Courtesy of Mark Whitfield
Photo by Lonnie Timmons III







Transparent Music

A FIRESIDE CHAT WITH MARK WHITFIELD


The first time I had an opportunity to see Mark Whitfield play live was with the Kansas City (the movie, not the band) tour funded by Verve in the mid-Nineties. I am not a huge fan of the guitar, but the word on Whitfield was the "next" Wes Montgomery. That's heavy pressure. Whitfield, at the time, was a rising star in the making at Verve and the label put money behind him to provide him the kind of exposure needed to succeed in the marketplace. But with the merger of Verve and Impulse! and the arrival of Tommy LiPuma at the helm of the new mega-label, Whitfield was a corporate casualty. I always wanted to get Whitfield's point of view and so I asked him about his time at the label and why he suddenly found himself label-less, unedited and in his own words.


FRED JUNG: Let's start from the beginning.

MARK WHITFIELD: I started playing the guitar when I was seven years old. My brother came back from Vietnam and he was a big blues fan. But he had no interest in learning to play and so he gave the guitar to me and my parents got me some lessons. My parents were big fans of jazz music and so I grew up with a lot of jazz around the house, a lot of records and all that. I used to go to a lot of concerts when I was a kid, people like Count Basie and Ella Fitzgerald, Oscar Peterson, things like that. As soon as I got a chance, I started playing instruments in the school ensemble, acoustic bass, alto saxophone in the orchestra. In the sixth grade, they started having concert jazz band. I played guitar and saxophone and bass in the band.


FJ: Why did you lay down the horn and bass and stick primarily with the guitar?

MARK WHITFIELD: Well, about a year later, I saw George Benson playing on television with the Boston Pops Orchestra and they were doing music from his album, Breezin' and I was wiped out, blown away. I saw that and at that moment, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to play guitar like George. That was the beginning of it. I was about eleven years old.


FJ: What were some of your listening pleasures back in the day?

MARK WHITFIELD: Yeah, I had a bunch of those Pablo recordings because my bass teacher had told me to check out Ray Brown. So I got introduced to Joe Pass and Herb Ellis that way. Other than George, I also had a Earl Klugh record. And I hadn't yet become familiar with Wes Montgomery or Grant Green or Kenny Burrell or Charlie Christian. That didn't come till I was maybe fourteen or fifteen. One of my history teachers, he saw that I was really interested in playing and he began to give me some records. He gave me Solo Flight, the Charlie Christian album. From there, I started, oh, actually, I left out a few people. Return to Forever was pretty popular then and so I was starting to hear the progressive rock cats, fusion cats on the radio. There was a lot of that going on.


FJ: Assess the impact George Benson had on your musical direction.

MARK WHITFIELD: When I got out of school, after going to Berklee, I came back to New York to pursue my career, I suppose. I met George at a jam session one night. He stuck around to hear me play after he was done playing and he left me a note that he liked me and would like to see me again. And then every couple of weeks or so he would stop by and see if I was making any progress. I guess when he thought I was ready, he sent me uptown to 25th Street to meet Jack McDuff and he told me to do my best to join Jack's band. Jack hired me and after playing with Jack for about a year and a half, almost two years, George introduced me to Tommy LiPuma and helped me get my first recording.


FJ: Take me through your time at Verve in the midst of the young lions movement.

MARK WHITFIELD: Well, I just at the time, I think I was overwhelmed by the fact that this could happen so soon. I was playing with all these musicians who were heroes of mine. Jack DeJohnette and Ron Carter and playing with Jeff Watts and Branford Marsalis and Kenny Kirkland and then playing with Tommy Flanagan and Dave Holland, I was having a ball. I think many of those recordings were made, admittedly, before I was even ready to be in the company of musicians like that in terms of my confidence and my ability to express myself on that level. It was a great learning experience and I was having, I started my own band and started making records out of the necessity of having to work. I really wanted to spend more time playing as a sideman and spend more time playing in other people's groups in New York but there wasn't that much opportunity for a guitar player. There was a lot of great bands but no one had a guitar and very few cats expressed any interest of having me play with them, so I had to take jobs where I could find them. For the most part, if I wanted to play, I had to make my own situation. That was how my own band came to be. I was having a great time traveling and trying to learn the ropes and trying to learn the music and learn about myself.


FJ: Upon reflection, would it have served you better to have apprenticed more as a sideman?

MARK WHITFIELD: I think I certainly would have benefited from that. Yeah, that would have been great. I had to supplement that as best I could.


FJ: When Verve and Impulse! merged with the Polygram and Universal mega-merger, Tommy LiPuma was chosen to head up the new Verve. You and LiPuma already had a working relationship together. Why were you dropped from the label? Just from a loyalty perspective, you would think LiPuma would have made it a point to advance your career and market access.

MARK WHITFIELD: Tommy and I had a great relationship when we were at Warner Bros. There were no problems between he and I except when he came over to Verve, many of the people who were working with me were let go as part of a corporate situation that had nothing to do with music. He also had Russell Malone and George Benson on his roster. Russell came as part of his Diana Krall thing and, of course, George Benson, he and Tommy go back thirty years now. I just don't think that they felt like they had room for two guys who were sort of doing the same thing with a guitar, which would have been myself and Russell Malone. Tommy and Russell had established a great rapport and I think they felt that Russell was the new guy on the block who needed to do his thing. Of course, they had Scofield and a few other people playing different areas of the music and so that was the decision that they made and so they decided to let me go.


FJ: Do you harbor any animosity towards how you were treated?

MARK WHITFIELD: In a way, it was a good thing for me. For a minute there I was very worried about what I was going to do and that I needed to find a new recording situation pretty quickly. I am fortunate that I have some very dedicated fans who support me and come to see me play. They made it possible for me to continue to work for a few years without even having a record out.


FJ: For the majority of your career, you were critically praised and marketed as a "straight-ahead" jazz guitarist, then came the album, Soul Conversation, an instrumental pop or "smooth jazz" release. Did you sell out?

MARK WHITFIELD: Well, I guess I could see it being called selling out perhaps, that I was making a pop record or I was in the company with Britney Spears, something that has the promise of making me millions playing at Madison Square Gardens, but one of the greatest smooth jazz records of all time was the one that started my whole career. I mean Breezin' is probably the cornerstone that formed the blueprints of that whole style of music. And if nothing else, for conversation, it was a throw back to that whole style. To me, smooth jazz is certainly more commercial than traditional jazz is, without a doubt, but I think in order to really sell out, you have to do something that promises to make you a lot of money. I don't think that guys that play smooth jazz do any better than traditional jazz. Traditional is not really about the money, it's just about playing something because that's what you like to do. Hopefully, throughout the course of my career, as I continue to grow and try new things, there are going to be lots of diversions as well as straight-ahead and do a lot of different kinds of music. Conversations was just one of those things.


FJ: Let's touch on your latest release, Raw.

MARK WHITFIELD: We were just on the road a lot and it had been a while since I had record to come out. We played a lot and I had a great band and we decided, and by we I mean the drummer and I decided to take a mini disc recorder and start recording all the performances just to see how things were going. Sometimes you get caught up in the moment when you are playing and you think sound better or worse or effective or less effective than that. It is hard to keep an accurate barometer on that. The mini disc recordings were a great way to gauge my progress and the sound of the group. After listening to a bunch of them, it dawned on me that this stuff sounds really good and that I think it would be great if we could find a way to clean up the recordings sound wise somewhat because it was not album quality and if we released some of this stuff. I think it would great to present this kind of playing to the listening audience because often times when you make a recording in the studio, you don't have the benefit of having played the same tunes every night for a couple of weeks, in front of people. You just don't have the feedback from the live audience and the energy at all. I think although, for some reason, live recordings don't seem to be as popular as studio recordings. For artists, often times, their best performances are in a live situation, doing what your doing without being concerned about the length of solos or the length of tunes, of making mistakes, and just kind of taking chances and playing music in the moment, which is really what jazz is supposed to be all about. The label was very excited about it when they heard the recordings and what statement I was making as a guitarist and also as a bandleader. We went in the studio, and as best we could, cleaning them up and some editing. It was great and I was so excited that they were going to put it out. I wanted that side of my development to be documented and I hope to do more things like that in the future.

Fred Jung is the Editor -In-Chief and Ben & Jerry's new flavor of the month. Email Him.