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Rob Reddy: The Fine Line Between Composition and Comfort

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A lot of times when I go to mix a record, an engineer will pull some of those ensemble things, those ensemble ideas, way down beneath a soloist. And I'll almost always say, 'No, no, bring that up--I want the clash. I want it to be in the same sonic space
Rob Reddy's one of the prominent soprano saxophonists working today, but his reputation has been built upon his work as bandleader and, especially, as a composer. He's been a presence in New York for 20 years now, having studied with soprano player Dave Liebman and reedsman Makanda Ken McIntyre before graduating from the first-ever jazz program at Greenwich Village's New School.

Reddy played as a sideman with bassist Reggie Workman and drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson (Jackson encouraging him to pick up the alto saxophone, an instrument he hadn't played in years) before starting his first group, a trio with Workman and drummer Pheeroan Aklaff. His first recording, Post-War Euphoria (Songlines, 1996) was a sextet set by his group Rob Reddy's Honor System, and was marked by all the elements that mark his music to this day: tight ensemble playing, fierce improvisation that's never indifferent to the character of the composition, and the sextet format itself, which—personnel and instrumentation varying—has been the lineup for all but one of Reddy's recordings. Reddy's surrounded himself with some of improvisational music's least generic musicians—players like Aklaff, drummer Guillermo Brown, guitarist Jef Lee Parker, bassist Dom Richards and violinist Charles Burnham—but the group performances on his CDs are, paradoxically, among the most unified and composition-centered in jazz music.

In addition to a healthy and ever-increasing number of commissions coming in for his compositions, Reddy released A Hundred Jumping Devils in late 2006, a release by his group Gift Horse. This is his first CD in five years and the first-ever release on his own Reddy Music imprint. It's worth the wait. I spoke with Reddy about the new recording, his thoughts on composition and improvisation, the players in Gift Horse, the soprano saxophone, and much more.

Chapter Index

A Hundred Jumping Devils: Why Five Years In the Making?
Gift Horse: "Chamberness and Mino Cinelu
Musicians' Personalities and the Line Between Composition and Comfort
Influences and "Eclecticism
More About Mino
Charles Burnham
Mark Taylor: Why French Horn?
Rehearsing
"The Unnamable
"One (For Jef)
"A Hundred Jumping Devils
Supporting and Competing with the Soloist
"Mark of Sincerity
"A Soprano Saxophonist Who Doubles on Alto
Interest in Smaller Groups and Thoughts on Composing
Gigging
What's Coming Up?



A Hundred Jumping Devils: Why Five Years In the Making?

All About Jazz: You have a new CD released, the wonderful A Hundred Jumping Devils, the first with your sextet Gift Horse, and the first on your own Reddy Music label.

This is your first CD in five years—your first since the Seeing by the Light of My Own Candle album from 2001, which was the third record of yours to come out in three years. What produced such a long interval between recordings?

Rob Reddy: Good question. I don't think it was by choice, or by too much of a choice that there was that much of a gap between these recordings. I suppose it was a mixture of always having more than one ensemble on my plate that I compose for—up until releasing this last record, anyway—and trying to find a label to put these recordings out on where it made sense and where I was able to scrape up a tiny little budget to be able to make the record and pay people as much as I want to. So those things were factors.

And that has a lot do do with why I finally threw in the towel and decided to put this last one out myself. I had been hemming and hawing about doing it for a while, because I knew how much more work it would be to put one out myself and actually get it out there correctly and actually sell more than five copies of it. So I sat on A Hundred Jumping Devils for about a year; it was pretty much done and ready to go. Finally, I decided to just start a label and put it out. And I'm really glad I did—it's been really great to sort of get a feeling for the inner workings of how to get a record out there and get people to listen to it and write about it. And buy it! class="f-right"> Return to Index...




Gift Horse: "Chamberness and Mino Cinelu

AAJ:This new CD is yet another sextet set, like the majority of your records—you don't seem interested in very small group presentations of your work—and it's yet another unique configuration, although like the last several, it includes Charlie Burnham on violin and Dom Richards on bass. Like all your records, it's got a richness of tone produced by that distinctive blend of voices and harmonized written melody lines that, like the rest of the music, bring to mind a great host of musical influences without really being overly indebted to any one of them. It's full of great improvising, but that improvising is always glued to the compositional material as opposed to the written work just being a structure for solos.



That said, I think this one might be the most compositional of all your recordings, and I also think the music is a little less about polyphony than Seeing by the Light of My Own Candle was. The presence of Mino Cinelu on percussion is really distinctive here and pushes the material into some especially grooving areas. Tell me what you wanted to accomplish with this recording and how it might differ from your previous work.

RR: I didn't sit down and make any sort of conscious decisions to try and make a different record. But I had scored a short film that was clarinet, French horn, violin and cello. So this record had something to do with that music that I wrote for that short film. I thought of having French horn, saxophone—instead of clarinet—and violin as a, so to speak, front line. There was something about it that I wanted to emphasize sonically—the chamber-ness, if that's a word, of that instrumentation. And I didn't think drum kit, which really takes up a lot more space sonically, with the high-end cymbals and low-end bass drum, would work. Especially the drummers that I prefer, really hard hitting drummers like Pheeroan Aklaff and Guillermo Brown. I think what they do takes up a lot more space sonically than what a percussionist might play.

I first met Mino when I was at the New School. He taught a class there, so I met him then, and we live very close to each other here in Brooklyn, so I'd run into him a few times. So it had been in the back of my mind that he might be great for this music, so I gave him some of the music and it just worked out really well. And yes, his choices of instruments were great—he really studied this music a lot, took the time to think about it and really work with it. So it just worked out perfectly. class="f-right"> Return to Index...




Musicians' Personalities and the Line Between Composition and Comfort

RR: About the music being even more compositional than the previous records—I'm sort of in the midst of a struggle, I think, with improvisation and its place in my music. I want to write for musicians that are what I refer to, and I'm putting my fingers up in quotes, "folk music. Musicians that play American folk music—jazz music, popular music, gospel music, blue music—because the interpretation is so completely different than if I were to hire more classically-trained musicians for my music. I might get more preciseness out of somebody like that, but I think I tend to gravitate towards musicians that have these really strong personalities. [Violinist] Charlie Burnham and [French horn player] Mark Taylor and [guitarist] Brandon Ross and [guitarist] Jef Lee Johnson and all the people who play my music are people who come with a really strong sound and a really distinct musical personality. But yes, I don't particularly tend to just write vehicles for them to blow on. But I don't want them to feel handcuffed, like they can't be themselves. So there's this really fine line between trying to get what I want out of people and having them feel comfortable and able to really play.

AAJ: No line could be finer.

RR: [Laughing] Yeah, exactly. It's working out, though. It's working out well.

AAJ: Well, you do want the musicians to be themselves, and the music has soloing in it—often very thrilling soloing. I interviewed someone once who told me he wasn't very interested in music that had a very clear line between the composition and solos—"Okay, we're soloing now.

RR: Yeah, "Here's the melody, and now the horn player's going to play, and then we're going to hear a bass solo, and the drum solo, and out. It's a formula that I grew up on and loved, but it's been done a little too much. But yeah, I like the morphing of those two things—of something that's clearly been composed and seems to sort of ask for something to be interpreted very specifically mixed with improvising. class="f-right"> Return to Index...




Influences and "Eclecticism

RR: I think I'm also coming to terms with all the influences I've had and all the music that's been in my past, like the rock and roll and popular music I grew up on as a kid. I went through a time where I was that "jazz guy. I was really just into jazz music. Then in the last ten years or so, I became really engrossed in western classical music. Then there was a time when I was listening to tons of American folk music and gospel music. And I remember a time in the mid-nineties when everyone was sort of throwing around this eclecticism—that was kind of a buzzword and there were people out there putting out records that were "eclectic. I remember kind of finding it mildly annoying; it just seemed like a buzzword to try to sell some records, but I think that same thing's sort of come around for me, and it's very organic. I'm starting to notice, if I listen back to my records, that there's not such a direct link—"Oh, that's from me listening to this so much, or, "This is from me listening to Led Zeppelin when I was a kid, or, "This harmony comes from the contemporary classical music that I'm checking out now. It's more of an osmosis; it's just sort of there buzzing around my head and it just seeps in.

AAJ: Well, it should seep in. No one's really inventing music in a complete cultural vacuum, and no one should be pretending that they are. But if you were exasperated by that so-called "eclectic music, it may have been that it was cynically or self-consciously done—not a question of musical influences just seeping in.

RR: Yeah. It's interesting—when people were writing about my records, about my music, there's always that, "It smells like this, it tastes like this, it sounds like so-and-so. I really do understand why those references are important and how they're helpful to people that listen, but if I sound like anyone, it really does have to do with what I was just saying. I could list maybe five people that always come up when people write about my music, but I've never consciously tried to be or sound like any of those people. I've worked with some of them, and I've listened to some of them, listened to a lot of their music—and there's no way logically or realistically that there couldn't be some essence of their music somewhere floating around inside my music. But I've never been conscious of it; I've never consciously tried to sound like someone else's music.

AAJ: What names come up most often when writers describe your music?

RR: Well, [drummer/composer Ronald] Shannon Jackson comes up, who I worked with. I played in his Decoding Society. So that completely makes sense to me, because I know that Shannon composes from the melody out. He always writes the melody first, which is essentially what I do. No matter how dense or cacophonous his music can get, there's always a really strong melody in Shannon's music, and I think that's sort of where I'm coming from. I generally write the melody first and then let things grow from there. So I certainly don't mind the reference.

Composer/saxophonist/flautist] Henry Threadgill comes up, and yes, I've listened to a lot of his music and I love it. I think he's one of our greatest composers. He's doing some stuff that's completely different than anyone else. I don't even really want to think about why that reference comes up—maybe it's the different instrumentations, maybe it's what I hear in his music related to other world musics and folk musics. Ornette Coleman comes up. Those are the three top ones I get.

AAJ: Your music doesn't really specifically remind me of anyone. I have a hard time even thinking about any comparison to Ornette, because to me he's like air—we've all breathed it. He's in everyone's music unless they're doing something consciously opposed to his music, which means they're responding to him as well. class="f-right"> Return to Index...




More About Mino

AAJ: I want to talk some about the musicians on this recording, although you've already covered some of that. I particularly like this band; it's as distinctive-sounding a band as you've produced. I want to ask more about Mino because I've been so taken aback by his playing on this record. I can't believe that he's not overdubbed, especially on something like "The Unnamable, where he sounds like two or even three percussionists. Beyond that, what does he add to your music, beyond what you've told me?

RR: Well, that's the only overdub on the record. And it's not in the liner notes—I guess I didn't say "overdubs. I said "additional recording. But "The Unnamable is the only thing with any overdubbing, because he was playing congas and djembe and whatnot, and he wanted to add a little flavor with what he calls "toys —the smaller instruments, the metallic kind of stuff. So [laughing] you picked the one! Otherwise, he would have needed something like six limbs on that one.

AAJ: Well, he sounds multi-limbed on a lot of them.

RR: Yeah. "A Hundred Jumping Devils is one take. The songs are all complete takes. There's no splicing or any of that shit going on. On "A Hundred Jumping Devils, he begins playing on hand drums, moves to something more like a drum kit—it's not really like a full drummer's kit although it resembles that—moves to something that sounds like a tabla and then moves back to the kit thing, or tablas, or hand drum, really seamlessly. And he just did that live. He was just turning his seat from one thing to another. I know that I wanted a single hand drum-sounding thing on the opening of that, and I know I asked him specifically to play a sort of ride-cymbal thing in the bridge of that one—but that's about it. Everything else is just him really going with it and doing what he thought made sense.

AAJ: He must have given it some real thought.

RR: He definitely did, and he nailed it. Everything he did there and in the rest of the music really made sense. And like you said before, he really drives this record in a different way from what I think I would have gotten from a more traditional kit drummer.

I'm going to make another record in the fall with this band—the exact same band. I've got about a half-book of music now, so by the fall I'll be ready to go with the whole thing. class="f-right"> Return to Index...




Charles Burnham

AAJ: Tell me about Charlie Burnham. He's played on the last three of your recordings, and I love his violin playing on just about every record I've heard him on. But I feel that your music brings out a magnificence to his playing that, on this record, actually makes me anticipate his upcoming solos. His playing on the ensembles is impeccable as well. What's he add to the mix?

RR: Oh, man, he's just brilliant. He's got a beautiful, beautiful violin sound. I know I've said this before about Charlie's improvising, but I definitely hear things that are definitely Charlie and come out of a pool of lines that he's played before or notes that he's played before—but his improvising is so pure. It's so obvious Charlie's never sat down and practiced those sequences and chord things that I've heard guys practice at school, those things I completely dislike where I was always wondering, "Why are they practicing that? He just improvises so freely—it's so obvious and clear that he's open to going anywhere while he's in the midst of a solo. And it works so well; he's always very inside the piece of music that I put in front of him.

AAJ: He always seems to have eaten and digested the music completely and his playing is then completely appropriate to its content.

RR: Yes, exactly. So to have him in the ensemble is great; he's just a wonderful spirit to have around. I really think Charlie is one of the most underrated musicians walking around the city, or walking around this country right now. He's going to put out a record of his own pretty soon and I just can't wait. I hear that it's really great. class="f-right"> Return to Index...




Mark Taylor: Why French Horn?

AAJ: I could talk about every musician on this record, but I won't. I'm sure you've been asked about this, but French horn is possibly the most uncommon instrument in improvisational or jazz music. So what does Mark Taylor's French horn do here that, say, a trumpet couldn't do?

RR: Well, the instrument itself is really different from trumpet. Texturally, it sounds completely different from any other brass instrument—trumpet or trombone. And the way I get it to blend with, specifically, soprano saxophone and violin, is something I like. It's just a beautiful instrument; I'm kind of having a little love affair with that instrument. I'm going to premiere a piece in March and, instead of having trombone or tuba, I'm having two French horns and two trumpets. I'm writing a piece for a ten-piece group.

AAJ: This is your ensemble Rob Reddy's Small Town?

RR: Yeah, that's the thing in March. I'm working on another commission for all of next year, and that's the ten-piece group. It's like Gift Horse plus four other voices. That's going to have Mark playing French horn. So it's a really great instrument, and Mark improvises with some serious agility on that instrument. Specifically, his solos on "The Unnamable and his solo on "Abraham on that record. I remember the playback on "Abraham, and everyone just clapped and yelled. You know, when you hear someone like Mark improvise on this instrument—it's got that thing I particularly like in players that I really, really like a lot: I forget what instrument they're playing. I don't hear Mark Taylor playing the French horn. I just hear his sound coming at me.

But on that point about peoples' sounds—it's the same thing with Charlie, or with Brandon Ross, or Dom Richards, or Jef Lee Johnson, or Pheeroan Aklaff. I don't get an image of the person and the instrument. It's just this sound coming at me. I don't see or hear the separation between the human and the instrument.

AAJ: Well, you pick these kinds of players. Jef Lee Johnson may be the ultimate expression of that sensibility.

RR: Yeah. I'm going to be playing with him again. I saw him playing in Brooklyn a few weeks ago and realized [laughing] how much I missed playing with him! So I'm writing some music for him right now. We'll be doing a project in 2007. class="f-right"> Return to Index...




Rehearsing

AAJ: How much rehearsal did this group have before you did the recording? The performances are very good.

RR: I played out in New York with that ensemble maybe twice and then we did two really healthy, long rehearsals just before the record. They were very relaxed rehearsals—it was actually a rehearsal studio in Brooklyn that doubles as a yoga studio, so we had this beautiful space to stretch out in, no pun intended, for two days. So we could really rehearse the music and just relax with it. And really get to know it. It was great; I seem to remember always scrambling in the past just to get one or two rehearsals before the record if I hadn't already played the music out live a lot. Everybody just learned the music really well. I would say that about 75 percent of what's on the record had already been played out live by the guys a couple of times at least. Then there were two or three new things that I had just brought into the rehearsals a couple days before. It wasn't overly rehearsed but everybody really took the time to learn the music.

I remember the first rehearsal of that band. Everybody was really excited because it just worked as an ensemble personality-wise and sound-wise. It's just a great band to be around. It's a pleasure. It's really easy. And it was the same with the recording session. It was a good time; it didn't feel like work or that I was conscious of making a record. class="f-right"> Return to Index...




"The Unnamable

AAJ: That does sound like a band you can't break up. "The Unnamable is a glorious, wonderful song with a propulsive, polyrhythmic groove and that unforgettable harmonized melody line that's somehow as Eastern European as it is Latin. It's very elegant and very joyous. Brandon Ross's electric guitar comps so interestingly that it's really contrapuntal—very un-clichéd. You're on alto on this one. Tell me about this one.

RR: That's interesting that, with "The Unnamable, you bring up the thought of there being something Eastern European or Spanish to it. There has been a bunch of ethnic music I've been listening to in the last couple years. But "The Unnamable is a bar of five and a bar of six. It's in eleven, essentially. I remember putting it first in front of one of the musicians, and he was like, "Oh, man, what a bear this is going to be. I said, "Do me a favor and do not count anything. And I sang the bass line, and everybody played it. I just wanted everyone not to count it, just play it—just listen to the melody. So I sang that melody, and everyone was like, "Oh, okay. Because I didn't write a bar of five and a bar of six to flex my time-trickery muscles or anything like that. But I do write a lot of things, it seems, in five, seven and eleven naturally; it's not like I'm ever conscious of wanting to sit down and write something in an odd time signature.

AAJ: Well, you write from the melody anyway.

RR: Yeah, exactly. So I think "The Unnamable grew out of that bass line, which I wrote on piano. Then I think I just looped the bass line and composed the melody on saxophone and flute on top of it. And then the bridge of that song is played twice; it's in six and the second time it's in seven. I remember playing through the bridge once and thinking, "I want to repeat the bridge; I like the way the changes are moving and I want to hear it again. So I played it, and recorded it on my little digital recording machine, and by mistake I played it the second time in seven. And I liked it. I thought it made a lot of sense. I thought, "If I'm going to play it again, I might as well play it a little differently. So that's "The Unnamable. class="f-right"> Return to Index...




"One (For Jef)

AAJ: The last song on the CD is "One (For Jef) which is, I think, dedicated to Jef Lee Johnson. I can't think of a more appropriate way to finish the CD. It's slow and somewhat ominous and starts with that pensive acoustic guitar intro. Brandon Ross is the free agent here—he gets to improvise on guitar over the entire piece, during the written French horn melody that's taken up by the ensemble over that sparse bass and percussion procession. It's certainly got that contrast between freedom and composition that marks your work, and it's one of my favorites here. I love your crying, keening soprano solo with its pregnant rests that just goes on as the piece fades. Any insights?

RR: I wanted it to be sort of dirge-like. I think we got that out of it. And yes, I remember my instruction to Brandon was that from the time he plays that improvisation out in front of the piece, I wanted him to improvise from the beginning to the end. He's improvising and, if we pulled the rest of the ensemble out, you'd hear this beautiful solo going on. He just played this gorgeous stuff on acoustic guitar. But it's sort of a situation where if you want to focus on what he's doing, you'd hear this beautiful acoustic guitar solo—but I wanted that texture of an acoustic guitar improvisation to support the melody instead of, again, everything being a vehicle to support this amazing guitar solo.

AAJ: I really like the harmonized violin-soprano-French horn voicings during the ensembles.

RR: Yeah, and that melody the second time around with the full ensemble has a serious rub going on. It's a really tight, dissonant harmony between the soprano, French horn and violin. Charlie, Mark and I played that melody through in the rehearsal first, because I wanted to hear the harmonies myself, and one of the guys went, "Um—are you sure, Rob? Is this correct? I said, "Yeah, yeah, just play it. And then when I added the rhythm section, that person said, "Oh, okay, yeah. It sounds good.

The tune was written for Jef Lee Johnson—about something not particularly pleasant. Something tragic. And I think that that recorded version of it really got the point across. class="f-right"> Return to Index...




"A Hundred Jumping Devils

RR: I can talk about "A Hundred Jumping Devils, if you like.

AAJ: Please do. I am coining the term "baroque groove music to describe that one.

RR: Baroque groove music. I've [laughing] got to write that down. Cool, I like that one. I'm going to use that myself, if you don't mind. I bought this weird little instrument. I was up in Maine and I bought this—well, I forget what it's called. It's this little wooden instrument and the guy put a saxophone mouthpiece on top of it. It plays just seven or eight notes. It's very limited; I think there's one chromatic in there. And I wrote that entire piece on that instrument. I was just fucking around on it and I thought, "I'm just going to write this simple melody on this instrument. If you take away the rest of what's going on in "A Hundred Jumping Devils, it's a very singsong, very simple melody. It's something like six tones—just six tones in the whole first "A section of the melody.

AAJ: And that's the first three or four minutes before the solos.

RR: Right. But I colored it with having Burnham play this repetitive drone thing that shifts. After the percussion plays, he opens with that. Then for the bridge, the "B section, I just added one more note that I could actually play on that instrument. So I composed that whole initial idea on that instrument.

Now, in terms of the improvising on that one, that is a more traditional method of improvising for me. It sort of hints back to the other music I listened to, other jazz music, and maybe some of the first music I heard Mino play, with Miles and some other people. In both of our solos, both Brandon and I play on just a mode for, oh, I don't know how long. And then we play on the chord changes of the melody. Then there's a duet at the end of that with Charlie and Mino. That duet's brilliant; you can tell they're really listening to one another and really going for it. And again, it's in the context of the composition—it totally makes sense. class="f-right"> Return to Index...




Supporting and Competing with the Soloist

AAJ: There's something I think you like to do in your music. When one of the musicians is soloing, the ensemble often joins in halfway through. On the last CD, Seeing By the Light of My Own Candle, it often went into some real polyphony, but here it feels more like soloist and ensemble—but they're of equal importance. The moment the group comes on over Charlie's solo is one of my favorite moments on the CD.

Rob ReddyRR: If there is a singular improvisation going on, I like the idea of there being something else that's sometimes supportive, but competitive as well. I think it prods the improviser to do something a little different, to go for it even a little more. A lot of times when I go to mix a record, an engineer will pull some of those ensemble things, those ensemble ideas, way down beneath a soloist. And I'll almost always say, "No, no, bring that up—I want the clash. I want it to be in the same sonic space as the soloist. They always [laughing] look at me like I'm crazy.

Because, you know, he is soloing, and it does sort of feature what he's doing, but I want that to compete with what I'm going to write for the rest of the ensemble. I don't mind it getting a little messy. I don't mind a soloist and an ensemble playing something that may or may not elicit some dissonance. I think the guys that have played my music for years, that have played on a couple records, have gotten used to it. They're familiar with [laughing] what they think I'm trying to do.

But in the past, I have gotten people who have told me that they really like and enjoy playing my music, but that sometimes it's not that easy right away because of exactly what we're talking about. Because I'm asking someone to improvise and they think, "Oh, here's a feature, a solo. But I'm asking their improvisation to serve a completely different purpose than what they're used to. It's really different from this idea of the person improvising stepping out in front of the ensemble. I want them to improvise and create something, but I want them behind the ensemble somewhere. Again, it's trying to find that balance between how to get people to do what I've been hearing in my head for the six months before I put the music on the stand and having them feel comfortable enough to really play.

And you know, I do have a lot of reverence for that kind of jazz music you mentioned before. It's the jazz music I learned how to play jazz music withn and that I first fell in love with. It was that kind of jazz music where there was a composition, but it was kind of secondary material, and these guys who were complete masters of their instruments were creating some really great music. But it was more about what they were about to do when they got up to take a solo. I still really love that music, and still put it on once in a while. class="f-right"> Return to Index...




"Mark of Sincerity

AAJ: "Mark of Sincerity feels very compositional indeed. This one gives me a feeling of all the instruments interlocked to become one, or maybe two, breathing, organic, mammalian organisms. It's also very hymnal and Mino's role on this one is certainly not to keep time.

RR: This is basically broken down into two trios. It's the trio of guitar, violin and drums and the trio of saxophone, French horn and double bass. It's funny, because there was a sort of aesthetic instruction that I wrote on the parts for guitar, percussion and violin—Brandon's, Mino's and Charlie's parts. For that opening hymn I wrote, "Salvation Army-like. It certainly has a sort of Charles Ives-ish thing going on where I've broken the ensemble into two halves. There are two things going on at one time.



But I just bought the two Charles Ives string quartets a couple days ago, and I didn't read the liner notes or anything, I was just listening to the music on the bus on the way home. I thought, "Wow, these are just so beautiful. These certainly sound like early American folk hymns, or something from that sort of music. And his first string quartet turned out to be called "String Quartet No. 1: From the Salvation Army. I certainly thought when we recorded that song that it had a serious Charles Ives thing going on, and people have responded to it that way. I've definitely listened to a ton of his music.

But again, it's the idea of two things happening simultaneously, and neither being more important than the other. So the two trios are playing at the same time and there's melodic material written for both of them where the parts are sort of consonant—they sort of make sense. If I took the saxophone, French horn and bass line and put it in time, it could definitely be interwoven as supportive material in that hymn. But instead, I decided to have that other trio playing rubato against the ¾ hymn.

And it's the same idea with the solos. After the two trios play those hymns simultaneously, there are two other trios—a trio of percussion, bass and horn improvising together and there's a trio of saxophone, violin and guitar. Then to go out, we play the hymn together; everyone sort of slowly makes their way back to it. I said, "I don't want a ¾ count, and then everyone plays the hymn. Take your time—if you don't make your way back to the melody, it's cool. It doesn't matter. And you'll hear that Brandon Ross almost doesn't make it back to the melody. He gets there three or four bars before we end it. It just feels like he's slipping around, making his way down a staircase, and then he finally lands on the melody with a big major chord. It's really nice. That was the first take of that, and I remember just going, "Okay! Next! class="f-right"> Return to Index...




"A Soprano Saxophonist Who Doubles on Alto

AAJ: You're a soprano player and an alto player. I really love your playing on either instrument. I suppose you're a soprano player first, but I really like your alto playing—I love how it doesn't remind me of any one else on alto. Would you care to talk about the two instruments—how you approach them and how they differ?

RR: I consider soprano home. I feel like a soprano saxophonist who doubles on alto. I played alto first as a kid, and then, I guess in high school, I was studying with Dave Liebman, who's such a master soprano saxophonist, and I decided that I really wanted to learn how to play that instrument. Then I played only soprano for about seven years, pretty much all through the end of high school and all through my time at the New School.

I didn't play alto again until I was hired by Ronald Shannon Jackson. He sort of suggested—he didn't insist—that maybe for his music, another voice might be nice, might work well. So I pulled the alto out, and I remember thinking, "Wow! I really miss this thing. This is the saxophone I played first. But I still feel like a soprano player. It makes sense to me; it feels like another limb when I pick it up.

It's a bitch of an instrument to play, to play correctly and get a real sound on it. And I hear a lot of soprano saxophone that—and this isn't a dis in any way—sounds like a person doubling on soprano saxophone. It's like a stock soprano sound to me. That seven years where I really learned how to play the instrument—it really demands that. Not that [laughing] everyone has to play only soprano for seven years, but it really demands a lot of attention. And when you hear guys like Liebman or Steve Lacy or Wayne Shorter play that instrument—there's really nothing like hearing a master play it. It's really a special instrument. class="f-right"> Return to Index...


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