Adam Rogers Discusses His Imminent Debut Release and More

AAJ: Do you memorize all this stuff for all these different projects?

AR: It depends on how important the project is. I don't try and freak myself out with that pressure.

AAJ: Any other famous folks we'd be surprised to know about?

AR: I did a whole bunch of dates with Elvis Costello last fall, with the Mingus Orchestra. We played at the Beacon and then at UCLA for a couple of nights. I also worked with him on a project we did with Roy Nathanson, the saxophonist/ leader for the Jazz Passengers. He had a record called 'Fire at Kenton's Bar and Grill' (www.sixdegreesrecords.com/artists/nathanson), so we did a bunch of dates for that with Elvis and Debbie Harry. Marc Ribot is on the record. I was out of town for that recording. Recently, I've done a bunch of playing with John Zorn-in '92 I was on one of the Cobra releases.

AAJ: The thing with the numbers?

AR: I was in a couple of versions of that. We did a couple of gigs recently in a version of the group Masada'electric Masada. We played on New Year's with Perowsky, Cyro Battista, Greg Cohen, and Jamie Saft, at Tonic. That was really fun. I also played with the Gil Evans Orchestra, the George Russell Orchestra, John Patitucci, Jack McDuff.'



AAJ: You did organ trio gigs with McDuff? I want to hear that.

AR: I did a couple of gigs with him in Charleston, South Carolina. I was there doing a show, when I was 22, and he was playing in the roof restaurant of the hotel that I was staying in. He actually wanted me to go on tour but I was doing a theatre piece.

Mike's thing with Larry and Idris is a pretty cool organ band, by the way.

AAJ: (laughs) Yeah I guess so. Killing.

AR: We actually did some gigs with Larry, Clarence and myself only, when Mike had a back problem, at the Jazz Alley in Seattle. We did two nights. It was really great, with swinging tunes and then, sound stuff, which was really great because Larry is such an amazing musician. The sounds he gets out of the instrument are amazing.

AAJ: Does he play bass lines with the feet?

AR: He seems to do that more on the ballads.

AAJ: Anyone out there you haven't worked with you'd really like to?

AR: Oh yeah. Dave Holland. I played with Dave minimally a couple of times with Cassandra, but I've always wanted to work with him., I've always wanted to play with Elvin. He doesn't use a guitarist currently in his band, but I'd just like to play with him in some capacity. Keith Jarrett, who also never uses guitar players. Charlie Haden in some way. Joe Lovano'



AAJ: How do you approach composing?

AR: How I compose really varies. Sometimes I think, 'I need a fast tune.' Like, with Lost Tribe I've said, Well I really want to write kind of an angular, polytonal, fast tune.

AAJ: Oh, I see. A polymetric, polytonal, slammingly funky masterpiece, which is a lot of what you guys wrote actually (laughs).

AR: But the point is, sometimes I start from an arbitrary idea of writing a certain kind of tune and then write that. And I use certain techniques, like contrapuntal techniques I learned through studying classical composition or from playing a lot of classical music. Other times, I come up with a groove, like a bass line I've had sitting around for a long time that somehow is compelling to me and I've waited for or worked on a melody that is somehow just as compelling. Or sometimes I come up with a melody in need of a continuation or a bass line. Usually, I'll come up with an element that's compelling, which is the easy part. What's more difficult is getting the rest'you have to reach deep to find the other pieces you feel as strongly about. Then there are times I write songs from beginning to end without thinking about it. They write themselves.

AAJ: Any favorites of your tunes you want to point people towards?

AR: On this current record I feel pretty strongly about them all. There's a song called 'Absalom' that I recorded again that I feel good about And then there's a free song called 'The Aleph.' Only a few of the tunes I write have titles reflecting what I feel the tune may reflect. There's a song called 'The Unvanquished,' which is a ballad. There's an element of that song that reflects a striving to deal with adversity. 'Esteban' is another song named for a character in a Gabriel Garcia Marquez short story called 'The Handsomest Drowned Man.' The reason I called it that was that I read this short story, an evocative and beautiful Marquez short story, and I got up and wrote that tune from beginning to end. It sounds like the soundtrack to an Ecuadorian or Colombian short story. On previously recorded things, on the Lost tribe records, there are pieces called 'Concentrics' and 'Manticore' that I really like a lot, kind of chromatic funk things. Then a song called 'The River' which is like a country tune.

AAJ: Tell us about Fima's new record, Soul Machine.

AR: I played on the whole record. David Torn played on it as well, and he mixed a couple of the tracks. That's a cool record with Jim Black and Edward Simon. Fima's grandmother, a Belgian lady, sings on it. It's a beautiful creative record on Zorn's label.

AAJ: Here's your opportunity to weigh in on a year-end thing, or weigh in on say, the Ken Burns controversy.

AR: I actually watched almost all of the Ken Burns thing. As a documentary filmmaker there are lot of things he does that are really cool. A lot of documentary filmmakers don't like him because he gotten really popular and he does this kind of melodramatic thing, but he's got a real style. For me it was really interesting with regard to early jazz history'although I think the people he used as information-givers were limited. I think he could have utilized quite a few other people. I'm not sure if this is the case, but perhaps because of Wynton's renown as an educator and a trumpet player, he used him constantly. That's not to say he doesn't have a tremendous knowledge of jazz history, but there are enough people who were actually alive in the 40's and 50's who I think would have been very interesting to hear from. You can think whatever you want about Wynton's opinions, but apart from that, he was on the show constantly. If you have 15 people on you're going to get a greater variance of opinion. A lot of it is an aural tradition, so' it was too much of too few people commenting on the history of jazz. For me, it was very educational about the 20s and the 30s, and so all the stuff about the swing era bands, and Louis and Bix and Frankie Trumbauer was interesting. Obviously, what happened is from the late 50's,early 60s, to the present day, he didn't deal with really at all. He kind of just glossed over it. From the perspective of a documentary filmmaker, it would be a much harder project to tackle because from 1960 until today, so many different things happened'there's so many different branches. If I were him, and maybe it's the advice he was getting'and I was really determined to paint a picture of jazz music from its formative stages to present day, I would have done two series. One from the beginning to the 60s and one from 1960 to present day. If you're going to do a historical documentary you do the entire history in depth or else it seems irresponsible. I think somehow it inferred that the last 40 years were not as important as the preceding eras. AAJ: That was the inference, I think.

AR: Ok'well...I think that's a drag (laughs) y'know. I think Burns deferred to people who have their own ideas about what was important and what wasn't.

AAJ: That's the way to temper it and probably the more likely scenario.

AR: There's only so much you can do. The branches of influence that jazz music went into from 1960 to today are so multifarious and it's also' from the 60's to today, the music is not as easy to understand as Louis Armstrong or even 1950s Miles Davis. It's much more challenging and not as saleable. What are you going to do? Present late John Coltrane and go in depth? A lot of people might not get that at all. It doesn't have the same melodic and rhythmic structure and it's not as easy to understand as bebop or swing era music. The fact that Louis and Duke were referred to, even through the seventies, and had these long sections of each episode dedicated to what they were doing at a time in their lives when they were certainly not in the avant-garde... Armstrong was an avant-garde founding father in the 20s, and he and Duke both did incredible things until they died, but they weren't the guys creating the new music in the 60s and 70s..What was that? I dunno'



AAJ: I always try to get folks to weigh in on the record industry thing versus the indie thing. First off, what do you think of these newer bands, particularly the jazzier bands in the jamband genre, that take it from the touring aspect on up rather than the record releasing aspect on up. Do you think that's a good strategy?

AR: Yeah I do, if you have the wherewithal and the energy to go out and tour that much. Then you're dealing with playing your music for people who like it or don't. If they do, you're developing a grassroots following of fans without having to go through a record label. It puts you in a better position as a business person because record companies want people who already have a following. They don't have to figure out how to find them one.

AAJ: It would be difficult for someone who has an established sideman career to make that change.

AR: Yeah, it would take a certain amount of dedication to doing that and it's a grueling lifestyle that can be difficult One has to decide that for oneself. But I like to see that because I like to see artists who are making it around the industry, and aren't depending on labels and the machinations of big industry to achieve success.

AAJ: But it seems like when they get big enough they just let the industry suck 'em right back in.

AR: There are people who I know who don't care about a label, because if you know you can sell records at shows on the internet or out of your van, and a label isn't treating you right, you can always go back to doing it the way you were. If there are people out there looking for your records and you can find a way to get 'em to those people directly, then you have much more juice in your corner. I think it's great that stuff is getting out there.

AAJ: What about the big industry aspect?

AR: I think that the record industry now, like other industries, has become so ensconced in the corporate world it has become less encouraging of creative development than it was at one point. To some extent, by virtue of the fact that very small companies are owned by an ever-growing series of larger companies, it has made record companies more concerned with the bottom line than they were 30 years ago. Look at the difference between'and it's a different era completely' but the difference between an Impulse and a Blue Note then and even the 70's with like, a CTI, or even the majors...they were not huge corporations. Any record label you have now is a subsidiary...like Verve is owned by Universal which is owned by Vivendi, a huge French conglomerate. Every parent corporation is involved to some extent with the smaller corporations that it owns and they're not necessarily interested in developing creative music.. they're interested in selling units. That's something that's colored the industry.

AAJ: Well put!

AR: I mean, the record industry was created by record industry people. It wasn't built by musicians to give musicians money and a lot of creative space. There have been people throughout the history of the record industry, like Alfred Lion of Blue Note, or a Bob Thiele of Impulse who, to some extent, were interested in recording really fantastic music'the Orrin Keepnews or Creed Taylor or Dr George Butler...I don't know what it was like to work with these guys.

For example, my dad was television director in Hollywood for 15 years. When he went to Hollywood he directed Mary Tyler Moore, and Rhoda, and Phyllis. And they were all, if you remember, produced by MTM, Mary Tyler Moore Enterprises It was 'what's the word? CBS was not involved with those shows nearly as much as Mary Tyler Moore and Grant Tinker were. They didn't have corporate intervention. My father would tell me about this, you know, and it was fantastic. They would go and they would do the script rewrites and there weren't corporate guys coming to deal with it...it was her and her husband, who were very funny people, so the shows were hysterical. When my dad went to work for NBC, the corporation was more involved. He said it took a lot of the creativity and the fun out of it and the shows weren't necessarily as successful and to me, they weren't as funny. When corporations get involved in the creative aspect, it's certainly not encouraging of creativity and artistic development and it's not as encouraging of record sales either. I think one of the problems in big record labels is that you have a relatively small number of people deciding what music will be promoted and distributed to a great many people. Inevitably, you're dealing with this small group of people's personal taste and projection of what people will be able to tolerate, be enthusiastic about, and at the end of the day, buy. What happens is because of a huge label you have a small group saying this music is OK, and we're going to sell it to these millions of people. Well, maybe these millions of people might like all kinds of music if you fed it to them in a certain way. I'm not saying people are going to run to the stores and buy Schoenberg in the same way they'd buy Britney Spears, but there's a lot of second guessing that goes on and I think it sells people short. I don't think that there is as much of a population of real music enthusiasts who are working in the record industry as there once were.

AAJ: Adam, thank you for your time, and some real thoughtful and thought-provoking opinions on the music and the scene. So leave us with what you want your new record to bring.

AR: I hope that I can convey some of the great joy and enriching experiences that I've had listening to, playing and composing music, to the listener. There are a lot of specific things that I'm trying to get to as a composer and player but basically if I can share that experience and spirit, which has had such a profound effect on me, with someone listening to my music, it will have been successful.

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