Shades of Soul
Michael Brecker
Interview by Ted Panken, February 2000

Older, wiser and more relaxed than ever, Michael Brecker takes on an array of new musical pursuits.

At 50, Michael Brecker is perhaps the most copied living saxophonist, having made his mark on every conceivable musical circumstance, from hardcore jazz to hardcore POP, during his 30 years as a professional improviser. Brecker no longer needs to prove anything to anyone, but a few holes remained in his resume at the beginning of 1999.

For one thing, the tenor saxophonist had never explored the capacious sonic field of the organ-guitar rhythm section, a mainstay for any young saxman coming up, as Brecker did, in an organ town like '60s Philadelphia. Nor had Brecker, whose debt on every level to the John Coltrane Quartet is no secret, ever locked horns in a studio with drummer Elvin Jones, a lifelong hero.

Brecker rectifies both gaps on Time Is Of The Essence (Verve), his third consecutive release devoted to full-bore improvising. Hammond futurist Larry Goldings and guitarist Pat Metheny frame the leader's urgent declamations, while elder statesman Jones and two descendants — Jeff Watts and Bill Stewart — sculpt the rhythm flow on three selections apiece. Goldings, a proactive comper and imaginative soloist, trumps the leader's ideas and tosses out intriguing postulations; Metheny, an infrequent visitor to the organ function, plays with bluesy feel and spare discretion. With a tone whose muscularity is less buff and more fluid than some years back, Brecker plays with characteristicblue-flame-to-white-heat clarity, a hungry master searching for--and often reaching--the next level.

For Brecker, this search seems to involve reaching out to younger musicians like Watts and Goldings, who investigate and revitalize the tradition without exploding it.

"That's an interesting point," responds Brecker when presented with this idea. He's tall, fit and bald, with a trimmed salt-and-pepper goatee and stylish spectacles. He speaks in measured tones belying the sturm und drang of his tenor saxophone voice. "The dynamics of the musical scene were quite different when I first arrived in New York, and we were coming from a different place. The advent of the newer generation of musicians allows me to play in the jazz tradition in a way that doesn't feel retro. It feels fresh. Time Is Of The Essence involves a certain amount of looking back."

Brecker's comfort level with the organ dates back to childhood. His father, Robert, a lawyer and semiprofessional jazz pianist, even bought a Hammond B-3 for the household. "My father and I played a bit, and my brother Randy got pretty good on it. I listened to organ records by Jimmy Smith and Shirley Scott with Stanley Turrentine, plus my dad took me to hear Jimmy Smith with trios all over Philadelphia. Every day as a teenager after school I played drums along with Larry Young's Unity, which Elvin is on, and both saxophone and drums along with Coltrane records like A Love Supreme. I played a lot with Eric Gravatt, an incredible drummer who was living in Philadelphia then, who later played with McCoy Tyner and Weather Report. He exposed me to a lot of things I hadn't heard, and different ways of playing. We did a lot of duet playing, just drums and saxophone. He used to set an alarm clock for an hour, and we'd improvise straight through — killin'!"

In the cluttered conference room of Brecker s manager's office suite high above Times Square, the closed windows cannot mute the blare of New York traffic and rattle of nearby construction. Distracted by the cacophony from the street, Brecker lifts his lanky frame from the chair, strides to the window to ascertain that it's closed. His manager is in the rock business, and he displays a row of meteorites on a shelf against the wall. Brecker looks for one, picks it up, ponders it and has me feel its dense heft and smooth metallic bottom. We marvel at the wonders of the universe, then return to the table to continue the interview.

"Why this record now? I can honestly say I don't know!" he laughs. "I didn't think of it in terms of, 'Oh, now it's the millennium and it's time for an organ record.' I just knew that I wanted to record with Larry Goldings. His sensibility reminds me of Larry Young. I love everything about Larry's playing--his sound and sense of time. He's funky as hell, and has a comprehensive harmonic palette that's unusual for an organist--possibly because he's also a superb pianist. I thought it would be fabulous to couple him with Pat, which turned out to be a natural. Pat plays compositionally, melodically, intensely; he has his own sound which blends with mine in a way that pleases my ear. And his thinking process is quick and very decisive. My last three records have all been jazz, where you have only a few days to resolve problems, unlike highly produced records where the mixes are more complex. When I'm sitting on the fence Pat will express firm opinions and force me to decide."

Brecker credits a five-week European tour two decades ago with Metheny, Dewey Redman, Charlie Haden and Jack DeJohnette, documented on '80/'81 (ECM), as a pivotal transition in a career during which he'd played with Horace Silver, Billy Cobham, the Brecker Brothers and on several hundred studio dates as the most in-demand session saxophonist in the world.

"I moved to New York in '69, and became involved in a loosely organized association of about 25 creative players who had been playing in each other's lofts, basically led by Dave Liebman with the assistance of Richie Beirach. It was called Free Life Communication, and we put on our own concerts, playing a lot of very free music. It was a special time to be in New York. That's when the so-called boundaries between what was then pop music and jazz were becoming very blurry, and those of us who experimented with combining r&b rhythms with jazz harmony began to develop a music that was a fusion, if you'll excuse the word, of various elements. We really had no word for it; at the time it was loosely referred to as jazz-rock.

"The culmination of that for me was the group initially referred to as Dreams. Our milieu dispersed because we started getting gigs, and we all left that loft scene and branched out. My brother and I joined Horace Silver, and eventually moved on to the Brecker Brothers and all the studio work.

"[During the tour with Pat, Charlie and Jack] I experienced freedom differently than in the early New York days. It was such an open environment; the way they interacted, the way the music was conceptualized made me feel a tremendous sense of freedom, like I could play anything. There was a type of communication in present time on stage that I hadn't experienced before."

In a subsequent telephone conversation, Metheny gives his perspective on this tour. "I've heard him and some of his friends say he came back from that tour a changed person, which makes me feel really good," Metheny says. "I wrote that music for the way I imagined he sounded. His first Impulse! record had basically the same band as '80/'81, and we took up where that record left off. Mike has evolved into a great composer, which you could see coming with the Brecker Brothers. Very little three-horn writing in any sphere today approaches the sophistication of the three-horn writing on the first Brecker Brothers record 25 years ago.

"Michael's music is so dense, the hardest music I could imagine playing. That's true on all three of his records I've been on, and it's incredibly flattering that he asked me to play on them. Tales From The Hudson is the date I point to as the most satisfying I've done as a sideman in the past few years, or maybe really ever. To me, that kind of playing, those kinds of tunes, the way the record felt as a whole, is what modern jazz is in the '90s. The new one is a continuation, and compositionally it's the best of them all."

Brecker's dance to the vivid beats of the different drummers on Time Is Of The Essence takes the session beyond being just another well-played all-star date. "In the last few years I've played a lot with Jeff Watts, which is enormous fun," he remarks. "He plays conversationally, constantly feeds me ideas and responds to ideas in present time, gets rhythmic layers going without sacrificing the swing. Bill Stewart has taken the drum scene by storm. He's come in with his own language, a sensibility on the instrument that I've never heard. He has a dry sense of humor, great warmth, tremendous dynamics."

During a Brecker-Metheny brainstorming session, the guitarist, recalling Unity, suggested Elvin Jones for the project. "I thought it was a great idea," Brecker relates. "I'd sat in with Elvin one night at Slugs in 1970 or '71 when Frank Foster and Joe Farrell were playing with him, and later I met him over dinner at a friend's house, but we hadn't really played. I was thrilled to have him play, because he's one of my idols, and such a consummate artist in every way. The beat even felt wider than I expected, like an open field. It feels like utter freedom playing with him."

Reciprocating, Jones asked Brecker to join a first-class edition of the Jazz Machine for his 72nd birthday week at Manhattan's Blue Note last September, allotting his guest a ballad feature per set. "I had a lot of fun, and learned a few things, too," Brecker remarks. "By the end of the week I was using a less notey rhythmic approach, leaving more space, generally playing less, which seemed to allow the music more room to breathe."

Not that Brecker's present sound is anywhere near serene or spare. Yet a quality of intuitive reflection--perhaps the term is mature wisdom--inflects his locutions on recent recordings and guest shots. The latter occur withincreasingly less frequency than the years when he accumulated most of the 525 sideman appearances cited in the February 1998 discography from www.michaelbrecker.com, which reads like a history of '70s and '80s pop and fusion — Paul Simon, James Taylor, Frank Zappa, George Clinton, Chaka Khan, Lou Reed and dozens more.

Why did Brecker's sound become an iconic signifier of the period? "My roots were a combination of jazz and r&b," Brecker reflects matter-of-factly. "I grew up in Philadelphia listening to Miles and Trane, Clifford Brown, Cannonball Adderley, George Coleman--I could go on and on--as well as r&b and rock. I genuinely loved them both, and happened to have a sensibility that let me go in many directions. It was never my plan to end up in the studios — not that I had a plan. It really started through the horn section in Dreams. Randy is so great in so many different contexts, and he already was established in New York. Dreams made a couple of records for Columbia, became known as a section after a few more records, and there was a chain reaction."

But there's more to Brecker's aura than felicitous timing, super-hero chops, and enviable ability to size up a situation instantly and conjure an apropos, often poetic, response. It's called respect, manifested in study andinternalization of idiomatic nuance. Consider his duo with Cameroonian bassist/vocalist/percussionist Richard Bona on Bona's recently issued Scenes From My Life (Columbia).

"If Michael was in my country, people would call him a wizard" Bona exclaims. "This piece, 'Konda Djanea,' is a 6/8 rhythm from the Oualla people on the west coast of Cameroon. There is a certain way to phrase it. You cannot just blow anything; it's going right to the heart. I didn't send him tapes before we went in the studio, because I didn't want him to get familiar with it. I wanted him just to bring his own thing. I knew he could blow on that, and it happened exactly how I heard it! Michael has listened to this music for years, has learned it and understands it."

Metheny agrees with Bona's assessment. "Sometimes I hear people put him down — 'Oh, it's technical and all flash,'" Metheny says. "I'd like to see any of those guys follow him anywhere. Following a Mike Brecker solo is like nothing else that I have ever experienced, and very few musicians on any instrument can do it. It's because he's deep! Man, by the time he gets done with an audience, people are standing on their chairs screaming. He gets to people under their skin, and that's what makes him heavy."

Bassist John Patitucci, Brecker's friend and collaborator for close to 20 years, is well-positioned to analyze the saxophonist's mystique. "He's got the history of the horn in his playing, yet he was able to forge a personal sound and statement, which is very hard to find among post-Coltrane guys," Patitucci says. "His sound was always very fat and warm; maybe it's a little darker now than before. I'm sure any composer who has ever worked with him is impressed with his ability to assimilate a melody emotionally and lyrically and deliver it with power and vulnerability at the same time — there's a personality attached to it. Michael is very self-effacing and self-critical, but a brilliant human being, yet very approachable, which is rare for someone that brilliant. For instance, he's coached me extensively in African music — what records to get and so forth."

Brecker's coach was the late Barry Rogers, the pioneering trombonist with Eddie Palmieri, and a member of the Dreams horn section. "Barry was my first close friend in New York," Brecker recalls. "I miss him. He was older than me, and he took me under his wing, helped me feel comfortable living in New York. He was the first to play me African music (out of Guinea, to be exact), and I was smitten by it. He was the first to play me Cajun music and Latin music. Barry could take music apart and analyze it very well, and he experienced it on a very deep level, spiritually and emotionally, with tremendous excitement — a very basic instinct that I was attracted to."

In middle age, does Brecker now find that he can access the spiritual fount of invention more readily? "I can't comment, even off the record," he says. "There's so much going on in that area. Isn't that weird?" His musical preparation includes non-musical things. His regimen — exercise? "Absolutely." Meditation? "A bit." Anything else? He folds his lower teeth over his upper lip in a mock grimace. "It's personal stuff."

Moving from metaphysics to the tangible, Brecker still spends plenty of time in the practice room. "When I'm on the road it's difficult to practice," he says. "[But] I try to go to sound checks a little early, and practice before the gig, at the gig. When I'm home and have the time and some ideas, I enjoy practicing. I enjoy the experience of learning new things, then watching it come out in the playing. I never really work on technique per se. I work on intervallic relationships. Sometimes I practice simple things, filling in holes in my knowledge."

Brecker's immersion in African music reached another level during Paul Simon's 1991 tour, when he became close with band members Armand Sabal-Lecco, the bassist, and the Cameroonian guitarist Vincent Nguini. "Having the opportunity to be around them was like a door swinging open, because they were a direct source I could ask questions to," he says. "If we were listening to something, I'd first ask where one was, what the words meant. I'd ask about the structure, the meaning of the rhythm, whether they were hearing it in 6 or in 12 or in 3 or in 4 or in 9. Armand would tap the rhythm on my arm as he heard it, which often was very different from where I was hearing it."

Brecker sees himself incorporating African tropes more comprehensively on future projects. "It plays a big part of music in the future for me. Jazz has its origins in Africa, so the aesthetic is built into the music automatically. At the same time, there's been a constant back-and-forth cross-pollination; you hear the influence of jazz in African music today and vice-versa. In conceptualizing a future project, I'm thinking more in terms of the musicians I would play with."

That open-ended intersection of personalities is what we hear throughout Time Is Of The Essence. "Compared to other instruments, the saxophone is relatively easy," Brecker says. "Because it's possible to play so much on it, what's difficult is learning to edit. Certainly my playing is more relaxed than it's ever been. Maybe some of that is just through age, growing up a bit."

Equipment: Michael Brecker plays a Selmer Mark VI tenor saxophone with a Dave Guardala mouthpiece.

Copyright 2000
Maher Publications, Inc.
Down Beat February 1, 2000