Photo by Jason Kaczorowski
Jambands.com sits down with trumpet player, vocalist and solo artist, Jennifer Hartswick, longtime band member in the Trey Anastasio Band, 70 Volt Parade, and now, the Classic TAB formation, which begins its tour today in Charlottesville. The talented Hartswick has been a prominent fixture in Anastasio’s solo work since her teenage years in the late 1990s, and we catch up with her for a brief history of Classic TAB, her origins as a musician in Vermont, her solo career, including 2003’s funk-fueled Fuse, 2007’s jazz standard collection True, and a recently completely album, to be released later in 2010, followed up by solo dates with her own crack band of veteran musicians. Hartswick is a warm and friendly individual, and while that comes across in her engaging brass and vocal work, it certainly shows up when one is speaking with her. Hartwick’s words are often laced with laughter, which is quite contagious. Indeed, one can see another reason why Anastasio has valued her input and company over the years.
RR: How have rehearsals been for the tour?
JH: We’ve been pretty much rehearsing for the entire month of January.
RR: How unusual is that for Trey?
JH: That’s very unusual. That’s a huge blessing. Things are much more organized. We want to make sure we go out being the best that we can, and it’s fantastic. Our last rehearsal was a few days ago, and we’ve had a week to hang out and let things stew, work on whatever we need to work on. We all fly out tomorrow [Saturday, February 6].
RR: Obviously, there will be new songs mixed in with more familiar material.
JH: There will be, absolutely. We had a week of rehearsals for the horns. Trey has been working with Don Hart [his orchestral arranger and collaborator on “Time Turns Elastic,” as well. See Site Editor Dean Budnick’s feature with Don Hart ]. He worked with him on all the string and orchestral stuff. He’s really just a brilliant guy, and an incredible guy to have in the mix. He came out the whole first week the horns were there. A lot of those horn charts are written for five horns, and now we have three so we have to revisit every single thing, and make it appropriate for three horns. We can’t just play our old parts because there will be something missing. We had to revisit every single old song, and really make it perfect, make it sound really great. Don was there the whole time to make sure that that happened, which is awesome.
Don also took a lot of the new songs that Trey had brought to him months and months and months ago, and he had written really beautiful and elaborate and involved horn parts that essentially was written like an orchestra, like a string section would be. The difference is that during the entire song, the horns are playing the entire time, and not just sounds at the end of the jam. It is a really, really beautiful thing, and exciting, and he writes such incredible parts that every time we got new thing, we’d open it up and read through it, and just melt. “Don, you’re AMAZING!” The new songs are really orchestrated and together and beautiful. The old stuff is just as killin’ as it always was, and a little more rehearsed. I think it’s going to be the best by a mile.
RR: What older songs are you really looking forward to playing again?
JH: Ummm…(laughs)…I don’t know…(laughter)
RR: O.K. What songs are you going to hate playing again?
JH: (laughter) “Stop making me play C sharp.” No. No. No. All the old really good Russ and Tony ones that only they can play because they wrote those grooves. It just sinks in, and makes your heart melt. Those guys are just so good, and the pocket is so deep. To hear Tony start “Burlap Sack and Pumps” we all cheer. (laughter) It’s unbelievable. Anything that starts out with Tony, or Russ and Tony, is my dream.
RR: Jeff Cressman, who has played with Trey before, could not play with the band on this tour because of commitments with Santana. His daughter, Natalie Cressman joins TAB on trombone and vocals. How did rehearsals go with Natalie? Ironically, she is almost at the same age you were when you began playing with Trey.
JH: With all due respect to Jeff, Jeff just lost his job. (laughs) I love Jeff. (laughs) Natalie is absolutely incredible. She is really a gifted young woman, and she fits right in. From day one, she just popped right in, and was so comfortable, and so smart, and such an incredible player. She also sings her butt off. We’ve been having a blast creating vocal parts and horn parts together. She’s really an incredible young lady.
RR: Had you known her at all before she joined the band?
JH: No. Trey called me and told me the situation—I happened to be in New York for a gig—and he hadn’t met her, either. I said, “Why don’t I just call her, and have her come down?” So, I called her, and she came down after class. She’s a freshman at the Manhattan School of Music. She’s 18. She came down with her horn, and we instantly hit it off. She sat in, played a couple tunes, and we hung out for a couple of hours. I called Trey the second she left, and said, “She’s exactly what we need.”
RR: It also helps that you aren’t part of the all-boys club. In 2005 and 2006, you had Christina Durfee, on vocals and keyboards, with you, as well.
JH: Yeah. At that time, when she was around, I couldn’t imagine doing it without her. (laughs)
RR: Obviously, everything was new to Natalie Cressman. How much new material did you have to learn for this tour?
JH: There’s a total of about 55 songs that are really well-rehearsed. I’d say a good 8 or 10 tunes are brand new.
RR: Are there plans for more TAB dates later on in the year?
JH: Can I plead the 5th? No, just kidding. (laughs) There’s some talk of, certainly, some stuff later on in the year, for sure. We’re all so excited about how the band sounds that there is no way that we’re going to do one tour and stop.
RR: Yes, I hope TAB comes out to the West Coast, too.
JH: Yeah, we definitely will by the end of the year. We’ll certainly be out there.
Trey Anastasio with Jennifer Hartswick Band, Lion’s Den, NYC, 11/7/03- photo by Regan Teti
RR: You are currently based in Chicago these days.
JH: I am. Yeah. We’ve been there about three years. We’re actually in the process of moving back to Vermont, which I’m very excited about.
RR: Let’s go back to your origins in Vermont, and your various travels after that.
JH: I’m born and raised in Vermont, and I was in New York for a very brief amount of time, going to school there, but I pretty much lived my whole life in Vermont. I definitely moved around. I moved to New York, and went to school up there, and went to school in Hartford. Once I left school in Hartford, I was on the road, but I was always based in Vermont.
RR: And you came from a very musical family. How did you settle on trumpet? Did you play various instruments other than that while you were growing up?
JH: I played pretty much every instrument I could get my hands on, (laughter) which is par for the course for my family. I started playing piano at four years old, and picking up clarinet, flute, and sax and all of that. Everybody is my family is a music teacher—all musicians and all music teachers—five aunts and uncles, and two grandparents. They’re all music teachers, (laughs) so there isn’t a chance to do anything else. I picked up all of those instruments, and that was before I was 10 years old. My uncle needed a trumpet player for his jazz band, and thought it would be a good idea if I picked up the trumpet, as well. It was all over after that; I completely fell in love with it. I always sang. I always played, and I always sang. It was just always the same mechanism for me. It’s all the same thing. It’s all music. I grew up doing that pretty much all the time.
RR: That development coincided with a special fondness for jazz, as well.
JH: Yeah, very much. Yeah
RR: So in high school, I would assume that your musical tastes were far different than any other teenager.
JH: (laughter) Yeah. I was the weird kid. Yeah. My family are all classical musicians, and then, we would listen to jazz occasionally, and I just really latched on to it, so yeah, other kids were listening to the radio, and I really didn’t turn on the radio until I was 14. Unless it was to listen to NPR, or something, I was a total nerd. (laughter)
RR: And suddenly you are playing with Trey Anastasio, first in the studio, and then in his solo band. How did the leap to that platform take place?
JH: I was doing a lot of playing in a jazz sextet with Dave Grippo [longtime TAB saxophonist and clarinet player] who is a part of that whole story. He had seen me at a jazz festival when I was 16, and thought that I was having the most fun he’d ever seen, and he wanted to have that much fun with me. He came backstage, and we started playing together. When Trey was doing his first solo album One Man’s Trash, he was looking for a trumpet player, he had asked Dave if he could recommend anybody, and he said me.
We started working together when I was 17, and recorded on One Man’s Trash. We just really hit it off. We met in the studio that day, worked all day together, and just really, really had a great time together, and really clicked. We kept in touch over the years, and a couple of years later, I was a jazz major in the Hartt School of Music in Hartford, Connecticut, and I had left after three semesters. It just wasn’t what I was looking for. I packed up my car, and had no plans. Ten minutes out of the driveway, my phone rang, and it was Trey, and he was putting this band together, and wanted to know if I wanted to go on tour in a couple of weeks.
RR: Ten minutes out of the driveway.
JH: Yeah, I thought, “I’ve had enough. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’ll figure it out,” and fate’s a beautiful thing, you know? (laughs)
RR: When you began with TAB, was it a crash course in Trey’s style of improvisation? How nervous were you? How easy was it to get into the flow?
JH: I’ve never really been nervous when it comes to music. Number one, it’s a very comfortable environment. Trey always makes sure he creates that. It was certainly a different world the first time I walked on a tour bus. It was an amazing experience that I will never forget. “O.K. O.K. This is O.K. This is great.” (laughs) And we do the first show, and “This is the most people I’ve ever played for,” and you just sort of get the hang of it after a couple of days. You think, “All right. O.K. So this is what I do now. O.K. If we were to do this again, I would do this.” It just becomes your reality. I think the younger you are, the easier it is to slip into that. You have that ability to be a chameleon, and slip into whatever the situation may be. I think it was an asset that I was so young when I started.
RR: What were the group dynamics like in Trey’s band in the early 2000s? Have those dynamics within the core players changed at all over the years?
JH: It’s only gotten deeper. You’ve got Russ Lawton and Tony Markellis who are the nicest human beings on earth, and then, at that early stage, you had Dave Grippo and Andy Moroz [trombone], who are also in that category. It instantly became this really comfortable and loving environment for everybody. Being able to see Russ and Tony, and play again, is a joy that I can’t explain. (laughs) It’s really incredible. Now, we have a 10- or 11-year relationship that just makes it that much deeper. It hasn’t changed. It’s just gotten better.
RR: Along the way, 2004 occurred, and we are all well aware of what happened in August of that year [Phish broke up, and Trey was “permanently” solo, for a time]. Trey came back with a completely different band in 2005, and yet, you were also part of that group, as well. Ironically, despite many challenges—musical, or otherwise—Trey was hitting some peaks right at the tail end of that transition period in late 2006, especially at the New Year’s Eve run in Atlantic City. Describe that period of time from 2005 through December 2006.
JH: It was definitely a change. It was a shift. I was glad to be a part of that shift because he was including a lot of new people at that time. There was new management, new band, and new everything. It was just different. I was used to a certain thing, and I was happy that he was playing, and happy that he was going in a new direction with the stuff that he wanted. It’s always a change when you change a lineup that way, and we had gone through three drummers. It was definitely…it was not a rock solid time…musically. (laughs) I will say that. You sort of settle in. At the shows in Atlantic City, we brought some really familiar faces back out, and it was really nice to have everybody there.
RR: Your debut album, Fuse came out in 2003, and in 2007, that was followed up by True, which focused on jazz standards. You’ve also played some marquee venues, as well, on your own. Let’s talk about your development as a solo artist.
JH: I have a few different sides to me as well. People got used to seeing me in one genre, and were figuring that they knew all about me. It’s lovely that they know me at all. (laughs) I have a huge love of jazz and have that background, and I have a huge love of R&B and soul music. We recorded True in 2006, and that whole album was done live. It was actually a benefit for my aunt who was going through some really expensive alternative breast cancer treatment. I did a benefit concert for her, and I thought, “How can we make her a little more money?” We decided to go to the Barn [Trey’s Vermont studio] in for a couple of days, record an album, and see if we could sell it. That’s how that album came to be. It was never supposed to be anything but that. Which is lovely—we did it, everybody donated their time, and it was a really great thing. A couple of months later, Trey said, “Did you record at the Barn?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Well, let me hear it.” I said, “O.K.” So I gave it to him—this was midnight one night—and he took it. I saw that we had a bus call really early for some flight at 6 in the morning, and he still had his headphones on, and he hadn’t stopped listening to it all night long. He asked, “Can we put this out?” And I said, “Sure.”
It was a nice project. It was just (laughs) a couple days, here and there, a couple of days in a row, and the guys on it were great. I really appreciated that they donated their time and skills. [Author’s Note: along with Hartswick on trumpet and vocals, True features pianist Joe Davidian, guitarist Nicholas Cassarino, bassist John Rivers, drummer Geza Carr, and tenor saxophonist Andrew Breskin.]
RR: Any other solo projects coming up?
JH: The last few years, living in Chicago, I’ve been doing a bunch of playing with some great musicians. I’ve been doing a lot of straight ahead R&B work. I have a new album that I just finished recording that’s an R&B album, and I’m really excited about it. The growth and history is really fun for me to go back and look at where I was a couple of years ago. I don’t know exactly when that album is coming, but we just finished recording it.
RR: That’ll mark three completely different solo albums for you—the first, funk; the second, jazz; and the third, rhythm and blues.
JH: Completely different, yeah. I guess they are equal difference apart, too [2003, 2007, and, hopefully, 2010].
RR: Very mathematical.
JH: (laughs) Yeah. Not on purpose. It just worked out that way.
RR: Who plays on that with you?
JH: That is Joe Davidian on organ; Corey Healey on drums, Dezron Douglas on bass.
RR: And Dezron has been with you off and on for a while, right?
JH: Yeah, Dezron and I go back around 10 or 11 years. He’s one of the greatest bass players in the world. He’s just really gifted. And then Nick Cassarino on guitar. We also had a couple tracks with Russ Lawton playing and Bruce Sklar on organ. We had a great time, just an unbelievable time. They are great guys to work with, too.
RR: I would assume that between TAB tours, you’ll be doing solo dates in support of your new material?
JH: Definitely. Yep. I get off tour, and I mix and master during the spring, and then it’ll be out in late summer, or something. But, yeah, I would love to do that, and the band is ready to go, really psyched about it, and so am I. You’ll definitely see some tour dates. (laughs)
RR: When are you planning on moving back to Vermont?
JH: The second I get home from tour. My family is up there, and [my husband’s] family is close by, and I have a really huge extended musical family that I value. They are all really close. Just to be on the East Coast, period—everything is so close between Boston and New York, and even Philly and, you know, Jersey. Everything is within driving distance. In Chicago, your two main cities that are closest are Milwaukee and Indianapolis. It’s nice just to be close to everybody, and to be able to go see music whenever, see your friends play, and play with your friends, and, more importantly for me, my whole band is based out there. It will be a really nice opportunity to get into some great music.
RR: What are the differences between the Chicago, Vermont, and New York music scenes from your experiences?
JH: Well…(laughs)…I have to say this diplomatically. The Vermont scene is a very welcoming, very arms open scene. If I am out seeing music, and I like it, we’d go up and say, “Hey—I’d love to play with you some time.” It is a very, very open scene.
New York has, obviously, a lot more to choose from. New York has its own vibe all together. There are a lot of really incredible musicians, and they all support each other. I feel like it’s actually not unlike Vermont when you get into it. People go out and see music all the time, and go out and support each other. I love that about New York.
Chicago doesn’t seem to have quite that warmth that the other two cities have, in my opinion. (laughs) I want to say it nicely. There is great music going on here. My husband works for Umphrey’s McGee, which is a band based in Chicago. We ended up at a point in our lives where we really wanted to get out of Vermont. He’s from Connecticut. He’s from the East Coast, too. We needed a change, and we ended up going out there in 2006. And we are just in the process, right after this tour, of being right back in Burlington.
RR: You’ve known Trey for a while. Is it refreshing in any way to be around him within the last few months?
JH: Yeah. I can’t express my joy in the last couple months. He’s a completely different person. And I say that with the utmost respect. He’s been through a lot. I love him, and
I’ve always loved him, but, he’s really just so incredible and healthy. It’s a joy to be around him every second that I’m around him.
