Kenny Barron with Special Guest Stefon Harris, January 30, 2003
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
by Larry Kelp
It's
about time that one of the masters of modern jazz, Kenny Barron, made his
San Francisco Performances debut. The pianist's Grammy-nominated 2001 recording,
Freefall, is a duo CD with San Francisco Performances' first Artist-in-Residence,
violinist Regina Carter. And this concert pairs Barron's quartet with vibist
Stefon Harris, the current Artist-in-Residence.
It
is also the West Coast debut of Barron's quartet. "The flute with vibes and
piano is not standard instrumentation," Barron admits, "but I really like
it in terms of the musical colors we can get." The group is so new that it
just made its concert debut in November. And while Harris is billed as "special
guest," he and Barron both talk of the band as a quintet.
Harris
recalls, "The first time I heard Kenny Barron (on a duo record with vibist
Joe Locke), I just remember how smooth his playing was, like an exhaling
breath that never ends. He captures almost everything he hears, and that's
something to strive for." Known for his melodic approach to bebop and post-bop
styles, Barron admits, "I really like lyricism!"
A
seven-time Grammy Award nominee who has worked with everyone from Dizzy Gillespie
and Stan Getz to Charlie Haden and Ron Carter, Barron has appeared in the
Bay Area often, most recently last summer at Stern Grove with his Canta Brasil
quintet of Brazilian and American musicians. With at least 40 albums of his
own as well as appearances on more than 60 other musicians' recordings, he
is one of jazz' busiest artists.
Since
summer Barron (in addition to teaching at Manhattan School of Music and Julliard
Academy after retiring from a 27-year tenure at Rutgers University in 2000)
has performed in Paris with this quintet, played piano duets in Cuba with
Chucho Valdez, recorded a new CD with his and Harris's Classical Jazz Quartet
as well as making that band's concert debut in New York City in December,
performed in the Midwest with Canta Brasil, and doing his first duo concerts
with Harris in Cambridge, Mass.
The
program for this concert is a mix of jazz standards with Barron's original
compositions, and possibly some of Harris's songs. "A couple of months ago
this quartet without Stefon did a concert in Paris, playing the music of
Billy Strayhorn and Wayne Shorter," Barron says, "and those tunes fit together
really well. So we might play something from them. I've also been working
on a commission to write music for this group to be performed in February
in East Lansing, Michigan, and we may try some of it out in San Francisco."
Barron
and Harris cite their intuitive sense of playing together. "We've never worked
anything out," Barron says. "We just play." Harris adds, "I think it is our
open-mindedness that was the key. The first time we tried playing together
there was a special chemistry. We were both willing to go anywhere the music
took us and not worry about boundaries." Likewise, the quintet plays tunes
with arrangements that leave much space for improvisation. Both drummer Kim
Thompson (from St. Louis) and flutist Anne Drummond (from Seattle) are players
Barron first heard when they were in high school. Thompson is now a student
at the Manhattan School of Music where Barron teaches, and Drummond is one
of his piano students there. Other than himself, the oldest member of what
Barron laughingly calls his "baby band" is in his thirties: Kiyoshi Kitagawa,
from Osaka, Japan. "Bassist Ben Riley turned me on to him. Kyoshi worked
with the Heath Brothers band and the Harper Brothers."
"One
of the things I most admire about Kenny as an artist is that he's constantly
creating himself. Unlike most musicians who get a style and stick with it,
he's putting together new groups and new associations, from (Miles Davis'
percussionist) Mino Cinelu to Regina Carter. And he's willing to work with
younger musicians; that's an opportunity that people like me and Regina and
his band rarely have, to work with these masters."
Harris
and Barron are also half of the Classical Jazz Quartet, along with drummer
Lewis Nash and bassist Ron Carter, with CDs of improvisations on music by
J.S. Bach and Tchaikovsky.
KENNY BARRON
"Jazz is first for me as a player," Barron emphasizes. "But I love classical
music, anything that's melodic and challenging, such as Brazilian music,
and not just the bossa nova but the more experimental creators like Hermeto
Pascoal."
Barron-who
will turn 60 this June, and has lived in the same Brooklyn house for 25 years-grew
up in a musical family in Philadelphia. "My two brothers and two sisters
and I all had to study piano, and while I studied classical piano for ten
years until I was 16, bebop was what I really grew up on. There were always
78 rpm records around the house of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and
then the post-bop Blue Note Records albums. Then when Ornette Coleman came
out (1958-'60), some people loved what he did, some hated it, but I loved
it, especially Ornette's compositions."
While
he studied other instruments in high school, including bass and cello, Barron
always felt that piano was it for him. And jazz was his language. "It was
the feeling of playing jazz, and the idea of being able to pull notes out
of thin air and make sense of them, as opposed to being locked into the printed
page." His first big influence was bebop pianist Tommy Flanagan, then Hank
Jones and fellow Philadelphian McCoy Tyner.
After
playing in local bands, in 1959 he worked with drummer Philly Joe Jones,
and after moving to New York City in 1961, he was soon in-demand to play
with a seemingly endless list of the jazz greats, including a four-year stint
with Dizzy Gillespie, and extended stays with trumpeter Freddie Hubbard and
flutist Yusef Lateef, and in the mid-'70s he was in former Miles Davis bassist
Ron Carter's first quartet, a chamber jazz group (piano, bassist Buster Williams,
drummer Ben Riley and Carter on piccolo bass) that allowed Barron to deeply
explore that lyrical side of his playing. In the '80s that band (minus Carter)
added saxophonist Charlie Rouse to become Sphere, taking its name from Thelonious
Monk's adopted middle name, and playing new interpretations of Monk.
Over
the past 20 years Barron has performed and recorded with a who's who of modern
jazz including Stan Getz's final concerts and duo recording in 1991, leading
up to the breakthrough Freefall CD of duets with violinist Regina
Carter. "In a jazz sense it was unusual," Barron says, "just the two of us.
Some of it was freer than standard jazz. That title tune had nothing written,
it was just, 'Let's turn on the tape recorder and see what happens.' It was
really free."
STEFON HARRIS
Vibist
Stefon Harris, who is almost midway into his four-year stint as San Francisco
Performances' second Artist-in-Residence, is now an old regular here, having
performed in the area while barely out of his teens, first with Wynton Marsalis,
then a 1997 group led by Berkeley-reared guitarist Charlie Hunter. Since
then Harris has led his own band, and a year ago nearly stole the show as
the new kid in Cedar Walton's all-star band at Yoshi's.
Currently
calling Newark, New Jersey, home, Harris has appeared on a number of recordings,
but still has only two out under his own name, A Cloud of Red Dust and Black Action Figure, plus a recent quartet album with pianist Jacky Terrasson, Kindred. His major commissioned composition, Grand Unification Theory,
has been recorded and will be released on Feb. 11. An 80-minute large scale
work for 12 musicians including flutist Anne Drummond, it sums up-in instrumental
terms-Harris' philosophy of life and everything else. Harris wrote the liner
notes to explain his ideas behind the music, "about the theory in quantum
physics, and how that theory inspired to bring all the different elements
of my life together and focus them in the music. It's really not music I
thought of, but that I discovered."
It's
a long way from Harris's not-so-long-ago youth, when he felt drawn to the
piano that the previous tenant had left behind when his family moved into
a home in Albany, New York. "Jazz wasn't allowed in the house, and I couldn't
play in church because I wasn't saved. In school, because I could read music,
I got to try a bunch of instruments. I auditioned on clarinet and percussion,
and ended up on percussion." He went on to get his undergraduate degree in
classical orchestra.
"I
started writing music in eighth grade, before I knew jazz or classical. Now
I've got a master's degree in jazz, and what I write is in the same spirit
I had in the eighth grade, only now I've got more options from my studies.
I've worked with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, Charlie Hunter, Joe Henderson,
Cassandra Wilson, Greg Osby, Steve Coleman, and African dance companies.
So now when I compose I'm drawing from all those sources and more." His
current role as San Francisco Performances' Artist-in-Residence, working
several times a year with students from elementary schools to colleges around
the Bay Area, has been a thrill, he says. "It's a tremendous source of growth.
I've always been interested in teaching. I was mostly self-taught as a child,
so I came up with my ideas of music education, and now I get to try them
out and put them into practice." As with Regina Carter before him, Harris
is well-suited to the role because he is engaging, energetic, and eager to
share his love of music with anyone else, especially youngsters.
Stefon
Harris made his San Francisco Performances' debut as a member of the band
in a joint performance of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and
Jazz at Lincoln Center concert in a pairing of Stravinsky's Histoire du soldat
and Wynton Marsalis' A Fiddler's Tale in May 1998 at Davies Hall. His Quartet
shared a concert with violinist Regina Carter's Quartet in April 2001, and
he returned with his Quartet in February 2002.
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