Photo by Annabel Lukins Stelling
You should surprise everyone on Jam Cruise and put together a jazz band.
Whoa, you’ve gone and started something [laughter]. It was funny, about two years ago, I had a version of the Runnin’ Pardners that was a completely employed band—about all of the guys were tenured: two guys worked in the post office, three guys were school teachers, the guitarist had his own band and the keyboardist had his own band, so none of them could ever travel for gigs. I got so frustrated, I kind of just broke the band up, and I started a four-piece band. I wrote music for the new band, and we played this gig as the Pardners and this local writer described us as a “smooth jazz band” in his review. Immediately my numbers went from 500-600 people a night in the local club to 100 people. But it wasn’t jazz, I just didn’t have a guitar player in the band. Nobody wants to come see Porter playing jazz, especially smooth jazz. I thought some of the music was just really good and had lots of potential. The saxophone player leaned more toward Coltrane, and I loved what he was doing, but basically I had to stop playing with the band. During the three gigs that I had on the band, our attendance went down to 45 people on the last gig. I had to walk away from it.
Do you plan to continue playing with Porter Batiste Stoltz?
I have one more gig [October 30th at Tipitina’s French Quarter] I gave my resignation a few weeks ago. It isn’t anything personal, I just have a lot of projects I need to work on. I also plan to work on my book— I’m also 50 pages into my autobiography.
As a musician, is there anything that has always eluded you?
I’ve always wanted to record a bebop record. I had been told by other jazz musicians not to tamper with it. I had spoken with these guys and they said that all of the bebop that has been played has already been played. Other guys gave me the same kind of opinion, saying there’s no such thing as new bebop. I don’t believe in that—I want to play bebop, and I don’t want to play old songs, I want to play new bebop songs. I’ll carefully put it out so I won’t get slapped all over the country [laughter].
Your name is synonymous with funk, but at this point in your career it seems you want to stretch your wings stylistically.
I’ve got three projects in mind that I really need to do. The bebop project is one, and I also want to record an album of Meters songs that never been played by any of the members of the Meters or any Meters-configured bands. There are about 35-40 good ones that none of those bands have ever touched, but they are all original Meters songs. There may have to be a Volume I and Volume II, actually. The third project I will work on is another George Porter record, and I want to get all of this done by the end of next year.
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