Appearing with Hubert Sumlin
BF: Switching gears slightly, how do you approach something that’s older and make it relevant to the audience sitting right in front of you?
BK: I guess it’s not really planned, it’s just nature. Through the nature of what I was interested in as I grew up, I kind of taught myself the history of American music chronologically. When I was ten or eleven I was listening to that early jazz and ragtime and sort of worked my way through all these different styles, not because I had any grand plan, just because when I was eleven I liked it. And when I was fourteen I liked boogie-woogie. I was kind of a weirdo, I guess (laughs). I was thirteen years old and was listening to early spirituals and Stephen Foster music. I don’t know why… I was always really into history.
As far as making it relevant to listeners- I don’t know. I believe in what I’m playing, and I don’t see the borderlines that so many people put on styles. I think it has something to do with conviction and passion. I think passion will always, if it’s real, communicate to people.
I played with Ronnie Earl for years and I was on a bunch of his albums. People just love Ronnie Earl, and a lot of times he’s not playing anything that different than a lot of other people. But it’s the immediacy and the passion that he’s playing with that just really grabs people. Anything that you do, if you have emotional investment and conviction- and you’re not sort of playing on the surface of it and you’re digging deep into it- people will be moved by it. I don’t have any grand plans like “I’m gonna take this swing-era thing and mix it with that and try to capture a demographic because they’re gonna like it.” I just do what I do, I guess.
BF: That’s how the Project A recording came out. You took the passion of Aretha Franklin’s soul music and translated it through a passion found in more of a jazz-blues idiom. Would you talk about how that came together? I’m guessing you assembled the band.
BK: Yeah, I definitely produced the album and I hired all the musicians. You know, the record company was very cool, they just said “Do whatever you want and we’re going to pay for it” (laughs). [They] came up with the concept, said you run with it, you pick the tunes, hire the musicians, do whatever you want, and I started listening to a lot of Aretha Franklin tunes.
But it was a fine line to find the material. I didn’t want to do certain tunes with the band because it would serve no point. On one hand there was the hip jazz musician thing- “whatever we take from Aretha we’re going to deconstruct it and turn it into something unrecognizable.” I didn’t want to do that, just because I’m supposed to be “hip” or something. And I didn’t want to record-copy the Aretha tunes cause then you can sound like you’re a wedding band. So picking the tunes was tricky.
I think we came to a nice middle ground, where we have three of her gospel tunes, two or three of her early tunes from her first couple of records when she was on Columbia and they didn’t really know what to do with her, and a couple of her hits. We re-interpreted the tunes that I felt like there was a good reason to re-interpret them. A few things, especially ‘The House that Jack Built,’ I just thought “OK, Jerry Jemmott’s on bass and it’s the coolest groove, and there’s no reason not to play it like it was played, and then just take it somewhere else.”
I transcribed all those melodies, and that was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. To take the timing she used to phrase her melodies, and put it down on paper, was really tricky. You’d be amazed at “Rocksteady” or “Maybe I’m A Fool,” which sound so natural coming out of her mouth. I poured hours and hours over little sections of things because we did the record in three days, [and] I didn’t want to go into an Aretha Franklin tune where some jazz player was vaguely approximating the original phrasing, because then it’s not the tune anymore.
When we walked in, I put written music in front of everybody that dealt with the melodies, so that everyone could see, play, and understand the phrasing. I couldn’t count on everybody delving as deeply into it as I was. And I’ve seen too many things be half-assed, especially sometimes with jazz musicans who think “To hell with the melody, it’s time to blow!” I wanted to have it really connected to Aretha, yet be really open for interpretation, and I think we succeeded actually.
BF: As I was listening to it in my iTunes mix, Coltrane and Burrell’s “Why Was I Born” by Jerome Kern came up, and it struck me how jazz wasn’t always so much from the head. I think you accomplished, with this session, the same thing Coltrane did with his more soulful work, where you respected the song’s “heart and soul,” yet took it somewhere new and interesting.
BK: That’s, in general, what I’ve been trying to do with my own stuff all along- combine the physical groove aspect, and still allow it to have intellectual roots if it wants to. I think that’s a lot different than a lot of jazz musicians, who have gotten away from the notion of grooving, or getting people to move their bodies as well as getting people to think with their minds. Which is why I think jazz has declined as a popular art form to a large extent. There’s no reason in the world why something can’t have melody and harmony and challenging ideas and still have the physicality of what used to be jazz.
People used to dance to jazz, but with contemporary jazz musicians, nobody dances to it. You can’t really dance to it; you could but it would be really pre-formed. Sometimes I play with some more modern-leaning jazz musicians, and it’s like the whole idea seems to be to hide the downbeat so that nobody can feel it.
BF: It’s interesting in that it’s the jamband world where, more so than perhaps any other current genre, people are open to hearing complex harmonic things, as long as they can groove to it. Talk about your experiences in that world, and let’s focus on 1969-1973, when you were a self-proclaimed ‘Deadhead’.
BK: Oh yeah- I would follow them around. Not exclusively, but there was a few years there where I was one of those people that, probably 90% of the music I listened to was the Grateful Dead, with some Allman Brothers and some other people in there as well. I was captured, definitely, by that music.
BF: If you were to describe the Dead to a jazz class at Berklee, what would you relate to them from your experience with the band?
BK: Um… that’s a good question. I guess, in my formative times, the Dead really struck the chord with me. Garcia was coming from the jug bands, and the country music, and the early American music, and he was like mixing with free [jazz]… I wouldn’t call it jazz, but it was the same concept as free jazz.
BF: Like the “Space” jams, where time was very free, and people could interject what they wanted to.
BK: Right, but it was still very communicative though. I remember the Bruce Katz Band I had with [guitarist] Julien Kasper, that made ‘Mississippi Moan’ and ‘Three Feat off the Ground.’ We would be driving around in vans and I’d be talking about the Grateful Dead and they would all sort of wrinkle their noses up.
So finally, we were in the middle of a long drive, and I brought Live/Dead with me and I played Dark Star, St. Stephen, and the Eleven for them, and they were really surprised at, first of all, how cool it was. Ralph knew about the Grateful Dead back in the day, but the other two guys, they just never really listened to it. And they listened to “Dark Star” and they just didn’t realize the level of sophisticated free… just the level of communication and broken time and time that’s implied and all the things that really jazz musicians do, or did.
In some ways it’s almost like the Bill Evans Trio. Especially in the last 60’s, early 70’s, where the time was really broken up and nobody was stating it, but it was there and people played around it and communicated with each other. And the Grateful Dead were doing that, and that was really a big influence on my concept of music.
I don’t know that I had really listened to or heard stuff that was so well done. That whole concept of deconstructing something to where it’s “free” but it’s not free because there were pulses going on. People weren’t necessarily stating them overtly but they’re playing around them or just getting to the point where it really is this open thing and everyone’s contributing melodies at the same time. That was very, very influential on me.
BF: It hearkens back to the Dixieland music in a lot of ways where the horn players would be throwing melodies out and interacting with each other.
BK: Right, but the big difference being, the timekeepers were really keeping time though. But, yeah it’s true. Actually the great, early Chicago blues bands- the harmonica, the piano, and the guitar were all kind of playing at the same time. But, you know, the whole essence of the Grateful Dead’s little vortex of time and space (laughs), and people playing all over the fringes of that- like I said, I don’t think I’d ever played or thought that deeply about music from that angle.
Of course, at the time, I found myself playing a lot of bass. I grew up playing string bass as well, so I found myself playing bass in a couple of bands with two drummers, whose repertoires were both original and Grateful Dead, Allman Brothers, Moby Grape, and Quicksilver, stuff like that. And of course Phil Lesh was my idol at the time. The Grateful Dead were coming out of an Americana tradition, and then mixing this much more sophisticated, improvisational aspect to it. You could say that’s what I’m still trying to do forty years later with my music.
I don’t know if it’s the greatest thing to say to a jamband [site], but that’s what I miss out of a lot of the jambands out there- they don’t have that Americana thing going on. Most of them are playing this sort of 70’s funk music, at least to my ears. Although, when I played with the Allman Brothers this past October, we were on the bill with Widespread Panic- I really like those guys. I felt like they had some of those roots, like the Dead had in their music, as well as some of the original generation of jambands, such as the Allman Brothers.
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