Dave Liebman: A New York Story

Dave Liebman Group

The European tour Liebman is referring to is a series of dates he just completed, in December 2010, with his longstanding Dave Liebman Group. The band has released over a dozen records and is one of the longest-running—and hardest-working— ensembles in contemporary jazz. Responsible for milestone recordings like Conversation (Sunnyside, 2003), Blues All Ways (OmniTone, 2007), and the recent Turnaround: The Music of Ornette Coleman (Jazzwerkstatt, 2010), the group's bassist and guitarist—Tony Marino and Vic Juris, respectively—have been with the group since its inception, while drummer Marko Marcinko replaced original percussionist Jamey Haddad in 2003. Starting out as a quintet, the group trimmed down to a more travel-capable quartet when pianist Phil Markowitz—who continues to work with Liebman in Saxophone Summit, a reed celebration that also features Joe Lovano and Ravi Coltrane—left in 2001.


Dave Liebman Group, Clockwise from Top Left: Tony Marino
Vic Juris, Marko Marcinko, Dave Liebman

While the empathy among everyone in the group is, at times, uncanny, the connection is particularly vital between Liebman and Juris—a linguistically sophisticated and sonically expansive guitarist who deserves to stand beside greats of his generation like Pat Metheny, John Scofield, Bill Frisell and John Abercrombie, and whose Omega is the Alpha (Steeplechase, 2010) has been largely overlooked. Much as bassist Dave Holland's thirteen-year-old quintet acts as the core for other projects, Liebman has recruited members of Dave Liebman Group for other projects, including his Dave Liebman Big Band, responsible for 2010's Live / As Always (MAMA Records). It's clear that the members of the group value the opportunity to work with Liebman; equally, he sees himself as having no small responsibility to keep things happening for the group.

"It's rare that we get to play almost every night for 12 days—and believe me, I don't take it lightly," says Liebman. "I'm very gratified that I'm able to get this for the guys and be able to put them to work. I'm very proactive as a leader, because to keep the same guys—which, through thick and thin, I try to insist upon—we don't have a lot of work and we don't make a lot of money, so the only thing I have is that they're playing with me, and the challenge of this music. Because it's for the music. I'm not trying to make it like we're carrying a cross here, but it is for the music. My job with these three guys is to make it so that there's a challenge and a reason to come out and play with me.

"That truly has to be for the music," Liebman continues. "So I have to keep that in mind and keep things moving. I have a book that's bigger than most jazz groups in the world- -we have 80-100 tunes—and I recycle here and there and change things. Basically, I really always want to keep the slant different. Right now I'm already thinking about what we're gonna do two years from now. We're in a completely different direction at the moment—electric bass only, Vic is playing a lot of colors and sounds, I am playing only soprano, and we are playing freer, sonically—a more rocky kind of vibe. I just finished with a whole cycle and I wanted to change the music, so that's our new sound for now."

Liebman has recently released Ornette Plus, a live recording that's only available at shows and as a digital download from his website. It features extended versions of three tunes from Turnaround, as well as a thrilling, 30-minute look at Juris' "Victim," first heard on Conversations. "'Victim,' Vic's tune—it's natural," Liebman enthuses. "I've been talking about this for the last year, and Vic, he's the main engineer; I've been talking about going in this direction and, for some reason, that night, 'Victim' got into that space a little bit. I'm just thinking of moving in a completely different direction because I want to have this group until the day I die, so I've gotta keep it going [laughs]!"

For those who've had the pleasure of meeting Juris, it's immediately clear that he's simply not interested in any of the games required to push his visibility to the next level; instead, his reputation continues to grow slowly, yet inexorably and inevitably, just as his own talent continues to evolve and expand. "I think, sometimes, some of it is synchronicity, the way the cookie crumbles," Liebman explains. "But some of it is certainly publicity and PR, and it all begins with the persona of the person. I'm not going to talk for Vic, but this is a guy who's one of the sweetest, nicest, calmest, gentlest, non-promotional guys of all time. And smart—it's not like he doesn't know what's happening, it's not like he's drifting. He just doesn't want to take part in the game—it's all bullshit to him. And I must say that in my case—and I'm not comparing— over the years, I didn't want to play ball with the guys, the companies. I just didn't wanna do it. I don't want to have anybody telling me what to do, and because of that, I'm hit or miss. I'm fine and I'm not complaining, but you must cede control somewhere, and if you're not that kind of personality, then most likely you're not gonna get above the radar.

"But you know what," Liebman continues. "When I went to the Village Vanguard, when I was a kid in the '60s, and I'd see Trane or Cannonball or Miles, or whatever, and I was 15 or 16 years old—when those guys walked into a club ... man, the vibe. They'd just walk to the stage and take their horn out, and everybody—guys like us— would be so reverential, like: 'What's he thinkin'? What's he doin'? What'd he eat for dinner? He's the heavy cat in the room.' That's what I wanted to be. I didn't look at the guy—the equivalent then—who had the 5,000-person audience. I wanted to be the guy who was this underground heavy that everybody was almost afraid to talk to because of their skills. I always think of James Brown, when he said this so clearly, because he knocked around for a long time, and he said, 'Man, if you just keep knocking on enough doors, one will open.' That's it.

"We lead a great life, man," Liebman concludes. "We are surrounded by incredible, high-level music, with people who are, by and large, honest—who are into it, in it for the music. Any young person who goes into jazz is obviously not gonna be the next Sting. At the top of the line, if you do a Wynton [Marsalis] or a Herbie [Hancock] or something like that, that's like three guys, maybe five guys, and even that ain't that much compared to anybody in pop music. So you must go into this with a love of the music and the tradition, and that's very good, because it separates the people, the wheat from the chaff. As soon as I meet somebody in this music, I can be pretty sure that they're honest and sincere.

"This is probably one of the busiest times I've ever had. Some of it is self-induced because of the award; I'm using some of that money to reinvest in myself, because this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. So that has raised my visibility a lot—and, of course, the number of records released, and we just happen to have had a lot of work with the group this past fall. And Saxophone Summit has had some work. It will slightly slow down this year, but it's been hectic, and there has been some press, and I've finally got a little promotion."


Recording

Having been around the recording industry since the early '70s, Liebman has experienced its many changes firsthand, and adapted his own viewpoint as to what the goal of recording has become. "The record business has basically dissolved, in terms of the old model, and now it's kind of like a kamikaze mission: hit and run," Liebman asserts. "The point of recording for me is two-fold, and one is hopeful: hopefully it'll sell and everyone can make a little money. And even before this crisis, it was a farfetched idea, because cats like me didn't make a lot of money. But the other important thing for me is to catalog the music and to be done; to say, 'I did that, and it's done and it's the best I could at that moment.' Because recording is the top of the food chain, as far as performance goes, there's rehearsal, there's jam sessions, there's live, and then there's recording, which brings out the most perfection and the best in you, and demands that you come up to the highest level.

"Live is the most challenging of all because you can't correct your mistakes, but my point is that recording is a mirror—you're under a microscope, and a microphone will catch everything, and that's not true when you're playing live," Liebman continues. "And that's a good thing. You try things; you're hanging, you're in a club, you don't have a plan or an agenda, you're just playing, and that's great. But, on the other hand, an artist should be able to pull his shit together when he has to. And it's like if I'm gonna give a speech, I can't get up there and ramble for two hours; I've gotta have my good 30 minutes together. I think that's a skill that helps one grow as a musician. Obviously, playing live is essential and has to be happening, and there's a certain built-in contradiction in recording anything. Jazz is about live and about the moment, and here we are magnifying the moment forever on a plastic disc, for someone to hear a thousand miles away, 10 or 20 years from now. That kinda contradicts everything jazz is about, because the next minute will be completely different.

"In the end, especially now, because of technology—even in the '60s you could still take tape and cut it—now you can replace a breath with another breath and nobody knows the difference," says Liebman."I think the only real way to know how somebody plays is to hear them live in front of your eyes, because even a live recording can be doctored. To tell you the truth, I don't trust anybody, because I know that if I can fix something by the push of a button, or my engineer can do it, I am doing it. My ethics aren't that big; hey, man, if I can fix it I'm gonna fix it. So I know that probably 95 percent of what you're hearing is not what it was. That's a generality, but somewhere in the high percentage points. If you're hearing a so-called 'record' now, you can be pretty sure that it's not what they played. If it's live, less so; but it's still possible that you're not really hearing what they played. Auto-tuning—you look good, you feel good, it's ridiculous, really. And that's why live, for jazz, remains the main game. It is the final proving point for somebody who's sitting 10 feet away from you and hearing you play. That's really it, in the end.

"If I can make a fix I will," Liebman concludes, "if I've got another take from another day that sounds the same. And another thing you do if you're doing a live recording is you get to the gig in the afternoon and do a couple tunes then, because the sound will be the same at night. The big band record, Live / As Always there's a title, "New Vista," that isn't on the CD but is going to be on a DVD of the gig. I remember telling the audience, after we were finished with the performance, 'We're going to take advantage of your presence. The official performance is over, but the first tune was a fuck-up and we're doing it again. The engineers are in place, and I'm taking advantage of that fact. Even though it's midnight, you can take it or leave it, but please be silent.' There is a certain amount of doctoring that I'd do live, but of course, it's much less than you can do in the studio."


Mike Nock, but his longest-standing friendship dates back to the late '60s with Richie Beirach, his partner in a number of groups including Lookout Farm, Pendulum and Quest, not to mention a series of duo recordings, including the woefully out-of-print Forgotten Fantasies (A&M/Horizon, 1975) and Double Edge (Storyville, 1985), recently reissued by the label, along with two early Quest discs—Quest II (1986) and Midpoint (1987)—as the double-disc Searching for the New Sound of Be-Bop (2010).

The two share a profoundly deep language, combining Liebman's inherent, post-bop expressionism with Beirach's distinctive blend of jazz harmonies and the classical vernacular of more outward-thinking composers who spanned the 19th and 20th centuries, which garnered Beirach's nickname, "The Code." "Richie is the original root," Liebman explains. "We met in school and jam sessions in Queens. Eventually, he was living in Manhattan and he started hanging out with me. This was 1968-69, and we were very compatible personally and musically, and we've been able to learn from each other for so long. We have a new record—me, Richie and Lee Konitz—coming out in March, and we have a new duo record coming out next September. We're not actually working that much; Richie's in Leipzig [Germany], though he has to retire in another year, when he's 65, and he'll be back here. Up until now, he's only been coming to the States twice a year, so maybe there'll be more opportunity for us to schedule things.

Quest formed in the early '80s, teaming Liebman and Beirach with bassist Ron McClure and drummer Billy Hart. The band worked regularly throughout that decade and well into the '90s, and has experienced something of a revival the past couple years, first with its 2005 reunion tour and subsequent album, Redemption—Quest Live in Europe (HATology, 2007), then with Storyville's Searching for the New Sound of Be-Bop (2010), and finally with the group's most recent release, Re-Dial: Live in Hamburg (OutNote, 2010).

Along with bassist Cecil McBee, Hart is also a member of Saxophone Summit, which is gearing up for some renewed activity in 2011. "We just came home from Europe," Liebman says, "and we're playing Birdland in New York in February and recording—just for ourselves at this point. In Europe, we did [Coltrane's] Meditations every night. I do that piece every five years, as well, in November [2010] I did an orchestral version of the suite—which Gunnar Mossblad, my big band guy, arranged for orchestra at Manhattan School of Music—which hopefully will come out. Eighty-five people playing Meditations—man, it was mind-blowing. But on the tour with Saxophone Summit, we did it because it's been 45 years since Trane recorded it— November 23, 1965, actually. Every couple years we try to get it happening.

"It's so much fun, and Meditations, man, an hour-and-a-half each night; we did it for six nights in Europe. I love that band: the heaviest guys on their instruments, with the amount of history—Cecil's 75, Jabali [Billy Hart]'s 70, and then down to me, [Phil] Markowitz and Joe and Ravi. We're spanning 30 years of jazz history; I mean, the guys I'm playing with—just the rhythm section, let alone me and Joe—it's like the history of jazz, and when you get onstage with guys on your own instrument, who play at that level and who are into it like that, with a rhythm section like that—no kids in this rhythm section, man, no young whips—I mean guys who have been doing this for 50 goddamn years... That's an all-star band that I'm the titular leader of, and I just try to get it together, with all the things everybody does.

Liebman also released Five on One (Pirouet), a fine disc with a new group of old friends, called Contact, in 2010—Marc Copland, guitarist John Abercrombie, bassist Drew Gress and, of course, Billy Hart. "The one common denominator for almost all of my groups is Billy," Liebman says. "Billy is my main drummer." Clearly the work of an egalitarian collective, which did one tour around the time of the recording, hopefully Contact will reconvene again in the future. Even Lookout Farm—the innovative, world-music-informed group that broke Liebman's name as a leader with its eponymous 1974 release on ECM—got back together for a gig at Birdland in 2010 to celebrate its 35th anniversary, though it wasn't recorded and there are currently no plans for future gigs. ("It was supposed to be a Quest gig," Liebman explains, "but Billy had overbooked.") Liebman is also completing a biography, in collaboration with noted author Lewis Porter, to be published in the next couple of years by Scarecrow Press.


Saxophone Summit, from left: Ravi Coltrane, Dave Liebman, Joe Lovano

And so, while Liebman suggests things might slow down a bit this year, a quick rundown of his schedule suggests otherwise. "When you go to my website, under 'Groups,' you see the Dave Liebman Group and Big Band—two of my own projects," Liebman explains. "You'll see 'Other Groups,' and there's like eight things there. Those are really all my things, and probably will be till the clock runs out. They're all different relationships—[Steve] Swallow and [Adam] Nussbaum in We Three, Ellery Eskelin, Tony Marino and Jim Black, called Different But the Same, Saxophone Summit, and various duos with Phil [Markowitz], Marc [Copland], Richie [Beirach]; my game is juggling everything and keeping the calendar organized, but I am very fulfilled. If I go down just playing those 8 to 10 projects plus the European guys I know [Liebman also released Eternal Moments (Bee Jazz) in 2010, a duo record with French pianist Jean-Marie Machado], then I'm in good shape and I'll have plenty of music to play for the rest of my life."

But how does a white, middle-class kid from Brooklyn find his way to the NEA Jazz Masters Fellowship? With a legacy like Liebman's, both in his own extensive discography as a leader and on classic albums like Elvin Jones' Live at the Lighthouse—which has been transcribed, in its entirety, by a Norwegian saxophonist and one-time student of Liebman's, Petter Wettre—it's really not much of a stretch. But it's particularly important that Liebman's win finally opens what may well be a floodgate of overdue recognition for artists who somehow got lost between the innovations of the '60s and the neocon movement of the '80s. Musicians like Liebman, who grew up in the '60s and began their own innovations in the '70s, ultimately changed the shape of jazz to come; it's just taken a few more decades to realize it and come to terms with it. "The '70s generation was already seeing the result of our initial forays in the way of art, drugs, everything—the whole lifestyle of us baby boomers born after the war," Liebman says.

"We came first," Liebman concludes, "and by the late '70s, things were already more formalized—and, by the way, more readily available and commercialized. It wasn't as pure. By then, there was fusion to make money; the innocence was already gone then, and that's why you have Spyro Gyra and so on. So what we have is the '70s generation growing up with very clear examples—you could go and hear Larry Coryell or Weather Report—and you didn't have to search it out, depending on where you lived, and you could see it all because we had already done our work. The truth is, the '70s generation came up and could afford to dance around a little more; but, on the other hand, a certain amount of water under the bridge meant the innocence was gone. How do you play it straight and really find the way that is amenable to your own personality, depending on who you are? I really never thought about being an artist—about art for art's sake—it was just what we did.


Selected Discography

Jean-Marie Machado/Dave Liebman, Eternal Moments (Bee Jazz, 2010)
Quest, Re-Dial: Live in Hamburg (OutNote, 2010)
Quest, Searching for the New Sound of Be-Bop (Storyville, 2010)
Dave Liebman Big Band, Live / As Always (MAMA, 2010)
Richie Beirach/Dave Liebman/HR Big Band, Quest for Freedom (Sunnyside, 2010)
Contact, Five on One (Pirouet, 2010)
Dave Liebman Group, Turnaround: The Music of Ornette Coleman (Jazzwerkstatt, 2010)
Dave Liebman/Michael Stephans, Nomads (ITMP, 2009)
Dave Liebman/Pendulum, Mosaic Select 32: Live at the Village Vanguard (Mosaic, 2008)
Dave Liebman/Roberto Tarenzi/Paolo Benedettini/Tony Arco, Dream of Nite (Verve, 2007)
David Liebman Group, Blues All Ways (OmniTone, 2007)
Mike Nock/Dave Liebman, Duologue (Birdland, 2007)
David Liebman, Lieb Plays Wilder (Challenge, 2005)
Dave Liebman/Phil Markowitz, Manhattan Dialogues (ZOHO, 2005)
Dave Liebman/Ellery Eskelin, Different But the Same (HATology, 2005)
Michael Brecker/Dave Liebman/Joe Lovano, Saxophone Summit (Telarc, 2004)
Dave Liebman Group, Conversation (Sunnyside, 2003)
Dave Liebman/Richie Beirach, Mosaic Select 12 (Mosaic, 2004)
Lars Danielsson, Far North (Dragon, 1994)
John Scofield, Who's Who? (Arista/Novus, 1980)
Steve Swallow, Home (ECM, 1980)
Dave Liebman, Lookout Farm (ECM, 1974)
Miles Davis, On the Corner (Columbia, 1972)
Elvin Jones, Live at the Lighthouse (Blue Note, 1972)
John McLaughlin, My Goals Beyond (Ryko, 1970)

Photo Credits

Pages 1, 4: Bill King

Page 2: Matt Vashlishan

Page 3: Gerald Andersen

Page 5: Courtesy of Dave Liebman

Page 6: Hans Speekenbrink

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