James Hurt
October 1999

"For me, the kinds of ideas that pop into my head are rhythms, rhythmic ideas. I go for those and that's something that I don't even have to think about. A big part of my playing is rhythm first."

Photo Credit
Jim Boom

By Fred Jung

The traditionalists whom criticize the current crop of young musicians for desecrating the hallowed grounds of Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, and Miles Davis should stop whining and get back on the curb. They didn't get it and probably won't. But for the rest of you, allow me to hip you to one cool cat before the media hype machine gets wind of him and the line gets so long that you have to take a number. Meet James Hurt, a man among men. A young man who takes the age, old phrase, "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" and throws it categorically out the damn window. He is "bada bing". And we should applaud him for that type of courage. We should stand up and stamp our feet in recognition of this young man's brass. In this age of the ".com", everything is publicized with as much fanfare as those sappy Disney cartoons and everyone seems hell-bent on promoting themselves as shamelessly as that dopey British infomercial guy. So from my personal perspective, I have been starving for a no-holds-barred, kick ass attitude like that of previous interview Hall-of-Famers, Greg Osby and Joe Chambers, who cast all that political correctness mumbo jumbo aside with Tuesday's trash. Let's all see the forest for what it really is, trees. Check out Hurt's quibbling on why he doesn't like to be referred to as simply a pianist, why he isn't hyped (yet) by the industry elite, and his fierce new Blue Note debut, all unedited, from Hurt's hip, and in his own words.

AAJ: Let's start from the beginning.

JH: How I got started in the music is a long story, kind of. As a kid, I used to have a lot of drumsticks and stuff. It wasn't until later that I got interested and wanted to play in the school band, but the instrument that I wanted to play was sousaphone. It wasn't drums and my mom, of course, thought that was out of the question. So I thought about trumpet. I brought home a mouthpiece, but that didn't work. My lips couldn't take that buzz, that first week buzz. Eventually, I got a drum book and some sticks and went, "I want to be a drummer." So that's kind of what started the whole thing. In seventh grade, I started out in school bands, different ones, symphonic bands or whatever, and focused on percussion and that actually lasted all the way through college. However, when I was around sixteen or seventeen, this guy gave me a couple of books. I didn't know what they were, but he was like, "Check some of these books out. These are just chord books." They were lead sheets with chords and all of this and that and the other. It was like right before I went to high school. The high school that I went to was a performing arts school. There I had a lot of theory and stuff, composition and basic fundamentals, theory. That was very, very instrumental in making me a composer more than anything. Especially, right before I went off to college. We used to compose every week, different kinds of arrangements. Composition is what brought me to the piano. While I was in college, working towards an education, I took time to try to practice, get some facilities, because I stayed at the piano a lot trying to just examine the different harmonic conventions that theory had to offer and just how many different ways you could do things. That's kind of how I started music.

AAJ: Touch on your partnerships with trumpeter Russell Gunn and saxophonist Sherman Irby.

JH: I did a couple of different projects with Russell. But the way that I met Russell was, I went to school in Nashville, Tennessee. Russell was in school, for a time, in Jackson, Mississippi. I had a good friend that I ran into and his name is Rodney Jordan. He's a bass player. He told he was down in Jackson, going to Jackson State, that's where they went. He was in the jazz program down there and Russell was in the jazz program and he was also in marching ensembles and other stuff. Every summer, I started going down to Jackson to look for work and they hooked me up with little gigs here and there. This was like over eleven years, well, more than eleven years ago. We just established a really, really good bond and strong relationship, musically with each other. So that was my annual thing in the summer. I knew I could look forward to going to Jackson and really doing a lot of great music, a lot of great hitting with some different cats that I didn't know, like from East St. Louis, that's where Russell Gunn's from, and the surrounding area. And then when I got to New York, Russell was like actually generous enough to let me pay him some money to stay at his house, so I started becoming his roommate. He kind of let me do that with very short notice, so I thought that was really nice. That gave me an opportunity to do a lot of catching up with the different types of music that I wasn't exposed to being in that part of the United States. There's only so much that you can be exposed to when you are on the interior of the country, unless you are surrounding yourself with people who have somehow made it from the coast up into that part of the country, which is very rare. It rare that you meet some of these musicians and if you do have a chance to meet them then you should really hang out with them. I tried to stay around them as much as possible. Being up in New York, it was a great place to do that. Russell had told some of his friends about me and one of those guys was Sherman Irby. So Sherman knew about me before he came to town. We started playing Smalls late night sessions together. That's what started our relationship. Then we used to always study together. He would show me a lot of different things that he learned from people and I would show him mine that I had learned from not jazz theory but from traditional, conventional western harmony and other kinds of harmony from other parts of the world. We had a really, really nice exchange of ideas between us. We were able to find and develop this vocabulary that was really personal. So by the time that we went to record his album, we weren't really worried about how it was going to turn out more than how we were going to do the arrangements of everything. We could go where we wanted to at any time. It was really fun like that. We used to chase each other around harmonically during a tune. We always had a lot of fun doing that. And that's how I ended up meeting Sherman.

AAJ: Influences?

JH: That's a lot of people. It's not just percussionists or pianists for me because I grew up listening to a lot of different music and jazz was one of the last types of music that I was exposed to as a kid. By the time I was twelve, I had heard many different kinds of music, but jazz wasn't the first. I didn't grow up listening to jazz albums that my parents had or anything like that. My mother had a few jazz albums and they were big band. I was first exposed to big band stuff like Duke and Count Basie and all that stuff. She had other stuff like Brubeck and a lot of different kinds of vocalists. I think she had Sinatra and Ella. I didn't grow up listening to combo music, the small combo music. That came very late for me, later. When I was drumming, I was doing big band drumming at school and stuff, and marching band drumming. So combo was always a challenge for me. When I was in college, the time I spent was learning how to find a voice in the combo setting. I was busy trying to get my thing together to prepare myself to start playing in small groups. It wasn't something that I had done that much because it is hard to do in a place like Nashville. There was more fusion groups happening at that time. Actually, I remember Bela Fleck used to come through a lot and I kind of knew them indirectly and I used to go to their gigs a lot when they were around. So it was a different kind of energy in Nashville.

AAJ: Your percussionist roots translate to your piano playing.

JH: I'm pretty sure that it is a direct result of how I play piano. Since I've been in New York, I've kept going in terms of trying to develop a certain amount of facility on the instrument because some people feel that you can never have enough, but I think the point is to be able to have enough to always play any idea you want to play. If you have a lot of ideas that pop into your head, it can frustrate you if you can't get to them.

AAJ: What kinds of ideas pop into James Hurt's head?

JH: For me, the kinds of ideas that pop into my head are rhythms, rhythmic ideas. I go for those and that's something that I don't even have to think about. A big part of my playing is rhythm first. I have the ability to be a speed demon, but I choose not to because one of the many pianistic influences was, of course, Phineas Newborn, Jr. and Peterson and Tatum and Bud Powell and then prettier pianists, like the eloquent, chordal pianists like Rowles, just a whole lot of people, countless numbers of people, Bill Evans, everybody that tried to copy those cats and everybody that is an extension of those cats. Stride pianists, that's very challenging to try to get under your belt. I spent time just trying to practice little inflections of people that had influenced me pianistically, but at the same time I don't seek to be the next pianist that plays like that.

AAJ: That can't be winning over any new friends.

JH: I don't know how to respond to that but one way, Fred. I can tell you this, because of my style, I don't work a lot (sarcastically chuckling). Because of my style, I am sitting at home a lot during tourist season because I think that there is a certain amount of nostalgia attached to every instrument. I think especially instruments that have had a lot of different innovators and pioneers of a certain style. I think the more that the instrument develops stylistically that the more problems you have in trying to find a voice and the more people expect you to play like one of the styles that is already out. It's almost as if you are paying respect to that style by maintaining it, but I don't think we need to do that anymore because that's why technology allows us to record, so that we can preserve styles. So when I think of it that way, I think that it's important for me to develop my style. There was a time in the world when if you were playing somebody else's style, especially if they were alive and in the room, you didn't really get received in a positive way for doing that. That was called "apeing". That's what I know. That's the history that I know. I don't believe in stylistically copying someone. That's why I think my mission is a lot more different than these guys that listen to records and get all the lines and transcribe them. I did that a lot. I listened to a lot of styles, but I'm not a stylist and I don't seek to be. For me, it's like surgery. I go in and see what's there. Then when I go out of it, I don't expect to do any of that. I'm trying to make a style that allows me not to do most of those things that has already been done. I think that there is still room for a couple of more styles.

AAJ: You're not alone James, Greg Osby, a monster is just now getting his just due.

JH: Wow. Wow, that's amazing.

AAJ: Is that type of resistance keeping both the music and the musicians down?

JH: I think because of commercialism and because of what has worked in the past, there is a need to not fix what isn't broken in regards to the recording industry. They figure, "OK, this works. Let's stick with this." People that come out not sounding like that are in a much more critical position than people who are sounding like what's already on record, because they know how to market that style already. I don't really think that there is enough confidence in people that create these days, in this day and time. Like I was saying earlier, I grew up in a time when it was not good to copy a style. Now, this is like the cloning era. You almost wonder if you are out of place. You begin to wonder of your own position as an artist. I'm like, "Am I doing the wrong thing by trying to be an individual?" I think of it this way. The sun comes up and down and we revolve around this sun 365 days out of the year and that never stops. It never stops. So because of that creativity will never stop either. For some reason, I don't know if the industry thinks that, but the industry has managed to put whatever mainstream is, I don't know what that is, whatever mainstream sound is and they've managed to put that in people's mind as to what's acceptable or what's creative or what's in the know. Things that sound like they did 30 years ago, that's not really, that doesn't symbolize development or progress and forward motion to me. You can see it in how people are marketed. You can see it in what kind of compilations are being re-released. Then you can see how many new sounding or how many fresh sounding musicians are in those mainstream oriented jazz festivals and touring and club dates and all this other stuff. You can see that the more you sound like something that's already on record, the more you are going to work.

AAJ: Let's talk about your new album on Blue Note, "Dark Grooves Mystical Rhythms."

JH: There's like four drummers on the album. Eric McPherson's on drums. Ari Hoenig is playing drums. Nasheet Waits is on drums and also Dana Murray. Greg Tardy is on tenor saxophone. Abraham Burton plays alto on this. Antonio Hart plays soprano. Robin Eubanks plays 'bone, trombone. Russell Gunn plays trumpet and Sherman played alto and these are on separate tunes. I had a couple of tunes that had horns and the rest of the material was the "Dark Grooves" material, which was specifically written as a continuous work, where every tune came out of, maybe the first tune that you here on the album was from another series but they are all part of the "Mystical" series. I have "Dark Grooves," "Grooves," and I have "Mystic Grooves." There are a big collection of works that fall under this "Dark Grooves" category or this "Mystical" category. So we took three tunes for a session that I did in 1997 for Blue Note and these were the ones that had the horns on them. Eric Revis was on the bass with different drummers. And we took material that we did earlier this year with Ari, Francois (Moutin), Jacques (Schwarz-Bart), and myself and we put those two different sessions together to create "Dark Grooves Mystical Rhythms." I think it turned out very nice because the tunes that I did two years ago were still like in conjunction with the works that I came up with last year. I was like, "Oh, we can use this." They were really happy about that and I was happy too. You don't want to have material that you believe in and have it not be released or have it unheard, especially when the guys did a wonderful job on the material. And the music itself is basically more of a program thing. It's not just about music and an album and how many clichés you can play. Maybe it's a lot less cerebral than that.

AAJ: Why did you utilize so many different drummers?

JH: That's a good question, Fred. The reason is you think about what a great drummer is and what it means to be a great musician in general. There is more than one kind. There's more than one kind of greatness. There is a greatness that allows you to be able to do anything at any given time and in any style. And than there is a greatness that allows you to look inside of yourself and master, develop, and perfect your own style. That's something that constantly changes throughout your life. The drummers that I know, that I consider great are the latter type of greatness. They possess an individual style. I couldn't bear to ask them to play like someone else, but I could just ask them, "Give me you on this tune." I think that's a lot more effective than trying to get them to play like this guy. Everybody's happy that way. People hire me and tell me to play like blank-blank or this guy and I'm like, "Well, I don't do that." "Well, play some McCoy Tyner bass notes." I like, "I'm not going to do that." I have another approach. You understand. For me, the drumming thing was about making sure that I captured the individual sound of each drummer and of each tune. One drummer couldn't have done this album. There's no way.

AAJ: Who are the innovators in your opinion?

JH: I could start with now because it's in front of my face. It's tricky because to say that Herbie and Chick and Keith aren't individuals, or McCoy is to say a false statement, but at the same time, they all share elements of the same vocabulary in their playing and that's interesting. But they are individuals. For example, let's examine one person. When I hear Herbie, I hear Bill. I hear Gene Harris, a really funky piano, and of course, Bobby Timmons, Wynton Kelly, Horace, and I think he and Kenny are really close in age as well, Kenny Barron. They kind of sound, they have some kind of things that are alike in some ways. Cedar Walton has some things that remind me of them. I guess the really true individuals, definitely, you could say Tatum. Definitely, Bud Powell kind of broke the line and broke up the piano from boom-ching in the stride tradition to more of a free-floating left hand. I think that people that fell under him were an extension of him. Bill Evans had an individual style, very lyrical, blockish, not unlike playing block style chording, but the way he did it and the voicings that he used were new and fresh and so was McCoy. He came up with some voices that were new and fresh, but at the same time, he studied with Bud at one point anyway. Early things he did, he was playing very bebop oriented lines on some trio stuff that he used to do, early trio stuff. To hear that and to hear McCoy that made his later stuff is like,"Wow." I guess he came into individuality as did Chick. He had that really digital sounding stuff that he came out with, with Roy Haynes. That was to me an incredible sound, especially in the '60s. And then going further back, I love different things about pianists. Barry, I like the way he connects his stuff. Tommy, I thought he always had a beautiful touch, Tommy Flanagan and of course, Kenny Barron, Cedar, and, I'm trying to go backwards and backwards, Bud Powell and Monk.

AAJ: I heard Horace Silver in there.

JH: Oh, yeah.

AAJ: He told me he prefers not to relegate his compositions to a traditional trio setting and I know the same applies to you.

JH: I don't think that just because, for example, I don't think that just because you play piano that you deserve the honor of being forced to play trio. You don't force tenor players to play trio with pianoless trio or a trio without bass or a trio without drums. I don't understand the whole piano player, you've got to play trio thing. People come to me and ask me, you know, all these guys on your album are nice, but we'd sure like to see you play some trio. I'm not a trio pianist. I'm a composer. I don't really have a desire to play trio to prove that I can do that because it's not what my style best represents. My style is so rhythmic that there are things that I do against a musicians when he's playing that if the musicians not there, what I'm doing is going to make sense but it's not going to really be in context with what's my concept of piano is and that's to be a small part of a bigger picture, not to be the center of attention or the main attraction. OK, you have a piano player and the bass player and drummer are trying to keep up with him all night. I'm no going to burn myself out on that idea. I say that because Peterson's played a lot of piano for many decades. Bud Powell did, everybody that's beautiful, Martial Solal, beautiful trios. For me, I don't like that because it reminds me of, for the audience, when they hear trio music, it's like it reminds them of a time to drink or a time to eat food or to talk over the music. I don't like cocktail music or dinner music. That's what trio has been associated with through the years. OK, fine, they went into the studio and made some trio albums and stuff and they've become landmark albums. That goes without saying but at the same time, if you walk around town and go into a place where there is a piano player playing trio, or duo, or solo, people are talking over him. Maybe it's because it's in the wrong place, but it's come to be almost expected behavior when there's a trio playing. It's really not as exciting to the listener for some reason. Personally, for me, it's not that exciting for me to do. It's not that exciting. I have a whole other concept. I want rhythms against the rhythms that I'm playing.

AAJ: There were some pretty landmark trios.

JH: There are so many great trios that can be considered landmark. Nat Cole, the setup of his trio was kind of unique. Peterson had a setup that was not really similar but kind of similar because he and Nat were friends anyway.

AAJ: He had Joe Pass.

JH: Right. He had Joe. Right.

AAJ: Journalists describe what you play as acid jazz, is that accurate?

JH: What is acid jazz? I don't know what that is. Who has done some acid jazz, Fred? Did it come from here or did it come from England? I have to find out the history of acid jazz. To me, acid jazz has always sounded like some sort of groove and people just kind of not really playing anything that sounded like jazz but they were playing stuff that ended up being called acid jazz and that's not what I'm doing. What I'm doing is very simple. It's American bass lines or African bass lines. To simplify what it is, it's lopsided funk bass patterns or danceable bass patterns with intense groove in a new experimental vocabulary. I would think that that is a far away from acid jazz. A lot of signatures are not just four/four time. There's different times which comes from my interest in other music like Syrian music or Greek music or music that has odd signatures, which people can even dance to. They dance to these things. You know what puzzles me, Fred? That this country can be such an innovative, has the potential to be such an innovative country and now we're kind of being looked at by other countries as the country that used to be.

AAJ: What would you prefer to be associated as, James Hurt, the piano player or James Hurt, the composer?

JH: Definitely, I'm a composer. I'm fighting that image now. Just because I got signed and people saw me play acoustic piano, they like to think I'm a pianist. I tell people all the time that I am a composer and percussionist that plays piano. They can all be tied for first, but the first thing that I think of myself as when I sit down is a composer.

AAJ: And the future?

JH: Well, basically, I have enough stuff, because I want the series to kind of continue. I have enough "Mystical" compositions to do a nice sized next album. I want to get to, and I think I know. I understand now. I understand why. See this "acid jazz" thing that you said has really got me, Fred. That's deep. I want to get more of an earthier sound and maybe I'm considering not even using traditional set drums in the future and using more hand drums, different kinds of hand drums. The point is not really being fully grasped and that's because people aren't giving something their full attention before they write something down. I think.