Very sad to hear of the passing of trombonist Curtis Fowlkes, a major voice and key contributor to the Jazz Passengers and various bands led by Bill Frisell, Don Byron, and Steven Bernstein, to name a short list. I didn’t know Curtis well, but we had a cordial professional relationship, and I’m glad that I had an opportunity to write this “Overdue Ovations” article for “Jazz Times” in 2015.
********
Half a lifetime ago, in the summer of 1982, a year after he and his wife moved into the Bedford Stuyvesant brownstone that his grandfather purchased in 1921, 32-year-old trombonist Curtis Fowlkes met 31-year-old saxophonist Roy Nathanson in the Big Apple Circus band at Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. Each made an instant impression upon the other; a musical marriage ignited, most famously begetting the Jazz Passengers, the avatar jazz-to-artpop ensemble that would mirror the eclecticism of the band in which they met.
“I’d just been in a Haitian band when I got the call,” Nathanson recalled. “I wasn’t reading shit. Some of the music was poppish jazz, with occasional solos, some was traditional circus stuff, and some was crazy, fast two-beat music. Curtis played it all so perfectly I couldn’t believe it—his soulfulness, his sound, his reading ability, how deep the blues is in his thing, and all so understated. He got me through the first couple of days by playing my parts for me.”
“I did help point Roy through a lot of the music,” Fowlkes acknowledged. “Section playing was more part of my makeup than he’d maintained.” It helped that he knew the repertoire cold after several weeks in the band, led by trumpeter Ric Albani, who knew Fowlkes from their co-employment in an Ernie Wilkins-led big band several years before. “Roy was totally turned on,” Fowlkes said. “We became friends.”
Born and raised in Brooklyn’s Bedford Stuyvesant and Brownsville neighborhoods, Fowlkes had been earning his living since high school as a journeyman trombone player in an array of Latin, Reggae, Calypso, Funk and R&B horn sections. Fowlkes played “Ascension-plus, play-to-the-gods” music with like-minded practitioners (his classmates at Manhattan Community College circa 1969-1970 included William Parker, Roy Campbell and Charles Tyler) at various “drop the key and start” sessions at apartments and lofts; kibitzed at sessions at a Williamsburg space run by Rashied Ali and rehearsals at Freddie Hubbard’s home at 919 Park Place; soaked up the atmosphere at the New Muse, a Pan-African-oriented cultural outpost that presented concerts by the likes of Betty Carter and Pharaoh Sanders.
“I was such a Brooklyn guy,” Fowlkes said. “Olu Dara called me when I was 21 to ask if I’d be interested and available to play with Doug and Jean Carn. But I didn’t think I was ready, so I didn’t show up to the gig. Olu used to tease me, ‘You’re never going to leave Brooklyn.’”
Active in the experimental theater and speculative improv circles then burgeoning in downtown Manhattan, Nathanson suggested they do duo projects and hired Fowlkes to play his music in productions at LaMama and Squat Theater. Later in 1982, saxophonist-actor John Lurie recruited Nathanson to play in a new, more “jazz”-centric edition of Lounge Lizards. On Nathanson’s recommendation, Lurie hired Fowlkes, guitarist Marc Ribot and percussionist E.J. Rodriguez to join holdovers Evan Lurie and Dougie Bowne.
“It was a more theatrical, stylized, edgier take on the free jazz avant-garde, with a nod towards rock,” Fowlkes said. “It was mind-opening. I finally got out of Brooklyn. We started playing gigs in places I wasn’t hip to, like A.B.C. and Limbo Lounge. We did full tours to Europe and Japan, my first experience like that, and the exposure and opportunity gave me confidence. Conceptually, though, it wasn’t that much of an evolution. I played kind of how I did at those full-blown avant-garde jam sessions, but with more competence and technique.”
Fowlkes opined that Lurie’s music “has aged in a very interesting way.” But at the time, both he and Nathanson were of two minds about Lurie’s m.o. of appropriating and refracting musical ideas gestated in the crucible of the ’60s and ’70s Black avant-garde with a cool, chic, suits-and-narrow-ties attitude. They continued to develop their duo simpatico, and decided to document it. “We’d say, ‘It would be nice to have another instrument on this cut,’” Fowlkes remembered. “Before we knew it, we had a studio full of musicians.”
The ensuing LP, Broken Night/Red Light, launched the Jazz Passengers. “When we started, the idea was that we’d be both more serious and less serious than John,” Nathanson said. “We’d be a real jazz band that explored the history of jazz, with changes in the tunes. John wasn’t interested in bebop; he’d make fun of Freddie Hubbard and this kind of thing. His only real relationship to jazz was through free jazz, which was legitimate—he played with people like Sirone.
“It’s been a weird partnership. I’m so neurotic, but also ambitious in my project ideas. Curtis is more laid-back. I’d say, ‘Let’s do this,’ and Curtis would look at me and say, ‘Oh…yeah.’ By the way he said ‘Yeah’ I could tell whether he wanted to do it. If not, it was a bad idea.”
Fowlkes began making such decisions soon after matriculating at Samuel Tilden High School in Canarsie in 1965. He won the trombone chair in an all-city high school band, and joined a two-night-a-week rehearsal band with a cohort of peers at a local community center. Within in a year, the unit—Fowlkes had invited bassist Alex Blake to join—had evolved from “little $20 gigs” into Latin Soul Drive, a combo fronted by both a sonero and a soul singer that emulated Eddie Palmieri’s two-trombone sound, and eventually recorded a minor Boogaloo Soul classic for Cotique Records.
“Those rehearsals were freeing,” Fowlkes said. “We were teenagers, seven black guys and three Latinos, making music on our own and adding our own ideas. Our instrumental was Freddie Hubbard’s ‘Crisis.’ It wasn’t totally correct; we did it all by ear. I hearkened back to those days when I’d move Roy’s ideas into a place where I thought it settled.”
One idea was increasingly to feature Fowlkes’ vocals in the Passengers mix. His renderings of “I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal You” and “Do Nothing Til You Hear From Me” were highlights of Broken Night/Red Light. In fact, Nathanson related, before signing their initial contract with Crepuscule, a Belgian label, a well-known A&R man told them, “the only way I’ll sign this band is if it’s based around Curtis’ singing,” before telling Fowlkes that he “could be the black Mose Allison.”
The Passengers declined the offer. Yet, the suggestion foreshadowed their 1994 recording, In Love, featuring arrangements for Jimmy Scott, Mavis Staples, Elvis Costello, Jeff Buckley and Deborah Harry. “We had a lot of material that didn’t make the cut,” Fowlkes stated. “The material for the In Love record was daunting for the singers. Roy figured, ‘Oh, they’ll have no problem singing in 7/4; this is like an R&B thing.’ It might have a nod towards R&B. But when Mavis Staples or the woman from Patti LaBelle’s group come into the studio and you give them a very quick 7/4, it’s ‘Problem, problem—emergency.’ Maybe my palette was a little more conservative, or I’m more of a realist.”
Singing has remained integral in Fowlkes’ musical production with the Passengers, both during Harry’s several-year tenure as the Passengers’ lead vocalist, and on their more intermittent reunions of recent years. With increased visibility as the ’90s progressed, he became a first-call sideman, as documented on widely influential albums by Bill Frisell (This Land, Quartet, Blues Dream) and Don Byron (Nu Blaxploitation, #6). More recently he’s been a key member of, among other units, Steven Bernstein’s Millennial Territory Orchestra and various trios and quartets with Charlie Hunter.
“After I heard Curtis on In Love, I always wanted to play with him,” Hunter said, a week before a brief tour with Fowlkes and drummer Bobby Previte. “He has that perfect balance of the intellectual and the visceral, and the history and music knowledge to back it up. The way he holds his narrative—telling the story—is super consistent. You know him within seconds. Curtis can be on a stage with a trombonist who’s playing “La Traviata” upside-down, flawlessly in 7/8; he’ll crack one note, and instantly all the playing that happened before is meaningless. When you call some old standard, he’ll know it. When you say Art Ensemble, he’ll have that. When you say Stylistics, he’ll have that.”
As we spoke, Folkwes was debating whether to make his conversational voice the focal point of a prospective second-ever leader recording, following an estimable hardbop-to-funk recital titled Catfish Corner, from 1999.
“I’ve been told people would want to hear it, but I’m not convinced,” Fowlkes said. Told Nathanson’s remark, “I don’t think Curtis would play something he couldn’t sing,” he stated that, while “flattered,” other imperatives animate him.
“I long to get to places in the improvisation that are singing, or singable,” Fowlkes said. “But I also want to make abrasive noises. The thing for me is the struggle to get away from where the song is.”
Today Is The Question: Ted Panken on Music, Politics and the Arts 