Interview: Chris Potter

To call Chris Potter a new artist would be a blatant lie. And yet, there are still too many listeners who haven’t yet woken up to the fact that this wizard of the tenor sax is one expensive major-label marketing campaign away from being a household name — not that anyone’s spending money on marketing anymore. Since touring in Steely Dan’s band and then taking on a crucial role in Dave Holland’s quintet, Potter’s warm, robust sound and intricately constructed streams of melody have been waging a long-term campaign to win jazz fans’ hearts and minds. Touring with his funk/fusion ensemble, Chris Potter’s Underground (with Craig Taborn on Fender Rhodes electric piano, Adam Rogers on guitar and Nate Smith on drums) and with a brand new record, Ultrahang, in tow, Potter spoke to EYE WEEKLY during a brief stopover at home in New York.

Both in Chris Potter’s Underground and outside of it, I’ve noticed that a lot of your tunes are straight-metred rather than swinging. Why?
Well, with the Underground band it wouldn’t really make sense. I really enjoy the way the Rhodes functions as a bass, but it doesn’t work very well if you try and make it work like a walking bass line. That just would kind of sound silly. And, you know, part of what I’m hoping to get at, too, is to free the funk language up a little more. Because it can be just as free, in terms of being interactive and open, as a swing feel. There are a lot of possibilities within that, and there’s something about it — it feels very modern. It feels like what’s happening now. That’s the combination of things I enjoy listening to — music that’s very open, that has that kind of anything-can-happen-from-moment-to-moment feeling; I also like, you know, some deep-pocket funk. So I’m trying to figure out a way to make both of those things happen at the same time.

Who’s the most recent artist whose music you really dug into and studied intensely?
I don’t know, exactly. A lot of it ends up being the same people that I’ve been exposed to for years. I mean, recent examples for me would be Sonny Rollins. I’ve been checking him out again. Duke Ellington, you know. Stravinsky. I always end up going back and learning something more from this music that I missed before, or just hearing it in a new way because I’m in a new place. You know. But there’s a long list of those kind of guys. Ornette, Miles, etc., etc.

I find that with some of the younger players, there’s not as much of an emphasis on re-listening to things.
Yeah, that’s one thing that makes it hard to really develop in-depth now. The amount of time that you have to put in checking out really fine details, listening over and over to Charlie Parker, trying to figure out what he’s doing and getting deep, deep inside it — it really takes a lot of energy. You kind of have to focus on that, to the exclusion of some other things for a while. And the nature of how information is dispersed now is kind of goes against that, because like you said, everything’s being thrown at you 24 hours a day.

I mean, someone like Bach, he was living in a small town, there were no recordings, he wasn’t getting any iTunes, he was working within a very small range of musical style, but I think since he could concentrate that deeply into what he was doing — and, I mean, he was a genius — something really amazing can come out of that. I think it’s more difficult to get into that space. But I find that for myself it really is important to turn everything off sometimes and just, you know, work. Or just sit there for 70 minutes and listen to an entire Mahler symphony. I really enjoy when I can finally get into that kind of space where I’m not trying to do 50 things at once.

What was it like coming up as a player of your generation, and how are things different today?
When I first moved to New York, it was right after Wynton Marsalis had been signed and there was a little bit of a renaissance of record companies signing straight-ahead jazz musicians which there hadn’t been for a while — the atmosphere musically was much more straight-ahead than it is now. The very good part of the way it was then is that a lot of these people were still alive and were still playing from the original generation, and I had a chance to play with some of them. And you could go listen to Art Blakey’s band, you know, for real. It was a little bit of a return to looking at what the beauty was of that music from the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s. But the downside was that you kind of felt like you had to conform to a certain thing or you weren’t quite in the club.

And now, I think it’s much more wide-open. It seemed like it got more open with musicians of my generation a little bit, but with younger generations especially. I mean, there’s no — they’re just not looking at the possibility of working as a straight-ahead jazz musician. They’re not gonna get a gig with Art Blakey’s band. These things do not exist. So I think it forces their creativity to go in different directions, and while it may be harder to get, certain musical streams of thought might not survive as well, but I think there are some other things that we’ll hear more and more. More and more kind of eclecticism.

To me it seems exciting, there are a lot of great things happening, a lot of great possibilities. I only hope that musicians of today can find a way to work, and make a living and get their music heard. That’s not getting any easier, that’s for sure.

Chris Potter’s Underground play The TD Canada Trust Toronto Jazz Festival at The Pilot, 22 Cumberland. Mon-Tue, Jun 29-30. $28 from Ticketmaster. 9pm. Potter will also participate in the Ken Page Memorial Trust Workshop Series at Nathan Phillips Square, 100 Queen W. Tue, Jun 30. Free. 2pm.