Best of birthdays to Joe Lovano, who turns 63 today. I’ve been fortunate to have many opportunities to write about Joe and to speak with him, and am sharing a few of these in this post. First is a long feature for Jazziz in 2000. There follow a pair of WKCR interviews, one the proceedings of a Musicians Show in 1989, the second of a 5-hour Jazz Profiles show in 1995 — much interesting information in both. Then comes the an interview conducted for the “Baker’s Dozen” feature on the much missed website, http://www.jazz.com — Joe discusses 13 essential John Coltrane tracks. Then come three liner notes. Joe gave me my first liner note opportunity in 1995 when Blue Note released his seminal date, Quartets: Live at the Village Vanguard. Subsequently, I wrote the notes for On This Day: Live at the Vanguard and the debut recording of his still ongoing group, Us Five, titled Folk Art.
Joe Lovano (Jazziz):
He isn’t brash, he doesn’t profile, but Joe Lovano isn’t the type to blend into the background either. When he strolls into the dressing room and exchanges greetings with Paul Motian and Bill Frisell, the mood instantly lifts. Lovano’s last performance with the drummer and guitarist, his partners for 20 years in Motian’s trio, was last together eight months earlier in Rome. Now, they’re about to take the stage at Caramoor, an elegantly landscaped arts center set on a former estate in the middle of Westchester horse country, to conclude a remarkable afternoon of music that’s featured the Sam Rivers Trio and Steve Lacy and Mal Waldron in duet.
Lovano has a ruddy tan, his salt-specked goatee-moustache is trim; he’s casually dapper in blue circular shades, a bebopper’s straw beret with alternating zig-zag stripes of white and sea blue, and a silk violet short-sleeved shirt with black markings resembling musical notes draping a burly torso. As greetings are exchanged, he assembles his silver tenor and begins to warm up, effortlessly filling the room from the first breath.
A few hours before, in this same room, Chris Potter, fresh from a turbulent tenor solo with Hilton Ruiz’ band, came upstairs to say hello. I reminded him of a comment of his — that Lovano’s influence on his generation of saxophonists is so pervasive that he, Potter, is making a concerted effort not to sound like him. “That’s absolutely true,” he replied.
“What you said to Chris is funny,” Motian remarked once Potter dashed back to the stage.
“I was just in Manchester, England, and as I walked into the club, I heard a saxophone over the sound system. I said, ‘Oh, that’s Joe Lovano.’ The sound engineer who was playing the CD said, ‘No, it’s not.’ I said, ‘You can’t tell me that’s not Lovano. Lovano has been playing with me for twenty years. I know when it’s Joe. All he has to do is play two notes. I know it’s Joe.’ It wasn’t Joe.” He laughs. “I couldn’t believe it. It’s an English guy. I don’t remember his name.”
“That’s far out,” Frisell said.
“It is,” Motian shot back. “I stole the CD. After I got home, I played it; it doesn’t sound like Joe. But at that moment, I thought it was Joe. And I hear lots of other saxophone players now who sound like Joe, which I didn’t when I first met him. He sounds better now than he did then, but not that much better. He sounded good then.”
Lovano sounds good on improvisational flights to the music’s outer partials with Motian and Frisell, I thought, and he sounds just as good on, say, the inspired and thoroughly idiomatic solo he took on “How High The Moon” for a record with the Ray Brown Trio a few years back. After I said something to that effect, Motian jumped in.
“Do you know why he can do that? It’s very simple. He’s a good musician. He has a lot of experience. He played with Woody Herman and other big bands, with the organ trios, all these different groups, he can read anything, plays all the reed instruments.
“Early when the trio was first forming, we had a gig in Cleveland, and we stayed overnight at Lovano’s home, with his parents. His mom cooked up this great food. I’m sitting on the couch with Joe’s father, who says to me, ‘You know, Paul, I’m an official at the local musicians union here in Cleveland; you have to give me $8.’ So I gave it to him! And he gave me his card, which later I gave to Joe after his father passed. Up on the wall of the living room is a picture of Joe in the crib, a couple of months old, but also in the crib with him there’s a fucking saxophone! So check that influence out. That’s the thing about Joe. It just comes naturally to him.”
“He’s natural, but he works his ass off, too,” Frisell added.
In his alchemical ability to play any style — play it convincingly and retain his unmistakable identity — Lovano is the model of what today’s savviest young improvisers strive to attain. Part of the mystique involves his big, furry sound. It’s a sound that tenorist Eric Alexander, an ’80s student of Lovano’s at William Patterson College, describes as “ultra-breathy, broader and darker just about than any tone I’ve ever heard on the saxophone.” He continues, “A lot of younger saxophonists have been excited and enthralled by that sound and tried to approximate it. It’s very personal, almost eccentric. If it were 1965, and you heard that sound, it would be shocking — you wouldn’t have heard a tenor sound like that. He doesn’t sound like any of the legendary cats tone-wise. Also, the way Joe organizes his notes and phrases and shapes his lines disguises what he does. There’s clarity, but the way he outlines the harmony is almost intentionally nebulous. It sounds like I’m being critical, and I’m not; I hear that rubbing off on a lot of younger saxophonists.”
Ever since he came off the road with Woody Herman twenty years ago, Lovano developed that sound on a wild mix of jobs, not least with Motian’s Trio. He played a vast range of charts with the Mel Lewis Orchestra [1980-1992], Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra, and the Carla Bley Orchestra. He worked frequently with Elvin Jones, in a remarkable quintet with Tom Harrell, in a two-tenor quintet with African drums led by bassist Ray Drummond, and, earned widespread visibility in John Scofield’s immensely popular quartet. He co-led a voice-and-woodwinds ensemble with his wife Judi Silvano, played in a European freebop combo with bassist Henri Texier and drummer Aldo Romano, and in a quartet led by Japanese avant pianist Yosuke Yamashita. One night in 1994 he spent an evening scratch improvising a series of memorable duets and trios with Evan Parker and Borah Bergman.
Blue Note signed Lovano in 1990; he’s responded with eleven albums, each different from the one before, all of which have extended his musical vocabulary. Most of these recordings incorporate musicians — Jones, Ed Blackwell, Jack DeJohnette, Al Foster, Lewis Nash, Billy Hart, Charlie Haden, Dave Holland — who, as he puts it, “play beyond technique with a sensibility of freeness.” Lovano also has collaborated with open-minded arrangers like Gunther Schuller and Manny Albam. Axiomatic as it may seem today that improvisers should experience the full range of contexts — from the most functional blues to the most intense abstraction — this was hardly the norm in the mid-’80s, when Lovano began to make his mark.
“I never said, ‘I dig this, I don’t dig that,'” Lovano emphasizes. “I’ve always lived in the different, let’s say, camps in the music. I’ve tried to be free, tried to develop my technique through the years so I could execute ideas freely and to develop ideas within the personnel in the band. I don’t come at the saxophone with one attitude all the time, which has helped develop my approach in playing a lot of different kinds of music.”
You can hear how independent-minded thirty-something tenor players like Mark Turner, Seamus Blake, Chris Cheek, Donny McCaslin and Joshua Redman have investigated Lovano’s capacious timbre and open approach to harmony on their way to finding a sound. “I don’t know any tenor player of my generation who doesn’t love Joe Lovano and hasn’t been profoundly influenced by him,” says Redman, who in June performed in San Francisco with Lovano, Wayne Shorter and Branford Marsalis. Redman was a recently matriculated Harvard underclassman when he first heard Lovano at a small Boston club on the urging of a tenor saxophonist friend. “I was completely blown away,” Redman relates. “You could hear the entire tradition of the tenor saxophone, but he had synthesized it all in a completely natural, organic and personal way, and he sounded completely modern and incredibly soulful and spirited.”
Redman has since shared numerous bandstands with Lovano, whose admiration for Dewey Redman, Josh’s father, is no secret. “Of the group of tenor players who came up in the ’70s,” Redman continues, “Joe completely embraced the modernism that came out of Coltrane, Joe Henderson, Wayne Shorter and Ornette Coleman, but with a sound which goes beyond that and in some ways reaches further back. There’s a humanism in his sound that maybe was lacking in other guys from the post-Coltrane era. I mean sound in the larger conception — the notes he plays, his rhythmic and harmonic conception, his melody. It’s his personality.”
Lovano’s peers and elders appreciate his willingness to aim for paths untrodden in an era when the weight of the tradition intimidated so many to fall back on the tried-and-true. “What I personally dig about Joe,” says the bassist Christian McBride, who most recently played with Lovano in the initial iteration of Grand Slam, a quartet that the tenorist co-leads with guitarist Jim Hall, “is that he’s not afraid at all. He always plays with what I’d call ‘careful abandon.’ I always have been a little dumbfounded as to why one morning we woke up and Joe Lovano became this really major person on the jazz scene, because I always thought he was one of the best tenor saxophonists of all time.”
Before Grand Slam formed, Jim Hall — a native Clevelander who played with Lovano’s Uncle Carl in high school and hung out in the one-chair barbershop Lovano’s father owned in Cleveland to supplement his income as a musician — brought Lovano onto several mid-90s Telarc dates; these involved complex chord changes and intricate charts. “Joe just gobbled them up,” Hall says. “He dives into things and assumes he’s going to come out on his feet; you can put almost anything in front of him. I first heard him with the Mel Lewis band at the Vanguard, and I was impressed with him the same way I am now. He was completely loose and confident. He just sounded so confident, so completely comfortable when he’d stand up to play his solo, no matter how complicated the chart was. There was no feeling of hesitation; he just would do it.”
“Joe goes toe-to-toe with people,” says Greg Osby. The saxophonist collaborated with Lovano for last year’s Friendly Fire (Blue Note), a well-wrought hypermodern jam session which commingles Lovano’s working trio of bassist Cameron Brown and the iconic New Orleans drummer Idris Muhammad, with Osby and pianist Jason Moran. “He’s spontaneous and inventive, and he doesn’t play licks. He incorporates alternate fingerings or choking on the mouthpiece or tonguing techniques to create shadings and colors — he gobbles up the notes. He knows how to embrace the sound. That comes from listening to people play the blues, and listening to singers, how they bend notes.”
It seems each of Lovano’s colleagues finds something different to appreciate in his approach. Cameron Brown has grounded the space between Lovano and Muhammad at least a couple of hundred times in the last two years. “Joe reminds me of Don Cherry,” says the bassist, who worked extensively with Archie Shepp, George Adams and Dewey Redman earlier in his career. “Both of them are always aware that music can be magic, that something special can happen at any moment, which puts the music at a different level.”
In fact, Lovano appears to know how to create a space where personalities can blend and set off sparks in any performance situation. As Motian implied, his father began to teach his oldest son how to crack the codes of such ritual shortly after he began to walk, in a manner not so dissimilar to the way griot families in oral societies pass along information. Lovano likes to emphasize that his projects emanate from personal history, a subject he discusses with obvious enthusiasm.
Lovano’s grandparents were born in Sicily, and settled in Cleveland, Ohio, in the early part of the 1900s. Three of his uncles were working musicians. Uncle Nick, now 85, who was a dance band tenor player (he played in the saxophone section in the Sammy Watkins Big Band, which Dean Martin sang with when he was discovered) and a used car salesman, told him that his grandfather was in the Masons, who encouraged their children to play instruments so they could play for their parties and meetings. Lovano assumes that his father, Tony, got into music from hearing his older brother play. Uncle Joe played “more wedding band style tenor saxophone — all standard songs.” Tony Lovano was next, and he and his younger brother Carl, who played trumpet, came of age during the Bop era — Lovano has a recording of them playing Dizzy Gillespie’s “Dizzy Atmosphere.”
“We lived with my grandparents until I was 5 or 6 years old,” Lovano recalls. “It was a festive atmosphere, with music all the time. I heard reel-to-reel tapes of parties where my grandmother’s brother, Jim, played mandolin and sang arias and Italian folk songs. My Dad would practice in a big bathroom on the second floor; I’d listen to him all the time, and the sound of the saxophone captured me completely from when I was crawling around the pad. I had my first alto saxophone when I was 5 or 6. A year or two later the drummer my Dad was playing with bought a new drumset and gave me his drums, which I set up in my room. My Dad gave me a wonderful opportunity to explore by giving me horns and letting me have his record collection to destroy as a kid — and I went through all his records. I had a lot of favorite players when I was really young. I mean, I knew about Sonny Stitt and Rahsaan Roland Kirk when I was in fifth and sixth grade, and I knew their playing.”
Lovano’s ideas about playing the saxophone were marked early on by his intense involvement with the drums. “I felt a little pressure playing saxophone,” he says. “My Dad played with me on all my lessons, and I was trying to have him dig me. Then I would sit at the drums and have fun. As I developed more on the saxophone, I heard the solos that Max Roach played with Charlie Parker, and realized he was playing some of the same phrases and melodies as Bird. As I learned the melodies, I’d practice them on the drums as well. I’d learn all the solos that Philly Joe Jones played on a record. It opened up my awareness to be involved not only in what I’m articulating on my horn, but to try to be part of what everybody else is playing.”
Tony Lovano, who went by the nickname “Big T,” was the most advanced player in his family; as Lovano recalls, “he was a real hipster; by the late ’40s he was seriously involved in the scene.” He didn’t travel much — Lovano recalls a tour with a trio led by Nat Cole’s brother Ike — but he worked all over Cleveland, playing gutbucket, walk-the-bar saxophone in rhythm-and-blues and jump bands, leading organ trios (by the ’60s, his East Cleveland barber shop, now with two chairs, had a Hammond B3), doing jam sessions, playing in supper clubs for listeners. “He was aware of all music, and especially the music of the Fifties and Sixties,” Lovano says. “That was his generation. Tadd Dameron and Freddie Webster were from Cleveland, so were [trumpeters] Benny Bailey and Bill Hardman and [guitarist] Bill DeArango, who he was real close to, and later Albert Ayler and Bobby Few. He was coming out of the Illinois Jacquet and Gene Ammons school of playing, but he loved Lester Young, and had a beautiful ballad approach, too. He played by ear, and he created melody all the time. That was his thing.”
Through his father, Lovano internalized the notion that mastery of function is the fount of invention. “My Dad always had integrated bands with the best musicians in town,” Lovano states, “and the organ players and drummers and bassists and guitarists he played with became my teachers. My main goal was to sit in, so I had to learn the tunes they were playing, sometimes on the spot; I had to figure out how to play in certain keys and maneuver through tag endings. I had to memorize everything.”
Once Lovano could drive, he got his union card, and began to take on weekend wedding and dance gigs that his father got calls for but couldn’t get to, leading bands with musicians Tony Lovano’s age. “That gave me confidence about playing with older guys,” Lovano says. “My Dad taught me to survive out here as a musician, to be able to take a gig and get called back a second time! He always stressed the technical things. He encouraged me to learn clarinet and flute, which helped me later to function in Woody Herman’s band and in the Mel Lewis Orchestra. He prepared me to sit in saxophone sections by bringing me around to hear the bands he played in; soon I was playing in rehearsal bands, trying to read and integrate my sound within the band sound. That prepared me to feed off of people, to blend my tone with other tones so the sound doesn’t stick out — to find other ways to listen.
“Music was my trade. But jazz music was always art to me, too. As a teenager I played on dances in Motown type bands, and I was one of the only cats who could solo. I thought the AM, Top-40 type music at the time was sad! They didn’t play like Sonny Stitt and they didn’t sound anything like Miles. There was no art in the way they played. When I was a kid, I felt I was studying sophisticated, incredible music, listening to Lester Young and trying to execute Charlie Parker’s melodies.”
Lovano earned enough money to pay his tuition at Berklee, where he enrolled in 1971, and immediately impressed his peer group. “I loved the way he sounded then, when he was 18 years old,” John Scofield relates. “Everyone was trying to play jazz and bebop tunes, more modern things, like Coltrane and Miles from the ’60s, even some Bitches Brew type of action and Herbie Hancock kind of fusion, and free music. Coltrane was the pervasive sound on tenor saxophone, but Joe was digging into some other stuff. Joe had the same quality then that he has now, only less developed — great time and a lush sound that echoes the tenor players I liked from older records, a commitment to improvising and swinging hard, and a high standard of musicality, a strength of purpose and focus.”
Berklee became Lovano’s finishing school. He immediately caught the attention of hard-to-please instructors John LaPorta and Gary Burton; in Burton’s advanced ensemble class, he analyzed for the first time the music of Wayne Shorter, Steve Swallow, Carla Bley, and Chick Corea — “tunes I’d heard before but never really played, with different forms and more deceptive resolutions in the harmony, more polychords, different rhythmic feelings within the music,” Lovano says. “That class opened me up to the future.”
Tony Lovano had a heart attack that December; Joe flew home to finish his father’s five-night-a-week organ trio gig, and remained to help support the family. He returned to Berklee nine months later, completed one more semester, then let school slide to join the fray, eventually receiving an Honorary Doctorate in 1998. He spent the next few years shuttling between Boston and Cleveland. In Boston, he would crash “for weeks and months at a time” with friends Billy Drewes and Steve Slagle at a loft atop an office building where well-attended sessions began after work and ended in the wee hours. He did gigs around town with bands like the just-formed Fringe with George Garzone, “playing open, freer, creative music, making enough bread to survive and practice and play.”
In Cleveland he collaborated with local wildmen like DeArango, Ernie Krivda, Abraham Laboriel and Jamey Haddad, and led rhythm sections at a room called the Smiling Dog opposite people like Stan Getz and Pharaoh Sanders. Brother Jack McDuff and Lonnie Smith took him on the road for some chitlin’ circuit hits; his solo on Smith’s “Afrodisia” [Groove Merchant, 1974] became a rotation staple in mid-’90s English Acid Jazz. Both McDuff and Smith frequently came through New York, and the young tenorman spent off-hours making the rounds, sitting in and being seen at rooms like Ali’s Alley, the Tin Palace, Studio Rivbea and Boomer’s. He moved to New York in the spring of 1976, got gigs with Chet Baker uptown and with the venturesome pianist Albert Dailey downtown, and received a call that August to fly to St. Louis and join Woody Herman’s Fortieth Anniversary band.
“Woody loved Joe, because he came up from a real jazz environment as opposed to colleges, where most of the cats in the band came from,” says Bob Belden, who replaced Lovano on tenor in the band in 1979. “He was the first cat I met who had it together as a jazz musician; to me, he was always the essence and the spirit of Jazz. Woody hadn’t had a natural player like that in some time.” Lovano spent the next two-and-a-half years touring the world as Herman’s primary tenor soloist, playing charts by the likes of Ralph Burns, Sammy Nestico, Jimmy Jones and Frank Foster, backing singers like Sarah Vaughan, Billy Eckstine, Joe Williams, Mel Torme, Tony Bennett on occasion.
When Lovano reflects on that time, he remembers the lessons he soaked up. “Sitting in those saxophone sections, accompanying those great voices influenced the way I play lead parts,” he says, “feeling like I’m the vocalist out front, but as the saxophonist. I had a chance to play with and stand next to Zoot Sims, Stan Getz, Al Cohn, Jimmy Giuffre, Flip Phillips, and Don Lamond. It gave me confidence to find my own voice in this music, to feed off the music I’m playing and the feeling of the players I’m with at the moment, to create something within what’s going on around me, always with my own ideas — not copying the way other cats played, but trying to play in the idiom and in the feeling of the beat and harmonic structure of whatever tune we’re in.”
After a pause, he adds: “A few weeks ago Wayne Shorter told me something that opened some doors, and it’s reverberating in me. He said, ‘Man, don’t let the gatekeepers hold you back.’ There are a lot of different ways to look at that.”
Actually, there are a lot of different ways to experience Joe Lovano’s music. He’s participated in a staggering range of high-profile work during his 47th year. A rundown of the past year’s activity includes: gigs with Herbie Hancock’s Quartet; a collective quintet with McCoy Tyner, Bobby Hutcherson and Billy Higgins; another, quartet with John Scofield, Dave Holland and Al Foster; several three-tenor summits with Michael Brecker and Dave Liebman; work with Grand Slam and the Friendly Fire Quintet; touring with a group culled from the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra to perform Duke Ellington’s small band music; recording as a guest with Abbey Lincoln and Flip Phillips, two tunes on a festschrift for Roland Kirk, and a pivotal solo in Bob Belden’s forthcoming symphonic suite “Black Dahlia.” Also, in various venues around New York, he worked with a series of trios — Brown and Muhammad; pianist Ken Werner and harmonica legend Toots Thielemans; woodwindist Billy Drewes and trapsetter Joey Baron; trumpeter Dave Douglas (his former student at NYU) and bassist Mark Dresser.
Lovano assembled those trios to frame his full arsenal of woodwinds and percussion for four 6-hour sessions over two intense days in the studio last April, then cherrypicked from them to create forthcoming Trios: Edition Two, a document that blends as-one industrial strength declamations by the working trio, harmonic tone poems with Werner and Thielemans, nuanced free improvs with Drewes and Baron, and finely honed sound exploring with Douglas and Dresser — it places him squarely in the camp of free-thinking improvisers.
The album follows 52nd Street Themes, for which Lovano rounded up an ensemble of first-call New York improvisers with whom he shared long-standing personal histories, and deployed them in configurations ranging from duo to nonet. 52nd Street Themes is an idiomatic paean to Clevelander’s Tadd Dameron, who of all composers associated with bebop most personifies romanticism, and an homage to the “blowing” ethos of Charlie Parker. Willie Smith, a Dameron protege who led Cleveland rehearsal bands that Tony Lovano played in and brought his son to hear, arranged much of the music. Everyone in the band has a tone with personality; in tune with the music’s history, they play with the edgy spirit we associate with the years of innovation that followed World War Two.
Lovano especially, who throws down one passionate tenor declamation after another with that wispy, driving voice and unfailing melodic intent. He offers a beautifully constructed à cappella intro to the title track, Thelonious Monk’s jagged “I Got Rhythm” variation. He soars operatically over a Dameronesque arrangement of “Embraceable You” and engages long-time tenor chums Ralph Lalama and George Garzone in spirited conversation on “Charlie Chan,” a variant on the 1947 version of “Milestones” on which Bird played tenor sax. Lovano makes you hear the spaces between the notes on a vibrato-drenched rubato reading of Billy Strayhorn’s “Passion Flower” in duo with pianist John Hicks; he addresses Fred Lacey’s “Theme For Ernie” at a quicker clip than John Coltrane’s famous 1958 version, yet hews unfailingly to the yearning lyric-blue essence of the tune; he flies like the wind with Dennis Irwin and Lewis Nash on a racehorse reading of Dameron’s “The Scene Is Clean.”
“All the cats in the period between the ’40s and the ’50s had solid footing growing up in their hometowns and basically being the strongest force in their area,” Lovano says. “They were a magnet to players on every other instrument to play with and learn from, but they were also learning from everybody who came through town. Those influences were strong, because during that period everybody was traveling. They did a lot of jam sessions, and their sounds were big and strong, because they had to stand up there and be heard. It was really a nightclub world, and it was an acoustic world.” That’s the world Lovano was born to, and the ethos that sustains him as he navigates the present and looks to the future.
Lovano shares that he’s writing an extended piece called “Mediterranean Waters,” an effort to channel “the feelings and energy from the Middle East, North Africa and southern Europe from ancient times.” He notes, “I’m trying to write things that have a Folk feeling, music before swing, without a walking bass. Music that has an openness in it. Oriental music, Balinese music, African music, folk music from Sicily. In a certain way, Jazz is folk music, too. It’s music of the people, of the time. Ornette Coleman’s music is very folky to me. Don Cherry’s music. Old and New Dreams. They played with a certain kind of feeling, not just in one style or another. It’s when players don’t have to play a role on their instrument.”
Back at Caramoor, on a serene summer afternoon in Westchester, the Paul Motian Trio is in synch from the moment they hit the stage. They feel each other out with “Monk’s Dream,” stir the juices on a wild Motian original. Motian pulls out his brushes for an aching rubato version of “Good Morning Heartache.” With Steve Lacy looking on from the wings, Lovano guides his tenor into that distinctive altisimmo range, shaping lines of pure melody that could have come from a soprano horn over Frisell’s sparse, polychromatic chords. Most bands would lift the tempo, but not this one; Motian kicks off a slow, floating blues on which Lovano and Frisell weave a collective ending that makes you wonder how they got there. Then Frisell initiates an abstract intro that morphs into “Body and Soul.” Lovano pulls the iconic tenor tune into time, rocking to an unerring inner clock, ascending again into that preternaturally sweet soaring voice. The audience explodes from rapt silence.
The ritual fulfilled, the generations spanned, Lovano tips his horn, and leaves the stage with his smiling partners, ready for the next encounter…which will be that evening, when he locks bebop horns with James Moody and Phil Woods on “Au Privave,” “My Little Suede Shoes” and “Confirmation” during several hours of inspired jamming.
A few weeks later, before a whooping packed house in the Old Office, in the sub-basement of the Knitting Factory, Lovano joins master drummers Andrew Cyrille and Billy Hart for an 80-minute set of impromptu free improvisation. Shaping his lines in an unfailingly interactive way, carving drum-like phrases, he creates melodies on the spot from the top to the bottom of the horn, avoiding licks almost completely. It’s a stunning performance. Maybe it will be the starting point for Trios: Edition Three.
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Joe Lovano (WKCR Profile, 1-22-95):
[MUSIC: Lovano/Redman, “Web Of Fire” (1993); Motian/Lovano/ Frisell, “But Not For Me” (1988); Lovano/Petrucciani/ Holland/Blackwell, “Portrait Of Jenny” (1990); Lovano/M. Miller, “Laura” (1993); Motian/Lovano/Haden/Frisell, “My Heart Belongs To Daddy” (1989); Lovano/G. Schuller, “Crepuscule With Nellie” (1994); Motian/Lovano/Frisell, “Reflections” (1988); Lovano/K. Werner, “Duke Ellington’s Sound Of Love” (1988); Lovano/G. Schuller, “Peggy’s Blue Skylight” (1994)]
TP: Listening to your music during the first hour, I’m struck both by the range of strategies you use in approaching similar material and the range of situations in which you function effectively and idiomatically. It seems almost axiomatic that improvisers should have this ability, and yet it doesn’t seem that widely practiced.
JL: There’s a lot of mysteries in music, especially in Jazz. For me, I grew up in a real creative musical scene in Cleveland, and played with a lot of different players of my Dad’s generation. My Dad, Tony Lovano, played tenor, and was always playing with great players on organ and rhythm section players, and I learned how to play by playing with all the cats that he was playing with. It really prepared me for what I’m doing now.
As far as material that I play and approach, I let the different people and personalities I play with completely feed my ideas. I just try to react to who I’m around. When I play a standard or a Thelonious Monk composition with, let’s say, Paul Motian and Bill Frisell, there’s a certain atmosphere and a feeling to draw from, but if I play that same tune with, let’s say, Mulgrew Miller, Christian McBride and Lewis Nash, the tempo is different and the whole energy on the stage is different. It’s really a challenge to play the same material in new ways with different people. The tempos that you play really create that mood, and also the different keys that you might play a tune in from time to time would create a whole different atmosphere for playing.
TP: Let’s talk a little bit about the scene in Cleveland when you were coming up, and your father’s milieu. I guess music must have been imbued in you from the cradle. There’s a photograph in one of your recent albums of your mother tickling your chin, and next to you is an alto saxophone that’s bigger than you are.
JL: I always grew up with the sound of the saxophone around me, and my father played all the time around the house. I used to listen to him practice all the time, and the sound of the saxophone just captured me completely from when I was crawling around the pad. From a kid, I just wanted to create that sound myself. The sound of the horn was the first thing that I wanted to play. Of course, later I started to actually learn about the notes on the horn. My Dad gave me a wonderful opportunity to explore by giving me horns and letting me have his record collection to destroy as a kid — and I went through all his records. I had a lot of favorite players when I was really young. I mean, I knew about Sonny Stitt and Rahsaan Roland Kirk when I was in fifth and sixth grade, and I knew their playing.
TP: Did you also have a chance to see them or meet them when they came through Cleveland?
JL: I did, yeah. When I was a teenager, 14-15 years old, a couple of clubs were happening in Cleveland, the East Town Motel and another club called Sirrah(?) House that my Dad used to play a lot. Alternate weeks, James Moody would come through, or Sonny Stitt, Dizzy Gillespie, Rahsaan, Jimmy Smith, Shirley Scott with Harold Vick. I had a chance to go to those clubs all the time, because they knew me, and I could go in and just sit in the corner or whatever.
I had a chance to meet Moody and Stitt and all those cats when I was a teenager, but hear them in the room, you know. When I first heard Dizzy in the room, heard his tone, after knowing his sound from the records, man, it really turned me on! So I realized at an early age about the different personalities in Jazz, not just the technique of playing a horn, but just the personality that can come through your instrument, and that’s what I always strived for as a young player.
TP: Cleveland has its own niche in the continuum of Jazz.
JL: Oh, yeah. From the Bebop period, Tadd Dameron, Benny Bailey, Bill Hardman, Freddie Webster were cats my Dad knew and kind of grew up under. Benny Bailey and my Dad were contemporaries, and so were Jim Hall and Bill DeArango, and also the tenor player Joe Alexander, who was one of the legendary figures that I’d never heard or met. He passed away, I think, in 1970 or something. But he was a good friend of my Dad’s, and they used to play together all the time. Bobby Few was from Cleveland, Albert Ayler was from Cleveland.
TP: Was your father open to that as well?
JL: Oh, yeah. Bobby Few played some of his first gigs with my Dad in Cleveland. I had never known that, but I saw Bobby recently in Paris, where he’s been living since the Sixties, playing with Steve Lacy and different people, and he told me that one of his first gigs was with my Dad. That was probably during the early Sixties, I’d say.
My Dad was real aware of all of music, and especially the music of the Fifties and Sixties. That was his generation. He had heard Charlie Parker and Miles play together when they came through Cleveland, Max Roach, heard Lester Young play in Cleveland. He was really on the scene. He told those stories all the time.
TP: What was his sound like?
JL: Well, he was coming out of the Illinois Jacquet school of playing, “Flying Home” and all those kinds of tunes. But he had a beautiful ballad approach, too, and he loved Lester Young as well. So I think his earlier playing reflected that more. As time went on, he got a harder kind of sound. He had a lot of different sides of his playing. But he definitely was coming out of the Gene Ammons approach.
I met Gene Ammons once. In 1970 or 1971, Jug came and played at this club, Sirrah(?) House, and my Dad took me to see him. We went in the kitchen, in the dressing room, and Jug and my Dad embraced like they were old friends. I guess my Dad had played at a jam session with him once or something, years before. It was incredible, man; I couldn’t believe it. I got Jug’s autograph. Hearing him play that night really turned me around. Amina Claudine Myers actually was playing organ with him at the time. Jug had a Varitone saxophone, which is an electric kind of hook-up on your horn, which my Dad had just gotten. He played a lot of organ gigs, a lot of organ trios, and with the Varitone you didn’t need a P.A. system, you didn’t need anything. You had this amplifier that really matched the sound of the Leslie speaker. I’ll never forget that night.
TP: Well, it sounds like your openness towards styles and musical situations is an extension of what you picked up from your father.
JL: Oh yeah, for sure. My Dad was a barber, too. He had a business and raised a family, and never really traveled that much. He toured a little bit. His trio played behind Ike Cole, Nat King Cole’s brother, for a while, and they toured the Midwest, went out to Denver, Colorado and did some gigs. He was on the road a little bit, although that was actually later, in the mid-Seventies. But mainly, he played around Cleveland.
He was a serious fan of the music, too, which really was great for me. I’m a serious fan of the music and the different players, too. I love to go out and hear people play all the time, and I’m trying to always check out everybody.
TP: Was there ever a time when you didn’t think you were going to be a musician?
JL: I don’t think so. No. As a teenager, I was really very involved in trying to get myself together and play. You know, I went to Berklee School of Music after I graduated high school in ’71, and I paid my way to school from all the money I’d made playing gigs in high school. My Dad was always working, five or six nights a week. So he got called for a lot of jobs that he couldn’t do, and he would basically send me. I was playing supper club type settings, weddings, and all kinds of different gigs. But all of the things I did at that time were with rhythm sections and one horn, and basically, I played all the melodies and songs. Very few gigs had, like, a stand-up singer that I had to accompany.
TP: Were you playing tenor?
JL: Yeah, usually tenor. I also started to play flute during those years. Flute became my first real double at that time. The beautiful thing was that I was studying standard tunes, and when I would go to a gig and play with musicians in his generation who were in the rhythm section, I would call the tunes and count the tempo off, and so forth. So I learned how to lead a gig and pace a set. My Dad taught me how to read an audience, too; if I was playing in a club where there was dancing, to play the right tempos, to find the tunes that people are going to dig. I was studying Bebop and those kinds of tunes, but usually we would just play standards when I played those gigs.
TP: So at that time your range of influences pretty much encompassed Bebop, or was it more expansive than that?
JL: I’d say at that time it was completely the Bebop school, for sure. My Dad was listening to records like Kulu Se Mama of Coltrane, he had A Love Supreme and those records, and I was completely into early Miles, and Miles with Coltrane, and Sonny Stitt, and those kind of records. But he never said anything to me like, “Man, listen to this; this is what’s happening now.” He let me discover everything myself. He was really generous with that approach.
Stitt was my first real love on record. My Dad had a lot of Stitt’s records, too, and I would just practice along with the records all the time, on saxophone and on drums, and try to learn the tunes and get next to what was happening. Stitt had a personality that he could play either tenor or alto and sound like a different player, in a way. He was playing from the same knowledge and wisdom and expression, but he really got into the different sounds that were happening on the different horns — and that influenced me from a real young age.
I had the great fortune of meeting Sonny Stitt a bunch of times. He used to come through Cleveland, but not like Coltrane and other cats who really had their own bands. Sonny never really was known as a bandleader. I mean, he toured the world always pretty much as a solo artist, and would play with rhythm sections wherever he went. In his era, he could really do that, and work a lot. But I think he was kind of frustrated in that world. I had a chance to hang out with him and sit with him a lot of times in clubs on breaks and stuff, and he was great. He was a real teacher. He’d look at you and ask you how many holes on your horn, and how many C’s can you hit. He’d start asking you questions right away. It was an education to be around Sonny.
I also had a chance to sit in with him a few times in different groups in Cleveland, with organ trios. One time he came in with Milt Jackson, and they played with a Cleveland rhythm section, I was playing in a group opposite them, and Sonny asked me to sit in with them one of the nights. It was a real thrill just to be on the stand with the cat, because he would take you through the changes, boy.
Coltrane and Stitt were definitely two of my first loves on the instrument, and I loved the music they played. I absorbed the two of them throughout their whole careers, all the different records and different periods. I was more familiar with Coltrane-with-Miles and the Prestige Coltrane for most of my young life, when Sonny Stitt was my favorite player. Then I really got involved with Coltrane’s more modern Impulse records, and once I started to get more familiar with those, it changed my concept of rhythm and the role of not just playing soloist-rhythm section. The way Sonny Stitt played, and in that whole period, you really played off the rhythm section. Your rhythm section was there to support everything you did. Whereas on some of Coltrane’s later records, it was a more collective, conversational kind of playing, and everybody fed off each other more. Elvin Jones or Roy Haynes with Trane were playing, like, the same rhythms, they were playing the same kind of phrasing. Hearing that approach to music opened up my concept, and gave my own music a lot more direction.
I also loved Hank Mobley’s playing from his records, the things he did with Coltrane together, all the things with Miles, and his own records. He was one of the first saxophonists whose tunes I really started to appreciate. All his tunes were so beautiful. At a certain time as a young player you’re so into just trying to play what everybody else is playing, and then you realize that trying to create your own music is part of it, too! That hit me. Hank Mobley was one of the first saxophone composers, both he and Wayne Shorter, who really influenced me a lot.
The trumpet was another important instrument for me in my young developing, because of its attack and a certain something that I really loved. I think I would have been a trumpet player if I’d had a different chance to do something. I just always associated with the trumpet and the rhythm. Lee Morgan and Miles were my two real favorite trumpet players. I used to listen a lot to Lee Morgan on all the Blue Note records, and things with Jimmy Smith — a lot of different things. Lee’s sound and his rhythm really got to me.
TP: Was anyone else besides your father teaching you any kind of theory when you were in Cleveland? Or did that begin at Berklee?
JL: My Dad really was my main teacher. All the theory and everything that I had studied up until I went to Berklee was with my Dad. I would say that was like the most formal.
Now, there was an organ player, Eddie Bacchus, who is still around Cleveland, a great, beautiful player. I learned a lot from Eddie, just talking to him and hanging out and checking out the harmonies that he played. Eddie is one of those legendary cats, man, who played with everyone who would come through during that certain period when there were a lot of gigs, man, and you could work six nights a week, and play two and three weeks in each town. He worked a lot with Lou Donaldson, James Moody, Sonny Stitt and Rahsaan, and a lot of cats during that one period, and he used to work a lot with Joe Alexander around Cleveland. Eddie is something else, man. He is still very active around Cleveland.
There was a cat named Lindsay Tough. There was another organ player, too, named William Dowland whose nickname was Paul Bunyan. He was this huge guy, like seven foot tall, and he played with my Dad a lot. He was great, man! He told me what records to check out. He was originally a trombone player, and he told me about the Miles records with J.J. and those things…
A few different drummers were around. Tony Haynes, Ralph Jackson, a drummer who plays with Duke Jenkins, who’s an organ player out there. Val Kent, a young drummer who was offered the gig with Stan Getz and a lot of different people when he came through town. There was a drummer around named Fats Heard who ended up playing with Erroll Garner, I think. Fats Heard in the Fifties and the Sixties would play with everybody who would come through town.
And there was Lawrence “Jacktown” Jackson, who passed away this last year. He was a beautiful drummer, man, and one of the first real Bebop drummers that I ever played with, you know, when I was 16 or 17 years old. Jacktown was from Detroit, and grew up with Elvin Jones and Pepper Adams and Tommy Flanagan and everyone, and moved to Cleveland probably in the late Fifties or so. I mean, I met him when I was in high school. My father told me stories about him, like when Miles’ group when come through town, Coltrane, Philly Joe Jones, those cats would stay at Jacktown’s house. They were all buddies. So there were a lot of cats in Cleveland during those days who played with everybody.
Hanging with my Dad’s friends was really like a school. They got me into going out, checking out different records. And I had some friends in my generation at the same time that were always hanging out with me, and coming to gigs and listening to my Dad playing. We would go buy records, man, and check out everybody.
TP: In a lot of ways, your experience hearkens back to an earlier generation, when musicians learned on the gig, when people started working earlier and so forth. And it’s one of the things that other musicians remark upon with you, as combining the spontaneity of an ear player with a command of music theory and an ability to do the heavy reading, such as on the Rush Hour CD.
JL: Well, I learned by ear first, for sure. I never considered myself a great reader, until I started to actually go and play with some saxophone sections in some big bands, and actually sit down and learn about how to play with interpretation, and not just read the notes. That also came from my Dad. He played in some big bands and rehearsal bands that he used to bring me to and I would check out.
There was an alto player in Cleveland named Willie Smith, who was an incredible writer and player — not the famous Willie Smith that everybody knows. Willie lived in Detroit for a while. He wrote a lot of arrangements for some early Motown dates, and did a lot of things. He also grew up with Benny Bailey and everybody, a real Bop player. Willie and I actually went on the road with Jack McDuff together in 1975.
We both played a weekend with Jack at this club called the Smiling Dog Saloon in Cleveland. Jack was traveling with two tenor players, David Young on tenor and Bill Cody, and he was picking up an alto and a baritone player in each town, and they would play. So they came to Cleveland, and on Friday and Saturday night they needed a baritone player and an alto player. Ron Kozak, who lives in New York now, a multi-reed player, was playing baritone, and couldn’t play the weekend, he had another gig — and asked me if I wanted to do it. I had a baritone that my Dad got me, and I was fooling around on it, but I had never played a gig on baritone before, so I was a little reluctant. Then I listened to them play a set and it was swinging like crazy. Joe Dukes was on drums and Eric Johnson was on guitar, a beautiful guitar player; David Young sounded incredible on tenor, he sounded so beautiful! So after their set I said to myself, “Okay, I’ll play; I’ll do it.” So I went home, and I practiced the baritone for two days, and found some reeds, and played the weekend, and we had a really nice time. About a week or two later, McDuff called me to join his band. So I went out to join him in Indianapolis, and I stayed with him for, I don’t know, about six months or something.
This happened right at the same time I was working with Lonnie Smith a lot, and I had recorded a record with Lonnie for the Groove Merchant label in 1974. That was the first time I came to New York and went in the studio. George Benson played on it, and Ben Riley was on drums, and Jamey Haddad was also on drums on some tunes, a real close friend from Cleveland who is in New York now, who is working with Dave Liebman and some different bands — a beautiful percussionist. It was funny, because I was on the road with Jack when Lonnie’s record came out, and it was playing on all the stations — it was kind of a far-out thing. The first times I came to New York to play were in 1974 and 1975 with Lonnie and Jack.
TP: Apparently one track from that session, “Apex,” is a staple of British Acid Jazz.
JL: I was hanging out with Courtney Pine one night in Europe, we’d played a festival together, and he told me that he knew my whole solo on this tune. I couldn’t believe it. He said they’re playing it in all the Acid Jazz clubs, and dancing to it, and everybody sings all the solos.
TP: Let’s do a chronology taking you from Berklee to your several years with Woody Herman in the Seventies.
JL: Well, the very first time I really did any kind of touring was 1973, when I played a six-week stint on the road with Tom Jones, the Pop singer. They were towards the end of a huge tour, like a six-month tour. Now, the saxophone section were all friends of mine from Boston, including George Garzone, a great tenor saxophone player who is starting to do a lot of things today, and recording, and he’s been teaching at Mannes School of Music, he’s been teaching at New England Conservatory in Boston for years. He’s really a fabulous player, and he and I go way back together, to the early Seventies. Something went down, and one of the tenor players split the last six weeks of this huge tour. So I got a call to join the band. So I flew out to Las Vegas, and started at Caesar’s Palace for two weeks, with this big band and string section and chorus, playing behind Tom Jones. I kind of had a little solo chair, so I had to do little solos and stuff. That was the first time I really worked in a large ensemble like that.
I moved to New York in 1976, and got the gig with Woody’s band a couple of months after I came to town…
TP: First, let’s talk about New York in 1976, and what a young musician coming in with some experience could hope to do and find.
JL: I had been coming to New York a little bit with Lonnie Smith, playing some trio gigs around with Billy Hart on drums. And in 1975 I came to New York with Jack McDuff, and we played the Kool Jazz Festival at Carnegie Hall, and toured with the Organ Summit with Jimmy Smith’s trio. Also on it were Shirley Scott and Harold Vick and Eddie Gladden, Shirley’s trio at that time, which was really great, man. For me, that was like the highlight of that whole tour that we did. We were on some gigs together in Philadelphia and here in New York. Larry Young had a band at that time, a bigger group that was more of a Fusion type group. Touring and playing with those guys was kind of wild. We did maybe five or six concerts together, with McDuff’s band with the saxophone section. That saxophone section was one of the first ones I played in that was really a Jazz band, where we were improvising and playing a lot of things.
So when I came to New York in May of ’76, I had been here a few times. I had already gone to some jam sessions and met Albert Dailey, and started to meet a lot of the players that I still play with today. Adam Nussbaum, for example; we met back then. Dennis Irwin was playing with Albert Dailey. When I came to town, I got a couple of gigs, and I was playing with Albert and with Carter Jefferson, another great saxophone player, and Harold White was the drummer. When I first came, I was just going around and sitting in with people. Rashied Ali had his club happening, Ali’s Alley down in Soho, and I went down there and sat in with Rashied. I was just going around and trying not only to be heard, but to play with some people that I loved.
TP: Studio Rivbea and the Tin Palace were in full swing.
JL: Studio Rivbea was happening. I went there many times, and heard Braxton play, and Sam Rivers and Dave Holland. It was before I had met Dave or anybody. The Tin Palace was a great scene, and I used to go there and play jam sessions all the time with Monty Waters, a great alto saxophone player. I first played with Woody Shaw there. There was a lot happening in New York then, in the late Seventies.
TP: What was your response when you first heard people like Braxton, or the Midwest musicians who were dealing with extended forms and different strategies?
JL: Well, I had heard them on record before I came to New York, some early ECM recordings. The first time I think I heard Anthony play was on Dave Holland’s record, Conference Of The Birds, which was one of my favorite records at the time, when it came out. I really loved hearing and trying to learn more open-formed type pieces. That was really an extension of the music that I was used to hearing from Coltrane or Archie Shepp, the first kind of freer playing music, the music that really developed from the Ornette Coleman band with Don Cherry and Blackwell and Charlie, and Miles’ band with Wayne and Herbie and Tony Williams and Ron Carter, Coltrane’s quartet. For me, all those bands, and the players that were in all those groups. was the music that really inspired me to develop a more open concept about improvising.
TP: Let’s elaborate on that a little more. I think one thing that’s not immediately apparent to the audience is that musicians are subject to a wide range of influences that don’t necessarily come out within a given situation, and so it’s very easy to pigeonhole people.
JL: Yes.
TP: So you’re playing these tenor-organ gigs, but you’re also listening to a lot of other things…
JL: …at the same time. Exactly. It was really inspiring to know that these players, like Dave Holland and Paul Motian and Charlie Haden… Man, these cats were on the scene, and I always aspired to play with them. I was trying to get myself together musically, so I could play with them — never dreaming that I would. You know what I mean? And as time went on, I really put myself in different positions to meet them and sit in and play and be heard, and things just developed to a point where I was starting to explore music with them. One thing that’s so beautiful about Jazz is that as a young player, if you’re really open and you listen and you dig all these different things, you can put yourself in a lot of different settings that will really enhance your concepts. So you don’t have to stay in one place. That was my dream, was always to play in a lot of different situations.
Also, my Dad always stressed, “Look, you have to be versatile so you can pay the rent.” He taught me clarinet, and wanted me to play flute, and be able to play in bands, and to be able to take any gig that came up. He always instilled that in me. So from an early age, I was kind of studying a lot of different dimensions of improvising and playing my instruments with those goals in mind.
TP: I guess the big bands are one of the great teachers of discipline to a young musician, and particularly in terms of playing for a function or a situation.
JL: For sure. I moved to New York in May of ’76; in August I got the gig with Woody, and went on the road, and stayed with him, like, until the beginning of ’79. So for about two-and-a-half years I was on the road. My first tours to Europe were with Woody. It was my first celebrated gig, like, at that level as a soloist. And I had a chance to play for a week with Sarah Vaughan once. We played behind Billy Eckstine once for a week. I played with Tony Bennett a number of times. I had a chance to play within some ensembles and to play orchestrations behind some incredible voices in music. We played with Joe Williams, too. I learned a lot, man, just playing in those settings, not even as a soloist. Just sitting there and playing these arrangements behind Sarah Vaughan was incredible, man.
TP: So the impact of a big band is extra-musical.
JL: Oh, definitely, for sure. And those experiences for me with Woody were incredible. That year was Woody’s fortieth anniversary year as well as a leader. So there was this huge concert at Carnegie Hall that was recorded on RCA that had all the big stars that had played with Woody through the years. So I had a chance to play and stand next to Zoot Sims and Stan Getz and Al Cohn, Jimmy Giuffre, Flip Phillips, as well, as Chubby Jackson and Don Lamond and Jimmy Rowles. I played “Early Autumn” with Stan Getz at the microphone, playing my part with him playing lead. It really taught me a lot about sound, and it gave me a lot of confidence to find my own voice in this music.
TP: After that ended, you played for years with the Mel Lewis Orchestra. You joined shortly after Thad Jones’ departure.
JL: When I left Woody at the beginning of ’79, it was right around then that Thad had left New York and moved to Denmark. So I joined Mel’s band right after Thad had split, and it had become the Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra. Bob Brookmeyer was back in New York and writing a lot of new music for the band, and started to work on some new concepts and different things, and he and Mel kind of added to the whole beautiful history of the book of the Thad-and-Mel band. That was right when I joined the band, in 1980.
TP: Throughout your tenure the band became a sort of laboratory and workshop for some of the most talented writers in New York, building up the huge book that it has to this day.
JL: That it has today, that’s right. I only recently left the band, I’d say in 1992 or something. After Mel passed away, I stayed in the band maybe another year-and-a-half or something. Then I’ve been just getting pretty busy as a leader, and I wanted to open my chair up for other people to experience that incredible music. When I came in, it was definitely challenging to sit in that band and play this incredible music of Thad’s that I had known from records. Thad wrote everything for the personnel in that band; he just didn’t write charts and bring them in. He wrote for specific people and for a specific record date. Brookmeyer did, too. In a way, my concept about writing and recording has developed from that experience playing with them.
Just playing with Mel alone was incredible. He was so consistent, man, and loved to play, and would feed every solo. He would play behind, like, ten solos in a row, and where some cats would be, “oh, no, not somebody else!” Mel would take on all comers, and like, he would start everybody’s new solo with a complete fresh sound — on a different cymbal, on a different energy. Mel was an amazing improviser and a beautiful musician as an accompanying drummer. Not only in a big band setting, even though he’s really most known for his big band work. But Mel played with a big band like it was a quartet. The horns were the piano, bass and drums, and the soloist. Or it was a trio to him, in a way. If it was an ensemble playing, it was like the band was the piano, and bass and drums. So he created this incredible intimacy within a big band in a way that not many drummers do.
TP: In the liner notes for your 1988 release Village Rhythm, Mel Lewis made the comment that your being a drummer, and a rather proficient one, was a great help to you as a tenor player because you’re able to play strings of notes and land exactly where you’re supposed to. Have you been playing drums along with tenor all this time as well?
JL: Well, I started playing drums when I was a kid, too. One of the drummers who was playing with my Dad (I don’t know how old I was, I was maybe 7 or 8 years old), he got a new drum set, and gave my Dad his drums to give to me. He showed up one day with this huge set of drums, like a 24-inch bass drum — a set from the Forties, you know. So as a kid, I had drums around me all the time. I have pictures of me playing those drums. And as I was starting to really learn melodies on the saxophone, I would just practice them on the drums as well. At the time there was no pressure to play the drums — when I was a kid. I felt a little more under pressure on saxophone; I was studying with my Dad, I was trying to learn everything and play and have him dig me. But then I would just sit at the drums and have fun. It was a real release, you know.
So that’s how I first started. As I developed more on the saxophone, and I started really studying records and hearing Max Roach and Philly Joe Jones, Max especially, the solos that Max would play with Charlie Parker, I realized he was playing some of the same phrases and melodies that Bird was playing. So I started to try to practice what I was learning on the saxophone on the drums. I learned all the solos, like, that Philly Joe would play on a record or whatever. I would try to really be with the rhythm completely. I think that studying like that when I was that young gave me a sense of time, and studying the saxophone the way I did, the harmonic approach and the rhythmic approach together, gave me a lot to work on and to work for as a young player.
That was kind of the beginning. Then through the years, I’ve always played them. I’ve played gigs on drums. But I would play mainly on jam sessions. I still play every day, and it’s like a part of my day that I just sit down and relax and just have fun and explore things.
TP: That’s your outlet.
JL: Yeah, it’s a real passion. Before “Topsy Turvy” on Rush Hour I had never really recorded like this, in a studio, where I overdubbed the drums. It’s something that I practice at home sometimes. If I’m writing a new tune, I’ll tape myself playing solo tenor, and then I’ll work out rhythm section parts by playing drums with the tune on tape. On “Topsy Turvy” Judi and I played the whole tune as tenor and voice first. We did the head, then she did a solo improvisation unaccompanied, and then I came and did a soprano solo unaccompanied, and then we played the head out. So the whole structure was there, and then I went back and and just laid one track down on the drums, straight across the whole thing, and I laid down the soprano part and the melodies, and then I accompanied her in her solo on the bass clarinet after I had already laid down the drums. So I just kind of played inside it. I had never done that before, but it was a lot of fun.
TP: Let’s explore the the overlap between your tenor style and your drumming proclivities a little more.
JL: Well, I feel kind of free on the drums. I mean, on the saxophone I feel like I can really play what I hear completely, you know. On the drums, I don’t really think. I just kind of play by feel completely. But I’ve had a chance to play with some great drummers, and I’ve learned from everybody I play with. One thing for sure from playing drums, that when I’m soloing on tenor, I have a real awareness of what’s going on around me. And I think practicing drums and playing in rhythm sessions and jam sessions or whatever has opened up my awareness as a soloist on saxophone, to not just be involved in what I’m articulating on my horn, but try to be a part of what everybody else is playing. I think that way of playing developed from studying drums and playing in rhythm sections as I’ve been growing up and learning, too.
TP: Were the two originals on your two recordings with Ed Blackwell written particularly with him in mind?
JL: Oh yeah. I wrote those tunes for him, and to play with him. I had never played “Strength and Courage” with anyone, or the piece “Evolution” on From The Soul. I wrote them knowing I was going to play with Blackwell, and with the expansive concepts that he plays with. I tried to really write some things that we could just hit on. In “Strength and Courage,” for example, he plays all these overlapping rhythms, and he plays some cowbell; explores all the possibilities of his vocabulary on that one tune. I didn’t really direct him in that, but the way I wrote phrases kind of directed the rhythm to go in those directions. He had the most beautiful concepts, and he had this radar that was unbelievable. He would just hit downbeats with you like out of the blue, like just…
Paul Motian is like that. Playing with Paul, the phrasing and different layers of time that happen are uncanny. I sometimes go back and listen to some of the things I’ve done with Paul that just amaze me, how we’re completely together, but we’re improvising very freely.
TP: Well, the Paul Motian Trio with you and Bill Frisell is one of the longest running groups in all of improvised music. 1995 marks fourteen years.
JL: Yes. We both started playing with Paul in 1981, and recorded a lot of different recordings, you know, playing Broadway music and Thelonious Monk’s music, Bill Evans’ music, as well as Paul’s music, which he writes and has some beautiful ideas. It’s been fabulous, man. We’ve been touring pretty extensively every year since 1981, and we’re actually just about to go to Europe next week, for a few weeks, for about an 18-concert tour all over Europe. It’s so beautiful, man, an expansive improvised setting to play with Paul.
TP: How free is it within the course of each performance?
JL: First of all, we have an amazing amount of repertoire that we do. Paul is very free about what he likes to play. He usually picks about ten to fifteen different pieces that we stay with throughout a tour. Then it’s very free to explore different arrangements and different ways of playing them every night.
TP: Frisell is a guitarist who has really extended the sonic and dynamic possibilities of the instrument. I think that can fairly be said.
JL: Oh yeah, Bill is amazing, man. And he’s really about orchestration, too. He just doesn’t play the guitar. He is so into every tone and every note I play. He voices all my notes in what he plays, which gives me a whole range of sounds to draw from as well. The way we all interact with Paul’s rhythm, and the way Paul’s rhythm changes from what we play — I mean, it’s a complete creative setting. In trios, somehow it’s really clear; the clarity is really there. The thing I love about the trio so much, too, is the intimacy that we play with. Sometimes we play, like, at really pianissimo volumes, and we really get next to what each other’s playing. It’s incredible. Bill really brings that out, too. He doesn’t just play like a guitar player. He plays like a pianist or something sometimes, with that kind of dynamic range.
TP: Well, it seems to give you a chance to explore the full dynamic range of the tenor saxophone.
JL: Yes, it does. I only play tenor with the trio, and it’s really great to go on the road and to just play one horn and to focus on one sound. With some other groups that I play in, with my own groups, I’m trying to write for more expanded sounds, using clarinets and flutes and percussion and different things. Maybe because I play only tenor with Paul, I’ve found it’s really fun and different to explore all these other sounds when I’m writing my own music. I think it’s given me a lot of ideas.
TP: Let’s discuss Paul Motian’s very distinctive sense of time and dynamics on the drums.
JL: Paul is a melody player all the way. All the music that he has experienced through the years, playing with the Bill Evans Trio and the things with the Keith Jarrett Quartet with Dewey and Charlie, those were the first things that I knew from records of Paul. I loved his playing, like, immediately. He was someone that was coming from Max Roach in the early days, but yet had his own feeling, and created his own atmospheres when he played. To play with him was a real dream of mine through the years.
I remember the first time I saw him play with Keith in Boston, I think it was in ’71 or ’72, and it was the quartet with Dewey and Charlie. Man, I went every night! Oh, man, it was the most happening quartet I ever saw live. The music just took off, every note everybody played. They were into what each other was playing. And it was maybe the first time I’d watched cats play that played like that. I was used to hearing Stitt and other groups that just played tunes that they’d known and played all their life. Keith’s group, when they played all their original pieces, the way they improvised together, the tempo changes, and just how they were listening constantly to each other, and shaping the music as a group — that was the direction I wanted to go in, right from that moment.
TP: Speaking of the Keith Jarrett Quartet, you’ve credited Dewey Redman as having had a major impact upon your concept of playing.
JL: Yeah. Well, from that time hearing him live, for sure, but also from some recordings that I had of him playing with Elvin Jones in Ornette’s band. He might have been one of the first tenor players I heard play with Elvin that didn’t sound like Coltrane or play in that kind of rhythmic way. He played longer, more open-sounding things with Elvin. Through the years, I’ve had a chance to play with Dewey a lot. With Charlie Haden’s band was really the first time. In 1987 I joined the Liberation Music Orchestra with Dewey. He’s one of those players that you don’t know what he’s going to play next. There’s a lot of magic in his playing.
TP: Universal Language features Jack De Johnette.
JL: He’s another drummer who has these amazing concepts, and hears everything you play, encompasses and circles around every phrase you play, and spells it right out with you. All the tunes on Universal Language were written for that session and for that personnel, to be played with Jack in mind, and with Charlie Haden, Steve Swallow and the rhythm section.
TP: Again, we’re getting back to individuals and personalities…,
JL: Yes.
TP: …which is the essence of improvising.
JL: For sure, man. Also, I think the records that inspired me to try to write and to give me the confidence to try to put things together were a lot of things that Wayne Shorter has done through the years, let’s say, where each record he made, it seemed like he wrote for the personnel that was on that date, and wrote tunes to be played with those cats, with Blakey’s band, or with Elvin Jones in the rhythm section, or things he wrote for Weather Report. Whatever it was, there was a lot of direction in each recording. It never repeated anything. So for each session I am trying to write for the personnel there, and conceptually it’s really happening. It feels beautiful.
Universal Language, with a front line of voice, trumpet and saxophone, was the most expansive ensemble that I’ve been able to work with so far as a leader, and I tried to write some orchestrations that were going to be free for everyone to contribute their own personality, but yet have some kind of structure and form so we had something to grab onto.
TP: I’d like to talk to you more about the dynamics of your style, the most personal thing for a tenor player, which is your sound — so if I start getting on thin ground, just tell me. But you were talking about your father’s sound as being sort of hard-driving, Illinois Jacquet, hard edges on it. Your sound is very rounded. You play a lot in the altissimo register of the tenor, the upper register, with a full sound — although you play the full range of the horn. Talk a little about the evolution of your sound in your mind’s ear.
JL: My sound has gone through a lot of different changes, let’s say, different periods. I know early on I played with a lot harder sound and a lot more, in a way, one-dimensional type sound. On the early recording that I did with Lonnie Smith, I think my sound was only one kind of beam or something, a beam of light, let’s say — it just was one direction. Through the years, in playing with so many different bands, especially large ensembles with Mel Lewis, and Woody Herman’s band, Carla Bley’s band, Charlie Haden Liberation Orchestra, where the music is always changing and there’s different feelings, rhythms and attitudes happening, my sound really went through a lot of changes. Rather than try to sound the same in each group, I would try to fit in in a different way all the time. That started this whole process of trying to open up my sound in a different direction. Through the years it’s definitely gotten wider and bigger, and I think I can play now, like, triple pianissimo with the same fullness that I can play a triple forte with. That range of dynamics, I think, was the key to starting to get my sound together.
TP: In 1994, you performed in some free improvisations with British saxophone master Evan Parker in an event sponsored by WKCR. Has that particular aspect of dealing with the language been a significant part of your experience?
JL: Oh, yeah. For years I’ve focused on improvising very freely with other horn players in duet settings. Billy Drewes and I used to play together years ago in Boston together like that, where we would just improvise and react to each other, and try to create melodies from what each other played. Billy played with us with the Paul Motian Quintet, on our very first quintet recorded on ECM, called Psalm, the first recording I did with Paul. Billy is just one of the players that I’ve explored those possibilities with. Judi Silvano and I do that with soprano voice and saxophones all the time while we’re improvising, and trying to really create melodies from what each other plays, rather than just trying to play what you play.
TP: You and Frisell would seem to do that, too.
JL: Sure. I improvise with that conception with everybody I play with. I try to do that when I’m playing with a rhythm section of Mulgrew Miller, Christian McBride and Lewis Nash, so that I don’t find myself repeating myself. I want to try to feed off of what everybody else plays so I can really explore possibilities in the music. That’s what improvising really is about for me, is creating something new.
TP: So it’s not about style, it’s not about genre, it’s about dialoguing in a situation.
JL: Exactly. Early on for me it was about style and it was about learning my horn, and this and that. But after a while, it shifted into this other place of trying to create something with what’s going on around you, and using your technique and the language of your instrument or whatever to create something different all the time.
So to just improvise in a duet setting with Evan that night was a lot of fun, man. I had known him for a while, and had heard him play a number of different times, some solo performances that were incredible on soprano saxophone and tenor.
I recorded a free improvisation with my Dad on Hometown Sessions [JSL], which I produced with him in 1986, where we were joined by Eddie Bacchus and Jacktown on most of the tracks. He was reading a part, and I was improvising all around his written part. So that was a little different concept about playing with two saxophones. Really, it was like a free-form structure. I was kind of, in a way, directing his notes, like the rhythm that he would play, and he was just kind of following me and letting me improvise between all his notes. I had never really done that before, and that was a trip! My Dad was a real open player, and he was into sounds and melodies and stuff. So it was a trip. Playing duets with my father all through the years really helped me develop a concept and get myself together to do things like that duet with Evan.
TP: Experiencing the inner dynamics of how that music was put together. Let’s hear a set of music focusing on performances of Joe Lovano’s compositions. The first track, “Luna Park,” certainly refers to Cleveland.
JL: The title refers to an amusement park that was across the street from where my grandparents had a house in Cleveland which was called Luna Park. I think it was a very famous park in the Twenties and Thirties, and then it burned down, so I never actually saw this place. When I grew up, there was a big projects complex there. But I had always heard a lot of stories about Luna Park.
This piece is kind of a carnival-type piece, and it features an ensemble that’s a working group, kind of a workshop ensemble that has been playing and doing a lot of stuff since the early Eighties. I recorded this for Blue Note in 1992, but this ensemble and this sound is a working group that I’ve been developing through the years. It features Judy Silvano on soprano voice and Tim Hagans on trumpet, Kenny Werner on piano, this track has Jack DeJohnette on drums, Steve Swallow on electric bass and Charlie Haden on electric and acoustic bass.
TP: There’s a lot of doubling going on in this.
JL: Yeah, there are some different approaches. Like, I wrote for Swallow to play within the rhythm section as an accompanist with chordal passages as well as actual bass parts. On this particular tune, he’s playing like a counter-melody in the front line with us that could almost be like a trombone type part.
[MUSIC: “Luna Park” (1992); Lovano/Redman, “Miss Etta” (1993); Lovano, “Emperor Jones” (1989); Lovano/Cox/ Blackwell, “Straight Ahead” (1990); Lovano/Holland/ Blackwell, “Evolution” (1990); Lovano/Schuller, “Topsy-Turvy” (1994)]
TP: We have cued up two earlier tracks. One is the aforementioned session with Lonnie Smith, and a track featuring Joe and his dad on a self-produced date, Hometown Sessions.
JL: Well, it’s a label that I started, basically, JSL Records. This was the first thing that we produced. It was right after I had recorded for Soul Note. I did this record called Tones, Shapes and Colors, my first solo record as a leader. I went to Cleveland and had a party with my family, and got a studio, and went in the studio and laid some tracks down with my Dad, and Eddie Bacchus on organ and Lawrence “Jacktown” Jackson, who I mentioned before.
[MUSIC: Lonnie Smith, “Apex” (1975); Joe and Tony Lovano, “Now Is The Time” (1986)]
[MUSIC: Mel Lewis Orch., “Interloper” (1986); G. Schuller/ Lovano, “Rush Hour On 23rd Street” (1994)]
TP: You had a chance to be paired with him in the 1988 recording, Monk In Motian.
JL: Well, this recording was the first one that we did for JMT Records. Up until that point, the band had only played original music of Paul’s, and then we had a chance to do this record, and the record company wanted to do more of a theme record. Paul played with Monk a little bit with Scott LaFaro; they did some quartet gigs with Charlie Rouse. And Paul was really into Monk, he’s been into Monk all his life, so he had all these tunes he wanted to do, and we started rehearsing. At first we didn’t know if we were going to just play trio, but when we started to rehearse trio with no bass the music was so beautiful. It was really different. It didn’t sound like we were trying to play the way Monk played these same tunes. So we decided to do it as a trio record. Then Paul brought Dewey in for a few tunes to join us, to play with two saxophones.
[MUSIC: Motian/Lovano/Frisell, “Epistrophy” (1988); “How Deep Is The Ocean”; “Turn Out The Stars” (1990); “One Time Out” (1991)]
TP: The next track we’ll hear comes from a forthcoming release on Blue Note, from a session last summer at the Village Vanguard that paired you with trumpeter Tom Harrell, who you’ve paired with on front lines very successfully for quite a while now, Billy Hart on drums, and Anthony Cox on bass.
JL: It’s a working quartet that we’ve been touring with and doing a lot of different things throughout the last few years. We recorded last March live at the Vanguard, and I am recording this week as well, live at the club, with Mulgrew and Christian and Lewis. They’re going to put out a double-CD package set, Live At The Vanguard, ’94 and ’95. So I’m excited about that.
This quartet played mainly original pieces that week. This week we’re doing a wide range of different compositions by other composers as well.
TP: What was interesting to me about this group when I heard it last year was it seemed a very creative extension of the Ornette Coleman-Don Cherry, or even the Ornette-Dewey Redman Quartet formulation. I guess some of this approach stems from your working with Blackwell for those couple of years in 1990 and ’91.
JL: Yes, playing with Blackwell and all the different groups with Motian have definitely influenced my writing. This quartet brings out a lot of those other sides. To play with just bass and drums and two other horns out front is a whole other energy and a different kind of atmosphere that happens in that. Tom is one of the greatest improvisers in Jazz, I think, and he has a lot of dynamic and amazing sides and personalities in his playing as well. In this particular quartet, I think for the first time he really opens up and plays very free and different.
This tune we’re going to hear is called “Uprising,” and it’s an original of mine that I wrote to play with this group. I play on C-Melody saxophone on this particular cut.
[MUSIC: Lovano/Harrell/Cox/Hart, “Uprising”]
TP: I don’t think anyone has ever quite mastered the technique of circular breathing or overtones the way he has.
JL: He’s phenomenal. He’s something else.
[MUSIC: Joe Lovano/Evan Parker, “Duo” (1994); Joe and Tony Lovano (1987)]
JL: That was a pretty wild piece there. It was exciting to play with Evan. We were into each other’s energy. We were really following each other beautifully. That was pretty far-out.
TP: Well, I think we’ve learned in the last four hours that with Joe Lovano anything is possible, and generally it’s going to work out in an extremely musical form that will then have implications for other activity. We’ve had some sense of the sort of parallel situations that continue to grow, evolve and merge. Thank you for your time, Joe Lovano.
JL: Thank you, Ted. I have to say, WKCR is such an incredible radio station, and all the shows you guys do are really inspiring. I listen to all the shows, and the birthday broadcasts, and the different profiles, and it’s really an honor to have you spend this much time on some of my recorded music.
TP: It’s quite a legacy of music, and I think we have a good three or four decades of creative music-making to come. So we’ll just take this as a signpost of where one of the most creative of the younger group of musicians is at this stage of his career.
[ETC.]
[MUSIC: Schuller/Lovano, “Angel Eyes” (1994); Lovano & Universal Language, “Josie and Rosie” (1992); Lovano/ Blackwell, “Fort Worth” (1991); Lovano/J. Redman, “The Land Of Ephesus” (1993); Yamashita/Lovano, “Kurdish Winds” (1993); Scofield/Lovano, “Comp Out” (1992)]
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Joe Lovano (Musician Show, WKCR, 7-26-89):
[MUSIC: Henri Texier/Lovano (Izlaz), “Golden Horn” (1988); Motian/ Lovano/Frisell, “Evidence” (1988)]
JL: I was born in ’52, so I really began playing and being around the music in the Sixties, around all the different records and things that were coming out during those years. I was really fortunate. My Dad played saxophone and was a beautiful musician, and his record collection was pretty wide when I was a kid, so I was able to hear and really distinguish between sounds and different tones on different instruments. I was able to start to recognize different players from their personality and their tone.
Q: He was a working musician in the Cleveland area.
JL: Yeah, sure. All his life. My Dad grew up with people like Bill Hardman, the trumpet player, Benny Bailey, Tadd Dameron. Tadd actually was a few years older than my Dad, but his brother Cesar Dameron was an alto player who was my Dad’s age, and they used to play a lot. Those years were really great for my Dad because he was really involved in the scene. There’s a lot of cats in New York who are from Cleveland that know my Dad, and I meet people from all around the world that have heard him play — or something. He traveled around a little bit, but he was mainly in the Cleveland scene.
Q: Well, in Cleveland and throughout the Midwest there used to be a thriving Jazz scene — Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Indianapolis.
JL: There was a circuit. I had a chance to tour with Lonnie Smith, the organist, and Jack McDuff, and a few different groups that played through that chitlin’ circuit, where you played really from New York to St. Louis, through Indianapolis and Cincinnati and all those towns. There were a lot of clubs. I caught a little part of it in 1974 or 1975 when I was like 20 years old. But throughout the ’50s and ’60s there was a real scene through that area.
Q: Joe’s first selection is one by the master, John Coltrane.
JL: This is from a record actually that came out on a reissue package with Roy Haynes on drums, McCoy Tyner, piano, and Jimmy Garrison on bass. It’s called To The Beat Of A Different Drum.
Somehow, my whole life as a player has developed in a strange kind of way around a lot of really great drummers. In the last three or four years, I’ve been really fortunate to be working with Mel Lewis. I’ve been playing with Mel Lewis’ band since 1980, and we play every Monday night at the Village Vanguard. Mel recorded with me on my first solo record as a leader for the Soul Note label, called Tones, Shapes and Colors, and I have a really close working relationship with Mel. As well as Paul Motian, who I’ve been playing with also since 1981. We’ve done a number of records, of which we’ll get to a few later, and also talk about the first times I had heard Paul play with Keith Jarrett and other people, and immediately wanted to be around that rhythm. Also Elvin Jones, who I toured with in 1987 for a two-month tour in Europe, which really was his last major tour as a leader with his own band. I mean, he’s toured with Freddie Hubbard and McCoy Tyner and a few different groups. But playing with Elvin was just an incredible lesson, man.
Q: You play some drums yourself.
JL: Well, I’ve been playing since I was a kid. Part of my whole thing with my Dad is my Dad was my teacher. We studied, we had lessons, but his lessons were he would give me a lot of things to work on, and when I felt like I was ready to present them to him… And he’d be hearing me practicing anyway. He would sometimes come down to the basement in the middle of what I was doing, and correct me or whatever. But it was a real close kind of thing. When I was six or seven years old, the drummer he was working with bought a new set of small drums, and gave his old set to my Dad to give to me. I mean, it was a huge, big bass drum, and all these drums. I have pictures of me playing these drums.
So since I was a kid I really got into the drums. I learned all the solos, like, that Philly Joe would play on a record or whatever. I would try to really be with the rhythm completely. I think that studying like that when I was that young gave me a sense of time, and studying the saxophone the way I did, the harmonic approach and the rhythmic approach together, just really gave me a lot to work on and to work for as a young player. So I know there’s been something about drummers, since I was a kid.
Now I’m starting to record and do some things on drums myself. Recently, just this last week actually, I went into the studio and did a solo-duo project where I laid some tracks down playing bass clarinet, drums and tenor, and then Judi Silverman came in and put some voice parts on some of the things, too, and we really created some rhythm sections. It’s the first time I ever did it. I brought a tape; maybe we could listen to one thing later.
But getting back to this first record, Roy Haynes has always been one of my very favorite musicians. I’ve never had a chance to play with him, but I heard him play a lot. And I really love this record. It was a real fresh… You know, after listening to so much Coltrane Quartet, this was like a little different twist with Roy Haynes on drums.
[MUSIC: Coltrane/Haynes, “Dear Old Stockholm” (1963); Sonny Stitt, “I Never Knew”, “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea” (1962)]
JL: Just a little about what Sonny Stitt meant to me. Stitt was my first real love on record. I used to listen to my Dad practice all the time, and the sound of the saxophone just captured me completely from when I was crawling around the pad, you know. My Dad had a lot of Stitt’s records, too, and I would just practice along with the records all the time, on saxophone and on drums, and try to learn the tunes and try to get next to what was happening. His sound on tenor and alto… He had a personality that he could play either horn and sound like a different player, in a way. He was playing from the same knowledge and wisdom and expression, but he really got into the different sounds that were happening on the different horns. And that influenced me from a real young age.
I had the great fortune of meeting Stitt a bunch of times. He used to come through Cleveland, but not like Coltrane and other cats who really had their own bands. Sonny never really was known as a bandleader. I mean, he toured the world always pretty much as a solo artist, and would play with rhythm sections wherever he went. In his era, he could really do that, and work a lot. But he was kind of frustrated in that world, I think. I had a chance to hang out with him and sit with him a lot of times in clubs on breaks and stuff, and he was a great cat. He was a real teacher. He’d look at you and ask you how many holes on your horn, and how many C’s can you hit. He’d start asking you questions right away. It was an education to be around Sonny.
I had a chance to sit in with him a few times, you know, in different groups in Cleveland, with organ trios. One time he came with Milt Jackson, and they played with a Cleveland rhythm section, I was playing in a group opposite them,, and Sonny asked me to sit in with them one of the nights. It was a real thrill, you know, just to be on the stand with the cat, because he would take you through the changes, boy.
Q: Who would be the rhythm sections in Cleveland, by the way?
JL: There were different guys. The organ player who plays on this CD I put out with my Dad, Eddie Bacchus, would play with most everybody that came through town. But there were a couple of other organ players. There was a cat named Lindsay Tough, and this other guy, William Dowland, who everyone used to call Paul Bunyon — he was a real big cat. He used to be a trombone player, actually, when he was younger.
A few different drummers were around. Tony Haynes, Ralph Jackson, a drummer who plays with Duke Jenkins, who’s an organ player out there. Different cats, though. Val Kent, a young drummer. Val could have… He was offered the gig with Stan Getz and a lot of different people when he came through town. There was a drummer there whose name was Fats Heard who ended up playing with Erroll Garner, I think. Fats Heard in the Fifties and the Sixties, he would play with everybody who would come through town. Jacktown, who plays on the CD, Hometown Sessions, that I produced myself, was from Detroit, and grew up with Elvin Jones and Pepper Adams and Tommy Flanagan and everyone, and moved to Cleveland probably in the late Fifties or so. I mean, I met him when I was in high school. But when he was there, my father told me stories, like when Miles’ group when come through town, Coltrane, Philly Joe Jones, those cats would stay at Jacktown’s house. They were all buddies.
So there were a lot of cats in Cleveland during those days who played with everybody.
Q: Hearing John Coltrane and Sonny Stitt together is a very interesting juxtaposition, and one could say they are two very important people in the formation of your own personal style of playing, your approach to line and your approach to sound.
JL: Yeah, Coltrane and Stitt were definitely two of my really first loves on the instrument, as well as the music they played. I absorbed the two of them throughout their whole careers, all the different records and different periods. I was more familiar with more of the Coltrane with Miles and the Prestige Coltrane for most of my young life, and at that same period, Sonny Stitt was really my favorite player. Then I really got involved with Coltrane’s more modern Impulse records. Once I started to really get familiar with those, it changed my concept of rhythm and the role of not just playing soloist-rhythm section. The way Sonny Stitt played, and in that whole period, I mean, you really played off the rhythm section. Your rhythm section was there to support everything you did. Whereas some of Coltrane’s later records, it was more collective, conversational kind of playing, and everybody fed off each other more. Like we were commenting during this tune, “Dear Old Stockholm,” the way Roy Haynes was playing with Trane, they were playing like the same rhythms, they were playing the same kind of phrasing. When I started to really be familiar with that, it really opened up my concept, and gave me a lot more direction in my own music.
Q: We have something cued up by Lee Morgan.
JL: The trumpet was another really important instrument for me in my young developing. I mean, trumpet had an attack and it had a certain thing that I really loved. I think I would have been a trumpet player if I’d had a different chance to do something. I just always associated with the trumpet and the rhythm. Lee Morgan and Miles were my two real favorite trumpet players. I used to listen a lot to Lee Morgan on all the Blue Note records, and things with Jimmy Smith — a lot of different things. Lee’s sound and his rhythm really got to me. The tune we’re playing is from a record that came out much later, in the Eighties, one of the Blue Note Japanese reissues, named The Rajah. It has Hank Mobley on saxophone, Cedar Walton, Paul Chambers and Billy Higgins.
Hank Mobley, too, was… I really loved Hank’s playing from all the records, different things he did with Coltrane together, all the things with Miles, and his own records. He was one of the first ones that I really started to realize how he wrote so much, man…
Q: All those slick, subtle tunes.
JL: Oh, man, all his tunes were so beautiful. At a certain time as a young player, like, you’re so into just trying to play what everybody else is playing, when you realize that to try to create your own music is part of it, too…! That hit me. And Hank Mobley was one of the first saxophone composers, him and Wayne Shorter both, that really influenced me a lot.
[MUSIC: Lee Morgan/H. Mobley/Cedar/PC/Higgins (The Rajah) “Is That So?” (1967); Hank Mobley/D. Byrd/Cedar/R. Carter/ Higgins (Far Away Lands) “No Argument”; Rollins/Philly Joe, “Surrey With the Fringe on Top” (1958)]
JL: When I really discovered Sonny Rollins and started exploring Sonny’s records and his music, it opened up a lot of doors for me melodically and rhythmically. Sonny’s such a master of… He can take any melody and stretch it out, and play so many variations of it to develop his solos. He didn’t just try to play the right notes, let’s say. He tries to explore all the possibilities with the melody and the rhythm that’s happening. For me, he’s a real genius improviser. Philly Joe Jones as well…
Q: You said when you were a kid you copied his solos.
JL: Yeah, Philly Joe was my man as far as the melodies he played. Like, he played the same things that Sonny Rollins or Miles were playing. There’s one record, I think it was Miles’ first record as a leader, with Sonny Rollins and Bird on tenor, with Philly Joe — it’s one of his first records. Man, it’s really smoking. I mean, Philly Joe to me was one of the…
Q: “The Serpent’s Tooth,” “Compulsion”…
JL: Right. “Compulsion” is the piece I’m speaking of. But his driving style melodically as well as his swing just really grabbed me completely when I was a kid. The breaks and things he played on that particular tune always have been with me. That’s why I wanted to play that cut. That record also has Doug Watkins on bass and Wynton Kelly on piano. That date has “Tune Up,” “Namely You”…
I’d like to to get to more tunes on that, but I want to play a couple of other things with Sonny on it first. We’re going to play something from Alfie, which has arrangements by Oliver Nelson. We’re going to play “Alfie’s Theme” from this. This is a real important record for me, too. Because it was Sonny completely out in front of kind of a small big band, and the band just plays parts. It’s a great band. Phil Woods is playing, Danny Bank. Frankie Dunlap is on drums who played a lot with Monk, and in later years played with the Lionel Hampton band quite often. But all his playing with Monk was really a great period for Monk’s music as well, with Frankie Dunlap. Kenny Burrell is on guitar on this, Jimmy Cleveland, J.J. Johnson — it’s a great record. We’re going to hear “Alfie’s Theme” from this.
We’re also going to hear Sonny Rollins playing a solo, unaccompanied version of “It Could Happen to You” from The Sound Of Sonny, which also… Sonny’s playing as a solo instrumentalist and accompanying himself as he’s playing, his freedom and concept also, like, really attracted me, and it taught me a lot about how to practice and how to get next to my own sound.
[MUSIC: Sonny Rollins, “Alfie’s Theme” (1966); Sonny (solo), “It Could Happen To You” (1957); Booker Little/Flanagan/ LaFaro/Haynes, “Minor Suite” (1960)]
JL: This album by Booker Little is one of my favorite Booker Little records, and this particular cut, which he begins with an unaccompanied intro, I find really fantastic. Booker Little is one of those players that I never, of course, had a chance to hear or see live. Freddie Hubbard talked a lot about him. He said Booker scared him more than anybody just because he played so beautifully technically. I think they were on Africa Brass together; they were the two trumpet players on Africa Brass with John Coltrane. It was interesting talking with Freddie about Booker.
[MUSIC: Lovano/Harrell/Werner/Johnson/Motian, “Birds of Springtimes Gone By,” “Dewey Says” (1988), Lovano/Motian/ Frisell, “Someone To Watch Over Me” (1989)]
“Someone To Watch Over Me” is from Motian On Broadway, Volume 1. This record for me was a real breakthrough in recording, just because five out of nine tunes are ballads on this record, and it was real challenging. Playing with Charlie and Paul together with Bill was really a treat.
Q: You’ve been associated with Paul Motian for just about the whole decade.
JL: Yes, when you think about it, time has gone by so fast. We’ve been playing since 1981 together. Paul was rehearsing a group which included Bill on guitar and Mark Johnson on bass. Mark and I knew each other from playing with Woody Herman’s band, and were really close friends. They had been playing with a few saxophone players. Mark spoke with Paul about me, and hooked it up for me to make a rehearsal one day. I went up and played with the quartet, and we’ve been playing ever since.
It’s been really beautiful, because we did some quartet playing and then some quintets, which included Billy Drewes on saxophone and Ed Schuller on bass, as well as Jim Pepper on tenor with Ed on bass. We recorded some really nice albums. One record on ECM called Psalm, which has Billy on it, and then three records on Soul Note with the quintet, The Story Of Maryam, Misterioso and Jack of Clubs — actually I brought The Story of Maryam to play a tune later, with Jim Pepper on saxophone, who is one of my favorite players, a really soulful cat. Then the trio kind of emerged from the quintet, Bill and I and Paul, which we’ve been recording and playing a lot around New York.
“Someone To Watch Over Me” started out as a trio piece, which we played the verse and then the whole song, and then Charlie enters as the guitar solo begins. On this record mainly it’s quartet with Charlie, but there’s a few tunes that are just trio tunes as well.
Before that we played two tunes from my record that just came out on Soul Note label, which also features Paul on drums. Having Paul play in my band, playing my music, has really been exciting for me. It just kind of tied a lot of things together for me and my music, and for our playing together. I feel our communication was really great.
The next thing we’ll hear is some music by Thelonious Monk from a record called It’s Monk’s Time.
Q: Now, the Paul Motian Trio just recorded an album exclusively of Monk’s music.
JL: Right. We’ve been playing a lot of Monk tunes. It’s really nice, because in the trio, of course, there’s no bass, so we’re playing guitar, saxophone and drums, and we’re trying to really feel this music in a different kind of way.
Q: It’s very interesting, though, because you always stay with the chords and the melody.
JL: Oh yeah, we’re into the tunes. Those songs are real beautiful vehicles, and we want to expand on everything that’s there as well as put our own wisdom into the piece. But that was a really fun record date to do. I’ve been playing a lot with Dewey Redman, and actually this tune “Dewey Said” was dedicated to Dewey. It came from some lines or some feelings that I have felt listening to Dewey play. Some of the melodies in the piece kind of developed from listening to Dewey. He’s one of my favorite people. And he actually has a son that plays tenor who I’ve been hearing a lot about, and I’m sure everyone is going to be hearing at some point soon.
Anyway, from Monk’s Time we’ll hear “Lulu’s Back In Town.” In this particular quartet is Butch Warren on bass, Ben Riley on drums, and one of my favorite saxophone players, and someone who passed on recently, but I had a chance to really hang with a few times at the Vanguard and was a beautiful cat, Charlie Rouse.
[MUSIC: Monk, “Lulu’s Back In Town” (1963); Coltrane, “Naima” (1965), Ornette/Dewey/Garrison/Jones “Open To the Public” (1968)]
That was a really inspired take. Elvin Jones is the truth. I mean, after touring with him and being around him every day on a two-month tour, I mean, he’s so intense and ready to play… He has so much fun! Before each gig he’d be like rubbin’ his hand together, “Let’s hear it!” And you could hear it on that take. On every record Elvin pays on. I mean, he comes there to play. He doesn’t fool around at all.
Next we’re going to play something from an album that I’m on with the Paul Motian Trio with Dewey Redman Monk In Motian. I’d just like to say what a pleasure it is to play with Dewey. And I’ve been lucky enough to play in Charlie Haden’s Liberation Orchestra as well with Dewey. It’s always exciting listening to him compose.
Following that, we’ll hear two tunes from a record of mine that’s coming out early next year, with a line-up of a few people who are playing with me tonight and tomorrow night at Club Visiones at Third and MacDougal. This record, Worlds, features my Wind Ensemble, which has Tim Hagans on trumpet, Judi Silverman, voice, Gary Valente, trombone, Paul Motian, drums, Henri Texier, bass, and Bill Frisell on guitar.
[MUSIC: Lovano/Redman/FrisellMotian, “Epistrophy,” Lovano Wind Ens., “Spirit Of The Night,” “Lutetia”]
——–
Joe Lovano’s John Coltrane “Dozens” for http://www.jazz.com (June 12, 2008):
1. Good Bait, (Soultrane) Prestige, w/ Red Garland, Paul Chambers, Arthur Taylor, 100/100.
This was one of the first significant Coltrane recordings, this recording Soultrane, for me, that I lived with as a real young player, and a young listener. That particular tune, Good Bait, was written by Tadd Dameron. I’m originally from Cleveland, Ohio, as well as Tadd. My Dad played with Tadd Dameron. So I learned a lot about music and the whole history of jazz growing up, studying Tadd Dameron’s music, and hearing Coltrane’s incredible, lengthy exploration on “Good Bait” was really inspiring to me, and taught me a lot about how I would have to deal with this music, and learn to play the saxophone. It’s a timeless recording that when I listen to it today, sounds as fresh as when I was a kid.
After studying Coltrane through the years, and being a saxophonist myself, realizing all of the things that you have to deal with to execute your ideas, every stage of the way is a different development period. That period for Coltrane in the mid ‘50s, I think he was probably with Miles at the time, 1956… [That recording was ‘58. And he’d kicked heroin at the time. He did this right after he left Monk.] I see. So that experience and journey to that moment was pretty intense, as far as the study of the music, the saxophone, the people he was playing with. He had come up playing with Tadd Dameron, playing with him in his music, playing with Miles’ band, Dizzy’s band, Johnny Hodges’ band. He was just starting to form a conception about who he was and how he wanted to present himself in the music. There’s another tune on this recording, “I Want To Talk About You,” that he played throughout his lifetime and presented in concert around the world many times. One thing I learned from Coltrane is that he lived with the music that he played, and he was always developing on it throughout his career. [Anything you’d care to say about his style then? Maybe how you see his development with Monk leading him to play those incredibly lucid solos that he did on that record?] One thing, playing with Thelonious Monk got him to be even more articulate than he was doing on his own. His execution, his articulation, his rhythm, his phrasing and ideas were all one. And his tone also, at this period, was really crystallizing. He was fusing together all of the elements of playing music and playing the saxophone. He was a virtuoso on his instrument, and he was really able to communicate his ideas in lengthy open solos, and “Good Bait” is a prime example of him really stretching out and playing through that pilece of music with his own approach.
2. BAGS & TRANE, “Three Little Words” Atlantic, John Coltrane, tenor saxophone; Milt Jackson, vibraphone; Hank Jones, piano; Paul Chambers, bass; Connie Kay, drums. (1959) 100/100
It’s incredible to hear Coltrane play on standard songs, and to play with a rhythm section like that, where Hank is very free in the harmonic sequence and is feeding him harmonies and voicings, and Coltrane is taking him places that’s giving him ideas and opening up what he’s playing harmonically as well. To hear Hank Jones and Coltrane together is incredible on this recording, and also, Milt Jackson is one of the most incredible lyrical improvisers in the music, and to hear them balance each other and come off of each other, and play on a tune like “Three Little Words,” and not play too many choruses, a few choruses each, just like really play through the tune and sustain the mood of that tune, was a real beautiful journey on their part, and for me, as a young musician, digging Coltrane playing standards taught me a lot about the repertoire to become a musician in this beautiful world of music we’re in. [So it was less that you were checking out Coltrane’s lines, but more that you were getting a feeling for the pathway of doing this? Or were you checking out the vocabulary?] Well, I was checking out the vocabulary of how they were all playing together. But the one thing that I learned about music listening to Coltrane, no matter what he was playing, was the depth of the repertoire that he knew, and how much ballads and the blues were in everything he played, and how it all related in his solos. He was a soloist of the highest order, no matter what he played, and his focus on the material drove him and fed him ideas. It wasn’t just what he was practicing on his horn, even though that was a big part of the way he played. The music that he played and the people that he played with really gave him direction, and you can hear it when you hear him playing on standards.
3. LIVE AT THE VILLAGE VANGUARD, “Chasin’ The Trane” (master take), Coltrane, tenor saxophone; McCoy Tyner, piano; Reggie Workman, bass; Elvin Jones, drums
All the different versions of “Chasing the Trane” through the years from the live recordings hit that same incredible level of creativity on the blues. This was one of the first pieces that I heard, and didn’t even realize it was a blues, for a long time. It was a whole side of one of the Impulse records, somewhere around 1961. Eric Dolphy comes in on the last note or something, at the very end. Now, of course, later they released all these other Live at the Village Vanguard takes, there’s other takes of “Chasin’ The Trane” where Dolphy plays and McCoy plays. But this particular version, the original that came out on that recording, was one side of a record, just Coltrane’s choruses. He played from start to finish. The first time I heard that, I listened to it all day. I just kept putting the needle back at the beginning of the recording. Then after a while, I realized it was a blues. I was a teenager, and it was something else, man. The energy, the focus, and the swinging, beautiful exploration of Coltrane’s choruses on that—it was really some magic, man. Then moving to New York, playing at the Village Vanguard with the Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra, and then carrying on into today, presenting my own groups, and recording live there, and feeling the spirits in that room, it goes back to that first time, checking THAT piece out.
[It’s fascinating that he recorded that maybe two years after “Three Little Words” from Bags and Trane, and the sound is so radically different.]
Mmm-hmm. Well, Trane was moving on in his playing and his approach, and becoming a leader, having his own band, focusing totally on what he wanted to play, and that in turn created a lot of ideas of how he was playing. He was always dealing with how he played, as well as what he was playing. He was definitely a dedicated, serious student of the saxophone and of music, but his approach widened through the years on how he was playing and how he was putting things together. We all study the elements in the music, and we all deal with things today that we dealt with on Day One. If you don’t do that, then I don’t think you can really play with the depth of your soul. If it only becomes a technical thing to get around your horn and to execute what you’ve practiced, you’re not really executing your feelings at all. Coltrane went through periods earlier on where he was documented, and was a very technical player. But you hear the evolution of how his feelings came out in his music in every step of the way, and that was a beautiful study also for me through the years. When you study somebody’s whole career on record, someone who recorded as much as he did… He recorded a lot! Hundreds and hundreds of songs through the years. That all came out in his playing at every moment, man, the soulfulness of it all, of his journey.
4. “The Night Has a Thousand Eyes”, COLTRANE’S SOUND
That whole recording is amazing, but “The Night Has a Thousand Eyes,” the form of it, the feelings, the way the rhythm shifted, and his ideas throughout the sequence of the harmonies with the different inflections that Elvin Jones was playing, and the way McCoy comped on that, little pedal points in the bass… It felt like a quartet. It wasn’t just Coltrane soloing over that tune or with a rhythm section. It really was a totally integrated quartet. This is an early record that I recognized that quality of improvising together as a unit. Some of the other things prior to that… Even on “Good Bait,” Coltrane’s playing with the rhythm section. But the interplay and the way they developed ideas and played off each other on “Night Has a Thousand Eyes” was instrumental in my discovery of the approach of playing within the group you’re in, whether you’re playing a solo or not. Also, Elvin’s playing on that. As a young player, I played a lot of drums, and was practicing saxophone and drums at the same time, and playing along with records and trying to hear what was happening. Playing along with that recording on drums taught me everything, man, about form and about following the line and the soloist, and trying to hit a groove, playing ALONG WITH Elvin and McCoy and Coltrane on that recording. That taught me a lot about everything.
5. “Body and Soul” from COLTRANE’S SOUND (Coltrane, tenor saxophone; McCoy Tyner, piano; Steve Davis, bass; Elvin Jones), Atlantic, 1960. 100/100
Studying the tune “Body and Soul” from that same recording. Studying Coleman Hawkins’ version. My Dad played Coleman Hawkins’ solo from that first big hit that he had, and my Dad knew it back and forth. I’d hear him play those lines all the time when I would practice. Hearing Coltrane’s interpretation, and his own perspective and view through his different harmonic sequences of “Giant Steps,” development through modulations and harmonies, and how he incorporated that… In that certain period for Coltrane, he was doing that on a lot of standard songs. The whole “Giant Steps” approach developed through his developing different ways of modulation through harmony. The way he put that together on “Body and Soul” was beautiful. It really taught me a lot about substitution chords, and how to incorporate those things as you’re playing through any given tune, and how it related to the blues as well. It’s one of the most soulful, beautiful versions of that tune. [Dexter Gordon incorporated those changes into his own version of “Body and Soul”] Dexter Gordon did that later on, sure. Dexter gave Coltrane a mouthpiece early on. It might have been the mouthpiece that he was playing on a certain early period with Miles. Well, Coltrane was one of Dexter’s disciples, I think, along with Bird and others. You could hear Dexter in Coltrane’s playing at a certain point, and later you hear Coltrane in Dexter’s playing a lot. That kind of mix teaches you a lot about what an amazing music this is. It’s multigenerational, multicultural. We all influence each other in different ways at different times in our careers and personalities.
6. “Vigil”, KULU SE MAMA (Impulse, 1965) (McCoy Tyner, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Elvin Jones, drums) 100/100
My Dad had this recording, as he did most of these. So I didn’t have to buy it. He loved KULU SE MAMA. He listened to this all the time. Of course, I grew up in the ‘60s, so I didn’t grow up when these recordings were coming out. They were all released. I was very lucky that my Dad had a hip record collection, and had these records from the different periods of Coltrane. He met Coltrane in the early ‘50s and played a jam session with him in Cleveland. Coltrane was playing alto; he was in town with a blues band. [Didn’t Coltrane stay in Cleveland for a little bit with a guy named Gay Crosse?] Gay Crosse was the blues band that he played with. I think he was a Cleveland cat. During that time, you might stay somewhere for a month or two and play every night. Anyway, they were one year apart; my Dad was born in 1925, and Coltrane in 1926. So they came up in the same generation, the same music. My dad played at this session with Coltrane, and he never forgot that, man. He loved Coltrane’s playing, and met him that time. Through the years, he had all his records. So I grew up with Bags and Trane and Soultrane and Kulu Se Mama and Meditations. But Kulu Se Mama was one that my Dad loved to listen to. This piece, “Vigil,” is just a duet with Elvin. It was so well recorded, it was incredible. When you listened to that down in our basement, on my Dad’s stereo, at forte, it was like they were in the room with you. The sound of the drums and the way they played together was so beautiful and organic. My Dad had a nice stereo with speakers all over the basement, so wherever you were down in our basement it was great sound! That piece really captured me, man, just in a duo. It might have been one of the first times I really heard a saxophone-and-tenor duet on a recording. [Speak a bit as to how Coltrane’s music was different in 1965 than 1961.] Definitely in 1965, when this recording was made, his sound… He was playing more majestic, in a certain way. He seemed to fill the room with his tone in a different way. In the early ‘60s, he was playing through his horn and flying around his horn, and he still filled the room… When I say “filled the room,” I’m talking about when you’re listening; I was never in a room with Coltrane playing live. But in the earlier Coltrane, his sound attacked you, it came at you. As he developed more to the end of his life, his tone was much majestic, and had a much more spiritual and open feeling to it—to me. Even though he was still playing some ferocious, incredible things around his instrument, just his sound was more beautiful than it even had been. It was always beautiful. I always thought he had a beautiful sound. But it was even more beautiful. It comes through on this duet as well.
7. “Venus” (from INTERSTELLAR SPACE, Impulse, 1967] Coltrane, tenor saxophone; Rashied Ali, drums. 100/100
That’s another duet piece with Rashied Ali on drums, who plays brushes on this piece. It’s a ballad like, lyrical, rubato piece, and the way they improvise together is so captivating and beautiful. You hit the Repeat button when it finishes. You want to keep listening to it over and over again. It did that to me. Interstellar Space was a recording I brought home and played for my Dad, which then he really dug, because it was a complete LP of only duets. There are four pieces on it, four planets. Moving to New York in the mid ‘70s, one of the first places I went was Rashied Ali’s club, Ali’s Alley. I’d been playing a little with Albert Dailey, and he told me he was playing a gig with ‘Shied down there, and told me I should come. I went down and ended up sitting in with him that night. It was one of the thrills of my life up until that point, calling home and telling my dad I sat in and played with Rashied Ali! That recording, Interstellar Space, was an important record to me.
[This is towards the end of Coltrane’s life; he’d gone to another place than even on “Vigil.”] “Vigil” had a certain energy and a swing to it, and a certain drive that Elvin and Coltrane hooked up on. “Venus” was maybe a year-and-a-half later. Coltrane was dealing with a new approach to rhythm and flow and playing counterpoint within the rhythm. It was still swinging and still moving in a certain forward motion, but it wasn’t a quarter-note swing type beat. It was a very open beat that gives you a lot of room for expression. In a way, Rashied Ali was playing more like a soloist along with the soloist. But they were finding all kinds of common, beautiful unisons within the counterpoint that they were creating with each other. It’s a way of playing that from that moment on I’ve been trying to develop in my playing. Those directions put me in a path to play with Paul Motian through the years. At that same period in the ‘60s, Paul was also exploring playing a very free approach in his accompaniment on drums, flowing with the soloist and not just playing the beat that everyone expects you to play. Feeling the beat and then improvising with it. Throughout my career I’ve had a chance to play with some of the master drummers in jazz, including Elvin Jones and Rashied Ali and Paul Motian and Jack DeJohnette, Ed Blackwell, Idris Muhammad, Lewis Nash and the cats today, Brian Blade, Al Foster… It’s amazing. When I look back, I projected a lot of those things to happen from this early period, discovering all this diverse music and feelings that were executed by Coltrane and the crowd. That crowd. It all stemmed from Max Roach and Bird and Diz and Monk. But that certain crowd of players, and the way they learned from each other and developed a way of playing just captured me, and I feel really fortunate to be on the scene today and trying to execute my ideas within that world and with that crowd.
8. “Chim-Chim, Cheree” (COLTRANE PLAYS CHIM CHIM CHEREE, Impulse, 1965…) 100/100
It was an amazing version of “Chim, Chim Cheree” on soprano saxophone, the groove of it, the whole interplay, the flow of the quartet. Coltrane, coming off of playing “My Favorite Thing” and having such a success on that, and then playing an interpretation of “Chim, Chim Cheree” so wide-open and exploratory, and just, like, SERIOUS. He wasn’t just playing it to play it. You could feel that he was into exploring what could happen off of that theme, and the way they put it together is just a beautiful, joyous journey and piece of music. Also, this certain period… This was maybe ‘63 or ‘64… [I thought it was 1965.] Could be around ‘64 or ‘65. The way he was playing soprano at that time was… The later records after that, he didn’t play soprano. This was one of the later recordings on soprano, in a way—for a studio date anyway. Man, his sound and his whole approach and focus on that horn on that recording is instrumental in giving me confidence to try to play other instruments and explore the possibilities of different tonal energy that comes off of the horn you play. At that same time, for me, I’d heard James Moody live and Sonny Stitt live and Rahsaan Roland Kirk live… Of course, when I say that same period, when I heard that record and heard those cats live, I was a teenager, 16-17 years old. I was in a room with those guys. Sonny Stitt played alto, and then put it down and played tenor. Moody picked up the flute. Rahsaan played all these horns, not only at the same time, but to play as his voice for the moment. The focus of sound and energy from the instrument came through. I really felt that on “Chim, Chim Cheree” from the record with Coltrane, his focus and his sound and the energy that that instrument gave him, and how he executed ideas off that inspiration.
9. “Father, Son and the Holy Ghost” (MEDITATIONS, Impulse, 1965) 100/100.
That melody, that theme, it’s like a very simple little exercise, in a way. If you broke it down and just played it like a scale, it was a simple, little, beautiful meditation on those intervals and those themes. How he played it through all keys. That was another record that my dad really loved, and he listened to it a lot. I heard it a lot without sitting and listening to it myself. I just heard it played in our house from the basement when my dad would be listening to music. At the time, I was dealing with trying to learn how to play the saxophone, so I was more into Bird and Diz and earlier Coltrane and Sonny with Max, but I was hearing my Dad listen to that record, and this piece in particular, “The Father, Son and the Holy Ghost,” and all of a sudden I found myself practicing a different way without even thinking about—just little simple things on the horn that I was working on, but playing them in different keys, and playing them more peaceful, in a way. Practicing them in a more peaceful way, instead of just running through them technically on the horn. Later, when I reflect on it, I realize that it was kind of subliminal something from that particular recording, the way my dad listened to that record a lot. I mean, he would go down to the basement and put that record on a lot. Maybe because it was totally new music to him. He wasn’t that kind of player, really. He was a real bebopper at heart, a hard-swinging player. But he had a beautiful ballads approach. I don’t know. Something about that record my Dad just loved, and listened to a lot. So I learned a certain way of practicing that came from that recording. Also, just the collectiveness of the way Pharaoh Sanders… Also, Rashied was on that record. It was a double-drummers record with Elvin and Rashied, Jimmy Garrison, McCoy, and Pharaoh. There were some things that were in that approach that have stayed with me, and certain things that I’m trying to develop to this day.
10. “Dear old Stockholm” (Coltrane, McCoy, Garrison, Roy Haynes, NEWPORT ‘63) 100/100
I love this live version of “Dear Old Stockholm” with Roy Haynes on drums, and I listen to it a lot. There’s a certain freshness and different feeling that happens when Coltrane plays with Roy Haynes. His ideas take different shapes rhythmically and melodically. Something’s different there. That also just inspired me to realize that when you play with different people, that creates the music, really. The music within the music comes from the people that you’re playing with at the time. I recognized that at a certain point, and through the years developing with the people that I’ve played with, especially drummers, Ed Blackwell, Billy Higgins and Mel Lewis…realizing you could play the same tune, but when you have a different feeling in the rhythm section, you should play with a different feeling as a soloist. The recordings with Coltrane and Roy Haynes were really instrumental for me recognizing that, and this particular version of “Dear Old Stockholm,” the ending, the way they play over the form, the way they explore… They could have played that all day and night. From start to finish, it’s a joyous, beautiful journey.
11. “Expression” (Impulse, 1967, Coltrane, Alice Coltrane, Garrison, Rashied Ali) 100/100
This is from Coltrane’s last session meant to be released. That tune… In a way, the harmonic sequence, the melody…it’s like a beautiful prayer. That’s something we just recorded with the Saxophone Summit on our latest release, Seraphic Light. Just to play that theme, when you’re playing that theme over and over again, just alone, on the saxophone, and implying some of the harmonies and the roots, it’s like the most beautiful prayer, and it’s a continuous melodic flow that is really something. It’s one of the tunes that Coltrane I don’t think ever really explored that much in concert. It was near the end of his life, and he might have just brought it in for the recording session for the whole group, and they recorded it. Now, of course, him and Alice might have been playing it as a duet, which I would have loved to hear that. When Alice came into the band after McCoy and played with a real harp-like approach, where she was playing the full piano in her accompaniment, it seemed to give Coltrane… In a way, he relaxed and played off of more of the spectrum in the harmonies. He was playing a harp-like approach also at that point, the way he expanded… They always talk about sheets of sound. When you slow that down, it becomes very harp-like, very open. Of course, on the duets, Interstellar Space, which was done in the same month or week, he was playing through things very quick, and flurries of notes throughout the harmony, whereas on “Expression” he kind of stretched them out a little bit. I think we would have heard another side to Coltrane if he’d developed during the years after this. Because his execution on his instrument was so beautiful. He could do whatever he felt and heard. When Alice came into the band, especially on these moments with the quartet… Stellar Regions is another quartet recording from right around that time where they explored many tunes, shorter version of them, that were kind of strung together. Expression was one of the songs I think that inspired a whole way of playing, for me, and a way of playing through harmonies in a free-flowing way, without a quarter-note or metronome-type beat. An open beat, but still moving through a sequence of chords. I learned a lot about trying to approach improvising with that aspect of meter. It’s something I’m just scratching the surface on now.
12. “Impressions” THE 1961 HELSINKI CONCERT (Gambit) FEATURING ERIC DOLPHY (Nov. 22, 1961) (Coltrane, tenor saxophone; Eric Dolphy, bass clarinet; McCoy Tyner, piano; Reggie Workman, bass; Elvin Jones, drums)
I was just on tour with McCoy Tyner in April, and I found this in a record shop in Basel, Switzerland. I never saw it before. There’s a version of “Impressions” that starts the concert that’s at kind of a slower tempo, almost like the tempo they played “So What” at with Miles. It’s amazing. Coltrane’s choruses are so beautiful, just the way they play the theme together and the way Eric answers and plays in the spaces of the melody. Coltrane plays around 9 choruses, then Eric comes in and plays 9 or 10 choruses himself that are some of the most beautiful Eric Dolphy with Coltrane on record. It’s incredible, because I think this was just released now. I never heard it on any other box set from European live recordings with Coltrane. Then Coltrane comes back in, after Dolphy, and plays another 2 or 3 choruses before they take the theme out. So it’s a short version of this tune with no solo by McCoy. It’s just fantastic. It’s some of the most inspired Eric Dolphy after Coltrane plays, and while Coltrane is playing, you can feel that he’s inspired just by having Dolphy on the scene. He hands it over to him in a way where he’s saying, “Okay, man, what have you got to say?” Then when Dolphy ends his chorus, Coltrane has to come in and play again because it’s at this really beautiful place in the whole structure of the piece.
[TALK A BIT ABOUT COLTRANE DIALOGUING WITH OTHER SAXOPHONE PLAYERS]
Coltrane recorded with a lot of different saxophone players. There was a great record with Johnny Griffin and Hank Mobley. There was some stuff with Al Cohn and Zoot Sims and Hank Mobley as a quartet. There’s some stuff with Paul Quinichette and Pepper Adams, Gene Ammons—Coltrane plays alto. Coltrane came up in an era where you played in bands with other saxophone players a lot. Some of it was documented, but I’m sure through the years he was in tons of bands, and many jam sessions and situations where you shape the music together spontaneously right at the moment with other saxophone players. A lot. Of course, with Miles and Cannonball and quintets with Cannonball. Throughout his career, I think he enjoyed, which I do, feeding off of other people, especially if they have a strong personality and ideas and have their own statement. It was great to hear him with Dolphy and have Eric’s voice, not only on alto, but bass clarinet and flute. We’re lucky that they recorded and did some things, a lot more than we ever heard really that were made for release. The recording Olé was beautiful with Freddie Hubbard and Coltrane together. But something like this, which just came out, from that tour, was so fresh! It was recorded in 1961. McCoy Tyner was 22 years old, maybe 23 on that recording. It’s so great to hear the inspiration of how they played together, and how they played off of each other.
13. “Ah-Leu-Cha” (from ROUND ABOUT MIDNIGHT) (Coltrane, tenor saxophone; Miles Davis, trumpet; Red Garland, piano; Paul Chambers, bass; Philly Joe Jones).
The way Coltrane, Miles, Red Garland on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, and Philly Joe Jones on drums play on that tune, the little counterpoint on that melody… I think that tune is based on “Honeysuckle Rose,” “Scrapple From the Apple”—I’m pretty sure it was derived from that sequence. But the way it was structured with the little drum-breaks and all these little things, and the way Coltrane played with Philly Joe Jones and Paul Chambers… Of course, we’ve heard many recordings through the years with them together as that combination. That was another feeling in the beat, and the joyous journey in how they were up in each other’s music, and were moving through the harmonies with a certain feeling. They weren’t just playing over chords and playing 32 bars. They were exploring a way of playing together. It was Miles’ group, but this community of players. Someone has to be the leader, to organize things, but it’s really the community of players that make the music. I’m feeling that today in my ensembles, creating situations for the community that I live in. My nonet has a certain repertoire, a certain community of players. We’ve been playing together for years. Now, I’m the leader. I’ve organized and have developed my career to a point to be able to put it together. But it’s the community of players that is making music, too. Each one of my ensembles has been inspired by that particular realization about what is happening on the scene. Miles and Coltrane and Monk and Bird, all their records are about that. It’s a community they were living in, man, and they were living this music together, and you could feel how much they loved to play together. That comes through on this recording, Round About Midnight, with Miles Davis, and that tune, “Ah-Leu-Cha”—but on every tune. For me, that was one of the first records that totally captured me and gave me a lot of ideas, and I wore it out two or three times.
[END OF CONVERSATION]
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Joe Lovano (Quartets: Live At The Village Vanguard) – Blue Note:
The two quartet performances that comprise Live At the Village Vanguard represent the latest installment of Joe Lovano’s ongoing dialogue with the Freedom Principle and the Tradition. 42 years old, at the peak of his powers, where vigor complements wisdom, Lovano is as comfortable playing improvised duos with English Free-Jazz-Master Evan Parker as in-the-pocket bebop with an organ trio. His solos display the spontaneity of an ear player, but behind them is the urbane sophistication of a conservatory-trained musician with twenty years experience interpreting difficult charts in big bands ranging from Woody Herman to Carla Bley. Fully conversant with the harmonic vocabulary of Coltrane, Shorter and beyond, he is able to navigate complex structures with an uncannily relaxed rhythmic facility and big furry sound at the most intense outer partials.
Lovano inherited his open, pragmatic attitude from his father, Cleveland-based tenor saxophonist Tony “Big T” Lovano. Papa Lovano worked a day job as a barber and played every variety of gig at night. Coming up in the 1940’s, Big T looked up to Clevelanders Tadd Dameron and Freddie Webster, played around the city with the likes of Bill De Arango, Jim Hall, Benny Bailey, Joe Alexander and the legendary blind organist Eddie Bacchus. Later, as a main man on the Cleveland scene, he knew and played with outcats Albert Ayler, Frank Wright and Bobby Few in their formative years. The likes of Gene Ammons, Sonny Stitt, James Moody and Roland Kirk considered him a peer, and he took his son to Cleveland spots like the Smiling Dog or the Sirrah Club to hear their live sound. When young Lovano was practicing to Sonny Stitt records in the family basement, his father had John Coltrane’s “Kulu Se Mama” or “A Love Supreme” on the turntable upstairs.
When Big T was too busy to make a booking, he’d often send his son. “I paid my way to Berklee School of Music from all the money I made playing gigs in high school,” Joe recalls. “I learned all the standard tunes, how to lead a gig and pace a set. My Dad taught me how to read an audience, too; if I was playing in a club where there was dancing, to play the right tempos, to find the tunes that people are going to dig. My Dad always stressed, ‘Look, you have to be versatile so you can pay the rent.’ He taught me clarinet, and wanted me to play flute, and be able to play in bands, and to be able to take any gig that came up. He always instilled that in me. So from an early age, I was studying a lot of different dimensions of improvising and playing my instruments with those goals in mind.”
Tony Lovano’s sound spanned a wide dynamic range, from the alligatory roughness of Illinois Jacquet to the expansive melismas of Lester Young and Ben Webster, and he bequeathed that range to his son. “My sound has gone through a lot of different changes,” says Joe, “or different periods. Early on I played more one-dimensionally, with a harder sound. On my first recording with Lonnie Smith in 1975, my sound was only one beam of light, let’s say, just one direction. Through the years, in playing with so many different bands, especially large ensembles where the music is always changing with different feelings, rhythms and attitudes, rather than try to sound the same in each group, I would try to fit in in a different way all the time. That range of dynamics started the process of trying to open up my sound in a different direction. Through the years it’s definitely gotten wider and bigger, and I think I can play now, say, triple pianissimo with the same fullness as a triple forte.”
A drummer friend of Big T’s gave 7-year-old Joe a set from the 1940’s, including a 24″ bass drum, and Lovano has played those drums for serious relaxation ever since. On saxophone, his phrases consist of long strings of notes disjunctively accented in dialogue with the drums, cliffhanger lines that seem fated to hurtle over the edge, but inevitably land squarely on the one. “Playing drums,” Lovano comments, “opened up my awareness of what’s going on around me when I’m soloing, to not just be involved in what I’m articulating on my horn, but try to be a part of what everybody else is playing.”
Tony Lovano also introduced his son to the revelations of free improvising; they recorded a free duet together on Joe’s self-produced two-tenor date with Big T in 1986. “For years I’ve focused on improvising very freely with other players, like Billy Drewes and Judi Silvano, in duet settings, just to improvise and react to each other, and try to create melodies from what each other played. I’m into performance, I’m into playing with the personalities I play with, and I improvise with everybody from that conception. I want to try to feed off of what everybody else plays so that I don’t find myself being repetitive.”
“For me improvising really is about creating something new,” Joe emphasizes. “Early on it was about style and learning my horn, but after a while it shifted into this other place of trying to create something with what’s going on around you, using your technique and the language of your instrument to create something different all the time.”
The March 1994 set features the powerful unit of Tom Harrell, Anthony Cox and Billy Hart, who had worked together off and on for two years. The most explicit antecedents are Sonny Rollins’ various trio recordings and the Ornette Coleman Quartet, but Lovano also cites John Coltrane’s music and Miles Davis’ various bands as inspirations. “Whether Miles’ group was a quartet or quintet or however big it was, it would come down to a trio sound a lot, the bass, drums and horn. I think that’s the essence in Jazz, and there are certain feelings that happen in that intimate setting.” The music was recorded on the week’s fourth night.
“In a quartet like this, with two horns,” Lovano continues, “you have the opportunity to change the orchestration as you play, to play backgrounds, to cut in on each other, to trade, to create a real ensemble sound as four people. I was able to write some new music and orchestrations that gave everyone freedom, a fresh approach to play together. The collective dialogue was unique, with a lot of explosive energy, and everybody’s attitude and personalities shaped the pieces. I think that’s why the chemistry worked. Each musician is in tune with the history of this music and tries to draw from it in a very personal way.”
Tom Harrell and Lovano have worked in each other’s bands since around 1987, when Lovano recorded Village Rhythm for Soul Note. Known for his exquisite improvising in “harmonic type music with piano or larger groups,” Harrell plays with extraordinary force in the freer setting, spontaneously co-composing arrangements with his horn-mate on every song, conjuring poised melodic sequences on every solo. Listen to the way he mimics the multiphonic burst that concludes Lovano’s solo on “Fort Worth” to segue seamlessly into his statement, or his ravishing solo on “Sail Away.”
Though Lovano first knew bassist Anthony Cox from casual sessions in the late Seventies, they established a real connection with John Scofield’s Quartet in 1989; in 1990-91 Cox worked in Lovano’s trio with Ed Blackwell. “Anthony is versatile and can play very freely within structures and forms and harmonic sequences with imagination and intuition,” Lovano states. “He’s a strong melodic rhythmic player who brings a lot of ideas into the tune, but always drawing from the tune itself. That’s the kind of bass player you need in a trio sounding group such as this.” Hear his leadoff solo on Cleveland composer Emil Boyd’s “Blues Not To Lose,” how he meshes with Billy Hart in articulating theme and variation on the tune’s striking melody.
On Joe’s first gig in New York with organist Lonnie Smith in 1975, Billy Hart played drums; they’ve since collaborated in many venues. “I first heard Billy with Herbie Hancock’s sextet in the early Seventies, and the first time I heard him, man, I wanted to play with him!” Lovano remembers. “In every situation Billy is open and inspired. He tries to get into everyone’s personality, plus he brings in his own incredible energy. In this quartet I wrote some tunes to feature him and let him explode and explore, give him freedom to shift tempos and to play however he wants, to listen and react. I think Billy Hart today is playing fresher than ever.” Hart’s dynamic range and command of timbre complement every beat of the set; hear how he complements Lovano’s trademark pillowed, honey sound on the 12/8 treatment of “Birds From Springtimes Gone By,” his impeccable brushwork on “I Can’t Get Started,” the quiet fire of “Sail Away,” and the controlled fury of every stroke on the Colemanesque “Uprising.”
Volume 2, from January 1995, features the dream team rhythm section of Mulgrew Miller, Christian McBride and Lewis Nash, the pianist, bassist and drummer that any bandleader would want on their gig, in a follow-up to Tenor Legacy, Lovano’s two-tenor collaboration with Joshua Redman for Blue Note.
“I wanted to make a counter-statement to the first quartet,” Lovano says, “and not just be throwing some tunes together. For the Vanguard, I wanted to play some classic things in my own way and in the group’s way, how we play together now. We challenged each other throughout the week on each tune. It didn’t matter what the tempo was or what key it was in or what the tune was. We could have played ‘Happy Birthday’.” Instead, Lovano chose compositions by John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis and Charles Mingus, a standard by Gordon Jenkins, and an original. As on the March 1994 set, the sequencing represents the actual set order.
Many pianists you talk to cite Mulgrew Miller as their model on the instrument; “one of the most elegant, swinging, tasteful pianists today,” comments Lovano, who met Mulgrew around 1974 when both were students in Boston. “He plays with an inner beauty in his sound and whole flow, and he’s one of the most swinging accompanists around. When he comps, he’s so much a part of what everybody else is playing that you’re not really aware of what he’s playing somehow. He’s so in touch with everything.” His ferocious, idiomatic solo on “Little Willie Leaps” marks a profound accomplishment; the duos with Lovano in the opening and closing verse sections of “This Is All I Ask” are lyric wonders.
At 23 years old, Christian McBride already has established his place in Jazz history for the quality of his tone, his deep center-of-the-note beat, virtuosic bow-work and imaginative soloing. He’s already appeared on about eighty recordings. “Christian is an incredible young musician who is deeply involved in the whole recorded history of music. He knows a lot of tunes, and he memorizes things immediately. You can play anything with him. After the first time through he plays it, SNAP, he knows it, he’s got it, he immediately grabs hold of what’s happening and hits a serious groove from beat one.” Listen to his solos on “Reflections” and “26-2” and his rhythmic interplay with Lewis Nash throughout, and you’ll see what the buzz on him is all about.
“The word ‘elegant’ applies to Lewis Nash’s playing, too,” Joe continues. “He is one of the most tasteful drummers, swings so hard, plays with complete precision with a heavy beat that never gets bombastic — he’s not just banging around. He articulates everything like a horn player, and it’s fun to play with him and interact with his articulation, the way he plays phrases at you and counter-phrases. He’s very clear. You can hear everything he plays like you’re snapping your fingers. It’s beautiful to play with a drummer like that, because you can play tight together.” Note the incredible swing Nash generates on “Lonnie’s Lament” and “Reflections” at the top of the set, or the ingenious 12-bar drum breaks between the melodies and solos of “Sounds of Joy.”
The contrasting styles of the two state-of-the-art drummers evoked different approaches from Lovano. “Lewis plays very differently than Billy,” he comments. “Billy plays really loose and flowing and strong and explosive, and takes big right turns and sharp angles. There’s a lot more angles in Billy’s playing. With Billy you’re listening deeply, and the interaction takes a different shape. You have to be very free as an improviser to create a solo that can shift and change with his accents and tempo. The piano quartet is about swing, and it’s about the rhythm section, the soloists, the tradition of Bebop. It’s really about flow and straight-ahead. They say, ‘Straight ahead and strive for tone.’ That’s the essence of that group. We hit a heavy groove and just sailed with it.”
“I played completely differently with the two groups, in two different attitudes, and I think you can hear that when you listen to each recording. My solos in the quartet with Mulgrew are a lot longer and a lot more involved with playing a solo. In the group with Tom and Billy and Anthony there’s more interplay, a lot more dialogue between all of us. I’ve played in both those schools my whole life, and I love them both.”
The Village Vanguard’s legend was built on performances like the two snapshots presented on this double-CD. Lovano’s intense consciousness of the room’s remarkable Jazzcoustics, “its intimate sound and clarity, like playing in a studio somehow,” began as a teenager, when repeated listenings to the Vanguard recordings by Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley and Bill Evans helped deepen his sense of how Jazz should sound. His live connection with the Vanguard began in 1976, the year he moved to New York. He drank in Dexter Gordon’s tone during Homecoming week (“I came home and practiced for hours and hours after hearing Dexter in that room”), sat in with Elvin Jones and Bill Evans. Lovano worked there almost every Monday night during the 1980’s with the Mel Lewis Orchestra, worked week-gigs with Elvin Jones, Charlie Haden’s Liberation Orchestra and the Paul Motian Trio. And since 1991, when Lovano embarked on the leader path as a full-time endeavor, his various groups have been a staple of the Vanguard’s roster.
So recording Joe Lovano at the Village Vanguard was a natural. Rigorous and hot, Live At The Village Vanguard is contemporary Jazz at its finest.
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Joe Lovano (On This Day: At The Vanguard) – Liner Notes:
“I’ve always lived in, let’s say, the different camps in the music,” Joe Lovano told me a few years back. “I’ve tried to develop my technique so I can execute ideas freely and within the personnel of the band and not come at the saxophone or the music with the same attitude all the time.”
That credo accurately describes the ambiance of On This Day (At The Vanguard), recorded on the final night of a week’s residence by Lovano’s nonet at New York’s Village Vanguard. As Lovano is at pains to note, it documents a working band in a continual state of evolution.
“I don’t want a bunch of horn players repeating arrangements that are rehearsed and set in stone,” Lovano says. “I want a band that creates music, with a structure that is secure and solid, but with freedom for everyone’s contribution to take shape and crystallize as we play. All the cats have played in great bands; they’re mature improvisers and serious ensemble players who shape their approach in the moment. This is how we put together our music for every concert. Each performance stands on its own. This is how we’re playing tonight!“
The core of Lovano’s first nonet album, the Grammy-winning 52nd Street Themes, was that branch of bebop gestated by the singular melodies, voicings and harmonic progressions of Tadd Dameron [1917-1965] as filtered through the sensibility of arranger Willie Smith, once a Dameron associate. Three years later, Lovano and his gifted cohort – propelled by the extraordinarily inventive and empathetic drumwork of Lewis Nash – pick up where they left off and stretch the form. The ensemble renders with heart and precision Smith’s luscious arrangements of Dameron’s “Focus” and the classic noir ballad “Laura,” while all members speak their piece on a rollicking “Good Bait” marked by an ebullient shout chorus. “At The Vanguard” is a Lovano-penned stomp (guess the source) with a Monkish connotation, while the leader offers an impassioned, reflective reading of John Coltrane’s “After The Rain,” and ends the set with a mellow quartet fantasia on Billy Strayhorn’s “My Little Brown Book,” made famous by Coltrane on his iconic 1962 encounter with Duke Ellington.
“I grew up with Coltrane’s recordings of these tunes,” Lovano says. “It’s a challenge to try to make them my own and not copy the way he played them.” That Lovano meets the challenge with such a palpably individual voice is attributable to early hands-on encounters with bebop signposts like Dameron’s “Lady Bird” and “Hot House,” a process that launched him along the same path that his heroes followed during formative years while carving out their own inimitable tonal personalities.
“Playing the inner parts and original harmonic structures of Tadd’s music influenced Coltrane’s early tunes,” Lovano states. “Although Coltrane was always moving forward rhythmically and sonically and in everything else, he always dealt with everything he ever studied. Even on the duets with Rashied Ali, he’s still dealing with ‘Giant Steps,’ still dealing with all these things that vibrated in his body. That simple melody on ‘A Love Supreme’ has the same intervals as on ‘Locomotion’ from Blue Train. With people like Coltrane or Miles, their surroundings changed, but what they played came from their entire lives.”
Lovano fully expresses his penchant for eliciting creative dialogue with the jazz lifeblood on the title track, a free kaleidoscopic journey built on a hymn-like 9-note melody [“on-this-day-just-like-a-ny-oth-er”] over an ametric pulse, and a second 8-note theme that echoes the syllables Bil-ly Hig-gins, the late drummer to whom Lovano dedicated the piece, and whose alert, relaxed essence Lewis Nash channels throughout. In their explorative solos, George Garzone, Steve Slagle, Barry Ries, John Hicks and Lovano develop and elaborate upon the shapes and moods, sustaining an emotional core and creating magic.
They embody the notion that the title of this special album refers not only to a snapshot of a work in progress, but to a philosophy of life.
“This music is honest and true,” Lovano says. “You can’t tell lies when you play it, because it’s already been documented. It isn’t just technical, but exists at a beautiful spiritual level also. ‘On This Day’ is about how cats from the inner circle – Coltrane, Monk, Mingus, Miles, Sonny Rollins, Dexter Gordon, Don Cherry, Ornette, Keith Jarrett, Billy Higgins, Max Roach, Paul Motian, Art Blakey – played with such consistency every time you heard them. Long before I became who I am as a player, they inspired me to develop that attitude to the art of improvising, and also to play with them. They gave me confidence to be myself, to put together an ensemble like this, with so much trust.”
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Liner Notes (Us Five: Folk Art):
It is entirely characteristic of Joe Lovano that he would use his 21st recording for Blue Note, released amidst the fanfare of the label’s seventieth anniversary year, to introduce a new ensemble, Us Five, deploying a fresh approach towards exploring his music.
To be specific, Us Five: Folk Art comprises ten compositions. Lovano plays tenor saxophone, straight alto saxophone, alto clarinet, tarogato, aulochrome, and percussion, joined by James Weidman on piano, Esperanza Spalding on bass, and Otis Brown and Francesco Mela on, to use Lovano’s nomenclature, drums and cymbals. He explores a wide spectrum of “colors, sounds, and feelings,” organizing the flow into passages for quintet, quartets, trios, duos, and solos within the unit, fully exploiting the various rhythm section possibilities that the two-drummer format affords. The better to coax the music onto unexpected routes, Lovano offers his collaborators wide latitude to interpret the raw materials “with freedom to take shape and crystallize as we play.” He himself navigates the fluid terrain with utter authority, consistently projecting the vocalized tone, uncanny time feel, and interactivity that mark his entire Blue Note corpus.
“I’ve always tried to be very free with inside approaches, and to be really in there on freer music, what they call ‘outside,’” says Lovano, noting that the unit, which first convened in the fall of 2007, honed their collective perspective during a week at Manhattan’s Village Vanguard directly before the recording session.
“The music comes out of our individual roots, and the combinations emerge. Francesco Mela is from Cuba; Otis Brown is a real New York drummer; Esperanza has a beautiful lyrical approach; and I love the way James conceives jazz music with blues, gospel, and freer forms. It’s an ongoing study on how to play together with mutual respect and an egoless approach.”
Except for Weidman, whose c.v. includes long stints with Steve Coleman and Cassandra Wilson, Lovano’s new partners are “people who aren’t my generation, haven’t totally developed their approach, are experiencing things for the first time. Everyone has fresh eyes and ears, and this gives me compositional ideas that I had never played with anyone else before. Everybody is on their toes.”
They have to be to keep pace with Lovano. The composer describes the opening track, “Powerhouse,” as “an original harmonic structure that combines things I study and work on all the time—trying to combine the turnarounds and resolutions of Bird and Coltrane in my own way, and working with Ornette Coleman’s harmolodic ideas, changing the meaning of notes as you play them by shifting color and key as you move along.”
Consider how “Folk Art” develops—Lovano states the theme on straight alto saxophone over a polytonal vamp, evolves the flow in configurations that shift from quintet to drum-duo and back to quintet, switches to tenor saxophone as the harmonic material takes a more straightforward direction, and moves to more open-ended polytonal exploration on the final theme. “That approach for me is what jazz is,” Lovano says. “It’s a real folk music, and you can play a multitude of influences from your experiences in the world of music in your improvisation and composition.”
The ebullient ambiance of invention never stops. The spiritual aura of late Coltrane permeates the ballads ‘Wild Beauty’ and ‘Song for Judi,’ the latter—dedicated to Lovano’s wife (“and inspiration”), singer Judi Silvano—containing three different key signatures that prod Lovano to extend and elaborate while also living within the lovely melody. Lovano plays tarogato (he describes the Hungarian folk instrument as “half-clarinet and half soprano saxophone, with many colors and a human voice sound”) on “Drum Song,” and aulochrome (a double soprano saxophone with one keyboard down the center) on “Dibango,” a funky line dedicated to Cameroonian saxophonist-vibraphonist Manu Dibano. He plays alto clarinet on the stately, folkish “Page Four,” and launches the open-form “Ettenro” (“Ornette” spelled backward), on alto saxophone before switching to tenor for a summational statement after Weidman, a force throughout, says his piece.
As do his twenty previous Blue Note albums, Us Five: Folk Art illuminates Lovano’s unique position as an artist who authoritatively deploys the tradition as a tool to point directly to the future.
“Alfred Lion and Frank Wolff wanted cats to find themselves and to realize that they had beautiful original music,” Lovano says of Blue Note’s founding fathers, expressing a sentiment equally applicable to Bruce Lundvall’s quarter-century at the helm. “Carrying on in that tradition of being a player-composer is the legacy of Blue Note for those of us who record for them today.”
[—30—]
Today Is The Question: Ted Panken on Music, Politics and the Arts 