. “There’s the insinuation that I’m somehow coming back to what I used to do, like a retro musical trend. I have no intention of going back to anything. We’ve been playing this music on the road for years, and Zen Food is the latest of several records I’ve made during my time here. If Mack Avenue hadn’t contacted me, I’d have put it out on iTunes.”
To be specific, Eubanks’ download-only imprint, Insoul, comprises six dates, all from the aughts, and recorded or post-produced in the fully equipped home studio that he built from Tonight Show earnings, Each explores a different facet of his interests. On Shrine, Eubanks, Pierce and the late pianist James Williams — cusp-of-the-’80s bandmates in the Jazz Messengers— join iconic drummer Billy Higgins in an informed, swinging session, while on Slow Freight Eubanks and his uncle, pianist Ray Bryant, offer a recital of blues- and soul-infused jazz. Genesis, which is all-acoustic, finds Eubanks and Pierce addressing modern hymns and spirituals from a harmonically advanced perspective. A similarly contemplative feeling comes forth on Angel, a suite for solo and overdubbed acoustic guitars that would not sound out of place on ECM; on Soweto Sun, Eubanks, Pierce and Smith, in trio, evoke quiet-storm intensity. Eubanks launched the label in 2001 with Live, an expansive location date with deep grooves, much melody and counterpoint, and abundant soloistic derring-do.
Asked why he didn’t publicize this strong, cohesive corpus, which, he acknowledges, “nobody has heard,” Eubanks responds: “I come from a school where you tour behind a record, which I couldn’t do while I was on The Tonight Show. Mack Avenue figured that I could now support Zen Food by going on the road, which is exactly what I want to do.”
He adds that non-jazz projects — among them, he cites collaborations with Nashville writers and five film scores — are a few of the “situations that probably will represent where the music goes in the future more than this record.” Again, Eubanks anticipates criticism and preempts it.
“It seems that the more interest you have in different things, the less seriously people take you, as though you can’t be excellent at any one of them,” he says. “The fact that people have heard me play jazz more than anything else may make it difficult for them to accept it when I explore other things. But The Tonight Show changed me. I’m way more into country music. And although I always liked bluegrass, now I like it way more, and I’d love to explore its connection with jazz. If I’m playing with a bluegrass artist, I’m representing the same work ethic, the same sensibility. I want to get greatat it. I would love to find a bluegrass player or a very progressive hip-hop musician who has been somewhat successful and create something together with the same sensibilities.”
Has Eubanks impacted the evolution of guitar language? “Maybe within a very small area,” he replies. “Maybe the guitar community would take me more seriously had I not been on TV for 18 years. That’s just how life is. But maybe it’s just in my mind. Maybe I’m paranoid about that.”
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During a two-hour conversation, Eubanks used different tenses of the verb “to learn” 35 separate times, as in, “I’m taking what I’ve learned at The Tonight Show and moving forward.” The lessons were wide-ranging.
One was to apply bandstand principles to his role in Leno’s nightly front-of-show monologue with Leno. “It was a comedic conversation between opposites,” he states. “But we trusted each other onstage. I was comping in support of his monologue, giving it energy without overtaking it, like when I play duets with Smitty or comp behind Bill Pierce.”
The imperative of enfolding individual skills within a collective context is key to his thought process. “Generally. my gig was to make everything better within my department and infuse that into the show — playing with other bands, choosing music, keeping the musicians mindful of professionalism and work ethic in a corporate situation,” Eubanks says. “The music is the web that connects everything, keeps the show moving. What will complement the comedy skit? If an audience member does something weird, can the music help turn it into comedy? Say Colin Powell was coming on. Can I find out from his aide what’s his favorite song? OK, it was a calypso. We found a tape, learned it, and surprised him by playing it when he came out.”
Others advised Eubanks on performance techniques. Arsenio Hall suggested he approach even the most familiar material as a first encounter; Regis Philbin reminded him to be intimate with the camera.
“I’ve met so many people who’ve embraced me, who feel they know me because I was in their living room every night,” Eubanks says. “On stage I try to convey that we’re company, so let’s be at ease and have a sense of humor about ourselves. That doesn’t conflict with making good music.” Such Tonight Show visitors as Willie Nelson, B.B. King and Buddy Guy, and various actor friends “don’t make a big deal of what they do on screen or stage; there’s a real person there.” He continues: “If people like you, they’ll generally be open to what you do.”
In March, the Thelonious Monk Institute appointed Eubanks Artistic Director for their Jazz in the Classroom program, with a mandate to work with aspirants in the public high schools of Los Angeles. (Eubanks reports that in 2011 he will visit Chicago and Philadelphia, his home town.)
“I stress sharing the workload, tutoring each other, working for people in your community, organizing fundraisers,” he says. “I want all the departments in the school to engage in this common purpose of putting together a song in an hour-and-a-half. I want dancers to make a dance for it. Lead vocalist, go to the horns, and learn the melody. Background singers, make up background horn parts. Artists, render everything that happens. At the end, everything coheres, and it’s become bigger than the sum of the parts, as I learned very well at The Tonight Show. You can take that work ethic anywhere, and prosper.”
He acknowledges that logistics make it difficult for Los Angeles jazzfolk to follow communital principles — jamming together, doing sessions, or walking, as is customary in New York, from one club to another. “That doesn’t mean that people aren’t just as serious,” Eubanks says. ALos Angeles is a production town filled with hard-working people who came here to be part of something bigger, professionals who network and do projects that go all over the world. After a while, your address book contains people other than musicians — a phone call could get you a jingle, it does well, and one thing leads to another. If you approach L.A. with preconceptions, you can talk yourself out of what’s really there.”
One aspiration is to conceptualize and shoot a pilot of a cooking show, perhaps pegging it to the Zen Food message by focusing on healthy eating for the over-45 set. But he isn’t in a rush. “People get this impression that in L.A. you snap your fingers and something happens,” he says. “But I’ve learned in Hollywood that it’s a big process from getting it off the drawing board to having someone look at it, buy it, and put it out. You need to market yourself, and it doesn’t happen overnight.
“The same thing applies to music. Don’t cater to a commercial audience, don’t change whatever you’re doing. But respect the fact that it’s not going to sell itself.”
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