By Jason West
NAt 29-years-old, Mark Taylor has an entire career in music to look forward to, a career that recently took two giant steps forward with the release of After Hours, his debut recording as a leader, and the receipt of a M.A. degree from the Manhattan School of Music. An alto saxophonist who doubles on soprano and tenor, Taylor grew up in Seattle and received a first-class jazz education from Washington Middle School, Roosevelt High School and the University of Washington, where he graduated in 1994. It was during his tenure at the UW in the early '90s, while studying under Michael Brockman and Marc Seales and performing with the first incarnation of what would become the Jim Knapp Orchestra that Taylor began to blossom as a musician. He credits his development to his instructors and, in particular, to his close friends and fellow UW student saxophonists Rob Davis and Travis Raney, saying of the sax trio, "We learned to play together."
In the summer of 1998 Taylor moved to New York City and enrolled into the graduate program at the prestigious Manhattan School of Music. Taylor admits he chose the Manhattan School in order to study with Dick Oatts, a jazz educator and current lead alto saxophonist with the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra. Surrounded by jazz in the clubs and in the classroom, Taylor soaked up the NY scene during his two-year stint there, playing various jam sessions and club dates while meeting a host of excellent musicians, including fellow Northwest native, drummer Matt Jorgensen. Leader of Matt Jorgensen+451 and a member of RadioAction, Jorgensen invited Taylor to play with him in New York and recently in California, where RadioAction played a six-date tour last summer. (Taylor subbed for the group's regular altoist Alex Graham.)
In January of this year, Taylor-graduate degree in hand-took RadioAction's Whitney Ashe (piano), Gary Wang (bass) and Jorgensen into a Brooklyn, NY studio to record. After Hourswas subsequently mastered by Reed Ruddy at Studio X in Seattle and issued this spring on Origin Records. Since then, Mark has moved back home where he's become an active player on our local scene, performing with a variety of bands including, the Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra, the Jim Knapp Orchestra, Chris Stover's Big Band, Charlie Smith's "Circle" group, and Matt Jorgensen+451.
This month, to promote of the release of After Hours, Taylor has hired Ashe, Wang and Jorgensen for club dates at EMP's Liquid Lounge (July 12), The Sunset Tavern (July 14), The Upstage in Port Townsend (July 15), JazzBones in Tacoma (July 16), Tula's (July 18), Crossroads Market in Bellevue (July 19), Bake's Place (July 20), and the New Orleans Creole Restaurant (July 21). For more information visit: www.marktaylorjazz.com.
Recently, I had the pleasure of interviewing Mark at his Seattle apartment.
JW: Talk about your debut CD After Hours?
MT: I liked it going in; [the recording] seemed like this was going to be a good set of music with a lot of different character. I think the material really holds its own, with or without burnin' solos. I love the way the songs fit together. That's what I was most pleased with-and the overall sound is great.
JW: Not having a lot of experience leading a recording session, how did you decide which tunes to include on the CD and which to leave off?
MT: The tunes that appear on the CD were the only eight tunes we recorded! I had a couple of alternatives that I brought with me, but we didn't even bother rehearsing them. We did two quick rehearsals on these eight. Everybody felt pretty comfortable with them. I knew going in that I didn't want to have a 72-minute disc, first of all. I knew that I wanted it to be under an hour, just because of the number of CDs I have where I've never heard track 10. I wanted it to be concise and keep individual tunes fairly short. I purposely didn't record 12 tunes because I thought that I would eventually have trouble trying to decide which ones not to use.
JW: How did you pick those eight tunes to bring to the session?
MT: The framework was around Whitney's two tunes ["The Drifter," "A Slippery Slope"] that we played every night when we toured in California, and my two tunes ["After Hours," "Foreshadow"]. I wanted to have a couple of originals, plus "Bye Ya" which is an arrangement of a Thelonious Monk tune that I wrote at the Manhattan School. From there I just filled in the gaps with the Jimmy Garrison tune ["Sweet Little Maia"] and the Carla Bley tune ["Around Again"] which I really like.
JW: "Around Again" is kind of an out tune.
MT: Yeah, that's kind of like the stuff that I was playing more often toward the tail end of being in New York. I was really starting to have a good time playing that kind of music. It's about the people you're playing with and how well everybody fits together. I've had some really great experiences playing like that and then some other ones that kind of go on for seven or eight minutes and do nothing.
JW: Now that your CD is out, what's the biggest reward for you? What do you take the most pride in?
MT: I'm really happy with the way the thing sounds when I put it on. I can sit and listen to the whole product without being overly critical of myself, and that's really rare for me. I think it's half the reason why I waited until now to do a CD. For one reason or another, I felt like really didn't need to record until I could write a couple of my own tunes that I really liked, and that's probably the biggest source of pride-having two originals and one arrangement that are mine and that I like a lot. And then of course, including material from Whitney and Jacob [Sacks] that no one's heard-that's really satisfying for me.
JW: Were you intimidated by the jazz scene in New York?
MT: No, I wasn't intimidated by it. I can definitely see where just complete persistence is what you have to do to get it going there. It's a little intimidating on that level, the fact that you have to hustle and hustle and hustle just to get gigs at places like Detour [349 E. 13th Street] and Kavehaz [123 Mercer Street], which are places were you make the door. At Kavehaz you make the door or they'll give you a flat rate that's not great, and at Detour there's no cover, so you're walking around during the ballads passing the tip jar. Those places are packed with great music all the time. I mean, there are plenty of places to go and play great music and meet great musicians but when it comes down to paying rent, that's the intimidating part. Obviously it can be done, because people are doing it, but you've got to keep at it so hard just to keep your name fresh in people's minds. You've got to hammer away to find a niche and then try to promote it. It's hard to float around and hope that people will hire you for these odd jobs. There are too many great players there to do that, but at the same time that's what makes it so much fun. I got energized hearing all these guys-there are so many people better than you everywhere you go-it's awesome.
JW: The competition didn't get you down?
MT: No, because I had that little safe-haven of school. I played a fair number of gigs, but at school there was a great core of musicians and we could play sessions whenever we wanted. Musically, we were always kind of taking care of that ourselves, whether we were doing it in private or public. We were playing a lot, so it was extra special when we'd get to go play at the tap bar at the Knitting Factory. That's another place that's just a blast to play, but some nights you'll have a great crowd and some nights you won't.
JW: You mentioned to me previously that you studied music at the UW. What did you take away from that experience?
MT: Well, I learned how to play the saxophone, but as far as playing musically, I don't think that started to enter into my playing until a couple years later. I did one year as an undergrad where I hardly played any jazz at all because I had to do a classical recital. As far as learning how to play the saxophone and learning how to practice specifics-that's the nice thing about classical music. It's right there on the page; you can either do it or you can't. It's real specific and you've got to learn how to play all of these difficult technical things and then interpret them. Probably one of the more valuable things I did at the UW was with Michael Brockman, working on classical music. I definitely wouldn't have done it on my own. In a sense that tricked me into becoming a good technician on the horn.
JW: Did you see a jump in your playing as a result?
MT: I didn't see it until later, but yeah, as far as some isolated problem in the head of a tune, or some key that I wasn't proficient at improvising on-having that classical background helped. For me it had to be something that specific. I think that's kind of what I'm getting at. It had to be-I couldn't sit and practice things in all 12 keys like a lot of people do. A lot of people play long tones and really work on their sound-I couldn't do any of that stuff by itself. I had to do it all together. Long tones for me was playing the head of a ballad well and not having my tone waver, and working on my intonation. Playing scales was being really awful on the bridge of "The Song is You" or some tune that goes into an unfamiliar key, and just working on that. I needed to have some focus so I could take care of it. I mean, you can practice all 12 keys for the rest of your life and in the end you're just going to be better at playing scales. Yeah, it helps, but I needed a more focused thing, and it took me a long time to realize that. Now when I practice I get a lot more done in a shorter period of time, and more often than not I'm not so worried about messing up on a particular key-I'm worried about playing good music and learning good tunes. I'm not quite as focused on the precision part, which I think takes care of itself. Not only that, but a lot of the guys who I've been listening to lately, like Paul Bley, Ornette Coleman, Lee Konitz-those three guys-there practicing is so unconventional. Not that I want to use that as a cop-out for not practicing, but I think there's something to that; they are very in the moment. I would like to think that someday-ten, fifteen years from now-I'll have the ability to be a little more intuitive and play without thinking about the changes. I know Lee is like that and I definitely know Paul Bley is like that.
