A FIRESIDE CHAT WITH GRAHAM HAYNES


One of my favorite discs of this past year has been Operazone (Knitting Factory), which has Bill Laswell taking on opera. As a die hard devotee of opera, this recording was a wet dream for me. Graham Haynes is on the record. In fact, he is the featured soloist and primary voice on the CD. That makes him a sure fire favorite of mine regardless of whose son he is or who came over his father's house when he was a kid. So I did not bother to ask Haynes because I don't give a rat's ass who he saw play with his dad. That does not interest me one bit, so we talked about other things. I hope the following interests you as well and that you are prompted to buy or download or whatever it is people do these days, and get a hold of Operazone and bpm, Haynes' own release (both on Knitting Factory Records). It is brought to you by the folks at the incredible egg and as always, unedited and in his own words.


FRED JUNG: Let's start from the beginning.

GRAHAM HAYNES: I chose the trumpet by accident actually, kind of by accident. I started off as a guitar player because that is what I wanted to play. I was eight and I had a teacher and I studied for three months and then I got bored with it. Then I picked up the trumpet by accident.


FJ: Let's touch on your collaboration with the Operazone project.

GRAHAM HAYNES: I have been working with Bill Laswell for about a year or so and then he came to me with this Operazone project that Alan Douglas wanted to do and I love opera. I'm a big opera fan. As you heard on bpm, I remixed some of Wagner. I've been an opera fan probably since I was in college. That was when I was twenty-one or something and I am forty, thirty-nine now. I'm heavily into the classic opera. I'm not so big on a lot of the really contemporary opera, but I do like some of it. I like some of the contemporary stuff, but I love the classic stuff. I love the Italian stuff, Wagner, Debussy. Laswell came to me with this idea that Alan Douglas had and he said that they were doing these arias and that it was going to be kind of like a Miles / Gil kind of thing, but using arias from these operas and that I was going to be the soloist. So I was totally ecstatic about these arias, a lot of them are my favorite arias. They introduced me to Karl Berger, who arranged the strings and I knew a little about Karl Berger through his work with Don Cherry and so I was like, "Great! Let's do it!" And so they put the tracks down and then I played over it. I had come back from Africa. They gave me a cassette and then I went to Africa for a month and I listened to it. When I came back from Africa, I laid down the solos.


FJ: Playing opera arias, there is no room to improvise. Puccini's "E lucevan le stelle" does not have trumpet charts.

GRAHAM HAYNES: It was really great, Fred. It was really great because it really falls in line with the way I like to play now, which is not improvisation over a bunch of chord changes and a rhythm section underneath. It is like you are learning the melodies and a lot of these melodies, I already knew. A lot of these arias, I knew already. It is really approaching it like a singer and doing some little things in between, which is really not much different from the way Miles did Sketches of Spain or Porgy and Bess. It is like he is a singer with the horn and then, around that, you are embellishing on these melodies and then you have some open parts, where there is some vamping kind of things and you got some chords and things you can open up. Karl Berger, the harmonizations and the orchestrations that he did were perfect. It is really in a Miles / Gil kind of thing. It was really great. With material like that, you really have to go into yourself. You have to go deep in yourself and express from an emotional standpoint. It is really difficult, but from a technical standpoint, it was not that difficult, not really for me. It is very emotional stuff and everything comes out. You are like a singer. It is not like there is a lot of rhythmic stuff going on, even though there is this jungle thing. It is a coincidence because I was working on bpm, the idea of bpm came before I knew about Operazone. Operazone was recorded before I did bpm, but I started configuring bpm in my head before I knew about Operazone. It is really a coincidence that there are two records utilizing opera and also using drum and bass as a rhythmic backdrop.


FJ: The burden falls solely upon the soloist, as it does the singer to hold the attention of the listener.

GRAHAM HAYNES: Yeah, you have to sustain the audience's ear and their attention.


FJ: What operas do you enjoy?

GRAHAM HAYNES: I love all of Puccini's stuff. I don't think that there is anything that he's written that I don't really like.


FJ: Puccini operas are the quintessence of lyric opera, such drama.

GRAHAM HAYNES: Yeah, very lyrical, very powerful stuff. I like some of Wagner. I don't like all of Wagner's stuff, but I'm starting to understand his sense of harmony. I've been listening a little bit to Strauss. I started listening to Wagner because I understand that Puccini was influenced by Wagner. That is how I started listening to Wagner. Then, I was told that Wagner also influenced Strauss and so then I started checking out Strauss and I have a lot of his records here. I haven't even really listened to it in depth. I love a lot of Verdi's stuff, Donizetti. I love a lot of the older Italian classical stuff. Puccini is high on the list.


FJ: Favorite singers?

GRAHAM HAYNES: Obviously, Caruso, one of the great tenors from the early twentieth century.


FJ: Let's talk about your new release, bpm on the Knitting Factory label. What does bpm stand for?

GRAHAM HAYNES: Beats per minute.


FJ: I am curious as to why you are not following suit to what your contemporaries are doing and playing bebop and variations on a theme from Ellington.

GRAHAM HAYNES: Yeah, well, it depends on who you call my peers. At this point, my peers are not other trumpet players. My peers now, in the world that I live in are DJs and that is the world that I'm in now. The guys that are playing jazz and jazz licks, I don't consider myself a jazz musician. I come from a jazz background, but I don't look at myself as a jazz musician, especially now. I don't think of jazz musicians as my peers. But I know what you are talking about. I do stuff that interests me. It is really funny, Fred, that the stuff that I was doing, I'm not patting myself in the back, but the stuff I was doing in the early Nineties, a lot of jazz musicians are starting to touch on now. My first Verve record, which was Griot's Footsteps, I worked with African musicians and I did a lot of stuff with Indian music and even cross time signatures. I mean, that has been done before by Don Cherry, many guys have done it, but there weren't any younger guys doing it and then I did this record and now it is like ten years later and you see all these guys experimenting with this stuff. It is funny.


FJ: You have been employing DJs on your albums for some time as well.

GRAHAM HAYNES: Yeah, again, I wouldn't say I was the first one.


FJ: You were on the leader board.

GRAHAM HAYNES: (Laughing) As a trumpet player, I think I was definitely one of the first ones. I know Greg Osby was doing stuff with DJs and rappers and stuff, but even the way he did it was maybe a little bit different.


FJ: So you view turntables as an instrument?

GRAHAM HAYNES: Yeah, definitely. Turntables are an instrument. The sampler is an instrument and the turntables are an instrument.


FJ: Traditionalists will want you to justify that statement.

GRAHAM HAYNES: Because turntablists are being hired as musicians. They are performing their music on something, then it must be an instrument. It must be an instrument just from a practical point. If a club, ten years ago, had a band, today, they are hiring a DJ. So what DJ is making music with has got to be an instrument. DJs are the musicians of today, so it has got to be an instrument. These turntablists have techniques. They are techniques, like scratching and things that have been developed over the years just like I would develop things on the trumpet over a certain amount of years. There is a whole vocabulary for guys who want to spin. I've been spinning a little bit myself and it is not like you pick it up and you know how to do it. It takes time. You have to work on it just like an instrument. It takes hours and hours and hours and hours of developing your chops to be able to do it. It is very much like an instrument. The same as the sampler, to me, and I have been using samplers for maybe almost ten years now. That is another instrument. A lot of people say that how can it be an instrument when all they are doing is playing stuff that is already prerecorded. Well, it is the time that we're in. That is all I can say. It is a different time now (laughing). It is the same with film. You have got all kinds of film techniques where they sample films and they do all kinds of technical stuff. It is film, but we are just in a different time now.


FJ: Sounds like you're into electronica.

GRAHAM HAYNES: Oh, yeah. There is some guys here in New York that I like. There is a whole New York scene. There are a slew of guys that I listen to. There are a whole bunch of guys from London that I like. I really like Grooverider. I think he is really great. I like Bukem. I think he's great. I think the music is great. I don't like all of it. I like some of it more than I like others. I like the guys who are really musical. It is growing music and so it takes time to get into it. What I tried to do with bpm was make a record that used drum and bass, but was really coming more from a musical standpoint. Like you have chord changes and progressions and key changes that you don't have in drum and bass, but I'm using the drum and bass as a rhythmic backdrop.


FJ: Any tour plans?

GRAHAM HAYNES: I was working on a West Coast tour with my band, but the Knitting Factory, who put the record out, sunk so much money into the Knitting Factory in LA that the tour support that I thought that I was going to have is not there. And the only way that I can do a West Coast tour with my band is with tour support. So now there is no tour support and so now, there probably won't be a West Coast tour. What I may end up doing is coming out with a DJ at some point, but as far as bringing the band out, it is not economically feasible without tour support. It is a drag because it was all set up. We talked about tour support. We made a budget and everything. I have this guy in Seattle booking some gigs and he was getting some things and I was talking to people, but the Knitting Factory went through some changes building the club. That is where a lot of the money went and so, that is where my tour support went. I don't know if I am going to play the Knitting Factory out there with my band. I definitely don't foresee a West Coast tour with my band.


FJ: Yet another reason for me to pack my bags.


Fred Jung is Jazz Weekly's Editor-In-Chief and is Pavarotti's replacement in the Three Tenors. Comments?  Email Fred.