Think the jazz festival season is over now that you’ve unpacked your bags from Monterey? In San Francisco, things are just warming up.

The 29th annual San Francisco Jazz Festival got underway this past weekend, kicking off a formidable 36-night concert series that will keep the city’s auditoriums busy until early November, with a few outlying shows spread all the way to to December 18.

Nonprofit presenter SFJAZZ has done a fantastic job of building and maintaining this festival over the years, with top-flight touring artists, cleverly themed programming, aggressive marketing and tireless fundraising efforts in these economically tough times. Since starting out in 1983 as Jazz in the City, SFJAZZ has steadily expanded under the leadership of founder and Executive Artistic Director Randall Kline to become a year-round operation — the Festival’s Spring Season celebrated its twelfth year in 2011. And the organization recently broke ground on a new performance and educational space of its own: the ambitiously conceived SFJAZZ Center in Hayes Valley, just blocks from Davies Symphony Hall and the War Memorial Opera House. Not bad for a jazz presenter.

But let’s talk about that festival.

If you missed Monterey, you can still catch Robert Glasper‘s trio at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on September 29, piano phenom Eldar Djangirov three nights later at the Legion of Honor, Pamela Rose and her “Wild Women of Song” project at Herbst Theatre on November 12 or the multicultural soul of India.Arie and Idan Raichel at Oakland’s Paramount Theatre on October 15. That’s just one of a half-dozen shows being held in Oakland, by the way.

Want big names? Check out the Wayne Shorter Quartet, McCoy Tyner with Chris Potter, Joshua Redman with Brad Mehldau or Jim Hall‘s quartet. They’re all appearing at Herbst throughout the month of October. Or Pat Metheny, who’s at Marines Memorial Theatre this coming weekend for two shows. Or Mose Allison at the YBCA Forum on October 27. Or Ahmad Jamal at Herbst in December. That’s a pretty damn good festival right there.

Look closely at the ads this year, and you’ll notice that right below the SFJAZZ logo there’s a new tagline: “JAZZ & BEYOND.” And this year’s lineup does indeed stretch pretty far afield from bebop. But SFJAZZ has always been a champion of world music, and when the “beyond” artists are of the peerless caliber of Indian vocal megastars Asha Bhosle and Shujaat Khan, father-daughter sitar masters Ravi and Anoushka Shankar, throat singers Huun Huur Tu and Brazilian songwriter Vinicius Cantuária, who can complain?

Okay, one complaint. I would like to maybe see a little more representation from local jazz artists on the calendar. But that’s a perennial issue, and one that passes over the real point: the problem isn’t that SFJAZZ doesn’t give gigs to local artists (they do — check out Mimi Fox this weekend at the Swedish American hall, or the free SFJAZZ Summerfest, or the Hotplate series at Amnesia Bar). The real problem is that those artists need more exposure, more places to play and more turnout from local jazz fans all year round, not just at big events.

And this one’s pretty big. But there’s still time to pick up tickets to most shows. To see the full calendar, visit www.sfjazz.org

Alto saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa is one of the most restlessly creative players on the scene. Since first emerging in the late 1990s as a member of the Vijay Iyer Quartet, he has forged a strong identity as a musician interested in exploring ideas and creating dialogues between the various parts of his personal background: his South Asian heritage, the esoteric world of higher mathematics, and the jazz saxophone tradition. His ten albums as a leader or co-leader include Codebook (2006), in which the compositions were inspired by cryptology and number theory, and Kinsmen (2008), a powerful fusion of jazz and Indian classical music featuring the legendary Carnatic saxophonist Kadri Golpanath.

A favorite of jazz critics and college radio, Rudresh has placed highly in the esteemed Down Beat Critics Poll and was recently named Alto Saxophonist of the Year by the Jazz Journalists Association. He was also the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship in 2007.

We spoke as Rudresh was about to embark on a whirlwind of activity: first a quick trip to California with his Indo-Pak Coalition trio (featuring Rez Abbasi on guitar and Dan Weiss on percussion), then a series of gigs with various groups back east culminating in the release of his latest disc, Apex, an exiting team-up with the fiery Bunky Green. Apex will be released on September 28 on Pi Records.

Let’s start off by talking about this band you’re bringing to Monterey, the Indo-Pak Coalition. How did the group come together?

I actually started a version of this group in the mid ‘90s, when I still lived in Chicago. At that point, it wasn’t the right combination of musicians, and I didn’t feel that I had matured enough — as someone knowledgeable about either jazz or Indian music — to really do it justice. It felt like something exotic, something to do for the sake of doing something “Indian,” you know? So I disbanded that group and didn’t really think about it again.

But after I moved to New York, I got to know Rez and Dan. I was really blown away by the parallel journeys we’d had. Dan is an amazing drum set player, but he started studying tabla well over a decade ago, and really took it seriously. He’s not a dabbler. He’s a real Hindustani tabla player as far as I’m concerned. He’s developed a guru-disciple relationship with the great Samir Chatterjee and he practices 10-12 hours a day. And Rez is someone who has come to find a way to embrace and express his South Asian heritage through his music.

After developing relationships with them, it seemed really imperative, actually, to start a new and fresh version of this group. I think it’s really coalesced in a way that I’m happy with, that I think is meaningful and communicates something.

Any particular reason you opted for a trio rather than a larger group?

I think I was trying to emulate a lot of the Indian classical music I’ve heard, be it South Indian or North Indian. A lot of that occurs in a trio format, with a lead voice, an accompanying voice, and a percussion element. Oftentimes you’ll see, say, a violinist and a tabla player and some other melodic accompanying instrument. So I was looking for that kind of sound.

In this case it’s a little bit difficult, because all of us — regardless of how steeped in South Asian music we are — are used to hearing a bass player in the band. And this is a situation that is a little bit treble heavy, you know? There is no bass, so each one of us is tasked with filling in that low end somehow, whether it actually occurs in the low register or whether it’s through some other texture. All three of us kind of take turns filling up that space. We’re all playing all the time, essentially.

With a group like this, is it a conscious effort to merge the modern jazz strain with the Indian strain, or is it more a matter of creating a setting and seeing what happens?

That’s a really good question. I think at this point the compositions serve as a kind of jumping off point. When I first began composing for this band, I was concerned about how those traditions can be integrated. I’m looking for real integration and a unified sound and concept that draws from both influences, as opposed to something that’s cut and paste. But now, I feel like we’re at a point where there the compositions provide a setting for us to interact on all these levels. We’re communicating as people who have all studied Indian music to varying degrees, and communicating as jazz musicians all at the same time. And the way we discuss the music is also very much a matter of both of those at the same time. It’s a unique group of players that’s able to do that.

How would you compare the Indo-Pak project with Kinsmen, the album you recorded with Kadri Golpanath? They have very different sounds.

With Kinsmen, I think I was more concerned — maybe more subconsciously than consciously — with where my musical personality and Kadri’s musical personality would intersect. I felt like I could play more from my Charlie Parker and Coltrane influenced background than as someone who had taken in a great amount of Indian music. It didn’t behoove me to try and play like Kadri, because Kadri is playing straight up Carnatic music; he’s not a jazz musician at all. So it was important for me to convey where our styles intersect, and how they’re similar and how they’re different.

It’s interesting to think about when they were recorded too: when I made the Indo-Pak album, I had just spent a month in India working on a bunch of stuff, both studying and collaborating with a few musicians, informally. So I came back with a different perspective when we recorded Apti.

Has that perspective remained? Is it manifesting today even in your straight jazz playing?

Absolutely. Those two very closely spaced long trips to India — well, long for me, meaning a month or two months — were part of my Guggenheim Fellowship. And those trips were focused on studying very specific aspects of Carnatic music, both melodically and rhythmically. Not only did they influence how I play overall, but all of that resulted in a body of work that I wrote for a more electric setting, which is a band with [drummer] Damion Reid, David Gilmore on guitar, Rich Brown, who’s a great electric bass player from Canada, and a great mridangam player based in the Bay Area named Anantha R Krishnan… we actually have an album in the can, which is yet to be released. I hope that comes out in the next couple of years; it’s been sitting around for a while! But everything I worked on that year, it comes out all the time. I feel like there was a great leap in my music after those periods of study.

As soon as you finish this California trip, I see you have some gigs with a quartet, with Craig Taborn and François Moutin, and then you’re playing with Amir ElSaffar, the Iraqi-American trumpeter, and then you’ve got this new album, Apex with Bunky Green…

Right! And I’ll be back in the Bay Area again in November with Nguyên Lê, whose a great French-Vietnamese guitarist. Yeah, it’s a lot of different stuff. And I also play trio with Mark Dresser and Gerry Hemingway, in a completely different artistic attitude… I guess I try to keep things fresh!

Let’s talk about the new album. In a way, maybe Apex is a little like Kinsmen, because it pairs you in a dialogue with a saxophonist of another generation. What was it like working with Bunky?

Bunky is amazing. I don’t even know how to begin. Bunky is, as you said, a different generation. He’s 75. And he’s a very interesting case, since I think most people who have heard his music probably think of him as coming from a more hard bop tradition. One of the major albums of his discography is a two-alto album with Sonny Stitt. But I think much like Coltrane and some of the other innovators, he was hearing a different sound, a different approach. At one point he sort of went into hiding and just worked on that concept that was ringing in his head. And he came out with a really unique and innovative vocabulary that’s still very much traditionally based. He was a young virtuoso: he replaced Jackie McLean in Charles Mingus’ band, Cannonball Adderley took a shine to him and produced some of his early albums. But I think what’s important is that he was a great influence on Steve Coleman and Greg Osby. Some people know that, but a lot of people don’t.

I first heard one of his albums from I think the late ‘70s, it was Places That We’ve Never Been. I heard that album when I was in college. A teacher of mine at Berklee College of Music played it for me, and it really blew me away. I was after some particular sounds at the time, and here was a guy who had already figured it out! So I chased him down. I found his office number; he teaches at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville, and I called him. I said, “hey, I heard this album, I want to send you a tape…” We’ve been corresponding ever since, and we got to be friends. We’d always talked about doing something together, but I think we just had to wait for the right circumstance. That developed over the past year; there was interest in Chicago in presenting the two of us together, and we really hit it off. So making the album was kind of a no-brainer. It was something that had to happen.

Who else gets you excited like that? Who on the scene today do you listen to and keep tabs on?

Some of my contemporaries are really playing amazing stuff. I was on an album that came out earlier this year with a great New York based alto saxophonist named Steve Lehman. Steve is a monster. I think he’s really on to something that’s very special. His previous album was music for an octet, and a lot of that was based on a somewhat microtonal approach, coming from twentieth-century music, you know. But I don’t think that’s what’s really important about it. It’s just that the music is fabulous. And he’s found this way of integrating a great tradition of jazz with a lot of interesting beats that are coming out of hiphop and dance music, along with a lot of great knowledge of contemporary classical music. He’s amazing and very inspiring.

Jason Moran, who’s on Apex, is always an inspiration and a valuable person in the current jazz scene. And I’ve worked with Vijay Iyer for over 15 years now. That’s been a really valuable partnership. There’s a bunch of people who are of my generation who I think are really doing important stuff. Tony Malaby. John Hollenbeck. It’s really great to see all these people on really important paths.

You made an interesting comment just now about Steve Lehman. You mentioned that on the octet record, some people maybe got hung up on the concept, you know? “These songs are based on spectral harmony!” But that maybe wasn’t the most important point in terms of the music itself or appreciating the music. Did you encounter something similar when you put out Codebook, which incorporated number theory?

To some degree, yeah. Codebook was a concept album but not a concept album at the same time. I tried to make it clear that I was trying to take these mathematical concepts that are perceived to be very cold, and to see the warmth in them. There was a degree of focus on the concept, but it may have been beneficial. Like there was a math teachers blog that I came across where they were talking about the album, and even Science magazine, one of the premier science journals, did a piece about the album. Which was particularly funny because I’m from a family of scientists, and I don’t think any of my brothers or my father have been published in Science! So that was kind of a fun family joke. But I wasn’t really concerned with that. I think that music is really vibrant and grooves hard. It has a lot of energy. I still play a lot of that music.

And hey, jazz needs all the exposure it can get. If it’s in the pages of Science magazine, that’s wonderful too.

Right!

Rudresh Mahanthappa’s website is at http://www.rudreshm.com/ You can also follow him on Twitter @rudreshm

Kim Nalley — Photo by Vladimir Korobitsyn

Kim Nalley‘s knockout vocals and glowing stage presence have vaulted her to the top of San Francisco’s jazz scene. As the former owner and artistic director of Jazz at Pearl’s (2003-2008), Nalley also rose to prominence as a motivator behind the scenes, giving a stage to local and internationally-renowned artists who otherwise wouldn’t have gotten a gig in the city.

Now back to being a full-time musician, Nalley brings her 3½ octave range to the Rrazz Room at Hotel Nikko for a special program honoring Billie Holiday, August 20-23. For the late shows on August 21 & 22, Nalley will be joined by the great Hammond B3 organist Rhoda Scott in what’s sure to be a dynamite collaboration.

You’ve been working with Billie Holiday’s material on and off for a while now. What drew you to it?

I accepted an acting role portraying Billie Holiday in a dramatic production. After the play closed, I wanted first as a jazz singer, to get a chance to sing the songs that I associate with Billie Holiday in a more authentic atmosphere, and second as an historian, to shed some historical light on the real Billie Holiday as opposed to presenting a theater/film archetype, something more edu-tainment oriented. In terms of research for this project, Julia Blackburn’s biography With Billie contained many interviews of people that knew Billie from before she became a famous icon, for example in reform school or at the Apollo. These primary sources really helped me flesh out who Billie was and shed alot of levity and comedy to events that are usually presented as dark and tragic.

Has your relationship with the music affected your view of Billie’s legacy as a musician?

People will probably kill me for saying this, but I have come to realize that Billie wasn’t a very great musician. A lot of her early genius can be in part credited to Teddy Wilson and her late genius in part to Ray Ellis. Billie didn’t read music or know what keys she sang tunes in. She relied on the band for that. On one occasion, she lambasted the band she played with in San Francisco as being the worst musicians she had ever played with. She expected that they should have known all the tunes that she was famous for and the keys and tempos that she sang them in before she arrived. Vernon Alley was one of the musicians on that date and he was an amazing bassist. She seemed to be blaming them for her lack of competence as a musical director…. There are some live recordings of her with pick up bands that sound just awful and it is humbling to realize that even our gods struggle night after night to deliver excellence with pick up bands in small dives [giving] widely varying results.

I also have come to realize that Billie played almost two completely different instruments because her voice was so different during her youth. Young Billie’s voice had a clear bell tone and it tended to swoop in from very high notes down to low at the start of musical passages. It was only later in her life that we hear that low raspy caricature that we are familiar with. In her youth she could hold her own with a Big Band behind her. With age, her voice was less flexible and needed a soft band with a light touch and sparse arrangements.

The shows with Rhoda Scott sound special. I remember you had her on the calendar at Pearl’s a while back…

Hammond organ impresario Pete Fallico was arranging concerts for Rhoda in the Bay Area and some venues were reluctant to book, so he asked me if I would sing with Rhoda because the venues knew I have a good draw. We ended up doing an extended run at Pearl’s as well as concerts at Kuumbwa and the Copia.

I was a little scared at first. Whenever someone tries to put artists together as opposed to the artist asking me themselves I worry that my presence is forced. And she is one the all time leading proponents of the Hammond Organ. But Rhoda was so warm and friendly. Pete has a great instincts for putting together musicians for shows. Rhoda is a supportive accompanist for a vocalist, as well as being a show-stopping soloist. The first tune felt as if we had been playing together for years and years. It was amazing! I am so looking forward to playing with her again. We share a similar style of improvising that is rare to find these days. For example, Jazz schools teach kids to improvise on scales, chords and melody, however Rhoda and I will also improvise on themes. This is something you can only do if you know the lyrics to songs and recognize the emotional impact of the song on the audience, and Rhoda is one of the great instrumentalists that does.

If someone comes to one of the Billie Holiday shows, then comes back for the Rhoda Scott gig, the vibe is bound to be different. What should they expect?

“The Heart Of Lady Day: Kim Nalley sings Billie Holiday” is a very worked out show. It is part history and part biopic as well as concert and it proceeds in chronological order, journeying from Billie’s youth ’til death. It is a special show and I don’t do it often. The vibe is swing and ballads, with familiar songs like “T’ain’t Nobody’s Bizness” and “Ooo what a Little Moonlight Can Do.”

“Kim Nalley & Rhoda Scott” is more of a laid back musical grab bag: jazz standards, folk, show tunes, blues, even chestnuts like “Danny Boy.” The major difference is the Hammond B-3 Organ. Once that animal is in the room, the vibe of everything changes. The pulsing vibration of a whirring Leslie [speaker] is something that you feel instead of hear. There is nothing like it. The warmth of the tubes. It drenches everything with soul and adds a tinge of gospel flavor.

How does it feel to be a free agent again, now that you’re not tied to your own club?

I miss the club as a musician, and San Francisco seems to have a little hole in the jazz scene since it left, but as an owner it is wonderful to not worry and stress about it constantly. It was a huge weight and very distracting from not only my music, but from having any kind of life outside the club. When I look out at the audience from the stage, I want to be able to give myself fully, I don’t want to look out and secretly think, “Oh no, the checks haven’t been dropped, I need to stretch this tune!” or “The people on table 26 really want another drink but the server hasn’t been to them for an hour!”

Also, I am trying to start a family and having difficulty. I postponed my dream of having kids for the club, without realizing the real truth about biological clocks: once you turn thirty as a woman it is really time to shit or get off the pot! Friends turn your head with comments about how young you are, or stories about the friend that gave birth at 39, but no one talks about how much money they spent or how many miscarriages they suffered trying to have a baby. As wonderful as it was, I would gladly trade all five years of Jazz at Pearl’s for an earlier start in the family department.

The Rrazz Room presents “The Heart Of Lady Day: Kim Nalley Sings Billie Holiday” August 20-23 at 8:00 pm, and Kim Nalley & Rhoda Scott Trio August 21 & 22 at 10:00pm. For more information, visit:

www.therrazzroom.com
www.kimnalley.com
www.rhodascott.com

Scott Amendola. Photo by Lenny Gonzalez.

When Scott Amendola sits down at his drum kit, almost anything can happen. That’s not mere hyperbole; it’s a fact. From his base in Berkeley, California, Amendola provides the rhythmic drive for some of the most creative and acclaimed ensembles in the jazz avant-garde, including the Nels Cline Singers and his own Scott Amendola Band. But he’s also the road drummer for the phenomenally popular singer Madeleine Peyroux. Throw in his work with Charlie Hunter and the funky quartet T.J. Kirk, the electro-acoustic freedom of his ensemble CRATER, and a discography that’s grown to nearly 70 albums in only 10 years, and it’s easy to discern two key points about Amendola: that he’s very much in demand, and that he likes to mix things up.

A prime example of this polyglot approach to music can be found on The Scott Amendola Band’s 2005 release, Believe (on Cryptogramophone Records). In the course of nine tracks, Believe moves from an Americana feel to a Fela Kuti-inspired Afrobeat vibe, and even into outright noise, with multiple genres often squeezed into a single track. Reflecting on this eclecticism over lunch at a vegetarian Chinese restaurant a few blocks from his home, a wry smile plays over Amendola’s face.

“It just happens that way,” he says between bites of mock chicken. He is lean and bespectacled, with unruly curls atop his head and colorful tattoos on each arm. The smile rarely leaves his face. “Right now we’re exposed to so much music, you can just turn on the radio or satellite radio and run through the channels and hear everything. And the younger generations, like our generation, have really come to like a lot of different music. So because I’ve been exposed to so many different things, and I like them, it all comes out in my own music.”

“Like when I recorded Believe, [guitarist] Nels Cline was like, ‘I don’t know how you’re going to sequence this, man,’ because the tunes are all over the map. And there was a point when I stopped and thought, well this is… interesting. But then I figured, well, yeah. This is where I’m at. It’ll work. And it did.”

Pots, Pans & Coffee Cans

The journey to this point began in Tenafly, New Jersey, the New York City suburb where Amendola grew up. An affinity for the drums came early: “I was banging on stuff when I was five or six years old,” he says. “I’d take pots and pans and coffee cans and chopsticks, set ‘em up and just bang. I just loved doing it. And then when I was nine I got to choose an instrument for the school band, and I chose the drums.” But if drums were an inevitable choice for Amendola, jazz was not.

“I was listening to a lot of really bad music back then, a lot of top 40 radio, heavy metal. When I was eleven I wanted to be [Led Zeppelin drummer] John Bonham. But my grandfather, Tony Gottuso, he was a jazz guitarist, and he’d played with everybody. He was in the original Tonight Show Band; he’d worked with Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, everybody. And he insisted that I take piano lessons for two years before I got serious about the drums. I hated studying the piano. I was such a terrible student! But I totally appreciate now that I did it, because it does help tremendously. And then I started listening to jazz, and I heard my grandfather play. And once we started playing together, that’s when I really started to learn about time. My grandfather swung harder than anybody, and his musicality was on a really high level. He played circles around me.”

An epiphany came in 1986, when Pat Metheny and Ornette Coleman were together for Metheny’s Song X tour. “I saw Metheny in New York every time he came to town, but it was always with the same band. I didn’t know what Song X was all about.” The blending of Metheny’s sound with a giant of the avant-garde blew Amendola away. “I remember that night like it’s right now. There was Jack DeJohnette and Charlie Haden and Ornette and Denardo [Coleman], and I just heard stuff I’d never heard before, I felt things I’d never felt before. That was when I realized that music could be anything. It was like walking through a door. But I didn’t understand that right away, and I didn’t know what to do with it until much later.”

Finding a Path

Amendola’s playing evolved during four years spent at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, where he was part of a generation that included Kurt Rosenwinkel, Seamus Blake, and Luciana Souza. “I began to experiment on my own,” he says. “I started improvising in my basement, really looking at my drums, focusing on them, and thinking, ‘okay, I don’t have to do this, I can do that instead.’ It broke apart a lot of stuff in my head. I think there was a time when I wanted to be a New York studio drummer, and just do session work, then maybe break into something like the Letterman show band or Saturday Night Live or whatever. But now there was this creative element starting to come out. It was like a ringing in my head.”

“I was really into Steely Dan and Dave Weckl back then. I copied everything Dave did. But I was also starting to listen to more of Ornette’s stuff, and Keith Jarrett, and Miles Davis’ late ’60s and early ’70s things. So there was this new feeling creeping into my drumming, and no matter what I did it was there.”

He pauses as he identifies another pivotal moment. “When I was about 20, I auditioned for this mainstream band. I was in the basement getting ready and listening to their records, but by the second day I was thinking, ‘man, I don’t want to play this music this way. I don’t want to play this at all.’ So I decided to just learn the songs, and then figure out how to play them so they felt right to me. And when I went in to play with these guys, I started scraping cymbals and stopping the beat and doing all this stuff they weren’t used to. I didn’t get the gig, but I had a great time. I went back to Boston, and that’s when I made up my mind. I decided that I was gonna learn who I was, and that I was gonna do what I was gonna do, with no second-guessing.”

It was a bold decision, especially given the often-tenuous life of a jazz musician. Amendola recalls his first paying professional gig: “It was in Boston, at this place called the Middle East. I was with this vibraphonist, Philippe Cornaz. I think that was the first. Anyway, there was nobody there except my dad, who had just come up from New York. I remember sitting with him afterwards, when the owner came up and gave me like five bucks. And my dad turned to me and gave me this look and said, ‘good luck!’”

Go West, Young Man

Scott Amendola. Photo by Lenny Gonzalez

Another bold move came after Amendola’s graduation from Berklee in 1992. He decided to forsake the New York jazz scene for the San Francisco Bay Area. He was lured west by a relationship, which didn’t last. “I knew it was going to fall apart,” he says today, “but I wanted to leave New Jersey, get away from New York. I’d visited San Francisco and loved it, and I had a bunch of names of people out here. So I just decided it was time.”

Once he arrived, Amendola was never motivated to look back. “It was really liberating. The tradition of the Bay Area is one of creativity. Whether you’re talking about jazz or rock or punk or funk, the vibe here is always one of creativity and branching out. And you always meet people here who are willing to cross over and play in different scenes with different musicians. It’s what music should be. I feel like anything’s possible here, and I love that. All you have to do is pick up the phone.”

Drawing on one of his college experiences, Amendola hooked up with a couple of Bay Area African bands, which he describes now as being “pretty awful.” It was a hardscrabble time. Amendola got a job delivering bread in the mornings, and took any gig he could get: “not like a lot of weddings or anything, but little one-shot club gigs. I did a lot of those.” But he soon started to make friends in the local jazz scene, and began the first in a long string of associations with guitarists. “I was playing with a flautist for a while, but then I met John Schott, and then Charlie Hunter.”

Charlie Hunter and T.J. Kirk

It was with Hunter that things finally began to come together. “Charlie and I met when I filled in for Jay Lane, who had double-booked himself. We connected instantly. It was right there. He had this regular gig on Fridays with Kenny Brooks at the Up & Down club in San Francisco, and he invited me to join them. Suddenly I had a regular Friday gig, and soon Charlie and I were doing other things too.”

Those “other things” included several years in the Charlie Hunter Quartet, which recorded three albums in as many years for Blue Note. But it also led to the formation of the jazz-funk outfit T.J. Kirk, a unique project that continues, albeit with long periods of dormancy, to this day. “It was Charlie’s idea to pull this off,” Amendola says. The words tumble out of his mouth in a rapid-fire imitation of Hunter: “He was like, ‘hey, you wanna do a band called T.J. Kirk we’ll play Thelonious Monk and James Brown and Rahsaan Roland Kirk and it’ll be great!’ And I said, ‘uh… okay!’” When the group gets together — they last surfaced on a 2003 album for Rope-a-Dope (Talking Only Makes It Worse) — they maintain their original lineup of Hunter, Schott, and Will Bernard on guitars and Amendola on drums. There are no horns, keyboards, or other instruments, but the unusual lineup doesn’t limit the group. “The thing about that band is, and I say ‘is’ because it’s not dead, is it really is a band. You take these four people and put ‘em in a room, and something great is gonna happen. We know the music so well that at any moment someone can start something and bang, we’re there. That’s a rare thing. It takes a long time and a lot of sparks. We had to learn how to work together, but it’s so fun and so free that it’s become like a little collective.”

Amendola thinks that the band’s three sources are also a critical factor. “There’s a spirit that they all have, Monk and Brown and Kirk, and a compositional uniqueness. With all of them, you have that groove thing, but also you have an intricacy of parts. You can take those tunes and work them out for three guitars doing three different things. It works subconsciously. And they’re all kind of bizarre people. I think it’s that combination of who they all are and our mutual interest in them that makes it work. Look at Charlie for example, and where he’s coming from. Weird but accessible: that was Monk and that’s Charlie.”

Three of a Kind: Amendola, Cline, Scheinman

In the mid-1990s, Amendola made two contacts that would be critical in forging his own identity as a composer and a leader. Guitarist Nels Cline and violinist Jenny Scheinman are key members of the Scott Amendola Band, and the three musicians frequently appear in each other’s projects. All three are now label mates at Los Angeles-based Cryptogramophone, which is no coincidence.

Amendola met Cline through a mutual friend, saxophonist Phillip Greenlief, with whom Amendola had recorded a duo project for the 9 Winds label. It took only a few scattered gigs together for the two to forge a bond, and by 1999 they found themselves playing together in the band L. Stinkbug, alongside guitarist G.E. Stinson and bassist Stuart Liebig. “It was a blast,” he says. “It was only occasional, but every time we got together and played it was just amazing. So one day I was on this really bad tour, and I was really bummed out, and I asked myself, if I could play with anybody in the world right now, who would I want to play with? And it was Nels. So I wrote him an e-mail and said, ‘look man, we gotta play music together. Your stuff. Your tunes.’ And he replied, saying, ‘that’s funny, I was just thinking the same thing!’ Nels’ trio had just fallen apart, and he was ready to do something else. But we needed a bass player. Well, soon after that I was talking to Devin Hoff. And I started telling him about playing with Nels, and Devin just took off. For 45 minutes he talked about Nels and his bands, The Geraldine Fibbers, all this stuff, nonstop. We’d found our bass player. And when we finally sat down to play, from the first note we were all like, wow, this is a band. It was greater than the sum of its parts… like H₂O or something! It was beautiful.”

Amendola speaks quietly for the most part, his words barely above a mumble. But he becomes animated when the topic turns to Cline, and much as Devin Hoff did years ago, he “takes off.”

“Nels brought so much stuff out of me. Like I use a lot of electronics on stage now, and he’s one of the reasons, because he saw it in my basement and he was like, ‘you gotta bring that shit out. Just do it!’ He’s always improvising, always making noise. Working with him is like having a mentor. He’s one of the greats. Anybody that knows Nels or has worked with him knows it. You can just see it, you can hear it, you can feel it. He never ever wavers onstage. Never.”

He begins chuckling to himself. “Here’s a funny story: we were playing a gig, with another guitar player who shall remain nameless, and this guy was conducting the gig. And for the whole night, anytime we started anything, he would just kill it. Just as it started getting good, this guy would cut it off! It was really weird, and everybody started to get frustrated. So it’s getting towards the end of the gig, and Nels and I start getting into it; it’s just going. And then this guys moves to cut it off, but Nels turns on him and goes, ‘F— YOU! KEEP PLAYING! F— YOU!’ And we kept playing! The man’s a genius. He’s everything that music should be, and he’s a deep person. I’ve learned so much from that guy. When he gets into a situation with people he likes, when he likes where the music’s going, he just pours all this positive energy into it, and always comes up with great ideas and pushes things to the max.”

That same energy carries through into the studio. About the two records Cline has made with the Scott Amendola Band (Cry and Believe, both on Cryptogramophone), Amendola says, “I have the most efficient band on the planet. We made both those records in 15 hours or less, and we’d come out with more than 80 minutes of music. Nels is so focused. With Cry, I remember we were having some problems in the studio, and it was 1:00 in the morning, second day, and Jenny Scheinman had to go and overdub this solo and she was exhausted, right? She’d been going all day and wasn’t sure she could keep it up. But she got in there and Nels just got this fire going in her, and he was like, ‘PLAY!’ and she just killed that solo.”

Scheinman, who now lives in New York, was a stalwart on the Bay Area scene for years. Amendola worked in several of Scheinman’s California bands, including The Django Project, which focused on the music of Django Reinhardt, and a quartet playing the violinist’s original compositions.

“Jenny is also really focused,” Amendola says. “She writes great music, and she’s super-passionate about it. When she’s there and playing there’s no stopping her. She’s more than just a fiddle player or even a jazz violinist — she can do the Joe Venuti thing or the classical thing or the free music thing. She’s even got the Catfish Collins thing, you know? She can just sit there and groove. She loves comping and bringing a rhythm. But then she can soar. Like on my tune ‘Buffalo Bird Woman,’ the way she phrases that melody, to me it’s like Neil Young singing.”

What the Singer Wants

The quality of singing is something Amendola can certainly appreciate. Beyond his instrumental projects lies a long resume of backing up distinctive vocal stylists, including Noe Venable, Kelly Joe Phelps, and, most visibly, Madeleine Peyroux. He came into Peyroux’s camp during the recording of her breakthrough album, Careless Love (Rounder, 2004). Larry Klein, the album’s producer, approached Amendola about playing on the record. Amendola was on tour with Phelps, but he found time to visit the studio and lay down brushwork on one track. When it came time for Peyroux to hit the road, Amendola got the call again. He’s been a mainstay on her tours ever since.

Amendola finds the experience rewarding, but there have been unexpected twists. “The shows have been wonderful,” he says, “musically it’s been great. But one thing that’s interesting is that there’s been a minor amount of… not backlash, but unhappiness from some fans over the shows.” Referring to some of the hype that has built up around Peyroux’s quirky vocal style, he says, “Some people see Madeleine in terms of this Billie Holiday connection. They come in thinking, ‘oh wow, I’m gonna hear the new Billie Holiday.’ And then when they hear her and get a taste of who she really is, they’re not ready for it. They say, ‘wait, that’s not what I wanted to pay however many dollars to go see.’ Because Madeleine is so much more than that. But some of the audience comes from an old-school perspective, wanting to define things, and they just can’t deal with it. That’s unfortunate, but luckily, that’s a really small percentage of the audience.”

Amendola finds that each singer he backs up is unique. “Different vocalists want different things,” he explains, “just like different saxophone players or anybody else would. Like with Madeleine there’s this real minimal thing. I play brushes on like 90 percent of the gig. For about two weeks on this last tour, she wanted me to play sticks on a few things, but then she wanted to go back to brushes.”

“With Kelly Joe, I was playing a lot of sticks and doing a lot of percussion things. He used to be a fretless electric jazz bass player. An improviser. So it was still about the songs, but every song was different each night, whether it was his vocal phrasing or just where the songs went. Because of who he is and where he’s coming from I could bring in all the elements of improvisation, and the energy was just incredible. He’s one of the most interesting guys I’ve ever played with. It was just genius, this great marriage of song and improv.”

“Then when I was working with Noe Venable, it was really about parts, and coming up with those, whether it was a drum part or a percussion part or whatever. And that’s interesting for me, working with parts and song structures. Like when I made that record with Jewlia Eisenberg and Marika Hughes called Thick — Red Pocket was the name of the band — we just made the record. We’d played a couple of gigs, or maybe just one, so they let me just come up with parts that I liked. And they let me go crazy with percussion, let me do whatever I wanted. So in any vocal situation it comes down to what the singer wants; some people don’t want much at all and some people want a lot of stuff. It’s about that and being musical and not overplaying, you know? I’ve had times in all of those gigs where the songs were so great, that even if I was barely playing or even stopped playing, that could be equally satisfying as playing, just being in that environment.”

Amendola the Composer

Working with singers has opened up new vistas in Amendola’s personal style, both as a drummer and as a composer. “It did bring out something different, and that’s just being more aware and conscious of what’s happening. I mean, I’ve always felt pretty deep into the music, but playing with singers got me into learning songs and learning about songs; it’s really deepened my relationship with song structure. I think I’m bringing that into everything else now, even free playing. In free playing, maybe it’s not even conscious, but you end up structuring compositions. I find that a lot when I play with Nels, because Nels is a real song player, with lots of melodic ideas. That’s where I’m coming from as a composer, too, I just write melodies and then I write chords. Or I don’t even bother with chords: I’ll just write melodies and let everybody else figure out what the chords are!”

Although he began writing music in college, Amendola doesn’t feel his career as a composer really began until 1997 or 1998: “once I began working with the right group of people, it just started coming.” His compositional method hasn’t changed, but he feels that his sense of harmony has grown over time. “And the other thing is that I’m more comfortable as a bandleader, which makes me more comfortable as a composer. But composing is still the scariest thing in music. I can play someone else’s song in front of a million people, but playing my own song in front of two people is just terrifying.”

Composition is still something of a mystery for Amendola. “The thing for me is that it’s something I can’t force. I can’t try to write something. It just comes to me and I go with it, and try to make it work if I can. Like when I’ve made my records, I may expressing a certain thing, but I don’t really control that. It’s just whatever’s coming out and coming together, and how I’m feeling at the time.”

Plugging In

Increasingly, Amendola has reached beyond his drum kit in search of additional textures and sounds. A frequent sight in his performances now is an electric mbira — an African thumb piano with a pickup attached. “I’ve taken it to a few workshops and clinics recently, and the hands always go up: what’s that? Workshops are a good opportunity to use it because I don’t have anyone providing a melody there. So I can make a few melodic loops with the mbira and then play along with it, get into that sonic world, that chromatic space. And then I can take it out, play a little more, put it back in… I’ve done that with my own band and with the Nels Cline Singers too. And sometimes when I’m playing with CRATER and just improvising I’ll try to come up with a couple of lines or something. But then I’ll just get totally whacked with the distortion on it and do something really crazy.”

CRATER is another unique project, a freeform ensemble that’s as much an event as a band. Like most other Amendola projects, CRATER is intermittent, re-forming when the stars align and then dispersing again. The group is never the same twice, but at its core are Amendola and JHNO [a.k.a. John Eichenseer], a sonic artist who produces music with a laptop computer. “We were playing in a band called Wavelord, with Michael Bluestein and Keith MacArthur. Michael’s concept was to work the laptop into the structure, playing in time. That was cool, but I got this idea in my head to try playing something with JHNO which was completely free, and let him really do what he does, which is amazing.”

“We’ve played a few gigs, each time with different people, mostly just with bass and guitar. But we’ve also done ‘Big CRATER’ with lots of different people. Jeff Parker’s played with us, and Nels. It was amazing how there weren’t any limitations. It was a real marriage of electronic, acoustic and electric music. And everybody was improvising but it had a real groove concept, and we’d hit a lot of things that seemed like songs. We’ll do it again.”

The Political Angle

Another factor that frequently manifests in Amendola’s work is his political viewpoint, which lies at the core of who he is. One look at his song titles — “Resistance,” “Cesar Chavez,” “A Cry for John Brown” — or his recent reading list, which includes A People’s History of the United States, is enough to gain an inkling of where Amendola is coming from politically. “Definitely from the left,” he confirms, adding that if he weren’t a musician, he’d probably want to focus on history, perhaps as a teacher or researcher. “When I first moved out to California, I did a lot of political activism work, but that stopped once I started working more. I still sign petitions and stuff, but lately it’s coming out more on a creative level.”

“Like on Cry it was really timely, with George Bush and the war in Iraq and all that. With that record there was a definite slant towards some pretty heavy feelings. That record’s dark. And I chose to cover Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War” on it. The record got a lot of attention because of that track. “Masters of War,” the way we did it, was about rage and anger and expression, but still beauty. I remember I gave the album to one guy, someone I’ve toured with, and he told me that he enjoyed the record but when he got to that track he had to turn it off. It was just too heavy.”

Believe, released more than a year later, had a different vibe. “There’s still some politics in there, but I was leaning towards a more positive side of things. We recorded that record in the summer of 2004, before the election — which for me was just a disappointment — and I felt that the future was bright. A lot of people were organizing and connecting, and sure there were a lot of things we needed to figure out, and a lot of changes to be made, but I wanted to come out swinging and thinking positive.”

This same sense of community organization pervades Amendola’s sense of who he is as a musician. When the subject turns to the intersection of music and politics through such efforts as Live 8, his passion is evident.

“I think it’s important to raise awareness, and to help people, like after Katrina and things like that. But oftentimes I think that musicians get mistaken for something that they’re not. I think that sometimes instead of playing music on behalf of somebody else, we should just let them speak. Like at Live 8, there was this whole struggle with Bob Geldof and a lot of other people over the lack of African bands, when they’re the ones who should be speaking and the rest of us should be going to hear what they have to say. Instead the message gets lost. I think that’s true for a lot of things.”

“I’ve been reading this book called No Logo by Naomi Klein. It’s about branding and how corporations have gotten involved in everything. One of the things they’ve gotten involved in is concert promotion, and now a lot of times the brand — like “Molson Presents” — is much bigger and better promoted than the actual music. Sometimes I feel that’s what’s going on with events like Live 8. It’s all, “U2! Green Day!” and where’s the message? I’m not sure it’s actually helping. It’s not exactly hurting, but there needs to be a more selfless attitude about it.”

“When I make my records, there’s definitely a political angle on it that’s my personal position, that’s my form of expression and it’s a very self-motivated thing. I don’t know if it raises awareness or not, and that’s okay because it’s really just about self-expression. But how could you have a concert about Africa and not let Africans express themselves? People are gonna tune in to see Pink Floyd reunite or whatever and then shut the TV off, and what good does it do? Humanity is losing its focus. We have attention deficit disorder.”

African music is dear to Amendola’s heart, and his albums often feature an element of Afrobeat, the funky style made famous by the late Fela Anikulapo Kuti of Nigeria. The liner notes to Believe include a shout-out to Fela’s longtime drummer, Tony Allen.

“Tony Allen is one of my heroes. He completely changed the concept of funk playing and made it this African thing, he’s like Elvin Jones playing funk, and with an African sound. There’s an element of dancing on the drums in Afrobeat, a lot of subtle things you can do. I remember when I was in college, playing Afrobeat with some guys, and we could stay on one groove for an hour. But it’s so infectious and there’s so much happening, it’s really deep and profound.”

“I once met somebody who spent six months in jail with Fela, and it was amazing just to hang out with this guy and learn about what was going on. Fela’s concerts were also political rallies; he was always fighting for the people, and he was a huge voice. I’ve been attracted to this music for a long time. There’s an entrenched sense of community in it, and a real energy.”

Moving Beyond the Music

Amendola has no shortage of heroes. When asked to list others, the first name mentioned is martyred South African dissident Stephen Biko. Several musicians follow: Ornette Coleman, Wayne Shorter, Jack DeJohnette, and Peter Gabriel. He reserves special attention for Shorter. “That’s someone I’d really like to meet. I’m just fascinated by Wayne, both compositionally and in terms of his playing. I mean, there’s so many different periods with Wayne, so many different facets of him: the Art Blakey period, the Miles late ’60s quintet period, Weather Report… that stuff blows me away. And Wayne solo, too, like Atlantis. That’s one of my favorite records of all time, although it got panned by a lot of critics. It’s just these beautiful compositions, this great meeting of composition and groove and harmony, and there are some beautiful vocal things on it. It’s just so Wayne and so unique.”

After further reflection, he casts all of these musical icons aside for someone closer to home: “I talked about some musicians, but watching my wife go through pregnancy and birth… that tops anything.” Amendola’s wife, a molecular biologist, gave birth to the couple’s first child in November 2005. He continues, “that’s probably the most inspiring thing I’ve seen in life. It was great and beautiful and rough and uncomfortable. It was amazing to watch that and to see him come out. So I put her right at the top. She out- heroes any musician. And having a baby changes the way I see everything, like there’s nothing more important than him. It’s like Charlie Hunter told me long ago when he had his first child, ‘man, I’ve just moved way down the list.’”

In the rare moments when he isn’t gigging, recording, or touring, Amendola enjoys using his hands. “I love carpentry and metalwork,” he says. “I find that kind of work fun. It’s hard on the body, but really satisfying. Like I came off a tour, and a friend taught me how to work with copper pipes. So I spent like three days in the basement of this house I was fixing up just figuring out how to run all these pipes and then doing it. I like doing something tangible. And I like having skills other than music, things that are really useful.”

Passing It On

Amendola also enjoys teaching the next generation of drummers, saying that although he doesn’t have much spare time to devote to giving lessons or leading workshops, the experience is both engaging and rewarding. But as with his music, his teaching style is sometimes unconventional. “There was this one player I taught, and we first got together about 5 or 6 years ago. I started talking, and I just talked for an hour and a half until he finally said, ‘uh, could you maybe play something now?’ I mean, maybe I can give them help or point them in some direction, but sometimes just giving students something they haven’t heard or haven’t thought about is just as valuable.”

Teaching also gives Amendola fresh insights into his own playing. “It reminds me that I need to practice!” he quips. “But seriously, anytime you talk about their craft or your art, that gives you focus. It makes me think about music and what I’m doing. And since I try to keep myself open to new ideas and possibilities, I’m open to learning from the student too.”

Thinking back to his own experience as a student, two episodes stand out. “When I went to Berklee, I had a lot of good teachers. One in particular was Joe Hunt. He might say, ‘what do you want to work on today?’ and I’d say, ‘I want to learn how to play a good brush pattern.’ So he’d have me play a bit and then he’d say, ‘what was wrong with that?’ and I’d say, ‘I dunno, it just didn’t seem right.’ And he’d say, ‘but what’s wrong with it?’ And maybe there wasn’t anything actually wrong with it, so he’d put it in perspective: ‘if the playing is good, and the time is good, then maybe your instincts are right.’ That whole concept of being able to show someone how to be their own person, to build confidence in themselves, that’s an important part of teaching.”

“I also spent five or six years studying with Sonny Igoe, a big band drummer. Great drummer, great teacher. I had heard Chick Corea’s Live in New York record with Roy Haynes and Miroslav Vitous, and Roy was breaking up time, just playing his butt off. And it blew me away. So at my next lesson I was trying to do that stuff, and Sonny said, ‘what are you doing?’ And I was like ‘man, I just heard this great Roy Haynes record, and he was doing this and he was doing that,’ and Sonny just said, ‘Buddy Rich.’ And he brought me back down to earth. It’s good to be able to say, ‘this is important; you should be able to do this before you get to that, and this is how it relates to that.’ I respect that.”

Amendola says there are several young players who he finds exciting. Guitarist Mary Halvorson, who works with Trevor Dunn, is one who has caught his ear. “And there’s this guy who just moved to New York named Erik Deutsch, I heard him play with Ron Miles in Colorado. He’s an amazing piano player. When I saw him with Ron, he had these things going that reminded me of Nels! The things he was doing were both texturally interesting and super-musical.” He also singles out Wil Blades, a San Francisco-based organist with whom Amendola has formed a well-regarded gigging trio.

Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

Blades figures prominently in Amendola’s plans for the near future. In March of this year, the two will premiere a duo interpretation of Duke Ellington’s Far East Suite. Amendola will also return to the studio soon for a tribute to seminal pianist Andrew Hill. With these projects and a regular gig in a Thelonious Monk tribute band (alongside Devin Hoff and clarinetist Ben Goldberg), it might appear that Amendola has entered a phase of looking back to his musical roots. But he says there’s more to it than that.

“In terms of Andrew Hill, that’s Nels’ project. It’ll be the Nels Cline Singers, plus Ben Goldberg and Andrea Parkins and Bobby Bradford. Nels wants to pay tribute to Andrew Hill now, while he’s still around, and give him some attention. Hill’s had such a profound impact on so many of us. We’re doing maybe ten or eleven of his tunes. That’ll be on Cryptogramophone, but I’m not sure when it’ll come out; hopefully this year.”

And the Far East Suite? “I’ve always wanted to play that music. At first I wanted to arrange it for my band. But now I have this relationship with Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco, as sort of a resident composer/artist. So I’d been preparing compositions to play there, and then I thought I could give this music a different take. I feel like Wil and I can say something interesting with it. We’ll bring it down to just organ and drums, and really strip it down and try to take apart the pieces, do something that hasn’t been done. I want to try a whole new concept, and we’ll see what we come up with.”

He’s also attracted to the suite’s multifaceted nature. “There’s a really heavy backbeat to some of the tunes that you can just groove on, and then there are some chamber-like pieces, and “Isfahan” is beautiful, almost like an English ballad. It’s an amazing work.”

Plays Monk, the trio with Hoff and Goldberg, is also about breaking things down. “Here’s a situation where it’s clarinet, bass and drums. There’s no chord voice. It’s taking Monk’s music and putting it into a different configuration. The way we play that music, we shy away from the melodies oftentimes. Or rather, Ben is really free with the melodies. Some of it we play straight, but the fact that there’s no chordal instrument really opens up the music for Devin and Ben. And we all just love the music.”

He sums up all three projects eloquently. “I feel like I spend most of my life playing other people’s music, and there are some people I just want to honor, like Ellington and Monk. Those people provide a lifetime of study. They’re so interesting melodically and harmonically, and I have so much to learn from them. When I play their music, it’s an education. Always.”

The list of current projects only begins there. Amendola just wrapped up another record, this time backing up violinist John Ettinger and saxophonist Tony Malaby. He’s preparing a solo piece for drums and electric mbira to be performed in March as part of the Under the Radar improv festival at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Meanwhile, he’ll be in the studio yet again for Madeleine Peyroux’s next CD and then touring with her in the spring. And as if that weren’t enough, Amendola also holds down a side job as a booking agent, programming music for Bacar, an upscale restaurant in San Francisco. How does he do it? “Between all the music things, I’m working 18-hour days,” he says. “I really miss reading.”

He may miss digging into his history books, but somehow Scott Amendola hasn’t missed a beat.

Mimi Fox is slowly but surely beginning to get her due. Named a “rising star” in the DownBeat magazine critics’ poll in 2003 and again in 2004, signed to a growing young label (Favored Nations), and with a discography that’s up to seven discs under her own name (alongside dozens of side gigs), Fox’s fluid guitar chops are finally beginning to reach a wide audience.

In January 2005, Fox will conduct a clinic on the art of solo jazz guitar at the IAJE conference in Long Beach, and perform a series of special duet concerts with bassist Harvie S in Berkeley and San Jose. Fans in San Francisco and environs can catch Fox on a frequent basis at clubs around the area.

FB: You’re really busy these days.

MF: Yeah, things are good for me. Professionally, things are great. If I was doing any more I don’t know where I would do it or how I would do it.

FB: You have a number of new recording projects coming out, right?

MF: I’ve done a bunch of different things with different people, but for myself, I’ve signed with an exciting label down in LA called Favored Nations, which was started by Steve Vai, a rock guitar guy who’s played with Frank Zappa and a lot of other people. He’s a great guy, and the label features all guitar players. They have Frank Gambale and Larry Carlton, but I’m gonna be their first straightahead release. It’s a great label; they have distribution with Sony, so that’s good. Anyway, that’ll be my next project.

Recently, I’ve done two projects with different singers, and the last project I’ve done as a leader was a solo guitar project of standards.

FB: Could we talk briefly about those three things?

MF: Sure. I did one with a vocalist here in San Francisco, Maye Cavallaro. It’s mostly duo stuff, although Paul McCandless plays horn on some songs; he did a beautiful job. And Ian Dogole plays percussion on some. But it’s primarily me and Maye. Then I did a project with a quintet in Seattle, featuring vocalist Greta Matassa. Great singer. That was actually a DVD project; it was a lot of fun. And before that was my solo album, Standards, released in 2001. That was also with a Seattle label, Origin Records.

FB: Do you find a difference playing with a vocalist as opposed to other instrumentalists?

MF: It depends on the singer. In Greta’s case, she’s a great scat singer, and is more like a horn, like having another instrumentalist. Some of the other singers I’ve worked with over the years, like Bobby McFerrin, are like that, just like working with horn players except that they may or may not be singing lyrics. Of course, some other singers are more word-oriented and less busy in terms of doing the scat thing. They’re more into phrasing and the beauty of the notes. But even then, I don’t know that it’s that much different than working with any other musician in a duo setting. I’m trying to be a sensitive accompanist, while at the same time retaining my individual voice.

FB: You compose quite a bit.

MF: I do.

FB: Is there such a thing as a Mimi Fox song, or a Mimi Fox compositional sound?

MF: I think as a composer, you do funnel all of the different things in your life, both personal and musical, that you are absorbing. It all becomes part of your compositional palette. I’ve written in all different styles; I’ve written for sextet and septet with horns, I’ve written numerous tunes with lyrics, that my vocalist friends sing, I’ve written blues forms and extended forms, stuff in odd meters, stuff that falls under the broad heading of Latin jazz, and of course stuff that’s straight-up and straightahead.

I do think that because I play drums also — although I don’t have as much time as I wish I did to keep my chops up on that as a second instrument — I do think there’s a strong rhythmic sense. I think one of the things that people notice about my playing as a signature or trademark would be a sense of rhythmic drive, and the complexity of some of the rhythmic figures. And that’s partly because I play drums and I revere drummers. Drummers were the first ones that got me into jazz, you know, Elvin Jones, and Art Blakey, Philly Joe [Jones]… when I heard those drummers I was enchanted. That was my first influence, and I think my playing and my composing reflect that.

FB: I was just about to ask if you still played drums…

MF: Yeah, I started out with drums and played them all throughout junior high and high school, and even the first few years after I moved out here, but then I had a running injury. I was a long distance runner, and one time I hurt my knee. That sort of messed up my drum pedaling — it was my bass drum foot — but it was a blessing in disguise. It curtailed my running career, and curtailed my drumming career, but it forced me to devote myself to the guitar. I still love having the drums to play when I can, and if I’m not in the middle of a project I do try to practice every day, at least a little bit.

FB: How long have you lived in the Bay Area?

MF: I moved here at the end of 1979, so 23, almost 24 years now.

FB: What brought you out here?

MF: Well, you know I grew up in New York, although we moved quite a bit when I was a kid; we lived all over the east coast. And I had sort of had enough of it. It’s an intense place; if you’ve been there, you know the vibe of it. And I’m an intense person. So when I came out to California, I slowed down a little bit, and it really helped me cool my jets, for lack of a better term. I find that it helps me, because I really do need a more relaxed pace. Plus I’m a very outdoors-y kind of gal. I can’t run anymore because of that aforementioned injury, but I do love to go hiking and biking and be outside a lot. I’d also had enough of the New York winters!

When I first moved to California I lived down in LA, doing a lot of studio work, and then I realized that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life having some idiot producer telling me what to play over these eight bars, and could I try to sound like Duane Eddy here, and could I put in this riff there… it’s totally the opposite of what you want as a jazz player. It stymies your creativity. So then I moved up to San Francisco, and it was there that I met Bruce Forman, and that really turned my head around. I said that’s it, okay, I’m going to give up my drums and just devote myself to jazz guitar.

FB: Do you ever play outside of the jazz idiom?

MF: I’ve done a lot of different projects. I do a lot of producing, and I’ve produced and arranged projects from hiphop and r&b groups to folk singers and singer-songwriters, world music, all kinds of stuff. As a player, I’ve been offered some high-profile pop engagements over the years, but I have continued to turn them down, because I’m doing pretty well as a jazz artist. I’m not a millionaire, needless to say, but I’m doing okay. If I ever needed to, I might do it, but I don’t want to. Although there are a few pop people that I love, people like Stevie Wonder, Bonnie Raitt… I just don’t want to be taken out of what I’ve devoted my life to. I’ve made my choice.

FB: How has your production work affected you as a player?

MF: Well, sometimes it’s just nice to take a little breather, if I’m playing 4 or 5 nights a week. Whether I’m at home or on the road, I play a lot. I’m always gigging. Sometimes, after three or four sets of hard-driving jazz and bop, it’s nice to sort of clear out your ears. So when I’m around stuff that’s harmonically a lot simpler, it gives me a chance to refuel as a jazz artist. Then when I pick up my ax again on the gig, I feel really energized. Whenever I’m tempted to feel jaded over some stupid gig or some dumb situation that just happens, it’s really ameliorated by the chance to clear out my ears and then come back fresh remembering why I love this music in spite of all the b.s. and professional politics that you have to deal with.

FB: If you weren’t a jazz musician, what do you think you’d be doing now?

MF: Here’s a funny story. When I was sixteen I was working with a number of different bands, but I was also playing in my high school band. So my guidance counselor, Alan Silverman — he was so sweet — he says, “Now Mimi, we all think you’re very talented. But a career in music is no kind of career. I think what you should do is take a year off, go to Israel, live on a kibbutz, and then when you come back you should be a lawyer because you love to argue.” And I said, “What do you mean, Alan?!” — but of course even then I realized the irony of what I was saying: you love to argue / no I don’t!…

But truthfully, I don’t know. I’ve done a lot of traveling in the last seven or eight years; I’ve gone to a lot of countries, and I’ve seen a lot of poverty and a lot of suffering. That’s something that has really impacted me. I think if I wasn’t a musician what I’d like to be doing is giving in some way to humanity. I had an extended stay in Bangkok. I was playing at a beautiful place, but then I’d go out on the streets and the poverty there — and you know the problem with land mines and the people with blown-off limbs — the suffering was enormous. And when I was in the Dominican Republic a few years ago, again I saw a lot of poverty in villages.

I also think children could benefit from having music brought into their lives; I’ve thought about giving in that kind of way, or teaching children, helping communities build in some way. Yes, I think some kind of humanitarian work is what would appeal to me. Another lucrative field [laughs], but I think the benefits you get from doing something like that far outweigh the sacrifice.

That’s just what comes to me off the top of my head. I don’t know if I would have made a good lawyer.

FB: Who are your heroes, musical or otherwise?

MF: Of course musically, I have my favorites. My friend and mentor Bruce Forman, and also Joe Pass musically are real heroes for me. And then there are many people that I’ve admired in other realms, from Harriet Tubman to Cesar Chavez, Gloria Steinem… many people who have been involved in human rights, civil rights, women’s rights, struggles for human dignity. I admire all of them for being on the front lines. They have devoted their lives to doing things that really changed the course of history and of the world. I have great admiration for those people.

FB: Okay, here’s a new subject. You give a lot of interviews. In all the time people like you have been interviewed by people like us, but especially in the past few years, it seems that musicians have been very critical of jazz journalism. Do you have any thoughts on that?

MF: I think that any time you’re writing about something and maybe not doing it yourself, you’re an easy target. The musician can turn around and say, “well, what do you know? You’re not out there in the trenches, playing these gigs and dealing with these promoters and so on. You’re not an artist.” I think it’s really easy to get into that, and I think there’s some truth in it. I know that there are some very knowledgeable, literate, even brilliant jazz journalists, but then there are those that maybe aren’t so knowledgeable. There, wasn’t that diplomatic?

But personally, jazz journalists have been very good to me. You know the old adage, “just spell my name right?” Basically, short of saying someone’s an axe murderer or whatever, I think that generally just getting any publicity is a good thing. I think most critics do try to be well-balanced, but everyone comes to the plate with their own series of biases. Hopefully they don’t have too much of an axe to grind, but I guess there are some people that do.

I think it’s just a delicate thing, and sometimes musicians and journalists, who should be friends, just fall into an adversarial thing, simply because sometimes you say something, and then it gets to print and you didn’t mean it to come off that way. Or maybe something you said tongue-in-cheek comes off the wrong way.

I had a funny experience in Seattle a few years ago. I was sent to a big radio station, I can’t remember the call letters. One of the marketing people or publicists had set this up for me. So I dutifully showed up on time and ready for my interview. Well, I was a little nervous because the woman who was interviewing me had like ten piercings and didn’t look like someone you’d normally see at a jazz station. It was more like a college station, definitely a different look. But I thought, “oh, Mimi, shed your prejudices, just do your interview.” Well, midway through the interview, she asks me what rock guitar players I liked, and me being rather flippant and casual, I said, “none.” The next thing I knew, all 80 lights on the telephone switchboard lit up. Apparently, the publicist never told me, but they had booked me on a big rock station! So all these irate rock ‘n’ roll hackers call up saying, “whaddaya you know, you jazz schmuck?” I was tired, it was the end of a long tour, I didn’t check. I’m a jazz musician; I just assumed the publicist was sending me to a jazz station. So I called the publicist afterwards and said, “Vinny, how could you do this to me?” He said he didn’t know, the person who called him sounded really nice… anyway it turned out that the woman who interviewed me, this was her thing, being a troublemaker and trying to sort of snare people and get them to incriminate themselves. Now how did we get into this silly story?

FB: We were talking about the relationship between artists and journalists.

MF: Right. Maybe I’ve been lucky, but I’ve found most journalists to be intelligent and articulate. I never hold against a journalist what an editor does. I think that sometimes you say some things that you wish got into an article and then they don’t because of space or editorial constraints, but I’d certainly never hold that against a journalist. However, sometimes things can happen because of the way things are edited that can make a story slant one way…

FB: And sometimes a minor point or a passing comment gets elevated to the theme of the whole piece.

MF: Right. So I’ve learned to be who I am but use some restraint, because things can get distorted. As a jazz musician, you do have to be aware of these things when you’re giving interviews… There are probably some people out there who shouldn’t be in positions of reviewing jazz. Jazz is an art form, and it should be reviewed by people who are art critics, who understand the music and know the history. It’s one thing for someone to say “I prefer this material over that,” but it’s another to say “this isn’t good music,” especially if they don’t know what they’re talking about. I’ve had good experiences, I haven’t gotten panned, but maybe if I become successful enough someone’s gonna slam me someday!

FB: Who on the scene today excites you as a musician?

MF: Let’s see… guitar player-wise, there are a number of people who are still really jazzing me up, and one of them is Jim Hall, who’s become a friend of mine. He contacted me after he heard one of my CDs and sent me the most loving note; it was like I was receiving something from a long-lost uncle. We’ve been friends ever since. He’s a brilliant musician — he’s really an architect when he plays, so incredibly musical and structurally developed. I also love Kenny Burrell. He’s someone I played with recently down in LA for a Heritage Guitar night, because I’m an endorsee and so is Kenny. He’s a great guy. I love Russell Malone, who’s become a good friend of mine. A not as well-known player who deserves more accolades than he gets is John Stowell. A very unassuming person, with a very unusual style. He’s from Portland, Oregon, but he does make it down here periodically. I love some of the stuff that Jimmy Bruno and Joe Beck have done. They have some wonderful guitar duet stuff that’s totally smokin’.

When you go into other instruments it’s a whole new field… Joe Lovano; Christian McBride plays his buns off.

FB: It sounds like you do a lot of listening.

MF: I do. Part of my job description as a jazz musician is to listen as much as I can.

FB: You’ve worked in a wide range of settings. Is there anything you really want to try that you just haven’t had the opportunity to do yet?

MF: I’ve been pretty lucky. I’ve gotten to do a lot of things. A few years ago, I performed some of my acoustic guitar pieces with a chamber orchestra. I have had contact with a fellow from Seattle, to possibly do some of my original scores with a full symphony orchestra. If that happened, it would just be a deeper level. Getting to arrange and perform in that capacity would be wonderful.

Also, there are some composers I would love to collaborate with: Mary Watkins, a wonderful Bay Area composer — we’ve actually talked about collaborating and composing a sort of jazz guitar symphony together, so it would be more orchestral, but written for jazz guitar, not something that I would have to adapt. We’ve sort of rolled that around, and again dealing with orchestras, and funding, and other various issues have hung it up, but that would be something I’d love to do.

And I think there are some other players on the scene I’d love to play with. Jeff “Tain” Watts and Christian McBride would be a “dream team”rhythm section for me. There’s a lot of players I’d like to work with, but those guys are pretty high on my list.

FB: Were the orchestral pieces written with a large ensemble in mind?

MF: I’ve adapted some of the acoustic guitar pieces I’ve written which blend jazz and classical influences. They were written as solo guitar pieces, but they’re highly adaptable for orchestra. I wrote out all the parts when I worked with the chamber orchestra, which was basically strings and percussion; a fairly small orchestral setting. For a larger scale, I’d like to collaborate with someone. Mary Watkins and I talked about doing something with a socio-political bent, since she’s African-American and I’m Jewish, blending our varied histories as peoples and being a real force for healing. There’s been some damage between those two communities over the years, and we think there’s an opportunity to do some healing on a musical level. So that was another idea, to be broad in scope both artistically and socially.

Tenor saxophonist Dave Ellis has been a stalwart of the Bay Area jazz scene for years. An East Bay native, he honed his craft in the famed Berkeley High School jazz program and, appropriately enough, the Berklee school of Music in Boston. After returning to the Bay Area, he spent time in the original version Charlie Hunter Trio as well as several other groups, and began recording a series of critically acclaimed albums. The most recent of these, 2003′s State of Mind, won the Outstanding Jazz Album honor at the 2004 California Music Awards. He has since joined forces with his sister, r&b vocalist Zoë Ellis, in a new project named Zadell.

Forrest Bryant: What’s the last book you read?

Dave Ellis: I’m reading two books right now. One is a copy of the Upanishads [a series of sacred Hindu works], that I got from Peter Russell, and the other is a book called The Elegant Universe, by Brian Greene, which is about string theory.

FB: Is that an interest of yours?

DE: Yes. Both things are strangely connected, so I’ve been into that recently. The Elegant Universe takes a minute. It’s in layperson’s language, but it’s still pretty complicated.

FB: So these are both the sort of things that you read regularly, spirituality and science?

DE: Yeah, the whole Tao of Physics type of thing, which is another book that I’ve read recently. That’s really fascinating to me, both ends of it. The interesting thing about books like the Upanishads relative to string theory is that knowledge that’s 8,000 or more years old, and was clearly understood then, is being borne out in very advanced scientific theory today. I can’t get enough of that.

FB: Is it possible to draw a connection between that and your own philosophy of music?

DE: I think so. Just from a purely practical, scientific point of view, if you check into string theory, the current idea that the smallest piece of stuff is basically a vibrating string, and the notion that vibration creates everything that we observe.

I’ve always felt that — and I have no idea where it came from, but we’re talking about back to single-digit age here — that I have a real difficult time doing things that I don’t think are worthwhile. It’s sometimes hard to say what’s worthwhile, but music has always felt like a worthwhile endeavor, even back when I couldn’t necessarily figure out why. But when you make this sort of connection… I have a degree in production and engineering from Berklee, and we had to take classes in math and science for recording, which was my first introduction to the connection between math and sound — you’re graphing sine waves and then you realize that these are the components that make up sound.

And then there the whole sort of notion of “vibrations” in the air”¦ there’s so many similarities between science, metaphysics, and philosophy. It’s absolutely part and parcel of my music. I don’t write tunes with titles like “The Tao of Physics” — it’s not that specific or upfront in the music, but certainly my state of mind infers this course that I’m on.

FB: Do you do a lot of writing?

DE: No. I’ve got a lot of tune titles, but nothing to go with them! I used to do a lot of writing in college, and later in the Charlie Hunter Trio we did a lot of group writing. And I’ve done some writing for each of the three records that I’ve put out, but a lot of that writing had deadlines to force me to do it. It’s a difficult process, I’m sure, for every composer. But for me, I’ve always focused more on playing.

That’s changing, because I’m really trying to figure out at this point in my career if there is such a thing as a “Dave Ellis song” — what my sound is, compositionally. Most of what I wrote in college was more r&b oriented — computer music with synthesizers and drum machines and stuff. I still enjoy that, and my music at home still winds up being full of samples and loops. It’s like my “under a rock” type stuff. I enjoy that, and I do it, but I have not yet really incorporated it into what I do in public, so that’s sort of what’s coming up.

FB: So you’re interested in incorporating the r&b flavor and the samples with the jazz?

DE: Yes, I always have been. The interesting thing about the Charlie Hunter Trio was that we always had that vibe right at the top. Jay Lane, the drummer in the trio at that time, is a real home-recording composer. He’s crankin’ jams all the time, as we say. And I have a lot of friends who do that; we’ve been doing that since 4-track cassettes were first made available to us after high school, in the mid-’80s. And we’re still doing it. That vibe was always up front. The Charlie Hunter Trio was an improvisational format, but always with funky beats. Charlie still does that; he’s really good at that, working it into an acoustically-based jazz format.

FB: Was that the trio’s secret of success?

DE: Yeah. Coupled with the fact that initially we played and practiced and rehearsed for the pure joy of doing that; the gigs were a side benefit, and something for us to rehearse for. We didn’t intend what eventually happened with it; it was a very organic thing, just for the joy of music. People tended to put something in front of the word “jazz” to classify us, like “acid jazz” or whatever. “Testosterone jazz.” That mix of danceable beat, high-energy music, was a key to that group’s success, and I think it remains a large part of what Charlie’s crowd comes to see.

FB: There’s a link there between what Charlie does and the whole jam band scene, which is really resurgent now. You’ve had experience in that scene as well, working with the artists formerly known as the [Grateful] Dead…

DE: [laughs]

FB: …How did you wind up working with those cats?

DE: Well, the short version goes like this. The first record the Charlie Hunter Trio did was on Les Claypool’s label, Prawn Song. Les did a recording session with Rob Wasserman, the bass player, and he brought Jay from our group along to do that. It was like a commercial or something. So Jay got introduced to Rob, who at the time was working in a duo with Bob Weir, just a little project of their own. And they asked Jay to come and play, so it became a little trio, and Jay eventually left the Charlie Hunter Trio to focus on that.

About a year and a half later, when they had changed the name of the band from “Scaring The Children” to “Ratdog,” they were adding more people. They had [pianist] Johnny Johnson come in and play, and [harmonica player/guitarist] Matthew Kelly was in there. And then Jerry Garcia died, which threw everything into an upheaval.

Now, I left Charlie’s group in 1995 or so, and began work on my first album for Monarch Records in ’96. At that time, Ratdog was looking for a lead voice, but because Jerry had only been gone for eight months or so, it would have been blasphemous for them to consider having a guitar lead. So they wanted to do something different, and Jay said, “hey, I know somebody we could bring in here,” so I just came up and started hanging out and playing, and it just blossomed. As soon as the impact of Jerry’s death had been accepted and they’d moved beyond it to a certain point, the guys put The Other Ones together as a band.

Each of the guys left from the Dead had projects of their own going on, so everybody kind of brought a guy along from their own project. So I was Bob’s guy. [Drummer] John Molo was Bruce Hornsby’s guy. The band all got together and agreed on Steve Kimock and Mark Karan; two guys to cover Jerry’s spot. And Mickey Hart had his entire “R.A.M.U.” [Random Access Musical Universe] setup, which involved a lot of people backstage that you never see, that was his crew. So that’s the relatively short version.

FB: We’re gonna get back to this in a moment, but you brought up something interesting that I don’t want to lose: cross-pollination. There were so many different things going on in the Bay Area at that time, and you were all communicating. And that was less than ten years ago. But it seems like the scene has changed since then. How would you characterize that change?

DE: We’re in a deep valley right now. I’ve been around here forever, and I’ve seen peaks and valleys. They generally come in relatively regular five or six-year intervals. But there were some very high times, and a very fertile scene in the early ’90s, with the Hunter Trio, Alphabet Soup, the Broun Fellinis… all kinds of bands. It was fertile ground: lots of small clubs with jazz where you could go in and pay five bucks and stay there all night listening to music.

But those go in waves. Currently, it’s a very, very bad situation. For instance, there’s not a national-profile jazz club within the city of San Francisco. And that’s a real indication of the state of things. Many, many of my old colleagues have moved away, to New York or LA. I’m one of the few, or maybe one of the only remaining guys from that crowd. It’s a very shallow pool right now. I think the current administration and the state of the economy and terrorism threats and all that stuff have deepened the valley this time, and extended the time period.

On the bright side, what I feel right now — being somewhat sensitive to it — is a swell from underneath of the need for creative outlets for everybody. And that blossoms when it blossoms, I can’t anticipate when that’ll be, but I’m beginning to feel it. Not just from musicians, either, but from the general population. There’s a missing element, and what I’ve seen in the past is that people begin to hunger for places to join together and things to hang around.

FB: Okay, now getting back to The Other Ones, how does it differ playing in that sort of a jam band environment from playing in a straightahead jazz environment? Is it a matter of how you play, or how you interact with the audience?

DE: That’s an excellent question. First, let me say how they’re similar. Most often I’m asked how could you possibly have gone from one to the other? And I point out the similarity in intent of the organization. They’re both creative, open, and improvisational. Now the Dead is a phenomenon. It’s its own thing, in a way. It’s obviously had the thousands of spinoffs and created lots of pockets in other kinds of music, but the idea that you could combine very good, thoughtful compositions with an open format of creativity and creation is just about exactly what jazz is.

As far as differences, the demographic is significantly different. Harmonically, jazz is much more complex. And I think I can say with confidence that it requires more practice and study as an instrumentalist to become accomplished in the field of jazz.
When you say “jazz,” it’s such a broad thing, but I generally think of it as the continuation of Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Duke Ellington, Miles, Trane, and so forth. That lineage.

FB: The “tradition?”

DE: Yeah, but people have a really limited view I think, when you say “tradition.” It brings about the idea that current jazz artists are trying to re-create something that happened in the past, but I don’t necessarily see it that way. Anyway, there are certainly differences between jazz and jam bands, but the similarities allowed me to bridge the gap.

One of the things that was spectacular, and I know I was very fortunate, is that I was like a rookie playing in the Super Bowl working with The Other Ones. The fans were so devastated by Jerry’s death, and they hadn’t had their fix of the Dead in years — and these people were used to monthly fixes, you know? But now years went by and they were losing it. So to be there in that real estate between Bob Weir and Bruce Hornsby, surrounded by that and the audience… I got a really unique perspective on what the whole thing was about.

For me, I grew up in Berkeley, and I honestly avoided the Dead like the plague when I was growing up. For somebody who was interested in jazz, that scene did not work, you know? The party was not something I was interested in. And to some extent, the Dead was an excuse to have a party. And the musical end of it was something I thought of as kind of lightweight. But there were a couple of times on tour — I don’t remember where we were, but there were about 35,000 people out there, in a good mood, and picking up on the slightest swell in energy and creativity from the band. That is just a fascinating thing; it’s a real phenomenon. You would look out on a sea of people, but it was all very friendly and calm, and positive. Man, I took my camera out on stage and started taking pictures of the audience!

And then a couple of those nights, Bruce Hornsby rendered a few of the Garcia and Robert Hunter tunes in a way that was more familiar to me, and I understood the value of those compositions. They’re real songs, whether you play them acoustically or orchestrate them or whatever. I realized that although most of them didn’t focus on being virtuosic on their instruments, these songs are timeless. I didn’t understand that before. But it’s an element in jazz that I find completely true. For me, that’s great. I started playing jazz when I was ten, and I can go ’til I’m eighty and in a sense, I’ll never be in style but I’ll never be out of style. And in a way, the Dead is like that too. You either like it or you don’t, but you can’t deny it.

FB: You went to Berkeley High School, which has an almost legendary status in the jazz community. Was it like that when you were there? Did the reputation of the place have an impact on you?

DE: Yeah. I came there at a very interesting time. Phil Hardymon was the person who implemented the initial program; by “program” I mean his students started in fourth grade and by the time they finished high school, they were essentially pros. But Phil was a very special person. He knew how to recognize talent, he knew how to suggest instruments, he composed pieces for elementary school bands to introduce them to jazz and improvisation. He was kind and friendly to the fourth graders, but as they got older it got a little more intense and serious! But he was doing it all simultaneously.

I grew up — myself and Joshua Redman and our generation of guys — watching Benny Green, Craig Handy, Paul Hanson and these guys. When we were in elementary school, they were seniors. Their status was — and I still believe this, ’cause I have the tapes — the peak of the Berkeley High band. ’77-’78-’79. The band was just ridiculous, especially relative to other groups. I mean, the lead trumpet player’s hitting C above high G, and Bennie Green’s like two years old and sounding Oscar Peterson already. You know, it’s just not normal! But young guys and girls grow up seeing that — they came to Franklin elementary where we all were — and it blew us away, but we didn’t realize that that’s not a normal level to be at when you’re a senior in high school! So that’s what we aspired to.

Now, right when I got to Berkeley High, Phil Hardymon left because of health issues. That was a devastating thing for me, because this was my goal growing up. It wasn’t football or anything else, just being in that jazz ensemble. At that time it would have represented an entire school career of practicing in anticipation of getting in this group. But then Charles Hamilton took over. And because of the legends of the past, my peers were as responsible as Charles was for remembering that tradition and continuing it. Because Charles was not Phil Hardymon, especially at that time. And so over the last 20 years, he and the students have had to re-establish Berkeley as a great place. I think the key to their success since Charles has taken over is building on the tradtion, and realizing that it’s the students who must understand the level that is expected at the school. The quality mirrors the level of understanding by the students. Charles provides the atmosphere.

The growth has been incredible. I judged the high school competition at Monterey this year, which Berkeley High won for the first time in about 12 years. They’re always in the finals but rarely win. This year it was unanimous, but this is the year that Berkeley High was not expected to win: they didn’t have any virtuoso super-soloists, but the band came together as a unit. And Charles was just fantastic as a leader. I had a tear in my eye. It’s come a long way. There have been a number of phases; some bands are much better than others over the course of a generation, but the focus on jazz as something that kids in school aspire to be good at has remained the same. You know, reputation carries its own weight, Sometimes the band was not so good, but that didn’t hurt the reputation. Just look at how many professional musicians have come out of there.

FB: Have you maintained professional connections with your high school associates?

DE: Oh, absolutely. Completely and totally. In fact, my best friends are still the guys I was in the band with back then: Miles Perkins, who’s the director of Mingus Amungus, was the bass player in that band; Josh Redman was in the band of course. Many people who are not directly in the performance area now but are involved in music in other ways, like Jeff Lipton, who’s vice president of a company called Pulse 3D; they do this thing called virtual personalities, which is an extremely hip, forward-looking IT endeavor. He was the baritone sax player in our section. We were all very close and have remained that way.

FB: Now, let’s get to this new album [State of Mind]… Your first two albums as a leader were very well received, but then there was a long lag between those and the current album. Was that intentional, or were you a victim of circumstances?

DE: Mostly circumstances. If you look at the recording date on my new album, you’ll see it’s March and November of 2001. The circumstances were that I had another album on my Monarch Records deal, and [producer] Orrin Keepnews and I had agreed to work on it together; we’d actually begun the planning stages back in 1999. But then Monarch pulled the plug on the deal by saying, “we want you to play smooth jazz, and if you don’t, you can’t do anything.” So I said, “well, I won’t be doing anything. Forget it.”

It’s funny, you know, “smooth jazz” is another one of those broad terms. I have a lot of electronic music experience, and I enjoy doing that, but I’m certainly not going to be told what I’m gonna do in order to make a record. So when Orrin got what was essentially an eMusic deal to make a record, he and I re-ignited the process to get this record back in motion, and we made it happen just like that.

Then, because of the state of the record business, which has been in flux since about that time, eMusic was bought by Universal and the project got shelved. Then Orrin had to work to acquire the masters, and then go about finding another home for it. Orrin’s long association with Fantasy Records provided the outlet, and of course it’s a little easier these days to sell a completed master tape than to ask a company to fund one, so it worked out very well [the record was released in 2003 by Milestone, an imprint of Fantasy].

FB: That was a pretty long gestation period; how much of your original vision made it into the final record?

DE: It’s better than we originally anticipated, actually. Of course, Orrin is just one degree — or half a degree, really — away from everyone in the world of jazz. In fact he may be at ground zero! I don’t think I would have been quite prepared to play with the guys I wound up playing with on State of Mind at the time we started. It was very helpful to have that extra time to progress and think about the record. Between 1999 and 2001 when it was actually completed, it grew into something bigger and better than what we originally thought of.

Orrin has always been very open with me about sharing in the production process, choosing music, talking about players, tempos, keys, all those wonderful things. We had the time to really craft this thing, and that’s why I think it’s better than it would have been otherwise.

FB: You’ve said in previous interviews that you believe an album should be a cohesive whole, something that you can listen to from start to finish. How do you achieve that?

DE: By paying close attention to what’s needed at what time, during the course of an hour’s worth of music. A lot like you might script a performance, but the advantage of recording is that you can be fine in your detail.

Things that we considered were not just key and tempo, but who are the players? What are the consistent elements? You know, this was two recording sessions with essentially two different sets of people. But we thought about what the common threads would be. One was me of course, the other was to use Mulgrew [Miller, on piano] throughout the whole thing. Also type and era of the tunes were considered. So you’ve got a couple from me, which are new and represent me at the time. And Orrin said, “I want a ’40s ballad, maybe an Ellington thing, maybe something that isn’t well known,” so the tune “Something to Live For” came out of that.

So we didn’t just pull together a couple of good tunes and a bunch of filler — which nobody goes into the studio thinking they’re going to do, but you know how often that winds up being the result. What was so nice about hanging out with Orrin was it meant going over to his house and looking at his Grammys [laughs] — hey, that didn’t hurt — and listening to music, saying, “Okay, what’ve we got here? What’s needed?” He wanted to do something a little more contemporary, more like a Woody Shaw or Joe Henderson kind of thing, and “Sunshowers” came out of that. There’s a tune that nobody ever thought of doing.

FB: Ah, I was going to ask about “Sunshowers.” That’s a great tune that doesn’t get covered very often. State of Mind has a lot of really interesting selections like that; what is it that attracts you to a particular composition?

DE: Oh, man! That intangible thing that you cannot describe. That transcendent thing in a tune that speaks to you from some other place. That. The indescribable thing that makes art worthwhile. It just speaks to you.

Now, I’m a Woody Shaw fan too, because he’s one of the guys I heard growing up, and I saw him a lot at the Keystone Korner. The funny thing about that is that he was often with Joe Henderson who I didn’t really like in my younger days; I was not a Joe fan then as I am now. I was way more into Woody, which is a trip now that I think of it! Anyway, I’ve always felt like outside of my ability to play the instrument, I have a good understanding of that intangible something. To reproduce it is another thing, but I think I have a good understanding of what valuable music is.

I know that’s completely subjective. Obviously I can’t sit here and say, “I know what’s good.” Maybe I should say I know what’s not good! I think Orrin recognized that, and he’s certainly a master of it. On the other hand, Orrin is fond of saying he’s made one of every kind of record, except one that’s sold! But he has never been into it for that reason.

FB: You close the album with a very unusual, almost inverted version of “Summertime.” That arrangement was by one of our local legends, saxophonist Noel Jewkes”¦

DE: Yes!

FB: “¦What’s your relationship with Noel?

DE: He was my teacher. He was one of four important teachers who I’ve had through my career, and I studied on and off with him between the ages of about eleven and fourteen or fifteen, and then there was a brief stint a few years later. That tune was on his Dr. Legato Express record in 1978, retitled “Winterlude.”

Noel is just completely creative. I remember going to see him one time and he had his recording gear set up in his garage, which consisted of a couple of reel-to-reel decks running simultaneously, and he had a piece of plastic PVC tubing that he was sort of whacking on, and he said, “play over this!” And I’m like twelve or thirteen! Talk about lessons on how to be creative”¦ And he can play piano and bass — he’s a multi-instrumentalist — and he’s always reworking everything. I was a little hesitant to put this tune on the record, because I know Noel, and he probably thought it was inadequate about five seconds after he originally recorded it in 1978. So to regurgitate that may not have made him so happy.

But that song, “Winterlude,” just became a part of my life, and I wanted to share that with people. I’ve been playing it with my current group, and it gets a lot of positive response from the audience, but also from the band. They’re just like, “man, that is killer!” People ask to see the music. It was a septet or octet tune when Noel did it, and I just broke it down to a quartet tune, so it’s missing a lot of the elements that I really enjoyed. But when we were rehearsing in New York and those guys were looking at the changes — Mulgrew, Peter Washington, and Carl Allen — I’ll never forget how they approached it. I’ve been around a lot of different musicians, and in some ways top level guys can have top level egos. But it was completely different here. Those guys said, “wow, this is a trip; why don’t we slow it down so that the changes can really be heard,” and they had all kinds of suggestions about how to help craft this tune into what I wanted it to be. I played them the original so that they could get a feel for it. And with their help, it turned into one fine record. Those guys are just about music.

FB: Last question: what’s in your CD player right now?

DE: Well, I have a two year old daughter, so oftentimes it’s The Wiggles. But right now, it’s Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, Volume 2: Mission Eternal, and also Free For All, so I guess I’m in an Art Blakey mode right now. And Eric Benet. How about you? What’s in your CD player?

FB: Why, your disc, of course!

DE: Good, that’s the right answer!