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Chris Potter on the legacy of the Village Vanguard

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    Posted: 02 Apr 2023 at 1:12pm

Chris Potter on the legacy of the Village Vanguard

by Joshua Lee

Chris Potter

  

American saxophonist and composer Chris Potter has been a regular at the prestigious Village Vanguard venue in New York City for many years now, with a yearly New Year’s Eve show among one of his regular gigs. It’s been a while since any of these performances have been recorded and released though, with 2004’s Lift and 2007’s Follow the Red Line being the last time anyone not in attendance got a taste of the saxophonist’s music in a live environment.

For his new album Got the Keys to the Kingdom, Potter returns to the Vanguard for a third time with a programme of standards and versions of traditional songs, recorded at his rescheduled NYE residency in February 2022. Calling me from his hotel room in Zürich in the midst of a European tour, Chris spoke to me about how his relationship with the storied venue began and the process of preparing material for the set.

You’re quite a regular at the Village Vanguard nowadays – how did this relationship come about?

I’ve been playing the week of New Year’s Eve for the past few years now as a bandleader. I can’t remember when my very first week there was, but that was a very big event for me – to have a whole week playing at the Vanguard! That was maybe 20 years ago or so, and I’ve been playing there at least once a year on my own, as well as a few gigs in other people’s bands. But it’s only the last 5 years that I’ve been doing the New Year’s Eve gig – there was of course an interruption when nothing was open, but it’s nice to be back at it now.

How do you go about deciding when a show at the Vanguard is going to become an album? I imagine it has to be planned ahead of time.

Yeah, obviously you have to make sure there’s someone there to record it! So far it’s the only place I’ve recorded any live albums from, because I just love playing there; I love the sound and the feeling you get, it’s a very special place with a certain kind of energy because it’s the same room – as far as I know it’s the same shape, the walls haven’t changed. I remember some years ago they were talking about changing some kind of pillar by the stage, and people were worried that it was going to change the sound of the Vanguard!

It’s not a huge space, just this little triangular room at the bottom of a narrow staircase, but there’s something great about the sound; wherever you sit in that room it sounds good to the audience and the performers. You can hear everybody really well, and it’s a pretty dry-sounding room so you end up playing a little harder than in other venues. The sound you get on-stage simultaneously has this separation but also an integration to it… it’s just everything you want out of a space. In a similar way to a concert hall is the perfect space for a classical performance, the Vanguard is really the perfect sound for a jazz group where you can hear the details and really focus on the rhythms.

So there’s the space itself, but also the spirit of it – you know everyone that’s been on that stage, and it’s been part of the jazz community for so long it’s a real gathering place. Musicians like to go to the Vanguard not just for playing, but when they wanna hear something, so there are always members of the community coming by.

It’s interesting to hear it affects how you play as well.

Yeah, you can feel the ghosts in there… It feels like the real thing.

As far as your band goes, they’re all old friends of yours aren’t they?

For sure, yeah, I’ve known them all for a long time. I’ve probably known Scott [Colley] the longest. We met when I first moved to New York in the early ‘90s, and then I met Craig [Taborn] a few years after that, then Marcus [Gilmore] a few more years after that – he’s a bit younger. At this point I’ve worked a lot with all three of them so there’s a history we can draw on, as well as them being a nice group of people and some of the best musicians in the world.

We didn’t really rehearse much for this set, actually. This album was recorded back in February 2022, but we were supposed to play the Vanguard as we usually do on New Year’s Eve, but there was a massive COVID outbreak among the staff and musicians so they ended up closing the venue. I thought we weren’t going to get the chance to play – the four of us have never actually played together before, as much history as there was – so I booked a day in the studio with the band which ended up being our first meeting. It sounded good, but to me it just sounded like some good musicians rehearsing, you know? But when the Vanguard invited us to come back in February, amazingly everyone was free, so we went in with a plan to make a record… which was a bit of an optimistic decision, in hindsight! But it ended up being really great. There was definitely a sense, especially coming out of the pandemic, that everyone was just so excited to be back together listening to music – it was a special moment. Especially for us musicians, we didn’t know if this was ever gonna come back, but here we are! So I think we were all in that same frame of mind, both audience and band, to really appreciate that.

It’s good to hear it went well, given there wasn’t much time to rehearse.

Oh yeah, as soon as we were playing live in front of people it just totally took off, which is what I figured would happen.

Compared to your past studio and live albums – which are usually very originals-focused – this set was comprised of standards and versions of other tunes. Was that a deliberate decision?

That was a very conscious decision, and was part of what I wanted to do with this set in particular. I’m often very focused on writing, but I thought it would be good to choose music that might or might not fall directly within the jazz canon – some of it more so than others. I was thinking, is there a way we can play this music and not feel like we’re just trying to recreate music that’s already been made, and make something that feels as personal as writing originals?

Of course so much of how you learn jazz is by playing the repertoire – learning Monk, Duke Ellington, Wayne Shorter and all the standards – there’s this wide body of music that you have to know and it’s how you really get to know the language, and then you can apply it to your own music. Jazz also has a long history of taking popular music and re-interpreting it, with the way jazz musicians play pop songs being a kind of ‘comment’ on it, so it falls within that kind of tradition.

And the title track ‘Got the Keys to the Kingdom’ is an old spiritual, isn’t it? So that’s really reaching far back into the canon.

That particular song was one that I found in a field recording that was made in South Carolina in the ‘30s – I’m from South Carolina too, from Columbia. I think the woman who’s singing the song on this recording is from the Sea Islands where there’s still this culture whereby there’s some African words in the language, and it’s a remnant of that. I haven’t been able to find that same song anywhere else, whenever I’ve looked it’s a version with a completely different melody. I really wanted to adapt that for the band, to get a little bit of that personal connection with it being from where I grew up.

With so many recordings having been made at the Vanguard over the years, do you have any particular favourites yourself?

The main landmark ones for me as a saxophone player are Sonny Rollins’ A Night at the Village Vanguard, the recordings of John Coltrane, and then there was a series called The State of the Tenor volumes 1 & 2 by Joe Henderson, which was also recorded at the Village Vanguard. These are very important records that I’ve listened to many times, as many of us have, so I grew up hearing the sound of the saxophone in that room and hearing the way that these musicians play. Obviously Sunday at the Village Vanguard by Bill Evans’ trio is an amazing recording too – those are the major landmarks from the history of the venue that I’ve probably spent the most time with.

You’re in the midst of a European tour right now, but have you got anything else on the immediate horizon?

I’ve got quite a lot going on, a lot of projects in the air. I’m doing a piece for orchestra at the SF Jazz Center in April, we’ll be rehearsing that soon and I’m curious to see how that goes – I’ve written for orchestra before but not very much, so I’ve been spending a lot of time getting it right. Of course, that’s something else you can spend your entire lifetime working on just like playing the saxophone!

There’s another album I’ve already recorded too, that’s coming out next year with Brad Mehldau, John Patitucci and Brian Blade, so old friends and people at the top of the game. That was a real joy to do, and it’s another album of originals which I brought in and I think they turned out really great. So yeah, a lot is coming up!

Chris Potter's latest album, Got the Keys to the Kingdom: Live at the Village Vanguard, is out now on Edition Records... 

Chris Potter

Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC

Joshua Lee - Jazz Content

from www.prestomusic.com



Edited by snobb - 02 Apr 2023 at 1:13pm
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