A FIRESIDE CHAT WITH CHRIS POTTER

(October 8, 2002)


I've spoken with Chris Potter a handful of times. I knew when he did Concentric Circles (Concord), he was to be reckoned with. A handful of years later came Vertigo (Concord) and with that a record for a major (Verve), Gratitude, Potters homage to a virtual saxophone hall of fame, John Coltrane, Wayne Shorter, Joe Henderson, and Charlie Parker. A full decade later from when I first heard Potter, he has managed to surprise me with Traveling Mercies and however cryptic the title may be, the saxophonist has proven he has grown into his own - impressive, but not surprising. I spoke with Potter in the midst of his cross country tour, about the new record, his band, and what it means to be a leader, as always unedited and in his own words.


FRED JUNG: Gratitude (Verve) did well.

CHRIS POTTER: I was happy with it. It is sort of hard for me to gage how things are going. But yeah, I am just really, really happy to be in a position at the moment where I'm able to do this. It is probably a natural thing to keep looking at the next step, the next step. The reality is that it is not easy at the moment to go out and actually be able to do a bunch of work with your own band and have it work out and have people show up and etcetera, etcetera. It is just really, really fantastic. It is what I always wanted, so now I am having a chance to do it and there is a certain element of you have to be careful of what you wish for. There is a certain ease in being sideman, just showing up and you don't really care if the club's full and relax, which I can't do now (laughing). On the other hand, it is a chance to really work on the music that I'm most interested in and just really focus on that. I feel as if this is something that I need to be doing to continue growing in the way that I want to grow.


FJ: Are artists capable of appreciating their own growth?

CHRIS POTTER: Yeah, it is sort of looking towards the next milestone and do things that you can't do now. But in general, I have been putting a lot of work into the music that I'm writing and saxophone playing and thinking about how I want to present a band and the kind of music that I want us to play. I think I'm hopefully getting better at it just from having more and more experience. To me, it seems like the progression from the last record to this record, in terms of the writing particularly, to me it seems like a natural progression, things I was working on, songs that I wrote on the last record, a lot of those same ideas I have extended a little bit and I keep working on the new one. Sonically, there are differences, the fact that there is a more electric kind of sound and more overdubbing, which was just the sound that I was hearing for this record. I always attempt to have sort of a sound in mind for each record that I do. It is just sort of the direction that I felt like I needed to take. But the musical ideas, it is sort of a natural extension to sort of keep going along and then there's new stuff that I'm writing that I think helps to take it further.


FJ: Using technology in the studio is not a new thing. Peers, Larry Goldings, Graham Haynes, Tim Hagans, and Medeski, Martin, and Wood are examples. Traveling Mercies is bound to be misinterpreted by some as ECM-ish in towing the line between what is and what isn't jazz.

CHRIS POTTER: Well, virtually all of the sampling stuff was actually done live. I was actually playing the saxophone and activating the sampler and manipulating the sound, which is something I had to practice at home to get it seamless. There are overdubs, but a lot of it is not overdubbed. Most of it is live. The way that I was looking at it, Fred, was all of the performances are live performances and the things that are overdubbed are not really the focal point of the piece. It's really a sonic thing that I wanted to add. The way that I look at it is that there is a lot that you are able to convey in a live performance that you're just never going to be able to quite convey in the studio. On the other hand, you can also use the studio for what it is and you have the option of creating different kinds of textures that you could live and I felt like I wanted to explore that a little bit. I'm not all that proficient with all the technical aspects of it either. I don't actually have a home studio like Larry does and I know nothing about how to use Pro Tools and stuff like that, although it does seem like an interesting world. It seems like there is a lot of really great music that can be made really using it. This is more using it in a conventional overdubbing way. If you really were able to know your way around well enough to make a piece out of a few little musical fragments and loop it, that there is something interesting. But I think it sort of takes it out of the realm of jazz performance, which is what I figure I've spent so many years trying to do it well. That's what I should stick to. But I definitely think that there is a lot of interesting music to be made in a variety of different ways using the technology.


FJ: I thumb my nose at hardliners (or was it the finger).

CHRIS POTTER: Well, it is also easy to get carried away in it and sort of lose the depth of musical content, which is what used to happen a lot. But anything is possible.


FJ: As a player, improvement is defined by practice, but how does a composer improve? Is it so simple as composing more?

CHRIS POTTER: They go hand in hand for me. I always find the things that I am writing challenge me to negotiate things in my playing, to further certain things in my playing. It is really two sides of the same coin as far as that. The kinds of things that I would be practicing would be trying to incorporate new kinds of contexts, think about new kinds of rhythms, new ways of organizing rhythmic patterns, phrasing, etcetera. That's the kind of thing that writing forces me to do. I'll write certain harmonic ideas that are challenging for me to play on. It is actually an interesting process where even though maybe I have written the tune, I still really have to think about how to approach improvising on it as if it was someone else's tune and look at the challenges as they are. But I do believe in, yeah, the more that you compose, the better you get. You just see more ways to go and you don't get stuck as often. The same is as an improviser. As you find your way, you don't box yourself in as much. You don't paint yourself into a corner quite as often because you can see more ways out and more ways to go from where you are.


FJ: Progression is also mirrored through your band (Scott Colley, Kevin Hayes).

CHRIS POTTER: Oh, yeah, that's a vital thing of what gives me the sound too. I am really happy that we made a record and now the band that's on the record is on tour. We're really working on the music and it's people that I know well and I know their playing well and there is really no substitute for that to create a band sound. That is the thing that is sort of missing a lot. You don't always have a chance to see a band. It feels like the more that we work together, the more we can read each other's minds, probably to everyone's benefit. I think it feels like to me that we're exploring every night. There is always further things to find on the tunes that we already know and just
a lot of new stuff that we're putting in the book. I don't really like to do the same thing over and over again. I guess I get bored easily. I think everyone sort of has that spirit of wanting it to grow and be free enough that it can go in any direction.


FJ: Is there an apex?

CHRIS POTTER: Just when it all comes together. Like when you hear something that you had as an idea in your head for a tune and just sort of that feeling of when it's all working, when the spirit arrives and the audience can feel it and the band can feel it and there is just this energy in the air. It's a wonderful feeling.


FJ: Some of which was osmosis by being in the Dave Holland Quintet.

CHRIS POTTER: Oh, yeah, he is a huge inspiration. It's been great to be in a situation where you're like this is how a band should be led. He has a very strong idea of band sound, which I guess is achieved mostly by who he hired to be in the band and then his own writing, and just a real serious focus. Definitely with that band there is also a feeling of that we're working on something and we're extending it and we're just really seriously dealing with the music and no extra outside factors of trying to be a commercial success. It has been really, really great to see the band getting some recognition. I have the feeling that he would be doing what he's doing whether or not the audiences were there or not. That is really inspiring too, just to really stick by your guns and know that this is what I want to do and hopefully, the people will come to me. That's the big thing that I've had a chance to learn from a lot of different people, but especially Dave, just the way that he is as a leader of a band.


FJ: Dave has always had brass. In a country where everything is hype before it is ever hip and an era in which artists rarely, if ever, define the music they play, it is comforting to know Dave Holland and Chris Potter are lone reeds.

CHRIS POTTER: I would much rather have five people show up to the gig and be marketing the CD myself on my own website or something and feel like I was really doing what I had to do, rather than doing a smooth jazz record and having five thousand people show up. That's an obvious choice for me. It really pays off. Just the level of satisfaction of feeling like this is what I meant to say and this is what I want to put out into the world. This is what I believe in and how I think things ought to be in an ideal world. I think people can sort of sense that too. That is actually a reason for the success of the Holland Quintet. There's like a few examples like that of guys who have been around for a long time and have just done it slowly and that is sort of my role model of how it ought to be. It is not an instant thing. Jazz is a really difficult music. To really get into it as far as it can go, it is extremely challenging. It doesn't happen overnight that some great group interplay happens or some real depth as a musician. It takes a lot of time for it to really happen. There's the rare exceptions of Tony Williams when he seventeen or something like that, but that is a real rarity. But it was also the fact that he was working with the group of the most talented musicians at the time too.


FJ: Helps when you're behind Miles and Wayne.

CHRIS POTTER: Right.


FJ: Audience attention spans are a fraction of what they were thus, the days of Trane blowing for half an hour or Miles and co improvising "E.S.P." for twenty minutes are long forgotten. Is it challenging as a composer to take a tune and arrange it to be radio friendly at four minutes or three and change?

CHRIS POTTER: Yeah, well, the thing is you can. You can sort of do whatever you want, but it is a factor in terms of getting things listened to. But as a listener too, sometimes I like shorter tunes too. When it comes to a record made in the studio, I understand the wisdom of playing not overextended, just sort of having it be a statement like this is this tune. This is how it goes. Live it is a whole different thing because you have the excitement of being there. The way that I have approached the last few records is sort of that, this is the statement and what this tune sounds like. It doesn't need to be twelve minutes long. That's actually fine with me. It is just a matter of what the music itself dictates.


FJ: What qualities were you looking in your band mates?

CHRIS POTTER: We've known each other a long time, especially over the past five or six years. We've worked in a variety of different contexts too. We've worked with Renee Rosnes together. We worked with Jim Hall together. I played on his records. He's played on mine. We've done various things together and we're friends too. That's been sort of a natural choice because we're obviously working on some more things as musicians and interested in some more things. He's an amazing bassist too. It is hard to say specifically exactly what I'm looking for in musicians that I want to play with, but I really want to play with people who have the overall music in mind, who are really
thinking about the way that the overall group sounds. It is sort of an abstract thing to talk about, as opposed to someone who is a great soloist, but doesn't know how to work with a band. I really want to associate myself with very well rounded musicians. I would say all of us have a lot of similar points of reference in that we've all really
checked out the history of the jazz tradition and we're also interested in other kinds of music like listening to twentieth century classical music and music from around the world, African music and Indian music. Everyone in the band has a real open mind as to what they like. A lot of influences end up going into the music we make. We might go into some kind of a Middle Eastern sounding thing for a minute and completely down the middle, like organ trio, swinging and a minute later, there might be a funk groove that just comes from the frames of references that we have. I think it is a generational thing too. This is a generation of musicians that are much more comfortable playing in odd meters. That is sort of something that you do. It is not as surprising to hear that now as it was years ago, although it still hasn't been explored to its fullest extent.


FJ: And the tour?

CHRIS POTTER: It is going really well. We started in Washington D.C., went up to Boston, played some nights in Philly, a week in Los Angeles, a week in Chicago, and now in Minneapolis a couple of nights. We're going to Indianapolis for a couple of nights and then Atlanta, so it is about three and a half weeks worth of work. It's a lot of work actually. It is really nice to have a chance to play that many gigs. It is nice to be able to set up shop in one town and not just be in and out. The fact that it is in a club, we do a couple sets. If you're not a band at the beginning of the tour, you're definitely a band at the end of the tour. It is really, really great.


FJ: And the future?

CHRIS POTTER: There is definitely a project I have in mind. I'm not exactly sure how and when it's going to happen, but I am actually hoping to do it at the Vanguard at the end of the year. What I really want to do is to record this band live playing a bunch of new music that we've been working on. Since we've had all this work and then we actually have about a month off and then we go to Europe for about three and a half weeks and then come back and play the Vanguard. I'm sort of hoping since we will know the music so well by then to try and make a recording of the band live, if not at the Vanguard then somewhere else. That's sort of the next thing that I want to do. I feel like I sort of wanted to make a record that is the opposite aesthetic of what I just made, which is really using the studio. This I just sort of want it to be open blowing, probably longer solos I guess, just more of a chance for everyone to stretch out and really hear what the band does.


Fred Jung is the Editor-In-Chief and sees not only the silver lining, but the black as well. Comments? Email Him