Paul Bollenback
Web Site
April 2001

"I think it’s a real thrill for an audience to listen to a really great improviser taking risks and coming out landing on their feet like a cat all the time."

Soul Grooves
Challenge
1999

Reviewed by
Douglas Payne

By Sebastian Krueger

Paul Bollenback’s fierce guitar style permeates his records: Soul Grooves, Double Gemini, Original Vision. But Bollenback has also amassed an audience from his recordings with artists like Joey Defrancesco and Terri Lyne Carrington. Bollenback’s recent works include not only an upcoming spring release as a leader, but also a Brazilian album with Russian Pianist Andre Konakov, and a record with Terri Lyne Carrington featuring Herbie Hancock.

AAJ: When did you start playing?

PB: I started playing guitar at seven. Like folk music, simple chords. And then in the schools you had to take an instrument. I took trumpet the first year and trombone the second year. I wanted to play clarinet but the teacher said it would fuck my teeth up, so I didn’t.

AAJ: The teacher told you that?

PB: Yeah, or the orthodontist said that; I can’t remember who said that. Some motherfucker said that. Anyway, it turned out not to be true. But anyway. So my folks said ‘well, take a brass instrument.’ ‘Okay fine.’ So I played the trumpet for a year, trombone for a year. They had a piano in the house that I was always messin’ around on. And I kept messin’ around on the guitar throughout all of this. And I mean I didn’t really get serious about playing the guitar until I was probably fifteen or sixteen and started thinking, ‘damn, you know, I might actually be able to get pretty good at this.

AAJ: What turned you on to the Jazz side of it?

PB: Well, I kind of went through a progression of listening to- I guess when I was fourteen or fifteen listening to groups like Yes, and Genesis, King Crimson and somebody said, ‘man, you should listen to Mahavishnu Orchestra with John Mclaughlin. And I said, ‘wow, okay,’ put it on: ‘wow man, that’s amazing. It’s weird but it’s amazing.’ And then shortly after that somebody said ‘you should listen to Bitches Brew,’ which is, y’know, Miles Davis’s really ‘out’ stuff. Or no. It was actually ‘Big Fun’ it wasn’t ‘Bitches Brew,’ I got ‘Bitches Brew’ after that. So that got me started with the whole fusion thing with Chic Corea and everything. And then I moved to D.C. with my folks when I was fifteen and I met a couple of guys whose music interests were very eclectic. And so in addition to listening to Yes and King Crimson and all these other groups, we would also start listening to Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane. And then when I was seventeen one of my dad’s friends gave me a record of John Coltrane’s music and I just freaked on it. I loved it. And that was it for me: that was what I wanted to do. As you get older you start to see those moments a little more clearly.

AAJ: Why do you feel that this art form specifically is so important?

PB: In a larger artistic sense I think that you could just as well ask the question ‘why is art important?’ Any art: drama, music, whatever. Because I think that without art the world would be a pretty dull and gray place. Y’know? And it is supposed to spark people’s imaginations, bolster their spirits, take them places they haven’t been before. And it is just a nice thing that people do for each other I think. And if you take that away, then you’re missing something. So to answer more specifically about Jazz music, it offers something that no other music offers: which is a very high level of sophisticated improvisation. In other words, in classical music everything is written out unless the soloist, y’know, decides to take a cadenza that’s not written out. In which case they’re –if they haven’t really studied improvisation, they probably wrote their own cadenza out. In which case they are still reading what some composer wrote. In pop music and rock music there is the harmony and the setups for any solos that there might be are very simple. They are not very sophisticated and a lot of times they’re worked out too. Ahead of time, right? But in Jazz there is like a lot of spontaneous composition once you get through the head of the tune. It’s your job to like, create basically a series of continuous melodies expressing something on the tune. And that’s something that you don’t have in any other form of music: I mean that level of improvisation over those types of chord changes and rhythms and stuff. It’s very sophisticated stuff. And that’s why I think it’s important. I think it’s a real thrill for an audience to listen to a really great improviser taking risks and coming out landing on their feet like a cat all the time. Y’know?

AAJ: What’s your reaction to pop music?

PB: Well, I mean. I like music in general. So, I like a lot of pop music. I mean, I think that its function is a little different. I think that it’s kind of ironic that in the 1940’s Big Band music, Jazz, was the pop music of the day. And then in the 1960’s with the advent of Woodstock, record executives started looking at how they could sell millions of records to these kids. And they started looking at rock as a means of doing that. So, in a way there are some really great talents man, playing and composing for the pop music market right now. And I think it’s a very fertile period of time for pop music. And there’s a lot that I like. I mean I listen –I’ve got an eleven year old daughter, so I listen to Britney Spears sometimes and the Backstreet Boys and 98 Degrees and all that stuff. But I also of course listen to Stevie Wonder and some of the hip-hop stuff like D’angelo. Y’know, just to check it out and see where it’s coming from. It’s deep. Like Me'Shell Ndegeocello. It’s really deep pop music. The harmony is very sophisticated, the melodies are sophisticated, the arrangements are sophisticated. Steely Dan is a great example of that. That’s some fantastic pop music. But I think it’s unfortunate that it’s so easy to get confused if you don’t know anything about music. It’s so easy to get mislead by marketing. I was at the airport yesterday –day before yesterday, couple of days ago, whatever- and this guy came over and sat down next to me, he saw my guitar and said ‘so what is that, guitar or bass?’ I said ‘well, it’s a guitar.’ He said ‘what do you play, rhythm or lead?’ And as soon as I heard that I was like ‘ oh boy. Here we go. What is this gonna be about?’ So I said ‘it’s Jazz.’ ‘Oh, I love Jazz!’ I said, ‘oh really, where are you from?’ Says, ‘Oh, I’m from D.C.’ I said ‘oh man, y’know I spent many years in D.C. Who do you like to listen to?’ So I thought he was gonna say, having said the word ‘Jazz,’ I thought he was gonna say ‘man I love Trane and Miles and Connonball Adderly’ and he was an older guy. And what he said was ‘yeah man I like Kirk Whallum and I love Kenny G and Boney James is my favorite.’ And I felt like saying –y’know I didn’t want to be rude, so I didn’t say ‘listen man, that shit is not Jazz. Okay? But eventually it did come around in our conversation where I said ‘yeah I thought when you said Jazz, you were gonna say the real Jazz.’ Y’know? And not the pop jazz. Because it’s not Jazz. The only thing it has in common with Jazz is an element of improvisation. All the rest of it is R&B basically. And it was interesting that this guy who was absolutely convinced that the music he loved was Jazz –and the problem is if you tell enough people that Boney James and Kenny G are Jazz, when somebody goes to hear a real Jazz group play, they have no idea how it’s supposed to sound. And it doesn’t sound like what they’re used to listening to. And so they say ‘I don’t like this,’ As opposed to the opposite: okay, this is Jazz. Listen to it a bunch of times, then go hear it live; This is instrumental pop music. This what you like? Go listen to this, go buy these records. AAJ: Heroes?

PB: Heroes. Wow.

AAJ: That’s always a hard one.

PB: Uh, heroes. Probably musical heroes would have to be like Miles Davis, John Mclaughlin, Lenny Breau. Maybe that’s it as far as heroes go. Um, Jeff Watts is a hero of mine. Jeff Tain Watts, yeah because when I think of somebody who’s a hero, I think of somebody who has really triumphed over adversity. Y’know? And presented something of real deep value to the world in the field they’re involved. And Jeff is certainly one of those guys, [because he left a really high paying gig with the Tonight Show so that he could regain his creative focus] So yeah, those would be good examples.

AAJ: How long have you known him?

PB: Tain? I’ve known Tain for –lemme see. I first recorded with Tain in 1987, so that’s thirteen years I’ve known Tain.

AAJ: There’s a pretty solid partnership there?

PB: Yeah, I mean y’know. He likes my playing. I like his playing. He’s a very busy guy y’know: touring with Branford Marsalis and Michael Brecker and Kenny Garret. So those are like the three top name saxaphone players in Jazz. So that keeps him pretty busy. So I don’t get to play with him as much as I would like.

AAJ: Any perks that you’d like to mention or highlight?

PB: Ahh. Well, I think that in terms of the whole travel thing –that can be a real perk. It just depends on how you travel, how much you like to travel, and much you travel. For example, I have been several times to Russian and while the travel itself can be pretty brutal –in other words, just to give you an example, my last tour there: get to Moscow, they had a hotel for me in Moscow so I could sleep a little bit. Slept till about seven in the evening. Guy came to pick me up. We took the subway with my bags and my guitar to the end of the line. And then caught a van which was packed with people to the airport. Waited at the airport for an hour and a half, got on a flight. Flew for four hours over four time zones. Wound up the next morning at eight o’clock –well, we arrived at six o’clock in the morning at this town. It’s freezing cold. It’s snowing. This guy comes and picks me up. There’s not enough room for all of us. He has two cars, they’re both small. So you like pack into these little cars, everything is filthy dirty. Go to a hotel. Get to the hotel. The hotel is like really funky. And it takes a long time to get checked in because in Russia, everybody’s a spy. Y’know? You got your passport and it takes an hour, write everything down. So finally you get your room key. You go and collapse for a few hours, and sure enough four hours later the sun is beating in because there’s no blind on the windows. The sun is beating in and you’re like ‘oh god, okay.’ So you get up. Oh, and then there’s a knock at the door. Okay, time to go to sound check. Okay, four o’clock in the afternoon man. You drag your butt up. You plug in. Amplifier sucks, it’s piece of garbage. So you do the sound check, and then it’s time for food. So you sit down, have some food. In the meantime you’re like all screwed up because of the jet lag and traveling and no getting enough sleep. 2 days with no sleep. But then you go and you play the concert. And the concert is killin’. It’s just jam packed with people that’re just absolutely loving you though. Just encore after encore, y’know. It’s like 1500-2000 people in this concert hall And so after the concert you’re awake because on your clock it’s like the morning y’know. So. You go and you get something to eat, maybe hang out for a while. In this particular instance that I am thinking of, the next day we had a flight –what the hell was it- oh yeah, we had to leave 4:30 in the morning to go catch our flight. So, I mean it was like, we got done with the concert at like 12:30. We hung out until 3:30, went back, packed the bags, and got on a shuttle bus to got to the airport to catch another flight back to Moscow to play a concert that night. So it can be really bruta,l but I mean I had a great time while I was there. And um, it was certainly worth the trip and I would do it again and I have done it actually since. I have done several trips there. And as far as other perks are concerned, I mean, this last tour I did to St Louis –it was great. We had a nice condo they put us up in. The refrigerators were completely stocked with food and drinks. The club was right across the street from the condo. Any place we wanted to go, the guys would take us where we wanted to go. They took us out to eat at nice places everyday. And it was just a very relaxing thing. I mean the gig. The gig: we did two sets. It was fine. It was no problem. It was a nice club, pay way good. So, I mean there are a lot of perks. Ithink the biggest perk is that you do have, to certain extent, the ability to say 'no.' In other words, if you don't want to do a gig or you want to take the day off, or you want to not take a particular tour, or you want to cancel a tour, you just do it. Y'know. And then you have a certain amount of autonomy. Your time is, to certain extent, your own. It's just a matter of how you choose to fill it up: what you choose to take, what you choose not to take. And of course playing is the biggest perk because that is a lot of fun.

AAJ: What about teaching, how did that come about?

PB: It came about many years ago. Somebody wanted to take a lesson from me. I was like ‘well, duh, gee I don’t know. What can I show you?’ So we sat down and I started showing him some stuff and the next thing I know, I have a bunch of people calling me saying ‘y’know man, I heard that you could really teach and y’know, we want to take some lessons from you.’ And it’s developed over the years. I mean I have taught at all levels. From very beginners, little kids, to the most advanced pros that have come to me for lessons. I’ve still got guys who are playing and who are touring all the time that come to me periodically for lessons. Man. And, I enjoy it. It’s fun. I mean of course it’s a nice way to augment your living: it doesn’t take up too much time, and there is a certain flexibility to it. If, for example, I called you next week and said ‘man, y’know I got a tour. I’m gonna be out. We’ll make up the lessons.’ And that’s it. That’s what it is. It’s not like if I don’t go, I’m gonna be fired.

AAJ: Has it helped your playing, just to reaffirm what you know?

PB: Ah, yeah. Actually it’s quite a challenge sometimes man. Because y’know, you’ve got bright students asking questions like, ‘how did you do this, why did you do that?’ It forces you to be on your toes a little bit y’know. It’s funny. When I have been touring a lot and I haven’t been teaching a lot, I really notice it. Like I’ll get in here. I’ll be like ‘oh yeah, that’s right, ah, lemme see, when you do this, ah, use, ah, I dunno, try this.’It’s definitely a challenge man. I mean, there’s no question about it. But it’s fun. Most of the time it’s fun. It’s only not fun when you’ve got somebody who either is not interested and they are only there because they need the credit, or because y’know somebody told them they had to go. Or they’re just like totally untalented with no musical ability at all, and they’re just dying to be a player. Or they don’t just do the work. That’s a drag because then –actually what I do now is that if somebody hasn’t done the work, I tell them, ‘use the time to practice,’ and I go off and do my own thing. Cause I’m not a babysitter man. Y’know, that’s not fair to me either, and say ‘yeah okay, entertain me for an hour because I’m paying.’ Fuck that.

SK What about the issue of race and gender in your profession? I think that is probably a good issue for jazz musicians –at least the male side of it. Why there isn’t a big wealth of female instrumentalists?

PB: Well, it’s definitely gotten better, I think, in the last twenty years. I know a lot of young female musicians who are playing just absolutely great. And they’re making an impact. And they tend to band together. In other words, you have a lot of –in New York you have not enormous amounts, maybe four or five groups of women that play together. And they hire each other. That’s what they do. That’s how they help to promote their community, basically. Jazz has been a very male dominated music for years. It still is, but I think it is changing. I think that women are asserting themselves more now, and they’re really showing everybody that they that they can play great. And y’know, that’s about all I have to say about that. I get really aggravated personally when I find that somebody’s not getting hired because they’re a woman. I think that really sucks. So I mean I have had plenty of bands where I have had women bass players, women piano players, another female guitarist, female drummers. My main drummer for a while, about two or three years, was a woman named Alison Miller who’s very popular. She plays great. Anyway.

AAJ: What about being white, every have problems there?

PB: Well, y’know what? I can’t say that I’ve had a problem. But I always tip my hat to the African-American community because basically they taught me. Musicians from that community taught me everything I know about playing Jazz. And so I have a pretty good connection with certain aspects of that. But I do know a lot of white musicians that complain, especially in terms of record deals and record –not so much distribution, but in terms of the deals that they get. And this is where it’s really tricky because you see a lot of young black musicians getting record deals to play Jazz, and they tend to play with other young black musicians, which is –whatever. I mean that is what it is. Y’know? Maybe it’s not a conscious thing. I certainly don’t feel cut out of that. But there’s a whole thing about this image that some record companies like to project –that really handsome, model-looking, really young, African-American Jazz musician, who plays in the style of (fill in the blank with whatever great master you care to fill in). –Which is not the fault of the musician, but the record labels are just out to exploit this stuff. Now, the back side of it, that some people just don’t get to with this is that the distribution that these black musicians get, and the push that they get from the record labels, mostly sucks. And most of those record labels such as Columbia, Warner Brothers, Polygram, and Atlantic, would rather put their big, big bucks behind white pop artists or white rock artists. I mean you look at like the Backstreet Boys or Britney Spears, or anybody like that, and they’re basically imitating African American roots music. Y’know? And they are getting all this ridiculous amount of play, and half the time they can’t even sing. Like Britney Spears: I don’t think she can sing, but she’s got a really big machine behind her, and lots of money. Now, if Jazz musicians had the same amount of money behind them, we would do maybe not quite as well because it is a small market, but we would certainly do a lot better, just in terms of being able to promote ourselves than right now. It’s all on us, y’know? And I think in a corporate world, if you’re black, there’s still a ceiling and I think that, that it’s really sad. I mean, I’ve certainly seen it. I’ve talked with a lot of musicians about this, about how, just as an example, Harry Connick will get more funding than, for example, George Benson. -For tour support and all that stuff. I mean, I don’t know how much of this is just built-in corporate, institutionalized prejudice or how much of it is exploitation –how much of it is even conscious. I don’t know. But that’s sort of one thing that I’ve seen. And I’ve seen a lot of white guys who are bitter that they’re not getting called to do certain gigs when maybe some young black guy is getting called to dot he gig who can’t play as well as they can. But they’re getting it because of an image thing that the bandleader or whoever wants to project. But to me it sounds like sour grapes when somebody says that. Because the black musicians are the ones that had to go in the back door in the 1940's, 50's and even in the 60's. And so, whatever success they can have as a group of people, the more power to 'em. I've been very lucky man, 'cause ninety percent of the groups I play with are all or mostly black. It's definitely coming out of that thing. At least that's just the way it's been for me.

AAJ: I’ve met a lot of people who seem bitter that Jazz isn’t in the forefront of pop music. But you’re a nice, humorous person who seems to care a lot about what you do. Do you want to speak to whether personal spirit matters to your success or that success is a function of spirit?

PB: Oh, it probably works both ways really. And in our business, and really any aspect in the music business, there is nobody but you to take care of things. I mean it all comes back to you. It’s easy to get dark about it for sure. Especially when you think about certain tour circuits and the way certain things are closed to those of us. I had good recognition cause I could play and I write and I’ve been out on the scene for a while. I don’t have sour grapes about it. But I could. And I could say ‘damn, man. I could be much further along here, y’know, if blah, blah, (fill in the blank)’. Whatever. But it’s really hard to make a living doing this stuff. And I think that;s the thing that people forget that. They say, ‘wow man, y’know, you’re a musician, man. You’re doin’ what you really love to do. You get to travel and, and y’know, if you’re any good you get to play with great players. And wow, concerts. It must be a really glamorous thing.’ Man, lemme tell you something: man, the only thing glamorous about playing jazz music is when you’re up on the bandstand, and you’re playing, and the audience is a great audience, and the band is on fire. That’s the only thing glamorous about it because everything else about it sucks. I mean, you’re not gonna make a whole lot of money, unless you’re really smart with your investments and are a really good negotiator. Like, I know a couple of guys, younger guys, who have really managed to do it to the record companies as far as getting a lot of money out of them. And they took that money and they invested it and now they have like half million dollar homes. But you’re not gonna have that if you’re Joe Blow who’s, trying to be an artist, and schlepping away at this stuff. It’s not gonna happen unless you get, like I said, very lucky. So you have that aspect of it. The money is always a struggle. You always gotta be thinking about ‘I’ve got all these bills I gotta pay. I got this thing I wanna buy. I got that I need to get. I need to get my car fixed, How many gigs do I gave this month?’ ‘Cause it’s not like you go to work for, y’know, IBM, designing software for them. You stay with them, and as long as they treat you nice, you’re set. Then you get a promotion and then they ask you to do this project. And then the next thing you know, you’re sixty-five and they’re handing you a nice fat pension check. Y’know? It’s not like that man. You don’t have paid vacations. You wanna take a vacation, you look and say, ‘okay, ah, I had two short tours this month that were really, really good money, and I got a record date next month. I can afford to take this week and I can go.’ But there’s some months you don’t- even the greatest players, man. There’s some months when they’re looking at it like, ‘mmmmyeah, I better not do that this month.’ That’s a constant issue. Sometimes things are cool: you sit back and you just let the phone ring and its fine. But the time when it doesn’t ring, for whatever reason, or it rings- five people calling you for the same week, y’know. You’re like ‘okay, hehe. But Jeff Tain Watts, he’s an incredible spirit. Kenny Kirkland, I knew: amazing spirit. Ray Drummond, bass player: loaded with spirit. It helps.

AAJ: When you record in the studio, how do you track? Do you do it live or together?

PB: It depends. Generally speaking you want to it live together because that’s gonna give you the best cohesive sound. But I’ve done stuff where they want a rhythm guitar and a solo on top of it. So, I’ll track the solo first and then play the rhythm part and then I’ll go back and redo the solo. That’s one possibility. Sometimes the studio might be small and you might have a big group, so you have the rhythm section lay down all their tracks. That’s how I did Soul Grooves. I had the rhythm section lay down all their tracks the first day, and then the horns came in the second day and laid down all their tracks. So even though it sounds like everybody’s playing together, it was done in two separate days. My next record that I’m doing, they wanna go it direct to two-track, which means that it’ll be live with no editing and no punches or anything. No overdubs.

AAJ: You cool with that?

PB: Sure. I mean, it’s a little stressful, but I’ve done it before, actually a bunch of times, and you just deal with it man. You go in, you concentrate. You take care of business.

AAJ: And you did all the arranging for Soul Grooves?

PB: Yeah. That’s all me. I studied a little bit of arranging and I’ve always arranged my own music. I’ve always done arrangements of other people’s music. So it’s just a matter of deciding what you want, and how to get to it. I knew I wanted horns on that. And I wanted to try and figure out how I could utilize this stuff in a creative way. The writing principles are the same whether you’re writing for solo guitar or writing for horns or string quartet or whatever. The idea’s the same. The idea is to keep the voices moving, to get the right color and texture and everything, and to support the melody and in the solos. What I do usually is that I write first without the instrument. I just write: Sit down and figure out what it is I wanna do, lay out the score. For this trio record that I’m getting ready to do, there will be very little written music ‘cause we’re gonna do a bunch of standards. And the tunes that everybody knows I might just think about some ways to do ‘em really cool. I just want there to be a lot of room for improvisation. So, there’s not gonna be a heavily arranged thing on this. That’s actually more thought on my part about what I want to play, and just playing that; as opposed to figuring out how do I want to arrange it. But with Soul Grooves, I knew it was gonna be a big project, so I got out my score paper and figured out how many parts I needed, and what I wanted, who I wanted. And I fussed around with it on the guitar for a little while to figure out what the overall sound was gonna be. Once I got the basic tune, all the harmony and everything all figured out- like if there were gonna be any breaks, meter shifts, how was this gonna go- Once I got that sussed-out, then I took that and transferred it to the score paper, with room for the horns. I wrote the horn parts as I went along. I was thinking about it like, ‘okay man, now here we’re gonna be working on this tune. Where do I want this tune to go? Do I want it to be the same thing here? Do I want it to be thicker, thinner? Do I want any horns at all here? What solo do I want here?’ Um, making decisions like that. And I would write it in, and I did a lot of this work on airplanes and trains and like, in clubs, on the brink, just ‘cause I didn’t have much time. Anyway, once I got it done, I would copy the parts out. And then I would play them either to the sequencer or to the four-track, just making sure that I really liked what I heard. And there might be some adjustments I could make or maybe I miscopied something and it was screwed up, just like proof-reading it also. So that’s my process for writing. I don’t ever bring something in untested. Unless I am just really positive that it’s gonna be cool, especially a big project, like we don’t have a lot of time. We don’t have a lot of time, man, for the things. Listen, when we did Soul Grooves, we did the rhythm tracks, in one day. Ten hours in the studio. Usually one take each. We had one short rehearsal before that. The horns came in, and I had given some of them their parts, but they didn’t have time to look at it. So they came in. They were reading the stuff cold, and it took them six hours to do it. So the whole thing was done in sixteen hours in the studio. We had two days. That’s all we could afford. That’s all the record label could afford.

AAJ: That’s pretty impressive.

PB: Well, it’s a pain in the neck. It would be nice to have a little more time.

AAJ: I was curious about the comment you made about what the ‘real’ jazz is. I was wondering where you thought those lines broke down. ‘Cause you said that Kenny G was more along the lines of R&B pop. Just like some of the things we call jazz now that are getting popular are like Medeski Martin and Wood, the Scofield stuff. What is that then? How are these defined?

PB: Well, I don’t know. This is a good question. I think for everybody it’s gonna be a bit different. I do know one thing and that is when you’re talking about jazz, it’s got to have the element of strong, sophisticated improvisation in it. And it’s got to have some kind of a reference to what historically, I think, came before, like in terms of where it’s coming from harmonically, rhythmically, and melodically. Just in terms of the vocabulary. At a certain point I don’t even think it’s important to call something Jazz. It just makes me aggravated when I think about the marketing techniques. It has a lot more to do with that than any philosophical viewpoint, because to me, it’s all music man. I mean, I like listening to Kenny G. That’s fine, but it’s not Jazz. And to market as Jazz does a big disservice to hundreds of thousands of Jazz musicians across the world.

AAJ: Which led to your point about how people go to see, straight-ahead jazz, it’s upsetting to them because-

PB: Yeah. It’s not what they expect. They’re like, ‘man, can’t you play smooth jazz?’ We say, ‘well, yeah we could but we don’t want to. This is what we do.’ Y’know? So that leads to all kinds of problems. But no, I mean, I love the stuff that Sco is doing and, y’know, Medeski Martin and Wood. I mean it’s working for them and musically it sounds good. So hey.