Donny McCaslin: Feeling the Spirit

Bruce Crowther

Recent articles (3 total)

Published: October 16, 2003

'On my first CD there were three originals and then I have this CD coming out around August 2000 which is all originals except for 'September Song' and I'm going to do another record soon after that which will also be mostly originals. I guess in terms of writing, it's one of those things where I feel I can best express all the things that I have been doing so far. It's as if my writing is like the sum total of all my listening and studying and the influences on my playing.'

Update ...

Since this interview was conducted in summer 2000, Donny has been kept very busy. 'From fall 2000 until March 2002, I was touring with Danilo Perez and the Motherland Project. Since then, among the highlights was being featured at Lincoln Center in January 2003 on Maria Schneider's newly commissioned work for her Jazz Orchestra. We did two nights opposite Toshiko Akiyoshi's band. Also, I've been to Japan four times in the past year and a half with Monday Michiru's group that features Alex Sipiagin, Dave Kikoski, Jonathan Blake, Boris Kozlov and myself. And I played and taught at the Aarua Jazz festival in Switzerland this past April. Lastly, I've been playing at the 55 Bar in New York City once a month with my own group and that's featured such musicians as Adam Cruz, Ben Monder, Gene Jackson, Boris Kozlov, Gary Versace, Drew Gress, Jeff Ballard, Jon Hebert, among others. In terms of recordings, I'm featured on Danilo Perez's new disc that comes out in the fall of 2003, also, Luciana Souza's North and South, Maryann McSweeny's Swept Away, and Deanna Witkowski's Wide Open Window, which is on the Khaeon label. My own new CD, The Way Through, on Arabesque Records, was released on 7 October 2003.'

Bearer of the flame ...

Audience response, the acclaim of reviewers and critics, and, perhaps most importantly, the respect and admiration of fellow musicians of all generations, make it clear that Donny McCaslin stands poised to be one of the flame bearers of jazz in the twenty-first century. A well-equipped, immensely talented musician with seemingly limitless technical expertise, he consistently proves himself to be much more than merely a gifted technician. Frequently, he impresses audiences with his organic improvisations and moves them with his emotionally expressive playing. Quite clearly, he is acutely aware of the danger of technique becoming the message and not the medium. 'When I hear someone play a solo that has a million notes, I know it's amazing but it also has to reach me emotionally. It depends on how the notes are played, in what spirit are they being played. Sometimes I hear people playing a lot of notes simply because they can and not necessarily because the music calls for it at that moment.'

Off-stage he is quietly self-effacing and genuinely modest about his remarkable achievements and he is clearly aware that in jazz there is always something more to be learned. On-stage, his combination of talents has given him striking self-assurance regardless of the company he keeps and to a considerable extent this is a result of his understanding of and respect for the music and musicians that have come before him. Although coming into jazz as recently as the 1980s, Donny is deeply conscious of the importance of the music's roots and of the work of the past masters of jazz.

'My father knows a lot of tunes and they are all from a certain era and being exposed to that an early age really helped to give me some sense of the history. It wasn't so much that he gave me records to listen to but he would just play all the standards that people had played for years and years. Initially, when I was young, I was drawn to stuff that was modern sounding but once I got a little older I could see that there were gaps in my own musicianship, that I was not really delving as far back into the history as early as I should. So I began doing more and more, really listening to Lester Young and Stan Getz and Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster and Sidney Bechet. I feel that it is a necessary foundation for what I am going to do. I have learned a lot by studying the history.

'At one time, I played for a while in a band with a singer doing a Billie Holiday thing and they had a bunch of transcriptions of songs with Billie and Lester Young. This was really a great experience for me to do that. It forced me to play in that style. It wasn't a gig where I could just go and play my modern stuff. It would have been inappropriate, so really playing that way and listening to it was a good experience because it helped me to develop a stronger foundation on which to draw. The history is really important and I try to use it to help create a base so that whatever I have to deal with can come from that solid historic foundation.

The future's past ...

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