The Pat Metheny Interview

History will likely be exceptionally kind to Pat Metheny. The guitarist, after all, is one of the most innovative, influential, and versatile musicians of his generation. During the last three decades, beyond his endless touring, he’s recorded an astounding lot of music in a stupefying array of contexts.

His most enduring – and commercially viable – vehicle is the Pat Metheny Group. With a lineup that currently includes vocalist Richard Bona, trumpeter Cuong Vu, drummer Antonio Sanchez, as well as longtime Metheny collaborators keyboardist Lyle Mays and bassist Steve Rodby, the Group recently recorded Speaking of Now (Warner Bros.), the band’s eleventh studio album. With the record safely in the can, a relaxed Metheny sat down for an interview with JAZZIZ publisher and editor-in-chief Michael Fagien. Over the course of a sprawling conservation, Metheny was unfailingly blunt and articulate, whether discussing life on the road, the sounds in his head, or the mechanics of his art.

MICHAEL FAGIEN: You seem to have always managed a rather hectic tour schedule. I remember meeting with you in a trailer 20 years ago for our first interview. You were on the road then and it seems like you’ve never let up. Do you enjoy being on the road so much?

PAT METHENY: I love playing so much. And you’re right, I don’t think I know of anyone who has done as many gigs as I have over the past 20 years, at least not in the jazz world. For me it hasn’t really been hectic as much as it has been really fun – and an incredible opportunity to learn about music and playing. And it was always a dream for me, the thing of getting out there and playing a lot, night after night. It is what I always wanted to do more than anything else. As much as practicing and thinking and working on music can benefit a player’s progress, I don’t think anything compares to the impact that just getting out there and playing night in and night out has. It all becomes real onstage; there is nothing theoretical about it.

Having said that, the past few years have been somewhat different for me. It’s not that I don’t still love going out and playing hundreds of gigs at a clip – I do. But I have to admit that I have been putting more attention and energy into different things, including the thing of taking the recorded medium itself a little more seriously by taking more time to try to make better records. Also, composing has become much more consuming for me as the standards of what I really accept melodically keep going up all the time. But, beyond that, the most significant change is that I now have a wonderful family life with two beautiful little boys at home and I love being with them so much. I certainly will still do a lot of gigs, but I don’t think [the tours] will be of record-breaking lengths anymore.

MF: Does your music translate better live than it does via, say, a compact disc?

PM: In many ways I see records and live concerts as being connected but somewhat unrelated activities – especially where improvisation is involved. They functionally occur at such distinctly different temperatures that they are bound to bring out different aspects of one’s musical personality.

I have always had a hard time with the way that recordings seem to be perceived as the defining evidence of a player’s career and music – although objectively, I suppose I can see why that is so. Especially in the very early years, I felt the records were really more just like an ad to get people to come to the gigs when we would show up in their town. And it seemed like during that period, there was much more of a difference between the records and the live thing, especially since so many of those early records were really recorded in a day or two with not much opportunity to expand on what they actually were going to be beyond just being a documentation of that particular band on that particular day. As time has gone on, I have been able to take the records themselves much more seriously and feel much more reconciled with their taking a more definitive place in things.

MF: Baseball great Cal Ripken once said, “Practice doesn’t make perfect; perfect practice makes perfect.” You used to be a practice fiend. Did you practice perfect?

PM: It’s funny, when I look back on my early fanatical period – basically from when I was 13 until I was 19 – it wasn’t that I was that interested in practicing per se; it was that I had a lot to do, a lot to digest. And I really practically and functionally needed to get it together as soon as possible because I was actually working a lot – probably several years before I should have been. When I would get on a stage with older musicians around Kansas City, when I was 15 or 16 or 17, and they would call a tune that I didn’t know, in a key that I wasn’t that comfortable in, at a tempo that was not that great for me, I would get the message in a very clear way that that is what I better get together – and hopefully by that same time tomorrow!

These days, I am sorry to say, when I am not on the road, I barely touch the instrument. If I had more time, I would continue to practice a lot – but it seems my time now needs to be spent addressing compositional and melodic issues in order to keep coming up with things that are inspiring to me. It has been many years since the guitar itself was kind of an end-all thing for me.

However, I really hope that one day I will again be able to really focus on the guitar more. I love the instrument in a way now that I just simply didn’t in the first 10 years or so that I played it. And I do think that if I could spend a year or so now really working on it with the information and general maturity level that I have now, that I didn’t have 25 years ago, I could make a lot of real progress.

MF: You talk about your more “out” playing in terms of “density.” Could you expand on that concept?

PM: Actually, I don’t think I would qualify out and density as qualities that are necessarily connected. For instance, I have always thought that both Secret Story and Zero Tolerance for Silence were both more or less explorations of sonic density – at least compared to something like Bright Size Life, for instance – yet, stylistically, they are pretty far apart.

The whole idea of “filling up the canvas” is one that came much later to me in whatever evolution has occurred in my thing. Early on, it was always as much about space and silence and the spaces in between the notes as the notes themselves. But as time went on, I really wanted to try for a sound where there wouldn’t even be one speck of white left on the canvas. Those two records I mentioned before were probably the apex of that period in their different ways. Since then, I would say that I am more interested in a kind of case-by-case approach.

MF: Are people who appreciate your dense music better listeners?

PM: One of the things that is different in the post-Internet world is that I have a lot more information now than I used to about what people listen to and for in our music. It used to be that you would put a record out and in the six months or so that followed you would get your 100 or so reviews from around the world that would kind of trickle in and a few dozen letters from people with whatever opinions they happen to have and that would be that.

Now a record comes out, and within a few days of its release, there are literally hundreds of nearly real-time appraisals from all over the planet of every aspect of the playing – the tunes, the production … everything. More than anything, what this has done is render all music critics obsolete – a condition that was already pretty much in evidence anyway through the dearth of even rudimentally qualified music writers, but one that is, nevertheless, welcomed by performing artists everywhere. Where there may have once been some influence or importance placed in those quarters, any remaining remnants of that have now been effectively eliminated.

MF: You once told me that a musician is really a good listener who’s capable of hearing what’s inside his head and bringing it to life. What’s inside your head these days?

PM: I would say that for me it has always been a pretty continuous road right from the start. The things that I used to like and study and respond to are all still there, and I still feel close to the kinds of sounds and ideas that I suppose most people have perceived me working on during the various records and tours that I have done for the past 20-some years. I think there are some musicians who totally reevaluate their whole thing on a regular basis, throwing everything out and starting over with an entirely new version of themselves, using all new materials and everything. I’m not like that at all. For me, what I hear in my head now is similar to what I have heard my entire life, even going back to when I was a little kid. The big difference is that now I have a greater capacity to make things sound closer to whatever kind of thing I am trying to get to happen through the manifestation of that particular idea into actual musical sound. The whole thing of getting better, to me, ultimately does revolve around listening skills and improving them. But it is also directly enhanced by just living one’s life and getting more experience and maturity as a person in a kind of general sense.

MF: I hear that on the new album. There’s bits and pieces of the styles you’ve explored over the years, more so than on your other albums. Was there a conscious effort to incorporate your older sounds on the new record or were some of these songs simply written year ago?

PM: I don’t know. Certainly not intentionally, but I think also it may be impossible for me to really see it objectively. I can see the connection with everything that I have done over the years in ways that are based more on specific musical issues. Paul Motian once said something that I thought was great: that every musician is born with one song and they spend their whole lives spreading the seed of that one song in many different ways, but that the core of that one song is always the same. I think that’s true. There is an essence that I feel in most of my favorite artists that is in everything they do, no matter how different or similar it is on the surface to other things they have done. I can’t help but think of my favorite visual artist, Paul Klee. He did so many different things, but they always had something that obviously and immediately attached them to him.

MF: You have a diverse and possibly segregated fan base. Some love your more accessible works like American Garage or We Live Here, but don’t necessarily care for your denser material – Song X or the project you did with Derek Bailey, The Sign of 4 to name a couple examples. At this stage of your career, are you ever concerned about someone who goes to buy an album by the Pat Metheny Group, sees another Metheny CD in the bin – say, Zero Tolerance for Silence - buys it, takes it home, and can’t believe it’s the same guy?

PM: Honestly, I don’t worry too much about people’s perception because it is something that I have no control over and, truth be told, very little interest in. I really just try to play the music that I love and that I feel strongly about. If I were to start worrying now about what I thought someone else likes – first of all I would be guessing because I simply don’t know. Also, whatever success I have had has been really built on just following my own musical instincts and by reacting to the things that I found to be true in music itself. Somehow, I have been allowed to continue and get gigs and play a lot by doing just that. It is something I feel very fortunate about too, and something that I consider a privilege. And with that privilege comes a responsibility that I take very personally. I feel that the ultimate honoring of that privilege is the creation of good music – that is the place where everything resonates or not for me – and it is sort of at that altar of sound that I worship, you could say.

MF: You said that when you did one of your earlier soundtracks, Under Fire, in the early ’90s, it was a great experience to collaborate with the master of film scoring, Jerry Goldsmith. You mentioned then that you picked his brain about scoring and supporting films without intruding on them. You’ve scored a half-dozen or so movies since then, most recently A Map of the World. With those in mind, how would you say your approach to film scoring has evolved over the years?

PM: Writing music for films is something that is quite distinct from the day-to-day life that I have as an improvising musician, but there is an overlap. In both areas, you are dealing with a sort of moment-by-moment unfolding of narrative ideas, and the sense of a larger purpose in the way things add up over time is really important.

I really enjoy film scoring for the collaborative aspect of it. It is really exciting to be around people who are from quite different disciplines who are all working together to try to make something great happen. But it is a rough life, and the people who do it full-time have my utmost respect. In my case, I am happy to do one every four or five years and I hope to do others every now and then. If you are lucky, it all comes out great and it is a positive experience. For whatever reasons, I think many film composers may agree that that is often not the outcome. Each time I do one, I learn a lot, but at the same time, what you learn on one project may or may not apply to the next one. Each one is its own world, literally, with its own cast of characters both on-screen and off. Flexibility, both personally and musically, is probably the single most important quality that you can bring to the table.

MF: Let’s talk about some of the musicians you’ve worked with. I know that Gary Burton was a huge influence on you in the ’70s. Back then, you played in his band and recorded three albums with him. But in the early ’80s when your career really began to take off, you kind of lost touch with each other, and it seemed that the likelihood of collaborating with him again had diminished. What was it that changed that situation and brought about Burton’s later works like Reunion and Like Minds, where you played and even toured with him?

PM: Gary Burton’s influence was huge for me, in so many ways. When I first met Gary and started playing and recording with him, I was really young. I was 18 when we did our first gigs together and I stayed in his band until I was about 22. The early years were great for me because I was able to learn so much just by being around him – and Steve Swallow and Bob Moses and Mick Goodrick as well. To me, Gary is one of the greatest improvisers of this era. There are very few musicians who have the capacity to truly invent new melodies each time out with the kind of harmonic ingenuity that he has at his disposal. And there are only a handful of players on any instrument who have a time-feel that is as steady and developed as Gary’s. I am especially happy that we were able to reunite years later for the Reunion record and, in particular, Like Minds, where I guess I feel that I was able to contribute more effectively to Gary’s thing, being a little bit older myself.

MF: Lyle Mays seems to be your main collaborator. What would the Pat Metheny Group be like without Lyle?

PM: How would the group have evolved had Lyle never been there or if he left after a few years? Many things would be different, but also many things would be the same. The original conception of music and the kind of band I wanted to have and the kinds of sounds and chords and solos and instrumentation and forms that I wanted to explore were already pretty fully formed by the time I heard Lyle for the first time. By then, I was already recording on my own and touring around the world with Gary Burton and already pretty active on the international scene.

When I heard Lyle at a jazz festival in Wichita in 1976, he immediately and totally knocked me out. I had a feeling that we would play great together, and it was just exciting for me to hear someone more or less my own age who had a sense of the music that was that advanced and the ability to improvise at that level. It has turned out that hooking up was one of the best things that could have ever happened for both of us.

Lyle brings things to every musical situation that he is involved in that are extremely sophisticated and really beautiful, and I always welcome the chance to get on the bandstand with him or work on a new piece or a new record. We really enjoy working together and seem to have more and more fun each project, even after all these years. And for me, I could never in a million years have hoped to have found such a fantastic piano player who would stick with me for all these years, where we could both continue to grow and develop our things together. I feel very lucky that we still are going strong and still have so much to talk about, on and off the bandstand. He is simply one of the best musicians in the world.

MF: The different bassists that you’ve used over the years – Jaco, Eberhard Weber, Mark Egan, Dave Holland, Larry Grenadier – have lent distinct flavors to each project. During the last few years, Steve Rodby seems to have assumed a greater role in your productions. You’ve done collaborative albums with Charlie Haden and Marc Johnson. Have you ever considered doing a project with just you and Steve, and if so, what might that project entail?

PM: Steve’s increased presence over the years behind the scenes in the studio has been a huge factor in the way the records have been recorded and organized. From Still Life Talking onward, he has had a major voice in the making of all the records, including many of the records I have done outside of the Group that he doesn’t even play on, like the recent trio records, the duet record I made with Jim Hall a couple of years ago, and others. He is one of the best producers out there and an incredible ally in the studio who makes the difficult process of recording so much easier and efficient.

And yes, he is an incredible bassist who has allowed me the possibility of putting a number of interesting and fairly far-flung bands together over the years by providing a rock-solid rhythmic and harmonic platform to build them on. Steve and I have done occasional duet gigs over the years, and I have always enjoyed them. You’re right, we should do more. He is a really great musician.

MF: Most of the drummers you’ve worked with are considered the best in jazz: Jack DeJohnette, Bob Moses, Danny Gottlieb, Paul Wertico, Joey Baron, Billy Higgins, Roy Haynes. Are there certain criterion you use to employ select drummers in certain situations?

PM: As I have said many times, the drummer is the most important person on the bandstand, no matter who else is on the stage. If the drummer is sounding great, everyone usually sounds great or at least pretty good. I have been so lucky in this area; I love the drums and have gotten to play with all of my favorites a lot.

Yes, each situation has a certain vocabulary, and I would say that the first major decision about any project is who is going to play drums?. Everything else follows from there.

MF: Richard Bona sings and plays percussion in your new group. Like Nana Vasconcelos, Pedro Aznar, Armando Marcal, David Blamires, and Mark Ledford before him, he brings a certain sound and voice to the group. I predict that Bona is going to be a major recording artist in his own right. Do you foresee working with him outside the group?

PM: Richard Bona is one of those rare musicians that comes along every now and then that is pretty much unprecedented. There has just never been a guy like him on the jazz scene. His talent is truly multidimensional, but it’s his singing that really takes me to someplace special. After I hired [drummer] Antonio [Sanchez], I knew that I wanted to find a few other new musicians who could offer something really unique. And I thought of calling Richard, not because I thought that he would do it himself (since he has this pretty active career going on his own), but because I thought he might know someone who would be good for us that I may not have heard about. When I described what I was looking for, he said, “I’ve got the perfect person: me!”

It turns out that he has been following the PMG thing for many years and had always wanted to do it. The prospect of writing for that voice and having him join us for a tour was so absolutely inspiring that music just started pouring out at the thought of it. I love Richard and admire him so much. And, yes, in whatever form that we can work together, I have a feeling we will whenever we can. And I totally agree, he is a major talent.

MF: You often take on the persona of a pop/rock artist more so than a jazz artist. And yet when you’re placed in the most serious jazz settings, you fit right in. How do you live comfortably in both worlds?

PM: I don’t think about persona. I really just try to find the good notes, try to find the right sound, the right spirit. It doesn’t matter who I am playing with or for. It matters even less to me what the mythology around a particular setting is supposed to be.

MF: I’m going to mention a few guitarists. You tell me what comes to mind. Ready? Wes Montgomery.

PM: One of the most inspired and consistent improvisers of all time and one of the most transcendent inventors of melody ever. My favorite guitarist and one of my major personal heroes. His music sounds better and better as the years go on. I listen to the same records I have listened to hundreds of times and hear details I had never noticed before.

MF: John Scofield.

PM: I love everything about John – his phrasing, his touch, his harmonic sense, his sense of humor – everything. And the best part of his playing is how it is such a natural and beautiful extension of who he is as a person.

MF: Derek Bailey.

PM: Derek is someone who has a melodic sophistication that is unique and very deep. His ability to maintain a certain kind of melodic tension for long periods of time is totally singular. His touch and sound right off the instrument are instantly identifiable, and his genuine curiosity about sound and music is informed with a profound sense of what I think he would term “more conventional” playing, which gives it a special kind of weight and insight.

MF: John Abercrombie.

PM: A guitarist who excels at everything he does. Besides being constantly engaging as a soloist, he is one of the best accompanists in jazz. His work with Jack DeJohnette, Enrico Rava, and recently with Charles Lloyd in quartet settings are some of the greatest examples of what a guitarist can offer as an alternative to a pianist as a primary comping instrument that you could find in recorded jazz history. John always finds something special and central to each of the many situations that he finds himself in.

MF: George Benson.

PM: The sleeping giant. If George made a guitar-trio record every year, the world would be a better place. As far as I know, he has never even done one. We really need him. He is one of my favorite guitar players of all time, right there with Wes, Django, Kenny Burrell, and Jim Hall. In addition, he is one of my favorite singers. If I could sing like that, I probably wouldn’t play that much either. I don’t think I would even talk; I would just sing all the time!

MF: Jimi Hendrix.

PM: To me, Jimi was a lot like Albert Ayler or Dewey Redman or Pharoah Sanders – a genuine storyteller that could use raw emotion in extended doses, for extended lengths, with a core that was always natural and real. Like Wes, he is another musician who sounds better and better in retrospect. Everything he played was so true.

MF: Django Reinhardt.

PM: Along with Wes, the best pure improviser ever on the instrument. And the sound! Just glorious, and so personal. Again, like with all of my favorite players, it all comes down to improvising melodies. It is the most difficult thing about being a jazz musician, and there are very few players who can generate melodies that approach the level of the songs that they are improvising on. Melodic playing is one thing you can’t simulate or fake; it has to be real. Django had the kind of conviction and power in each phrase that made his solos add up to more than just a string of ideas. They all seemed to be of one piece.

MF: Any young players caught your ear?

PM: I have not really been with my ear to the ground that much in the last couple of years. Most of the guys that I would call young are not really all that young anymore. I am even a little bit concerned. Practically from the dawn of jazz, there were teenagers and people in their early twenties really putting the pressure on the music by keeping it changing and overtly challenging the status quo of jazz. For a couple of generations now, the young guys have been playing great but more or less adopting the fundamentals and sticking with the tried-and-true, messing with things around the edges rather than going right at the core. The good part of this is that we have so many more fundamentally solid improvisers around. There are now hundreds of guys around the planet who can play well on changes and really deal with form and structure with a kind of fluency that was, while not rare, not found in previous eras in the abundance it is now. But I keep waiting for some kids to come along and really make me, for instance, rethink everything I know. And that hasn’t happened for me since I first heard Jaco. But I bet it will soon. I just have a feeling about it.

MF: There are few artists who manage their own companies. You of course control Metheny Group Productions and all of your business dealings – the imaging and positioning of Pat Metheny as a product. I know this requires a lot of discipline, vigilance, and organizational skills. Most musicians don’t like dealing with the business side of things. What’s your story?

PM: Actually, compared with the thing of dealing with the music itself, that aspect of things is just barely a blip on the radar screen of the activities that occupy my time and energy. I don’t mind talking about music or working on the details of how music is presented at all. And taking responsibility for how things go down in all of the aspects of how the music is finally put out into the world is a big part of what the stuff you are talking about entails. It is just kind of natural to follow through on everything.

MF: There seem to be a lot of Pat Metheny live bootlegs floating around. Obviously piracy is alive and well with your fans. What’s your take on piracy and bootlegs?

PM: The fact that people care enough to tape and trade and catalog all the live things that they have that I know are out there is equal parts puzzling and flattering to me. The bootlegging and piracy things are fairly major irritants. However, there are a few instances where pirates have peeled the soundtrack off of video performances and put it out as things that appear to be sanctioned albums that are just out-and-out theft.

MF: Do you see any difference between traditional bootlegging and the Internet technology that allows for free distribution of music?

PM: Honestly, they are basically the same thing. Having said that, like everyone else, I am having to relearn the social context of what it is to be a musician in this new culture: what our function is, how people do or do not value what it is we do, and what purpose we actually serve to the communities that we live in as musicians, or artists, or authors, or whatever.

MF: It’s possible that you’ve covered a wider range of styles in your career than any other jazz artist. With that in mind, I can’t imagine what you’ll do next. Any desire to go where no Metheny has gone before?

PM: Again, I don’t exactly think in those terms. There is a place you go every time you improvise that is essentially a journey of discovery. You really don’t exactly know where you are going to wind up. You have done a lot of research, maybe you have a plan or a map – some changes or a vibe or something that you know is going to be an element leading you towards a goal – but you still are ready and willing for anything to happen in your quest to bring sound into the air for other people to check out as well. That process is the most fun thing there is. I just want to spend as much time as possible in that search for those moments where the question morphs into the answer as it is being posed, where the idea itself takes you to a place that you always knew was there but had never quite been able to get to before. That is what it’s all about for me.

Bless the Godchild

Sanctified by Dinah and Quincy, Patti Austin’s career was destiny.

By Michael Roberts

Music lovers who only know Patti Austin as the voice behind “Baby, Come to Me,” a 1982 duet with James Ingram that topped the pop chart thanks to exposure on General Hospital, have a lot to learn.

The daughter of trombonist Gordon Austin, who performed alongside the likes of Lena Horne and Billy Eckstine, Austin has led an extremely rich and varied show business life that began when, as a preschooler, she bulldozed her way onto the stage of the Apollo Theater – and into the hearts of Dinah Washington and Quincy Jones, her self-proclaimed godparents.

By the 1970s, she was a CTI Records solo artist, an in-demand vocalist on the commercial-jingle scene, and a studio singer with an incredible list of credits. She contributed to big-selling albums by Roberta Flack, Paul Simon, Steely Dan, and many other notables. After making a major impression on two Jones productions – Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall, a 1979 dance-floor classic, and 1980′s The Dude, a Grammy winner released under Jones’ name – Austin signed to her godfather’s Qwest imprint, where she became one of the most reliable adult-contemporary stars of the era.

In the years that followed, Austin issued a slew of discs for labels such as GRP and Concord Jazz and rewarded loyal fans in Asia by performing for them in Chinese. Then, in 2002, she recorded For Ella, a tribute to Ella Fitzgerald cut with Cologne, Germany’s WDR Big Band. The CD was such a success that she recently reunited with WDR for Avant-Gershwin, a recording whose dramatic arrangements, by Michael Abene, help her infuse George and Ira Gershwin staples such as “Funny Face” and “Lady Be Good” with fresh energy and vitality.

These terms apply to Austin, too. Since having gastric bypass surgery in 2004, she’s shed well over 100 pounds – a dramatic change that’s improved her art as well as her health. “Losing the weight has made my singing much better, much stronger,” she says. “I’m able to access parts of my body that I couldn’t before, because they were covered with big wads of fat.”

In conversation, Austin is straightforward and sassy – just as she was back on that mid-’50s Sunday when she made her impromptu Apollo debut, which she recalled for JAZZIZ …

Patti Austin: We went to the dressing room, and Dinah leaned down and said, “Hi, honey, I’m Dinah Washington, and I’m a singer.” And I said, “I’m Patti Austin, and I’m a singer, too.” And everyone kind of inhaled at the same time, including my parents, who had no idea I was going to be so bodacious. And she said, “Oh really? Well, if you’re a singer, you’re going to go out and sing onstage today.” And I said, “Okay!” Her musical director was walking by the door, and she said, “Get in here. The kid’s going to sing today. I’m going to cut my second number and let her do a tune.” He says, “Oh really?” Everybody’s chuckling. “What do you want to sing, little girl?’ And I said, “Mmmm, ‘Teach Me Tonight.’” Everybody laughs again, and he says, “What key do you sing it in?” And I said, “B-flat!”

JAZZIZ: How old were you at this point?

I was 4.

And you already knew what key you sang in?

Yeah, because when my dad would practice, and he’d show me what everything was. But when I walked onstage, the band was playing the intro in a different key, because the musical director forgot to tell them it was in B-flat. So I stopped them and said, “It’s in the wrong key!”

You were bodacious.

Oh yeah! The audience flipped out. That was my first taste of an audience flipping out – and that was it for me.

How did your first album come about?

I’d started writing. Quincy was always on me to write, and I finally did, but I was very shy about it until one day when Bill Eaton, who was doing the arrangements for my club dates, came over to add some new material for my show. Those were the days of sangria, and after we shared a pitcher, I was sufficiently loose to play him a medley of my “hits” – and he loved them. Bill was working with Ralph MacDonald, and Ralph took a cassette to CTI, and they loved them, too.

When did you start singing on commercials?

I kind of went at it very bass-ackwards. I was working as a solo artist and making records and doing local concerts. I used to work a lot with James Brown and Patti LaBelle on the New York City circuit, and then I started getting work as a studio singer. But I kept seeing this thing called the jingle business, and I wiggled my way into that world. It was very closed and very racist and very difficult to be a part of, because there were about eight people in those days who were singing pretty much all of the commercials – but I managed to slide in as Barry Manilow was sliding out. People liked what I did, and so for 15 years, I sang on commercials and produced them and wrote copy and just became totally immersed in the jingle business. At that point, I abandoned the studio background singing, because jingles were a fulltime job. We were doing six jingles a day in those days.

What are some of the commercials you did that people would remember?

I was the voice of Avon for many years. I did Hyatt, Hellmann’s, Dr Pepper. At one point, I had 75 spots running at the same time between TV and radio. I ended up with hit records I never worked because I was making too much money on jingles. You couldn’t get me on the road to support “Baby, Come to Me” because I was doing so much jingle work.

Among the more famous items on your studio résumé is Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall, which is a title that seems more appropriate now than it probably did then.

(laughing) Yes, hindsight being 20-20.

What was that experience like?

Whenever you work with Quincy, it’s a whole bunch of fun, because his motto in the studio is, “Let me get the baddest mamma-jammas who do whatever it is the baddest mamma-jammas do, and have some great snacks on the console, and generate an atmosphere of creativity and silliness.” That’s what all of the projects I did with Quincy were like, from The Dude to working with Michael to working on my own albums. Everything was fun-filled, with the best people imaginable.

Over the years, you’ve built a huge following in Asia by singing in Mandarin and Cantonese. How difficult is that?

Everybody wants to get all excited about that, but it’s really more like being a trained monkey. You just do it over and over and over until you’ve got it right.

When you’re singing in those languages, do you think of your voice more as an instrument? Or do you have enough experience in those languages to know what syllable to emphasize to create the most meaning?

I always approach vocals as an instrumentalist just because of the time I came up in the business. People would always ask me, “Who was your influence?” They’d expect me to say Ella or Sarah Vaughan or whoever, and I’d always say Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. But lyrically, I approach music as an actor, because I want to tell a story. Once I’ve learned the lyric and understand what it means, I go about the task of kind of gluing the actual melody around all of that and finding out where the inflections lie musically against the Cantonese and the Mandarin and the Portuguese or whatever language I’m singing in.

It sounds as if that’s one of your great pleasures when you’re singing in another language – that it takes you out of your comfort zone.

Oh, yes. Ever since I hit 50, I feel like everything must be a challenge. Something’s got to wake me up in the morning, whether it’s trying to learn a new language or trying to accomplish a new form or an ancient form or find a new way to express a lyric so that people feel it even more. Whatever that is, that’s my joy at this point.

A lot of your hits continue to get airplay on smooth jazz radio. When you were making them, did you think, “I’m slipping some jazz into the mainstream”?

Oh, hell no. When I make a jazz record, you’ll know it. As far as I’m concerned, I haven’t done jazz yet. The closest I’ve come to making a jazz record is the For Ella project and Avant-Gershwin, which is somewhere between big-band jazz and Broadway.

Why did you choose to focus on the Gershwins?

I love Ira. I love George. And I love what they wrote. It’s melodically fun to sing and the lyrics are crazy and wonderful. It’s all the things music is working overtime not to be at this point. So I must zig when everyone else zags.

Is the “avant” part of the title a way of telling people you’re not going to do this music the way everyone’s done it for years?

Exactly. The idea was, let’s do “I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise” and all these songs that people think of as vaudevillian and hokey, and show that the music is so much deeper than the style than it was originally performed in – that it’s still profound and fun.

Is there a song on the new album that epitomizes that approach?

I’d say “Swanee.” That’s the one song where especially black folks go, “Oh, shit! Don’t want to hear no banjo music up in here!” Even Michael Abene looked at me like, “You want to do ‘Swanee’?” And I said, “Yeah, but we’re going to funk it up,” and he really did a brilliant job of translating what I wanted to express.

Listening to the music, it doesn’t sound creaky. It feels very vibrant.

Yes, and that was the other reason the word “avant” worked so wonderfully. The intention wasn’t to create any kind of new form. I think taking these gowns out of the closet, these magnificent gowns, and taking a tuck here, and putting a little beading over here just makes this material live again.

With this project, do you feel as if you’ve come full circle?

Absolutely. When I was a kid, my mom bought me a little Victrola from the next-door neighbors, and their record collection was all Broadway show tunes. For the first three years of my life, I thought I was Stubby Kaye, because my favorite musical was Guys and Dolls. I used to sing, “Sit Down You’re Rockin’ the Boat” until my mother was like, “All right, already! Sit down! You’re rockin’ my boat!” And now, with Avant-Gershwin, hopefully, we will be performing this music on Broadway. That’s the ultimate plan – where we can develop it to the point where it can became a theatrical piece. That really would be full circle.

Being Michael Bublé

The Canadian crooner discusses Sinatra, Darin, performing, and misconceptions.

By Michael Fagien

Success in the music business often depends on a lucky break.
After years of laboring on a fishing boat and, later, playing club dates where he sang everything from jazz to Elvis covers, Michael Bublé’s break arrived soon after he gave one of his homemade CDs to Michael McSweeney, a friend of former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. McSweeney passed the disc to Mulroney and his wife, who then asked Bublé to sing at their daughter’s wedding (where Bublé delivered a version of Kurt Weill’s “Mack the Knife”). At the wedding, Mulroney introduced Bublé to producer and record executive David Foster. Shortly thereafter, in 2003, Foster signed Bublé to his 143 record label before producing the Canadian singer’s self-titled debut disc later that year.

On his fourth and latest album, Call Me Irresponsible (143/Reprise), Bublé continues to grow as a crooner. As on previous releases, he sings an array of standards, covers, and classics. And yet his own composition, “Everything,” has become the hit.

Since 2000, Bublé has appeared in a number of films, including Duets, Totally Blonde, and The Snow Walker. Though he’s not sure where he’s headed professionally, he maintains that singing remains his greatest passion.

Michael Fagien: Tell me about the misconception of your overnight success.

Michael Bublé: I don’t expect people to know my life story -
working on a fishing boat, playing the clubs, paying my dues. I saw Tony Bennett recently, and he was saying that he wished there were more clubs where eager singers could cut their teeth. For me, I worked small clubs, and sometimes I hardly worked. Then, once things took off, the real work began. I’ve since been around the world eight times, doing my best to make jazz and pop a hybrid so that people can hear and understand what that means.

Who keeps you rooted?

The upbringing I had is my root. On one hand, there are now things I’ve gotten very used to in my life and almost take for granted. … I don’t remember the last time I called for a cab. On the other hand, I’m proud of the way I treat my people – my crew, and people I work with.

What have you learned from other crooners?

I was listening to the greatest of all time, Frank Sinatra, singing Simon and Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson.” And when I heard him sing “coo-coo-ca-choo,” I immediately thought about how you have to be sensitive of that line. I have an idea of what is crossing the line. But I’ve messed up, too – like when I recorded the Bee Gees’ “How Do You Mend a Broken Heart?” When I hear it now, that’s the line I crossed.

Who are some of your favorite crooners?

When I think of crooners, I don’t necessarily think of the traditional ones. Instead, I think of Chris Connor, Chris Isaak, Eddie Vedder – ones who have nice voices and dulcet tones. James Taylor is another one. Despite what people think, I don’t get nostalgic. I don’t have to sing a certain way or wear a velvet jacket, sipping a martini. But there’ll never be another Sinatra; God kissed those [vocal] cords. Just like Pavarotti, there’ll never be another. For them, it was all instinctual, not learned in school. They just got it.

Some critics have called you a “Sinatra wannabe.” Other people have called you “the next Sinatra.” How do you respond?

It happens all the time. Jamie Cullum has been called “Sinatra in sneakers.” Harry Connick Jr. is still compared to Sinatra today. I’ve heard the same about rockers – those who are compared to Dylan, to Lennon.

Your song “Everything” sounds different from most of the work you’ve done and has been well-received. Will there be a time in the near future when we say, “Remember when Michael Bublé used to sing the old classics?”

I don’t feel that there’s anything to sneeze about when it comes to interpreting other people’s songs. From Ella to Louis Prima, so many great singers have done it. I love that I get to be a small part of that. I can sing “Come Fly with Me,” and I fought to sing the songs I believe in. I’d be crazy to turn away from this passion. Those people who say I should can fuck off. I don’t think Sammy Cahn or Nelson Riddle would have said they don’t want to do those songs anymore.

I’ve heard that you’re most enamored with Bobby Darin.

One of my favorite tunes he did was “Blowin’ in the Wind,” which is a Dylan tune. If I feel a connection to Darin, it’s because I understand what it was like to be pushed one way and for him to really want to do it another way. Back then, it wasn’t easy for him. People didn’t want to accept that he could get much deeper than “Mack the Knife” or “Splish Splash.”

In a word or two, tell me what you think of when I mention the following: Harry Connick.

He’s my Sinatra. A huge idol who I studied and listened to. I don’t know if I hate him or love him. I guess I’m jealous.

Van Morrison.

One of my favorites. I remember when I didn’t have any money, I traded an Ella and Louis Armstrong album for the Best of Van Morrison cassette that I used to listen to on the fishing boat.

George Michael.

Fantastic … dig him, great writer. I think he’s writing a Christmas song for me.

Paul Anka.

Canadian godfather. He’s doing something that no one else is doing. To have success for this long. His records are better now; even his voice seems better now.

Freddie Mercury.

Love Queen. Big voice.

How did David Foster find you or pick you?

I drove him crazy. Not one person picked me. I forced myself upon everyone from management to record company to my agency, William Morris. It’s not that I proved them wrong, but I proved myself right. They look a chance on me. I’m surrounded by greatness. My father would tell me not to be afraid to have someone around you who’s better than you. David Foster is a better musician than I’ll ever be. But he’s better than 95 percent of the world. He takes good concepts and makes them great.

You’ve had a few small parts on the big screen and it seems that there’s a connection between the kind of singer who does what you do and acting. How do you fit in?

It’s an extension of who you are. There are great vocalists; then there are great interpreters and great actors. I’m neither. I’m too self-conscious as an actor. I’m just concentrating on what I do. It’s easy to spread yourself thin. But when you get the call, it’s important to show up. I have a girlfriend who’s an actor [Emily Blunt], who’s one of the best. Real talent, real chops – that I don’t have.

As the title of the new album suggests, are you irresponsible?

I’m a lad, a regular guy, and I do wonderful and stupid things. I will say what I have to say. I have no filter.

You once said, “The enemy of good is great.”

That’s from Foster. I think when I showed up with him … I never had anything to compare him to. Before David, I would hear something and say that sounds great because I didn’t know and really couldn’t afford to do what Foster does. He’ll sit a trio in a room until it’s just right. And after that kind of experience, you hold yourself to a higher standard. Whether it’s Foster, Tommy LiPuma, Phil Ramone – I learned a lot being surrounded by these people. Checking out artists like Harry Connick Jr. and Diana Krall, learning how to play … the more you play the better you get.

Hef

Hugh Hefner discusses his life, his dreams, and 30 years of the Playboy Jazz Festival.

By David Pulizzi

Admiring and envious men the world over know Hugh Hefner as the founder and public face of Playboy, the men’s magazine with the saucy centerfold that first hit American newsstands in 1953. What most men – and women, for that matter – may not know is that Hefner has been a serious jazz fan since he was a teenager growing up on the West Side of Chicago in the late ’30s and early ’40s. Like his boyhood pals, he was partial to the popular music of the era, swing, but he also fancied Dixieland. Hefner has never lost his taste for the ebullient sound of early jazz. In many ways, the music of Bix Beiderbecke, the Dorsey Brothers, Harry James, Artie Shaw, and their contemporaries has provided Hefner with the perfect soundtrack to his life.

To celebrate the fifth anniversary of Playboy in 1959, Hefner conceptualized and then hosted a jazz festival for the ages – an affair that Billboard magazine trumpeted as “the whoppingest jazz festival in history.” During that three-day weekend in early August, nearly every major jazz artist of the day performed within the cavernous confines of Chicago Stadium.

Though the festival was both a critical and popular success, Hefner didn’t stage a follow-up until 1979, this time to celebrate 25 years of Playboy. Held at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, the lineup of talent was at least equal to the lineup that shook Chicago Stadium 20 years earlier. As the ’79 festival wound to a close, Hefner took to the stage to announce that henceforth the Playboy Jazz Festival would be an annual event.

This year, during two days in mid-June, the Playboy Jazz Festival will celebrate its 30th anniversary at the Hollywood Bowl. In March, a month before his 82nd birthday, I spoke to Hefner about the milestone and about jazz in general. During our conversation, I discovered that, as his reputation suggests, the founder of Playboy is personable, gracious, good-humored, and intelligent. In Hugh Hefner, I thought, shortly after hanging up the phone, jazz has a fine and able champion.

JAZZIZ: First of all, congratulations on 30 years at the Hollywood Bowl.

Hugh Hefner: Well, thank you. Hey, time flies when you’re having fun. It’s amazing.

The Playboy Jazz Festival is now considered a major annual event in the jazz world. Obviously it’s two days worth of fine entertainment, and you yourself have often referred to it as a “wonderful party.” But beyond that, do you feel that the festivals have made an important contribution to jazz?

I think it’s kept the music alive. I mean, people have been prematurely reporting the death of jazz since the arrival of rock and roll. Jazz is the music that I grew up with, the music of my youth, the music that fueled my dreams. So when we were celebrating our fifth anniversary at the end of the 1950s, we held the first Playboy Jazz Festival. That turned out to be really an iconic gathering of musicians that would never be together again.

Why did you choose to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the publication with a jazz festival?

Well, again, I think it’s because the music had such special meaning for me. And we covered jazz from the very beginning. We had a piece on the Dorsey Brothers in the very first issue. I just felt that it was part of the party. In other words, if you are dedicating a magazine to lifestyle and leisure activity, you can’t do it without the music. And the coolest kind of sounds, certainly back in those days, was jazz. As a matter of fact, it wasn’t till the latter part of the ’60s that we started encompassing other kinds of music.

Was that decision dictated by popular taste or had your own tastes expanded?

It had more to do with my editorial sensibilities – the recognition that the music tastes of our audience had grown to such a degree. Whole generations had grown up that hadn’t grown up on the music I had grown up on, and I had to recognize that fact. My own tastes have never changed a great deal. I play Bix Beiderbecke here at the house most of the time. That’s the background music at the Playboy Mansion.

Do you spend a lot of time just listening to music?

Well, I spend a lot of time in an environment where music is a part of it, yes. In other words, we entertain with regularity, and whenever there is anybody in the house, there’s music playing.

Will you be attending the festival this year?

Yes.

Have you ever missed a festival?

I think I’ve been there every time. I’m not there both days, but I am there on the opening day, and I don’t think I’ve missed one.

You were born in 1926, and you grew up on the West Side of Chicago. Swing bands were popular as you were growing up. When did they start making an impression on you?

Well, music made an impression on me from very early on. I was also a huge fan of movies. That’s where I escaped into the dreams. And I loved the musicals. And, of course, radio was hugely popular during that time. You would get the big-band remotes from all over the country. So I was a big fan of the big bands by the latter 1930s, when I was in seventh and eighth grade. I learned to dance in eighth grade, and I had my favorites early on – Artie Shaw, then Glenn Miller, and then Harry James.

I assume your friends listened to that music, as well.

That was what was unique and what was wonderful about that period – the universality of really good popular music. And it was all, by and large, jazz oriented. It was wonderful. And I had a big taste for Dixieland.

Do you still listen to the Big Bands?

Oh, yes. And I pay attention to a British singer named Al Bowlly, who was kind of the British Bing Crosby in the early 1930s. I play a lot of his music, too.

A minute ago you said something that reminded me of something I wanted to bring up to you. In a 2003 interview with James Liska, you said, “Being raised in a very typically Midwestern Methodist home with lots of repression, music itself was a great source of dreams and fantasies for me. I think music and the movies were the major influences and the major kind of escape for me into the other possibilities of what being alive might be. I think my life has been a quest for a world where the words to the songs are true.” I’m wondering, as you look back at your life, do you see it as the fulfillment of that quest? Have you made the words to the songs your reality?

Oh, yes. And I’m still living a boy’s dream. Absolutely.

A boy’s dream?

Yes. And my connection to the boy who dreamed the dreams is what my life is all about. You will find in my home, particularly in the bedroom, a lot of artifacts and memorabilia from childhood. From posters of Flash Gordon and rocket guns and The Maltese Falcon to busts of Frankenstein’s monster and all manner of other kinds of things of that sort. I think it’s that connection with childhood that keeps this all so delicious. People who see my life from the outside – depending on their own particular dreams and fantasies – think my life seems rather special. But I can’t begin to express that what they see is only the beginning of it, that it is so much more than that. It’s not simply because I’ve accomplished so many of the things that I wanted to accomplish; it’s living the life and enjoying the friendships that have become a part of it. I have an ongoing family of friends that I have shared much of my life with, and those friendships and that love is what makes it all worthwhile.

Have you ever felt that there is anything that your life is missing – anything that you might have wanted to do that you might not do?

No. There are most certainly decisions in one’s life that one might have done differently in business and on a personal level. But those are all roads untraveled, and, quite frankly, I think that’s a very dangerous game. It’s the old Ray Bradbury “butterfly effect” – you change one thing, and you don’t know where it leads.

You’re going to go to your grave a content man, aren’t you?

That’s my thinking, yes.

Let me get back to the jazz festival. Leonard Feather called that first festival in ’59 one of the greatest weekends in the history of jazz.

He called it the single greatest weekend in the history of jazz.

There you go. Still, though, you didn’t stage another jazz festival for 20 years, in 1979. Why did you wait so long?

As a matter of fact, I had actually thought about doing it a second time. Then I thought, how are we going to top ourselves? Also, the jazz festival was in August of ’59. In October of ’59 I started recording “Playboy’s Penthouse.” It didn’t start airing until January, but we started actually taping the shows in October. In December, I bought the first Playboy Mansion in Chicago, and in February of 1960 we opened the first Playboy Club. So in the space of less than six months, my life changed dramatically. I became, in fact, Mr. Playboy. I started living the life of the fantasies that were expressed in the pages of the magazine.

At the Playboy Clubs and on “Playboy’s Penthouse” and later, on “Playboy After Dark,” you showcased a wealth of jazz talent.

Yes.

Did the demise of those clubs and the television shows have anything to do with your decision to re-launch the festival?

The decision to re-launch the festival was the fact that we got to our 25th anniversary. And what were we going to do to celebrate the 25th anniversary? I was living out here in L.A. In addition to a number of other things that we also did in that time frame, the most logical thing for me to do was another jazz festival. And the notion of doing it in the Hollywood Bowl brought together for me my two loves: jazz and movies. Because I had seen the Hollywood Bowl in a whole host of movies when I was growing up. So putting jazz in the Hollywood Bowl was, again, a boyhood dream. The intention, of course, was to do it just as a single event, just as we had done for the fifth anniversary. But it proved so popular, we decided to do it a second year, and here we are 30 years later.

When you show up at the Hollywood Bowl for these festivals each year, does that rekindle your sense of childhood dreaming and wonder?

Oh, yes. You can’t share that music in the Bowl setting and not get some of that childhood kick.

You’ve singled out big-band music as your favorite type of jazz. How did you feel when bebop came along?

I liked it, but it was not my music.

How about some of the “out” stuff that came along later?

Well, I think that what you like has a lot to do with when you begin dreaming the dreams. I think it has to do with childhood. But to some extent also, it must be said that I feel blessed to have grown up in a time in which the music was so romantic. I sometimes feel badly for young people growing up now, when the only music that they can say, in effect, is their song, you know, turns out to be impersonal rap.

I assume you have a love for beautiful melodies.

Yes. And lyrics. That’s one of the reasons that I loved musicals when I was a kid. I was a big fan of Alice Faye. There were moments that could break your heart that were expressed in a song.

You’re really just a romantic guy, aren’t you?

Oh, absolutely. And there’s something else that must be said. I was raised in a home without prejudice, and witnessed prejudice for the very first time when I went into the Army during World War II. And I saw anti-Semitism and racial bigotry. And it was something of special pride for me to break the color barrier with our television show “Playboy’s Penthouse,” and do the same with the Playboy Clubs. It was very controversial to put black performers into a social setting that appeared to be an apartment party, and have black and white guests and performers interacting.

I think the television show was banned in parts of the South.

We had no distribution in the South at all. And breaking those color barriers was very meaningful to me. And I then did the same thing with the clubs. Jazz was part of all that.

In recent years a lot of non-American acts have performed at the Playboy Jazz Festival. From Cuba, for instance, you’ve brought in Los Van Van, Chucho Valdés, and others. With that in mind, I’m wondering if you feel there is a sort of unspoken political component to jazz in general and your festival in particular.

Well, that’s in effect what I was really saying when I talked about the racial aspect of it, because I think that there is a political side to the entire racial question. And I do think, without question, jazz has been cited on a number of occasions as the one true original American art form. It is also the one American export in addition to movies that the rest of the world loves. The America that the rest of the world loves doesn’t come from Washington; it comes from Hollywood, from the movies and music that came from – and continue to come from – America.

Have you ever thought of yourself as an important advocate for racial integration in America?

Yes, I think so. In other words, I think that I’ve played a very real part in changing social sexual values; it’s obvious in terms of the sexual revolution. But I think that it goes a good deal beyond that, and it does involve race and pop culture. They are all intimately interconnected, and I’ve communicated the notion that having liberal views on race and life, et cetera, can be cool. It’s the way to be. It makes you a complete human being. Prejudice stunts you and makes you half a person.

In the Liska interview that I mentioned earlier, you said, “I look back at those images of the jazz age -  F. Scott Fitzgerald, bootleg booze, flappers – and thought of it as a party I had missed.” Do you still associate jazz with a good, lively party?

Yes, I do. And the reason I do is because the jazz that I identify with is the less cerebral kind. It’s the kind that comes from the big bands, Dixieland, et cetera. The jazz festival at the Bowl has been referred to on a number of occasions, by me and others, as one great party. And I think that the party theme has always been what Playboy was all about. In other words, it’s a response to Puritan repression. It’s the other half of who we ought to be, the part that celebrates the very fact that we are alive.

You once quoted H.L. Mencken, something to the effect that a Puritan is someone who -

Someone who is unhappy because he knows that someone somewhere is having a good time.

Right. Okay, here’s a hypothetical for you. You’re banished to a desert island. You can take either your collection of jazz records or your collection of beautiful girlfriends. Which collection do you take?

I would take the girls. I’m a jazz lover, but the girls come first. Human relationships, you know. (laughs)

It’s really been a good life, hasn’t it?

Yes, it has been.

Are you a natural optimist?

Yes, I am.

And a dreamer, as well?

Yeah, very much.

So you’re a romantic, optimistic dreamer?

That’s who I am.

One last question: Do you read the magazine or do you just look at the pictures?

I do both.

So do I. Actually, I like the articles more than the pictures. I think I’m the only guy who’s ever said that for real.

It’s the combination of both.

Must be. Anyhow, congratulations again on a job well done for many years.

Thank you.

Something for Bill

Eliane Elias discusses her latest release, a handsome tribute to the late Bill Evans.

By Michael Roberts • Photography by Tom LeGoff

Musically speaking, pianist/vocalist Eliane Elias is a one-woman United Nations. A native of Brazil, this former child prodigy is well versed in the work of artists like Antonio Carlos Jobim, whom she’s saluted on a pair of popular discs. But as is clear from the best entries in her extensive discography (page 38), she’s equally comfortable performing challenging classical compositions, and her knowledge of jazz is deep, wide, and impressive. Over a career that’s now in its third decade, she’s proven herself to be a strong and imaginative instrumentalist whose original tunes and interpretive numbers exude intelligence and passion in equal measure.

While Elias’ recordings have often focused more on her singing than her playing in recent years, her latest album, Something For You: Eliane Elias Sings & Plays Bill Evans, evens the score. The disc teams her with drummer Joey Baron and bassist Marc Johnson (who’s also her husband) on material either written by or associated with Evans, one of her early keyboard heroes. Highlights include “Here’s Something For You,” the de facto title track, which is based on an unfinished musical sketch that Evans recorded on a cassette and gave to Johnson, his onetime bandmate, shortly before his death in 1980.

In conversation with JAZZIZ, the effusive Elias discusses her eclectic background and the impact Evans’ music had on her when, as a precocious child, she didn’t just play his music but transcribed it, too. From there, she talks about many of the personal touches that distinguish Something For You, from its cover (based on a postcard she and Johnson created during a late-night visit to a copy shop) to tracks that feature Johnson caressing a bass once owned by the late Scott LaFaro, which was last used in a recording during an Evans live set in 1961. She also provides a preview of her next project, which figuratively transports her back to Brazil.

Don’t expect Elias to stay there forever, though. When it comes to music, she’s a citizen of the world.

JAZZIZ: Is it true that as a child, you fell in love with jazz albums brought home by your father, who frequently traveled abroad?

Elias: That’s right. My mother is a great lover of music. She played classical piano, loved jazz, and had a great collection of jazz records that she played around the house. As a child, I asked my father to bring me jazz records while on his business trips, especially hard-to-find copies of records I saw in certain catalogs. Growing up in this musically eclectic household was quite different than it was for most children born in Brazil – or anywhere, for that matter.

What did your father do for a living?

He is a businessman. Nothing really to do with music. The musical side of the family comes from my mother and my grandmother and my great-grandparents. They were completely into music. They weren’t professionals, but they sang opera, and my grandmother wrote really beautiful songs and played beautiful classical guitar, too.

Was this the period when you first heard Bill Evans?

Bill Evans’ music was played in the house, and I fell in love with his playing. I don’t remember the first recording of his I heard, but I recall being taken with his approach to harmony and the interactive playing within the trio.  Bill approached the trio conversationally. His piano had an orchestral quality – the voicings and the way he used the whole instrument. I hear in his playing influences coming from the romantic classical tradition, from composers like Chopin, Ravel, and Rachmaninoff. In my opinion, the impressionistic quality of Bill’s playing differentiated him from the bebop players of his day. His approach to harmony and the sound he produced was something I was attracted to and it has stayed with me.

One of the things I’ve always admired about Bill Evans’ playing is its multiple levels. It can seem very accessible and simple on the surface, but the closer you listen, the more complex it gets…

He can sound deceptively simple, and for me as a child, it was something that seemed approachable to try to transcribe and play. But when you transcribe his playing, you notice the intricacies – the subtle rhythmic shifts and melodic colors. And that makes it so beautiful, the way he presents melody, harmony, and those inner voicings that move so tastefully. It’s so much more sophisticated than just about anything else that was happening at the time. Or even since.

Was it easier to understand those intricacies when you could see them on a page?

Yes, I could see all of that. For example, even the way he would play a chord with his left hand – how the voicings would move. Pianists sometimes play chords like boom! – a block of four notes or whatever. But Bill many times used three- or four-note chords, but one of the notes would be moving inside the chord, creating a counter melody with color, tension, and resolution. It’s hard to explain to you in words. But the feeling I had after transcribing his playing gave me such personal satisfaction, a sense of discovery. It was something that I really enjoyed doing. And so when Marc found the cassette of Bill, and I heard what he was working on at the very end of his life, of course I felt moved and compelled to transcribe it.

When you met Marc, did you remember that he had played with Bill in his last group?

Oh, yes. I knew, because I had some recordings. Coincidentally, I have played with several other musicians who also played with Bill. I had a trio with Eddie [Gomez] and Jack [DeJohnette], and they played with Bill. And I have also worked with Toots [Thielemans], and Toots played with Bill.  And that was one of the ways I connected with Marc. We first connected musically because we had such similar influences and we liked so many of the same things. Marc loved Bill’s music, and he was very influenced by Eddie Gomez and Scott LaFaro’s playing as a young musician. He really loved that sensibility, where the bass was more in dialogue within the music than in the traditional jazz trio. It was part of his formation as a jazz musician, as it was with me.

Getting the chance to play Scott LaFaro’s bass on one of the new album’s tracks must have meant a lot to him.

It was really an auspicious moment for Marc and for all of us, the way it fell into place. Barrie Kolstein has Scott LaFaro’s bass in a vault at his bass shop. Some of Barrie’s clients who go there may be able to play the bass, but the bass doesn’t go out of the shop – and the last time it was recorded was for the Village Vanguard sessions made just before Scottie died. I love those recordings, with songs like “My Foolish Heart” and “Detour Ahead,” which we recorded for this project. So Marc was in the shop one day, and he mentioned, “We’re going to do a tribute to Bill Evans.” And Barrie said, “Would you like to have Scottie’s bass?” And Marc was like, “Sure!” We only had the bass for a short while, and Marc played it on “My Foolish Heart” and “Re: Person I Knew,” which is a bonus track for Japan. Having this bass was another ingredient that made the recording special for us, as did finding the cassette tape.

What was your reaction when you heard the piece you used in “Here’s Something For You”?

As I heard what Bill was playing for the first time, I had goosebumps. Right away, I decided to transcribe it – which, by the way, technologically, is so much easier to do now. When I was a child, I transcribed music with a record player. I would lift the needle, go back and write it down, then put the needle back again. But now, you can just put it on your computer and start and stop with your space bar. So I was in my music room with my headphones on, and as I wrote it all down. Every chord and everything he did became magnified in that moment. It was so artful – the voicings and the way they moved. And too, there was Bill’s own voice making comments about the composition to someone who must have been there near him. By the time I finished the transcription, I was nearly in tears. I experienced the joy and emotion and fulfillment that I thought was only for a child first discovering something. But 30-something years later, this moment inside Bill’s music took me back to that place.

Was that the moment you decided you wanted to make a tribute recording?

The first thought I had was to play the music live. I said to Marc, “We should go out and book some dates and play a tribute to Bill.” We both got very excited about the idea and we decided to make a poster that my booking agent could use. This was late – ten o’clock at night, or 10:30 – and I said, “Marc, what do you have of Bill’s? Do you have pictures or programs?” And he showed me this particular picture that he really liked, and we thought it would look great with a picture of me playing live that I’d just gotten from a photographer. So we immediately went to Kinko’s and made a composite, which we loved. And then we put a little blurb together and had some prints made and sent them to our booking agent, and the booking agent got tons of responses. Everybody wanted to book it. But by then, I had to say, “No, no, no.”

Why?

Because I was still promoting [2006's] Around the City, and I was tied to Sony BMG contractually – and they didn’t have a department to market something like that. My division closed, and I would’ve had to go in a more pop direction if I stayed with them. But my contract was ending and I was talking to different companies. I took the idea to two executives who were close to me for 16 years while I was with Blue Note, Bruce Lundvall and Hitoshi Namekata, and they loved it and wanted me to make an album. So, in the end, I just kept one concert – the JVC Newport Jazz Festival, which was the first time we played this music live. But we were still able to use our design concept for the cover art. The record company had seen it, liked it, and decided to stay with it. Everything for the recording happened somewhat like that – serendipitously. It unfolded very gracefully. This recording is so much from our hearts. It’s so wrapped up in our emotion and our love for the music.

In addition to using the music you discovered for “Here’s Something For You,” you also incorporated your own music and lyrics. Was that at all intimidating for you? Or did you feel the personal connection so strongly between you and Bill that it almost felt as if you were collaborating with someone sitting beside you?

It was not intimidating at all. It was like what you said – a collaboration. I know Bill’s playing, and from knowing his playing, I believe I know some of his thinking about music, and I feel his heart – and I think he would have enjoyed this. But at first, there was no intention to write words for the song. The arrangement had been conceptualized already. I was going to start the song by playing the transcription in a slightly modified way, giving myself some artistic license, and then bring in Marc and Joey [Baron] and play the song as a trio. The arrangement was done, and I was moving on to other things.

But for some reason, the tune really stayed in my head, and one day I was in the kitchen preparing something to eat and I started going – [she hums the melody] – and then I went [she sings], “Here’s something for you.” I didn’t even have a title for the song at that point, but it just came out, and so did the next line: “Where or when it finds you.” And after that, I ran to the piano. I didn’t walk. I ran to the piano and got some music paper, and I changed the key, because the key he had was too high for my voice. And from there, the song just happened. It was really a moment of inspiration. I worked on it for a couple of hours, and that was it. I told Marc, “We’re going to change how we’re going to do this. We’re going to call it ‘Here’s Something For You.’”

How did you choose the other material?

I really wanted to cover his whole career and give people an overview of everything that he had done from beginning to end. So we have a song called “Five,” which was one of his early compositions. It’s quite Monkish – with rhythm changes, and some bebop influences. So we started from there and ended with some of the last things he wrote, like “Here’s Something For You” and “Evanesque,” which I also transcribed. The whole first part of “Evanesque” you’ll hear is exactly what Bill played. We recorded the first part of the song in 4-4, but the tune wasn’t a good vehicle for soloing. It didn’t really call for that. So I wrote a whole middle section creating different chord progressions that traveled with a kind of repetition of the melodic motif of the last few bars of the song. And at that moment, we switch to 3-4 and stay in 3-4 to the end of the tune. Going from 4-4 to 3-4 is one of the devices Bill used – he liked to do that when he performed live, changing meters. So I thought that would be something interesting.

What was the balance you tried to strike between instrumental presentations and songs with vocals?

We put in some signature pieces of Bill’s, like “Waltz for Debby,” which I thought was especially interesting because of the lyrics. Being the mother of a daughter, I can really relate to them – to the lyrics about a little girl who grows up, and when she goes, her dolls will cry, and they’ll miss her, and so will I. Of course, Bill didn’t sing, except for this little recording you might have heard of him singing, “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.” He sings that so cute! But he really liked singers, and he did recordings with Tony Bennett. So I thought it would be nice to revive the song and also include the lyrics – and I thought the same thing about “A Sleepin’ Bee.” I was looking for an uptempo song, and I remembered that Bill had recorded it with Jack and Eddie live at Montreux – and I also remembered that Nancy Wilson recorded it on that album with Cannonball. I thought, “This will be nice to sing.”

Over the years, vocals have become a lot more prominent in your work…

My voice is the latest addition to my musical life, and I’m so happy to hear the evolution of this instrument. I never really prepared myself to be a singer or thought of myself as one. I really concentrated on the piano – and when I first started singing, I was a bit shy about it. But it’s become more and more a part of what I do, and I confess that I’m proud of what I did vocally on the Bill Evans recording. I think the voice has arrived somewhere else after these last few years of singing in concerts. That’s the way I sing now, and it’s opened a new world of things I can do.

You’re such a virtuoso player that I understand why you might be tentative about the vocals at the beginning. Do you feel your vocal ability is on par with your playing ability at this point?

It’s such a different instrument. With the piano, I don’t feel any boundaries, I don’t feel any barriers. The piano is really a continuation of my body, of my soul. I can sit there whether I’ve got a fever, whether I haven’t gotten any sleep, and if you want me to play a classical concert that minute, I can do it no problem. But the voice is a much more delicate instrument, and it has a very characteristic sound. It’s not a big voice, not a huge-range voice, but I’ve learned to travel through harmony and melody as a musician would, and I look forward to seeing what more is going to happen with it.

What’s the next project you plan to tackle?

A recording of Brazilian music. This year is a celebration of 50 years of bossa nova. It’s the year songs like “Desafinado” and “Chega de Saudade” and “Ipanema” were launched – and this music is so very implanted in me. So the next album is going to be all bossa nova, and I’m making it with the greatest team. We have Paulo Braga, who is the father of modern Brazilian drums, and guitarist Oscar Castro-Neves, who’s legendary and is also an originator of the bossa nova movement. And Marc is a virtuoso bassist who has been performing with me now for over 20 years and has absorbed so much of the Brazilian music. He has an amazing sound and a great feel. The recording is going to have some strings, like Dreamer did, and like so many of the great bossa nova recordings that influenced all of us, and it’s going focus on my voice. It’s really coming out beautifully.

It sounds like a nice change of pace from the Evans album.

It is. I feel so blessed, being a native of Brazil and living this music 24/7 while I was growing up. This music is part of my roots, my natural heritage. I toured and recorded with some of the creators of bossa nova starting at age 17. I also had the good fortune of being born into a home where there was such a great love for jazz, where there was such great music playing in the house, and where I received a wonderful classical foundation, too. All of these things are a part of me. I feel like I’ve been given a great gift.