John Brown, director of the Jazz Program at Duke University, was out of the classroom and into the recording studio this past summer. He was working with his quintet, cutting tracks at Overdub Lane in Durham, with John Plymale engineering.
The efforts of Brown and his quintet compadres will yield more than one album. Our first taste is coming on Nov. 6 with the release of Terms of Art — an album conceived as a tribute to the great Art Blakey and his band, The Jazz Messengers.
Terms of Art is stellar jazz. Brown is a massively skilled and knowledgeable bassist. He’s the sort of player who will surround himself with equally adept musicians when he gets down to cutting tracks, and this is particularly true in terms of his quintet. On Terms of Art we get Brown’s full-time cats: Ray Codrington on trumpet, Gabe Evens on piano, Brian Miller on saxophone, Adonis Rose on drums, with, of course, Brown on acoustic bass.
During a recent conversation, I asked Brown about the inspiration that led to Terms of Art.
“For the material it really is Art Blakey, and for the way I envision putting together my own group, that was inspired by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, as well,” he replied. “As a young musician, I started getting familiar with tunes and trying to establish a concept about listening to jazz. Blakey’s music reached out to me. Once I got a hold on it that became where I lived as a player.
“As a secondary thing, I was inspired by the group I have,” he added. “I feel like the people in my band have a lot to say, and at every opportunity we’re in the studio. We did three records over the summer. This one — Terms of Art — just came together so quickly. I find myself listening to the album simply to hear the guys in the band play.
“I think their performances on the album are a testament to their gifts. The fact is that the guys had never seen some of the tunes before, and they only had one day on them, so for the album to turn out as well as it has is a tribute to my band mates.”
Brown was expansive in his discussion of the members of his quintet. He clearly has a great deal of respect and affection for each of them.
“The people in my band represent various stages in my career, and Ray Codrington is very special,” he noted. “Ray is one of the two main people who introduced me to jazz when I was a teenager. What he brings to the band is all his experience and knowledge. He represents the jazz period we’re dealing with on Terms of Art. He’s the epitome of a fine musician.”
Brown explained that in junior high school in Fayetteville, his home town, he played in the Fayetteville Symphony. While playing with the Symphony, he also began to do gigs at the Fort Bragg Playhouse.
“I think Ray and I first played a show together at the Playhouse,” he said. “Ray and a piano player named Paul Scott got me checking out some jazz. All I knew at the time was symphony, so they got me listening to Ray Brown and Dexter Gordon and John Coltrane. I was also listening to Weather Report and really got into Jaco [Pastorius], who was playing bass at that time with Weather Report.”
Brown met pianist Gabe Evens during their college days.
“We call Gabe ‘Tasty’ because he plays the right thing at just the right time,” Brown noted. “Whereas a lot of piano players feel like they have to be saying something, and you feel like you’re taking a theory class playing with them, Gabe is playing things that are musical. He’s from Durham. After college he went on to play with Betty Carter. In the early ’90s we hooked up and started playing gigs together. He’s a friend and we also play music, and we’ve playing in a variety of contexts.
“Gabe is sensitive and thoughtful about making music, and these things are evident in how he plays on this record. Gabe’s currently at the University of Miami working on his master’s degree.”
Brown met Adonis Rose in New Orleans in the early ’90s.
“I’d gone down there to play with Delfeayo Marsalis,” he recalled. “We did a couple things around New Orleans with Nicholas Payton, and we’d just kind of run into each other at festivals. Adonis was playing full-time in Nicholas’ band, and I was playing in Delfeayo’s band and Elvin Jones’ band. We had a casual association at that point.
“A few years later, Adonis and I found ourselves playing together in Ellis Marsalis’ trio,” he said. “That was a lot of fun. We really hooked up, and now he’s my full-time drummer. Whenever I can afford to fly him to a gig, he’s there. Adonis was living in New Orleans, but after Katrina he moved to Fort Worth.”
Sax man and Durham resident Brian Miller is someone Brown encountered in his role as teacher.
“I think I coached a combo Brian was in one semester at NCCU,” Brown said. “We’ve played together ever since. I don’t consider him a former student, really, but he was a student at NCCU when I was a teacher. In any kind of band configuration I’m doing, Brian’s in it. So either I love playing with him or I can’t get rid of him,” Brown laughed.
Brown went on to explain that choosing the material to record on Terms of Art was something of a struggle. He’d wanted to do a tribute to Blakey for some time, but in confronting Blakey’s body of work, he faced an abundance of cool tunes. He allowed that he needed a focus.
“When the title of the CD — Terms of Art — came to me, I knew it was the perfect working title,” Brown said. “It put me in a direction to pick music that met a couple of purposes. I wanted music that sounded good, and I wanted music that was recorded by Art Blakey and The Jazz Messengers. There isn’t a single tune on the album that Art wrote, but every song on the album was recorded by Art and his band. I did a lot of listening.
“There are tunes on the album like ‘Moanin’ and ‘Night In Tunisia’ and ‘The Preacher’ that everybody knows and everybody plays,” he continued. “That was why we did them. I knew people would know these tunes. I wanted to introduce listeners to the musicians in my band. Jazz fans may not pay too much attention to anybody’s name on the record, but they’ll pay attention to the tunes. They might be thinking, ‘Hey, that’s a new version of ‘Moanin’; let’s see who’s playing.’”
There are also songs on the record that are less frequently covered and, consequently, less well known; tunes such as “Buttercorn Lady” and the ballad “Hello.”
“I just stumbled across this beautiful ballad ‘Hello,’” Brown said. “Over the summer I set out to listen to every track recorded by The Jazz Messengers that I could find. When I heard that melody for ‘Hello’ I thought, ‘That’s Ray Codrington right there all day long.’
“I know some people may ask why they should be listening to our version of a Jazz Messengers’ song instead of just going to the original,” he said. “I’m not trying to move aside any of those recordings. It’s more of a tribute. That band, and Art’s concept for keeping that band together, inspired generations of musicians. Since this is music about improvisation, I’d like for people to hear what we have to say about the tunes Art and his band recorded, in the instrumentation he intended with his first group.
“We’re not trying to reinvent the wheel,” Brown observed. “Just like someone might read a book and have something poignant and insightful to say, that’s exactly how I view our take on these tunes.”
Check out Brown’s Web site — www.jbjazz.com — for information on acquiring a copy of Terms of Art.
Adieu
Jazz keyboardist/composer/band leader Joe Zawinul died on Sept. 11 of Merkel cell carcinoma. He was 75. Zawinul, a native of Austria, played with Maynard Ferguson, Dinah Washington and Cannonball Adderley’s quintet. He played on the Miles Davis albums Bitches Brew and In a Silent Way — for the record, he wrote the song “In A Silent Way.” In 1970, Zawinul and Wayne Shorter founded the groundbreaking jazz fusion group Weather Report — that alone would’ve made him a jazz legend. Zawinul continued to write and perform jazz after Weather Report with his band Zawinul Syndicate. His last album was released in February 2007; titled Brown Street, the album is a live, double-disc gem on the Heads Up International label, recorded at Zawinul’s club, Birdland, in Vienna, Austria. Zawinul is credited with bringing the synthesizer and electric piano into the jazz mainstream.