Courtesy of Joe Lovano







Blue Note





Blue Note

A FIRESIDE CHAT WITH JOE LOVANO

(June 5, 2002)


This is my seventh or eighth interview with Joe Lovano. That tells you something about the man. One, that his output is nothing short of impressive and two, he is just that interesting. Well, at least to me anyway. I caught up with Lovano as he was weeding his garden of all things (the man is grounded, I like that) and we spoke about his thirteenth album for the Blue Note label, Viva Caruso, an homage of sorts to the legendary Italian tenor from another legendary Italian tenor. Poetic isn't it? Life can be that way sometimes. I offer you yet another intimate portrait of one of the class acts in jazz, Mr. Joe Lovano, unedited and in his own words.


FRED JUNG: You've done lengthy apprenticeships with Woody Herman, Mel Lewis, Charlie Haden, John Scofield, and Paul Motian, does the learning process ever stop?

JOE LOVANO: When you live a life in music and in creative improvisation and jazz, you're always developing new ideas from who you play with from the very beginning and at the very beginning, you're inspired to play with the people that bring you up to that high level. Throughout my whole lifetime, that's always been very important for me. My dad played saxophone and when I was coming up as a kid, to play with him and his peers and the cats that were in his bands was my goal. And when I started to do that, I reached further and moved to Boston, went to Berklee College of Music, started to play with people there and subsequently moving to New York to play with people, to sit in with people like Chet Baker, Bill Evans, or Elvin Jones to name a few. Sonny Stitt was someone that, the first time I sat in and played with him, man, Fred, that teaches you all kinds of things about sound, about blending, about everything. So through the years, for me, that has always been really important and because of that, I've always played with people that have inspired me. Today, my generation is amazing. I call it the inner circle, when you play with people that played with Monk and played with Charlie Parker and Lester Young and John Coltrane and Miles Davis, it's a trip. And right now, in this generation, you touch all these different, multi-generational conceptions and aspects in this music. In my career, the different, diverse situations that I put myself in and I try to write for, that kind of gives me a direction of who I would play with, musicians that have different kinds of feelings and different kinds of backgrounds would fit in different in different kind of bands. Like in my Nonet for example, from my recording, 52nd Street Themes, that is a really modern jazz ensemble. It had musicians that have roots playing in the tradition of famous music let's say from jazz history, Tadd Dameron's music, Dizzy Gillespie's music, Charlie Parker's music, Miles' music. So to put a band together and play in those directions, I try to play with people that have those feelings that are coming from that, like my most recent project, this Viva Caruso project I did is more folk music. It's more freer, coming from a freer place with different kinds of rhythms and different kinds of beats. That direction gives me ideas to play with musicians that are coming from that perspective, players like Joey Baron or Ed Schuller on bass. So the music that you're in really gives you a lot of direction about who you play with.


FJ: You have a dexterity for free playing, why don't you record a record?

JOE LOVANO: Well, you know what, Fred, it is like to record, to make recordings, I try to play, whatever music I play, I try to play in a free manner. And the thing is, I love to play a lot of different kinds of music and I'm influenced by all kinds of different feelings. So when I'm playing in a real straight-ahead way, I'm trying to cross over and bring in the more freer aspects in that and when I play in more freer music, I try to play with a conception of orchestration and harmonic development within that. I'm trying to develop a way to play whatever music I play that it has a continuum kind of feeling. But when you say free music, Fred, what do you mean by free?


FJ: The playing of Albert Ayler and the wealth of ideas that flowed like a river from his saxophone.

JOE LOVANO: Well, Albert Ayler was from Cleveland, Ohio, where I'm from too. Musicians that came up around him all knew my dad, Bobby Few. Bobby Few's from Cleveland. He used to go sit in with my dad all the time and Frank Wright was another tenor player who lived around Cleveland. Bobby and Frank went to Paris together in the Sixties. I've kind of known those guys since I was a teenager and Albert's music was always something that was close to me because he was from Cleveland and he had this march feeling and a real kind of a folk feeling, but yet, I don't know, also had something that I think Sonny and a lot of cats really tapped into things Albert was doing in an earlier time, just in the sheer power and the feeling in his beat. But for me, it's not about going and playing in someone else's direction. I have to play from my personal history to be an honest player and to develop ideas the way I have that have really been coming from my growth from the people I've played with, the diverse directions and musicians that I've played with in my life. I think that's what really makes each individual player himself. Not trying to be in someone else's shoes, but actually dealing with your immediate surroundings as you develop. For me and my career, I've had a lot of different influences, the people I've stood with and sweated with on the bandstand and tried to develop ideas alongside. Recently, I just played in Bologna, Italy with McCoy Tyner and Bobby Hutcherson like two and a half weeks ago. I've been playing a little with McCoy on and off, him and Bobby actually in the last three years and to play with them is incredible. You can't play like anybody else. You have to deal with that moment and have a reservoir of ideas and vocabulary to be spontaneous with them.


FJ: You've been able to seamlessly bridge the breach between tradition and modern. Not an easy feat.

JOE LOVANO: I think it would be difficult if you were trying to do something like that because then you wouldn't be able to be free and spontaneous in the music. It is something that just happened for me from a young age, being aware and accepting of a lot of music. Growing up really, I graduated high school in '71, so the late Sixties when I was a teenager in high school, I was playing and listening to everything from Charlie Parker and Diz and Don Byas and Art Blakey's bands and all of Coltrane's recordings from his earliest stuff to the final things he did. I was listening to Albert's music and Ornette's music and Miles' music from his earliest stuff into his electronic period. I was aware of a lot of different kinds of ways to improvise and I was digging it all. By the time I went to Boston in 1971, '72, and heard Miles live, playing with Keith Jarrett and Jack DeJohnette, in that band when that record Live Evil just came out. I heard them live and then I heard Keith's Quartet with Charlie Haden and Paul Motian and Dewey Redman. I was just wide open to all kinds of different ways to improvise, but yet the traditions of playing standard songs and beautiful melodies and Broadway tunes and jazz standards, those things taught me how to play my instrument and how to deal and maneuver through harmonies. So those roots gave me a serious foundation in harmonic approach and melodic approach to deal with these different rhythms that were being infused in the music at the time. A lot of younger players that maybe hadn't gone through studying the standards and jazz standards first and played free first and then try to go back to study harmony after, that's a long way, that's a hard way to go. But when you have foundations in harmony and melody, then things blossom a lot faster and different. And I'm finding that teaching a lot. I have this chair position at the Berklee College of Music and I just started teaching up there this last year and a lot of younger players today, they learn out of books. They learn out of pattern books and they learn things to play over chords instead of what the chords really are and what they sound like and voicing and it is totally different. That's why the older players that are steeped in the tradition of song and a melodic approach, play with a lot more beauty and depth in their tone and in their ideas.


FJ: For your last two large ensemble recordings, you've done some challenging arranging. For the everyman, what is arranging?

JOE LOVANO: Well, I find it challenging to give everybody room to contribute within an arrangement and to keep it loose and open enough that each time you play it, it's an experience for everybody, instead of trying to recreate an arrangement all the time. I've been in a lot of bands where you sit there, you play your part and every time you play that same tune, it's the same as last time. It might be better this time because everyone played a little more articulate or something. I'm trying to write arrangements that give everyone a chance to contribute their feeling within it. That's a big challenge and it has to do with having the right players and the right sounds around you. It's a lot of trust so everyone could be creative within the music. My recording, Flights of Fancy, my last record that was out this last year, also, like the different trios that we put together for this recording, the way I tried to arrange it so that everybody could be free to be who they are and that's the magic in jazz, I think.


FJ: What are you putting more emphasis on these days?

JOE LOVANO: Well, I think my improvisations are the foundations of my arrangements and the way I compose. So when I put together a tune, from the very beginning, it's from my imagination and how I would try to improvise through a set of chord changes or the way I would play variations of a written melody. So I don't know, Fred. For me and the way I put things together, the whole conception about variations and improvising and creating music is my foundation. So I feel the most comfortable like that.


FJ: On the second installment of Flights of Fancy, you feature a trio with Dave Douglas and Mark Dresser (Lovano plays drums of all things behind Douglas and Dresser on one tune).

JOE LOVANO: Oh, Dave is one of the most creative young players today, as a composer and an improviser in many different styles. It's not even styles. He's very free within whatever kind of music you play. I've known Dave quite a while. In the mid-Eighties, I was on the faculty at NYU and he was one of the students that I had in one of my ensembles and for private lessons around 1986 or something like that. From the very first notes we played together, it was beautiful. He was the kind of a player that was searching and exploring the music right away and has a real beautiful approach and attitude about being creative with the material that he's looking at and trying to learn and execute. So through the years, we've done a couple of little things together and I was trying to do something and document the way we could play together. It just came together really beautiful on this recording with Mark Dresser on bass, the trio that we did together, so I wrote three different pieces for that group, one that I could play drums on to have a trumpet trio piece with drums, trumpet, and bass. In our lessons at the very beginning, some of the first times we played together was in duet with drums and trumpet. And then I wrote a piece to play on tenor and another one to play on soprano.


FJ: But Cameron (Brown) and Idris (Muhammad) are your working trio.

JOE LOVANO: Yeah, that has been for the last three years since the first Trio Fascination came out with Dave Holland and Elvin Jones. Cameron and Idris have been the working group and we've recorded together with Greg Osby and Jason Moran on a recording called Friendly Fire that was a collective group of Greg's and I. We put our two bands together on that. So yeah, we've been playing a lot together. We just did a European tour at the end of April. We're planning on doing more things. Right now, this summer, I'm going to be touring some with this street band from the Caruso project. We just did the Iridium with that with a small ensemble from the group. We have some dates coming up because I want to present the music from that recording and really explore some of those things.


FJ: Let's touch on the Viva Caruso project.

JOE LOVANO: I guess it was about two years ago. Dennis Irwin, a great bass player and close friend, gave me a book about Caruso's life and I started reading about Caruso and it was incredible, his life and all the things he did. He lived in New York between 1903 and 1921, was a part of the Metropolitan Opera and when he died, he was 48 years old and lived in New York almost twenty years and was really a character, an amazing virtuoso. He was the first major superstar in music that toured internationally. He was the first main soloist that made such an impact in the world of music as a recording artist and as an entertainer that really inspired the whole industry in recorded music. To read about his life and that time and that period, it tied a lot of things together for me. All four of my grandparents came from southern Italy. They call came to New York and went to Cleveland, all around that same time, 1906, 1912, that period.


FJ: Was this an homage to them?

JOE LOVANO: Well, it was just an awakening about that period. I started to hear all this music and some beautiful melodies that I never heard anybody play and some songs and some things that inspired what became our standard songs, Gershwin and Irving Berlin and those cats, the music that they listened to and that inspired them to write were songs from Italy and France and those beautiful folk songs that we've heard. That's why I didn't really do the arias. I didn't really go into the opera tunes. I took more folk songs and more tunes that I could improvise and play really free, the way I want to play on them. So the real inspiration behind the thing was really Caruso's stature as a musician and that period in the 1890s, that kind of rhythm and different kind of energy that was happening, the music that fueled what became jazz. A lot of the music that developed in the last century really was inspired by that part of the world. The combinations of beats and song form.


FJ: Caruso defined what we've come to know as the tenor role. It must be humbling to note that perhaps you too have defined the tenor role for future generations.

JOE LOVANO: Wow, I don't know about that, Fred (laughing). I feel like I am just starting myself. I'm inspired when I listen to Charlie Rouse and Clifford Jordan and Sonny Rollins and Don Byas and Johnny Griffin and Dexter Gordon and John Coltrane and Jackie McLean and Charlie Parker. I feel I'm just trying to put my ideas together and play with a beautiful sound and hope that I can contribute something that is myself.


FJ: Caruso credited his renowned work ethic for much of his success, how has your practice regimen been of late?

JOE LOVANO: Well, through your lifetime, it's always different. I've definitely gone through periods where I played all day and night all the time. Now, when I'm traveling so much and you're on the road, I usually just play at the gig. When I'm home, I play a lot at home, but throughout the day, I'll always have my horn out or sit at the drums and throughout the day, I'll play moments at a time. It depends if I'm working on a project or not too. But these days, Fred, I've been traveling so much that it's hard to have any kind of regimented thing like that, practicing.


FJ: How serendipitous that you would choose Caruso, whose diversity and range were unparallel.

JOE LOVANO: Yeah, a lot of those things started to come together for me. It really flipped me out. I just turned forty-nine and I recorded that music when I was forty-eight, right at that time, and I realized that he passed away when he was forty-eight years old. It was amazing, just a lot of crazy things came together for me about him. I've always known about Caruso. My grandparents, that's what they listened to. My dad has tapes of my grandmother and my great uncle playing mandolin and singing those things. But I grew up in a total jazz house. My dad was a be-bopper all the way. He grew up in the swing era and hearing Bird live and hearing Lester Young live and that's all he talked about. He didn't have any of those records. In the last few years, it really just clicked for me.


FJ: Herb Robertson is featured on the record.

JOE LOVANO: Yeah, Fred. I've known Herbie a long time. We've done some special gigs at the Knitting Factory together. I was in the Charlie Haden Liberation Orchestra in '86,'87, and Herbie played with us a couple times during that band. And he just recently moved back to the States from Europe and so when I was putting this project together, for that one piece, I was really hearing his personality and voice in there. I'd love to do more stuff with Herbie.


FJ: Having just turned the page to forty-nine, any mid-life crisis?

JOE LOVANO: Well, not so bad (laughing).


FJ: You haven't purchased a convertible have you?

JOE LOVANO: (Laughing) No. No, but I have a John Deer tractor. It's not a big tractor, but it's a tractor.


FJ: Having done the Village Vanguard record, the big band records, the Sinatra material, the duet and trio material, the Osby pairing, and the Caruso material, what's left?

JOE LOVANO: I created these recordings to play this music. And a lot of the recordings came from playing the music with those people and trying to present the music and trying to really live it. Right now, all those recordings you just mentioned, I'm playing within all those settings all the time. I'm living for the moment right now and trying to explore the different repertoires from those creations with those people. It's been great to actually create some situations and some gigs where I could present different ensembles. A lot of people just play with the same one group all the time.


FJ: Caruso defined what we know as the Met, you are defining new Blue Note, a marquee for the label for over a decade now.

JOE LOVANO: I know, Fred. It has been great working with Bruce Lundvall and having him give me the trust to create and produce these projects. After I think I did the Rush Hour recording with Gunther Schuller and executed that and pulled that off. I just sat with him and told him what I wanted to do and he looked at me and said, "OK." He gave me the green light and once I actually did it and recorded those things and brought him a tape two days later and played him the music and he couldn't believe it and from that moment, I've had a real beautiful chance to let my imagination take me and deal with my life as a player and who I play with. The next thing I'm doing is we're going to record live at the Vanguard with the Nonet in September, some new music and possibly we're talking about maybe having it be a DVD, where it's a video as well. Blue Note hasn't really done that before and I'm hoping that that could happen. And this summer I'm touring with a special quartet with Scofield, Dave Holland, and Al Foster, a group that we played three summers ago. We did the European festivals and it was so much fun and we had a ball and very successful that we're doing it again this summer. We're going to record for Blue Note when we return from Europe. That's a collective group so it's not really on my contract, but it will come out on Blue Note, maybe in January.


FJ: Can you imagine playing for another label?

JOE LOVANO: No, not really. I feel really, really comfortable with Blue Note and really proud to be part of their amazing history and legacy.


FJ: The legacy of Alfred Lion is safe with you on watch.

JOE LOVANO: Thanks so much, Fred.


FJ: Finish this sentence, "Jazz is…"

JOE LOVANO: Jazz is alive and well.


FJ: It certainly is in Joe Lovano.

JOE LOVANO: Well, thank you, Fred. Thanks for diggin' the music.

Fred Jung is the Editor-In-Chief and is donating his jazz reference books to science (they aren't worth shit). Comments? Email Him