SOUND PROJECTIONS
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
SPRING, 2016
VOLUME TWO NUMBER THREE
WAYNE SHORTER
Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:
LEO SMITH
March 26-April 1
AHMAD JAMAL
April 2-8
DIONNE WARWICK
April 9-15
LEE MORGAN
April 16-22
BILL DIXON
April 23-29
SAM COOKE
April 30-May 6
MUHAL RICHARD ABRAMS
May 7-13
BILLY HARPER
May 14-20
SISTER ROSETTA THARPE
May 21-27
QUINCY JONES
May 28-June 3
BESSIE SMITH
June 4-10
ROBERT JOHNSON
June 11-17
http://www.allmusic.com/artist/billy-harper-mn0000083525/biography
Artist Biography by Chris Kelsey
BILLY HARPER
Artist Biography by Chris Kelsey
BILLY HARPER
(b. January 17, 1943)
Billy Harper is one of a generation of Coltrane-influenced tenor saxophonists who actually built upon the master's work, rather than simply copy it. Harper is consummately well-rounded, able to play convincingly in any context, from bop to free. His muscular tone, lithe articulation, comprehensive harmonic knowledge, and unflagging energy define him as a saxophonist. He's also possessed of an abundant imagination that connects directly to his blues and gospel roots. Though not as well-known as he might be, Harper is a jazz improviser of significant stature. Harper grew up in Houston, TX. By the age of five he was singing in church and at various choral events. At age 11 he was given a saxophone for Christmas. In the beginning he was mostly self-taught, though he was helped along by his uncle Earl Harper, a former trumpeter who had gone to school with bop trumpeter Kenny Dorham. Dorham's 1950s work was a formative influence. In his teens Harper played in R&B bands, and at the age of 14 formed his own quartet. In the early '60s, Harper studied jazz at North Texas State University, where he became (at that time) the only African-American member of the school's prestigious One O'Clock Lab Band. Harper graduated from NTSU with a Bachelor of Music degree and also did post-graduate work. In 1966 Harper moved to New York. That year, he led an ensemble that was featured on an NBC-TV special, "The Big Apple." Within short time after arriving in New York, Harper started playing with well-known bandleaders. In 1967 he began a long-lasting association with bandleader/arranger Gil Evans. Harper has played with some of jazz's greatest drummers; he served with Blakey's Messengers for two years (1968-1970); he played very briefly with Elvin Jones (1970), and was a member of Max Roach's band in the late '70s. Harper also became a regular member of the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Big Band. In the '70s, Harper began recording under his own name for European labels. His album Black Saint (1975) was the first recording issued by the label of the same name; his In Europe (1979) inaugurated the Soul Note label. Harper recorded relatively infrequently in the '80s and '90s, although he maintained an active performing career, mostly as a leader. He's enjoyed a parallel career as a music educator, teaching at Livingston College and Rutgers. He's also received multiple grants from various arts agencies, including two from the National Endowment of the Arts. Harper's Black Saint LP was named Jazz Record of the Year -- Voice Grand Prix, by the Modern Jazz League of Tokyo.
http://www.jazz.com/encyclopedia/harper-billy-r
Billy Harper is one of a generation of Coltrane-influenced tenor saxophonists who actually built upon the master's work, rather than simply copy it. Harper is consummately well-rounded, able to play convincingly in any context, from bop to free. His muscular tone, lithe articulation, comprehensive harmonic knowledge, and unflagging energy define him as a saxophonist. He's also possessed of an abundant imagination that connects directly to his blues and gospel roots. Though not as well-known as he might be, Harper is a jazz improviser of significant stature. Harper grew up in Houston, TX. By the age of five he was singing in church and at various choral events. At age 11 he was given a saxophone for Christmas. In the beginning he was mostly self-taught, though he was helped along by his uncle Earl Harper, a former trumpeter who had gone to school with bop trumpeter Kenny Dorham. Dorham's 1950s work was a formative influence. In his teens Harper played in R&B bands, and at the age of 14 formed his own quartet. In the early '60s, Harper studied jazz at North Texas State University, where he became (at that time) the only African-American member of the school's prestigious One O'Clock Lab Band. Harper graduated from NTSU with a Bachelor of Music degree and also did post-graduate work. In 1966 Harper moved to New York. That year, he led an ensemble that was featured on an NBC-TV special, "The Big Apple." Within short time after arriving in New York, Harper started playing with well-known bandleaders. In 1967 he began a long-lasting association with bandleader/arranger Gil Evans. Harper has played with some of jazz's greatest drummers; he served with Blakey's Messengers for two years (1968-1970); he played very briefly with Elvin Jones (1970), and was a member of Max Roach's band in the late '70s. Harper also became a regular member of the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Big Band. In the '70s, Harper began recording under his own name for European labels. His album Black Saint (1975) was the first recording issued by the label of the same name; his In Europe (1979) inaugurated the Soul Note label. Harper recorded relatively infrequently in the '80s and '90s, although he maintained an active performing career, mostly as a leader. He's enjoyed a parallel career as a music educator, teaching at Livingston College and Rutgers. He's also received multiple grants from various arts agencies, including two from the National Endowment of the Arts. Harper's Black Saint LP was named Jazz Record of the Year -- Voice Grand Prix, by the Modern Jazz League of Tokyo.
http://www.jazz.com/encyclopedia/harper-billy-r
Encyclopedia of Jazz Musicians
Harper, Billy
Harper, Billy, tenor saxophonist, composer, arranger, educator; born Houston, TX, 17 January 1943. His family is musical and he was also strongly influenced by growing up in the A.M.E. (African Methodist Episcopal) church. His grandmother Pearl was married to a minister and was the "guiding light" of his life. Pearl (Nicknamed-"Peachie") raised him. His uncle Earl tried trumpet in high school in Austin, TX, alongside Kenny Dorham and got Billy interested in music. He was already singing "A tisket-a tasket" and other songs at the age of three. In 1948-1956 he began his singing career performing at sacred and secular functions. Around the age of 10 he became fascinated with the appearance of a saxophone that he saw in a music shop window each day as he came from school, and he received a Christmas gift of a tenor saxophone at age 11 from his biological mother, "Babysugar."
In high school he played in the marching band under Sammie Harris, alongside Michael Carvin and Michael Bolivar, and the band won a state championship. Another musical colleague was drummer Malcolm Pinson (they later performed together professionally). He learned about stagecraft from his drama and speech instructor, Vernell Lillie, and he found musical support in her husband, tenor saxophonist Richard (Dickie Boy) Lillie. He was working professionally in blues groups, and graduated cum laude in 1961 from Evan E. Worthing High School. From 1961-1965 he attended North Texas State University (now known as the
University of North Texas), from where he go to Dallas and meet James Clay, Claude Johnson, David "Fathead" Newman, Louis Spears, Ted Dunbar, Roger Boykins "Shag", and "Worm" (an alto saxophonist).
Harper was the first black musician to perform in the famed NTSU "One o'clock" big band that was awarded first prize at the Kansas Jazz Festival. He received a Bachelor of Music degree in 1965 with a major in saxophone, and a minor in theory. Additional major in experimental program for students particularly interested in jazz. Formed and performed frequently with the Billy Harper Sextet.
Moved to New York City in 1966. He spent about a year unemployed, sitting in at Slug's and elsewhere, though he got one lucky break in 1966 in an NBC-TV documentary film, "The Big Apple" (featured newcomers: model, boxer, businessman, opera singer, and jazzman).
Then he met Gil Evans on Broadway and in six months began working with him. In 1967 he also began working with Art Blakey, including a tour to Japan in'68. In 1970 Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Harper, Harold Mabern, and dedicated listeners formed the "Jazz and People's Movement to protest the absence of jazz in TV and radio broadcasting.He and Lee Morgran were in the group that "interrupted " the Merv Griffin Show, and later succeeded at voicing their grievances on the Dick Cavett Show. He worked with Lee Morgan from 1969 until the trumpeter's murder in Feb. 1971.
During this period overall, he worked with Evans 8 yrs., Donald Byrd ('70-'71), Thad Jones-Mel Lewis big band ('71-'78, including a trip to Russia in 1972), Max Roach ('71'-'79), and Randy Weston (with whom he still performs from time to time,'72-present). However since 1979 he has worked most often as leader of his own quintet. He made trips to Japan with Max Roach ('73, '74, '76), Thad Jones ('74), Gil Evans ('72), Billy Harper Quintet ('79), and five other times with All Star groups (1984, 85, and others). With his quintet, he has also toured Western Europe; Portugal; Istanbul, Turkey, Poland, Rumania, Malaysia, Indonesia, Korea, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Israel, Taiwan, South America, Japan, Phillipines, Kaoshung, Taiwan, Norway, Finland, France, Italy, Leipzig, Germany, and others.
He is very active as an educator. In 1972 he received a grant from the New Jersey Council for the Arts to teach improvisation at 15 high schools. In 1975 he taught saxophone and flute at Livingston College, Rutgers University. From 1992 to the present he has taught at the New School jazz program, and since 1993 he has presented lectures and master classes at educational institutions around the world.
Awards and Honors:
2002 Grant for composition by the Chamber Music America's New Works Creation and Presentation Program, funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation
2001 Commissioned to create the music for a play, "Whispers Want to Holler" for the Kuntu Repertory Theater, University of Pittsburgh
2000 Judge at Brilliant Note International Saxophone Competition (classical and jazz) in Staicele, Latvia and performed concert in Riga, Latvia with Latvian quintet (Jul. 28 - Aug. 11)
1996 Birth of the Billy Harper Fan Club on April 17, 1996
1994 Jazz Magazine in Japan awarded top honors to Harper's CD "Somalia"
1992 Saturday, September 19, 1992 declared "Billy Harper Day" in Houston, Texas by the Mayor of the City of Houston, Robert Lanier.
1988 Cultural Attache to Kishiwada, Japan, appointed by Mayor Noboru Hara
1984 Panelist - National Endowment for the Arts Grants Awards Program
1976 Jazz Record of the Year "Voice Grand Prix" award from Modern Jazz League of Tokyo for the album Black Saint
1975 Swing Journal International Critics Award - Tenor Saxophone
1974 Down Beat International Critics Award - Tenor Saxophone
1974 Music Composition Grant, National Endowment for the Arts
1973 Music Composition Grant, National Endowment for the Arts
1970 Music Composition Grant, National Endowment for the Arts
ca. 1974 Award for composition
1964 Scholarship to attend Berklee School of Music (but he chose to attend North Texas instead)
1964 "Most Promising Saxophonist"-Notre Dame Jazz Festival, performed with the Billy Harper Sextet
Recordings:
Capra Black (1973); Black Saint (1975); Love on the Sudan (1977); Soran Bushi-B.H. (1977); Knowledge of Self (1978); Billy Harper Quintet in Europe (1979); The Awakening (1979); Trying to Make Heaven My Home (1979); The Believer (1980); Billy Harper Quintet en Plogne (1980); Destiny Is Yours (1989); Billy Harper Quintet Live on Tour in the Far East (Seoul, Korea) Vol. 1 (1991); Billy Harper Quintet Live on Tour in the Far East (Kaohsiung, Taiwan) Vol. 2 (1991); Billy Harper Quintet Live on Tour in the Far East (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia) Vol. 3 (1995); Somalia (1995); If Our Hearts Could Only See (1997); Soul Of An Angel (2000)
As sideperson:
Randy Weston: Randy (1973), Carnival (1974), Spirit of Our Ancestors (1992), Saga (1995); McCoy Tyner: Journey (1994); Mark Masters Jazz Orchestra: Priestess (1992); All Stars: The New York Saxophone Madness, Such Great Friends (1983), Great Friends (1986); Max Roach: Lift Every Voice and Sing (1971), Live in Tokyo, Vol. 1 & 2 (1977), Nommo (1977), The Loadster (1977), Live in Amsterdam (1977), Confirmation (1978); Joe Bonner: Angel Eyes (1974-76); Gil Evans: Blues in Orbit (1969-71), Ampex (1971), Kimiko Kasai with Gil Evans Orchestra: Satin Doll (1972), Masabumi Kikuchi with Gil Evans (1972), Blue Fish (1973), Svengali (1973), Gil Evans Plays the Music of Jimi Hendrix (1974), Festival de Montreux (1974), There Comes a Time (1975); Thad Jones: Consummation (1970), Suitie for Pops (1972); Thad Jones/Mel Lewis/Manuel de Sica: Portuguese Soul (1973); Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Big Band: Potpourri (1974); Jon Faddis and Billy Harper: Jon and Billy (1974); Robin Kenyatta: Stompin' at the Savoy (1973); Horacee Arnold: Tribe (1973); Lee Morgan: Trip (1970), A Date with Lee (1970), Lee Morgan (1971), We Remember You (1972); Bobby Humphrey: Flute In (1972); Charles Earland: Charles III (1972); Louis Armstrong and His Friends: This Black Cat (1970); Jimmy Owens (1970); Leon Thomas (1970); Art Blakey: Live at Slugg's (1968); Woody Shaw: Love Dance; Piotr Wojtasik: Quest (1996); Malachi Thompson: Jaaz (1996), 47th Street (1997); Barney McAll: Widening Circles (1998)
Radio and television broadcasts:
2003 Billy Harper Quintet - Israeli TV, Tel-Aviv Jazz Festival
2000 Billy Harper Quintet - Polish TV interview and performance at Blue Note Club in Poznan, Poland (Oct.9)
2000 Billy Harper Quintet - Polish TV interview and performance - Szczecin, Poland (Oct. 9)
1975 TV and radio appearances in Norway, Finland, Holland, Belgium, Denmark,Sweden, France and Italy
1966 Highlighted in N BC TV Special (documentary), "Big Apple" with Elvin Jones, Freddie Hubbard, McCoy Tyner and Reggie Workman.
TV performances in Norway, Finland with Max Roach, and later with the Billy Harper Quintet
Billy Harper Quintet on TV in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Chile; Buenos Aires, Argentina; and Yugoslavia
TV tape of a tour with Art Blakey that includes Harper with Blakey, and separately features Elvin, Max, and Sonny Murray.
Bibliography:
2001 Interview in Jazz Times: America's Jazz Magazine (September)
1997 Featured article in Jazz Forum Magazine - Poland (March)
1996 Interview in Downbeat Magazine
Contact information:
Billy Harper Fan Club: (410) 467-4328
PO. Box 4539; Baltimore, Md. 21212
Inquiries: Explorejaz@aol.com
Website: www.Billyharper.com
Billy Harper: A Life of Persistence and Improvisation
by R.J. DELUKE
November 19, 2014
All About Jazz
On stage, Billy Harper puts his lips to the tenor saxophone, stands relatively erect and sings through his horn; a strong, angular, muscular sound. There little physical gesticulation, belying the effort it takes to express feelings and emotions through the instrument. But Harper's creative statements demand attention.
Over the last few years, a lot of that energy is expressed on stage with the Cookers, a star-studded septet that has been burning up the scene, gaining fans and critical acclaim. Harper is blowing his best among comrades Billy Hart, Eddie Henderson, George Cables, Cecil McBee, Donald Harrison and David Weiss, stellar players and old friends. He also is a prolific composer, an educator and has led his own bands over the years, as well as performed with Gil Evans, Max Roach, Lee Morgan, Charles Tolliver, Randy Weston, the Thad Jones and Mel Lewis big band, Art Blakey and others.
It's a career where Harper, a born musician who started singing while in diapers, has shown remarkable persistence. A self-taught saxophonist in the beginning, he honed his chops so well that he eventually entered the prestigious music program at North Texas State University. But it was during a time of segregation and there were tough things to deal with. Harper persevered. He won out.
"I got into jazz completely, which meant improvisation, which was the way I learned to live," says Harper, a congenial sort who's thoughtful and forthright. "Improvising all the time. It was not just music. It was the way. That is my life. It might be a funny thing to say, but I feel like I am the music. I don't mean I'm the only music, but I am music. That's how much it is a part of me, or I'm a part of it. I really feel like the music. I think that other musicians who are playing represent the music. They are the music also... Whenever writers say sometimes, 'jazz is dead.' I think that's a conspiracy or something. As long as it's in the musicians, the music is there. It's where I live."
Harper, 71, who released his first album Capra Black in 1973 (Strata East), also leads his own quartet and is working on the release of a DVD that will feature his sextet performing with 60 voices. Using voices is a natural progression for someone who came up in the Houston area singing in the church and thought he would be a singer or an actor before the saxophone pulled on his coat.
The Cookers have four albums out and this year's Time and Time Again (Motema) is outstanding. The band is tight, the writing strong (three songs by Harper) and the soloists bright and expressive—as they have all been throughout their careers.
"It's great. Everybody's played together at one time or another," Harper says. "Everybody has their own group. Among those guys, they've either played with Freddie Hubbard or Lee Morgan. So we're kind of connected from a long way back." Henderson played with Harper for eight years gong back to the '70s. "So we've got a close connection. When I first got to New York, I was trying to get Billy Hart to play in my band. He was there for a second until Stan Getz paid him. [chuckles] He could pay some real money."
"That's probably one of the reasons the group works so well," he said of the dynamic group feel of the band. "We also know the history in the same way. Many of the young guys don't know the history of getting a sound and a purpose. Power. When I say that, I mean I played with Art Blakey. Eddie played with Art Blakey too. I played with Elvin Jones. The best drummers. Everybody in the band played with somebody like that. Like Herbie Hancock. George Cables was on my first record. Also, we played together with Blakey too... It's working out."
Harper has been a major voice on the saxophone for decades, but the singing thing—that was first.
"When I was crawling, my uncle said I was trying to sing something from Ella Fitzgerald, from the radio. 'A Tisket, A Tasket' or something. I was singing that before walking. Then they were always getting me to sing in church. I was pushed on stage to sing. That was going to be my main thing. When I was there, my grandmother was married to the minister. So I was there all the time. I heard all these great choruses. Wow. I heard people who were singing like Aretha Franklin. Really good singers. At that time, it would be a sin to change the way they were singing to do something commercial. But they were just as great as Aretha. And I was in the middle of all that. I was little, but hearing it all and taking it all in without realizing it. That was quite an experience. In fact, I would think it would be the thing that led me to my style of singing and playing."
http://weaa.org/post/black-saint-billy-harper-plays
"The Black Saint" Billy Harper Plays On
by Marcellus Shepard
January 7, 2015
WEAA
January 7, 2015
WEAA
Billy Harper
Jazz Master of the Month
January, 2015
Saxophonist Billy Harper, aka “The Black Saint,” was born in Houston on January 17, 1943. He was already singing in spiritual ensembles at age five and formed his first Billy Harper Quintet in his last years of high school, He went on to graduate cum laude from North Texas State University with a Bachelor of Music degree.
As most musicians who pursue jazz, Harper moved to New York City in 1966 seeking greater exposure and immediately began attracting the attention of jazz greats such as Gil Evans, Max Roach, Thad Jones, Mel Lewis, Lee Morgan, Art Blakey and others. He immediately began touring in some degree with each of these groups from 1966 to 1979 while also organizing and performing with his own Billy Harper Quintet.
The Billy Harper Quintet performed on the NBC Special The Big Apple, where his big tenor sound and spiritual solos gained even wider exposure.
Harper taught at Livingston College, Rutgers University, and The New School of Jazz and Contemporary Music.
One group of accomplished musicians commented that hearing [Harper] play was like hearing the voice of God.
Harper’s album The Black Saint in 1976 was named Jazz Album of the Year by the Modern Jazz League of Tokyo, which further increased his worldwide recognition as a serious innovator on tenor saxophone. His 1973 recording of “Capra Black” was one of the premier recordings during the black consciousness movement days. It, as well as other landmark recordings, endeared him to the serious jazz community in much the same way as did John Coltrane.
Harper has recorded more than 15 albums as a leader and more than 50 as a sideman.
His DVD release Billy Harper: Live from Poland (performed in a cathedral with full choir and jazz quintet) is still considered one of the most spiritually inspiring viewing and listening experiences ever recorded.
After hearing him perform with Max Roach in Philadelphia’s Aqua Lounge, one group of accomplished musicians commented that hearing him play was like “hearing the voice of God.”
Billy Harper still travels the world extensively and performs in Baltimore on occasion with his band as well as other ensembles.
http://coas.howard.edu/music/huje/BillyHarper.pdf
http://www.thecookersmusic.com/about/billy-harper/
Billy Harper
Billy Harper’s unique music creativity was first noted in Houston, Texas, where, at age 5, he was singing at sacred and secular functions and participating in choral and solo singing events. By age 14, he formed his first Billy Harper Quintet while a student at Evan E. Worthing High School. Graduating cum laude, he went on to study saxophone and music theory at North Texas State University and received his Bachelor of Music degree. He continued graduate studies at NTSU and became a member of their famed One O’clock Big Band.”
Harper moved to New York in 1966 and soon began attracting attention from some of jazzdom’s giants such as Gil Evans, Max Roach, Thad Jones, Mel Lewis, Lee Morgan and Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. He performed, recorded and toured Europe, Japan, Africa and throughout the United States from 1966 to 1979 with these groups, as well as his own Billy Harper Quintet.
In 1966, The Billy Harper Quintet began receiving notoriety of its own when his ensemble was highlighted on the NBC-TV special, “The Big Apple.” With more exposure came bigger audiences and bigger demands for appearances.
Throughout Harper’s career, there has been a pattern of spiritual growth and innovation. “My feeling is that music should have a purpose. In the past, it always has been used for healing and uplifting and meditation. And that’s the way I see my music” said Harper, “I’ve had people come up after a program to tell me that they felt a spiritual healing from the music. When that happens, I feel we’re fulfilling what we’re supposed to do. If people are entertained, that’s ok too but I certainly see a purpose in my music beyond that.”
As a teacher and lecturer, Harper has taught at Livingston College, Rutgers University, and The New School of Jazz and Contemporary Music. He has also received a special grant from the New Jersey State Council for the Arts to teach improvisation at 15 different high schools. Awards and honors include three Music Composition Grants; two from the National Endowment of the Arts, and one from the Creative Arts Program. He also received the International Critics Award for Best Tenor Saxophone for two years consecutively.
As a recording artist, Billy Harper’s album, Black Saint exploded on the international jazz scene in 1976. The reviews all applauded his innovations and prompted the Modern Jazz League of Tokyo to name the album, “Jazz Record of the Year – Voice Grand Prix.”
http://jazztimes.com/guides/artists/3621-billy-harper
Billy Harper
One of the last great tough-toned tenors from Texas, Billy Harper was influenced by John Coltrane but developed his own passionate sound and style. Born in Houston in 1943, he sang in church from the age of 5 and at 11 started on tenor. He gained early experience playing in local R&B bands and formed his first group when he was 14. Harper studied at North Texas State University in the early 1960s, played in the One O’Clock Lab Band, and earned a Bachelor of Music degree. In 1966 he moved to New York and was quickly discovered. Among his important early associations were Gil Evans (with whom he began working in 1967), Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers (1968-70), Lee Morgan, Elvin Jones, Max Roach and the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra.
With the latter group, Harper took a lengthy and notable solo on “Fingers” from their Consummation album. He has also led his own groups from the 1970s on and recorded the first albums released by both the Black Saint (1975’s Black Saint) and Soul Note (In Europe) labels. He maintained a lower profile in the 1980s and ’90s as he became very busy as an educator, teaching at Livingston College and Rutgers University in addition to teaching improvisation at high schools, but Harper has always been active as a saxophonist. Among the labels for which the tenor has recorded significant albums are Strata East, DIW, SteepleChase, Evidence, DIW and Metropolitan. Billy Harper’s sound is both intense and spiritual, and his style manages to be both adventurous and accessible.
http://txmusic.com/artists/pioneers/pioneers-billy-harper
Description:
Billy Harper
February 5, 2014 | by Texas Music Magazine
Pioneers: Billy Harper
The extraordinary jazz saxophonist from Houston is a disciple of John Coltrane and a master of blues and gospel. And at 70, he has an ambitious new project.
by GEOFFREY HIMES
JAZZ LEGEND Billy Harper is sitting in New York’s “jazz church,” St. Peter’s, but he wants to talk about his childhood in Texas. With his golden tenor sax in his lap, he’s filming a video for a Kickstarter campaign to fund an ambitious concert for a jazz sextet and 60-voice choir. He’s talking about how he got started in music as a five-year-old singer at St. Paul’s A.M.E. in Houston and how, a few years later, he got hooked on jazz and started hanging out with a slightly older saxophonist named George Irwin.
“George introduced me to this magical musical world,” Harper recalls, “the language of the street. He’d say to me, ‘Hey, Billy, sah ba doo lay, a breek a breek a bebop, see boom bob a doo bop, whatcha gonna do?’ ‘Whoa, whoa,’ I said,” and Harper holds his hands up defensively in surprise. “But I realized he was trying to get me to answer in the same style. OK, so eventually I did: ‘Hey, bebop see bang, see tang bob a doo bop, brip, brip, brip, soo be doo be dot day.’ George and I would talk like this oh so many times. I didn’t realize that he was actually introducing me to a natural, universal jargon, which I now call improv lingo.”
Harper, who turns 71 in January, recreates this long-ago dialogue with syncopated finger snaps and punctuates it with a finger pointing right in the listener’s face. His signature haircut, a modest afro with corners cut in at the temples, is now gray, and he breaks into a laugh, amused by the memory of two teenage hipsters improvising nonsense syllables to funky rhythms as they sauntered through Houston’s Sunnyside neighborhood, befuddling every adult they passed. Harper moved from Texas to New York at age 23 and went on to record with such jazz greats as Art Blakey, Gil Evans and Max Roach, but the saxophonist forged his musical personality in Houston.
Harper’s recent album, The Roots of the Blues, an unaccompanied duo project with Randy Weston, echoes those spontaneous scat conversations with Irwin. Weston, an 87-year-old grandmaster of jazz, plays a wordless phrase on the piano, and Harper responds with a phrase of his own on the tenor saxophone. Back and forth they go through a dozen songs, never repeating what the other has played but always coming up with a variation obviously connected to the previous phrase (the album also includes an unaccompanied solo by each). Their combined 125 years of professional experience allow them to pare away all the clutter from their musical conversation so they present only the distilled essence of each tune.
“Randy and I went to Japan as a duo in 2012,” Harper explains. “From that experience, he got the idea we should record. In a duo without a rhythm section, there’s much more room; we have a lot more freedom to go further in our expression. But we can’t rely on the drummer and the bassist to handle the rhythm — we have to create the pulse just between the two of us. In some duos that’s a problem, but Randy’s a rhythmic pianist; he’s like a drummer. When he plays, you get the feeling of Duke Ellington and the feeling of Thelonious Monk, but there’s all this rhythm happening at the same time. He takes you to a place where you feel the presence of an elephant or a rhinoceros moving through Africa.”
Harper was the 31-year-old saxophonist in the Max Roach Quartet when he traveled in 1972 to Tangier, Morocco, for a jazz festival organized by Weston, who was living there at the time. Harper quickly bonded with Weston and recorded two albums with the pianist: 1973’s Tanjah and 1974’s Carnival. But the more Harper heard local African musicians, the more he was reminded of Texas.
“Africa was totally enlightening,” he says. “Everything was really making sense. I heard the rhythms I’d heard as a little boy in Houston, both from the corner bar where they played the blues and from the Wesley Chapel A.M.E. I began to understand where these rhythms came from and how they connected to American music.”
When Harper was nine, he became entranced by the gleaming metallic horns in the shop window of a music store along his route home from school. He was taken with the saxophone, if only because it had so many more keys than the trumpet. He told his parents that for Christmas he wanted a saxophone and a horse. He got only one of them.
A few years later, his uncle, Earl Harper, who’d gone to school with jazz trumpeter Kenny Dorham in Austin, got his nephew listening to Dorham and Sonny Rollins. This music was more complicated than the Louis Jordan and Charles Brown records that were popular among Billy’s friends, but the youngster relished the challenge. “It was really hip,” he remembers, “something I hadn’t heard before. Not only did most people not play like that, but most people didn’t even think like that. It was way above my head, but it gave me something to aim for.” By the time he was 16, Harper was playing in R&B bands for money and at jazz jam sessions for knowledge.
“That improv lingo with George helped in all kinds of ways,” Harper says. “Without realizing it, I was learning how to have rhythm naturally just in speaking, and that became the rhythm of how I played. It was similar to what we did in church with call-and-response. When the minister would say, ‘Oh, yeah, we got to go to heaven,’ someone would say, ‘Oh, yeah, Reverend.’”
If it was an exciting time for music, it was a difficult time for society. Segregation was so deeply entrenched in Houston that Harper never encountered Anglos except for the clerks at the stores where his family shopped. But when he went off to North Texas State College in Denton, he was part of the first group of African-Americans integrating the school. They were just 100 blacks in a sea of some 10,000 whites.
“Not everyone was staunchly segregationist,” Harper points out. “Some Caucasians were in the integration movement with us, but the fraternities weren’t like that. Every year there was a parade through town by men on horses carrying Confederate flags. We integrated the apartments in town, and sometimes we’d wake up with bright lights shining through the windows. We’d look out and see a cross burning. We got through it because we knew we had something of value in our music. It had always been like that: we always got through tough times thanks to the music in church and elsewhere.”
Harper moved to New York in 1966 at age 23 and had all his clothes and money stolen the second night he was there. But he persevered. He got a menial job at ASCAP and would bug musicians such as Miles Davis’ arranger, Gil Evans, John Coltrane’s drummer, Elvin Jones, trumpeter Lee Morgan and drummer Art Blakey to let him sit in, and they’d tell him “no” or “maybe” or “later.” But Harper was persistent, and when he finally got a chance to sit in, he was good enough that he was eventually hired for tours and recording sessions by all four men.
“I was ready for those bands,” Harper says, “but being able to say I played with all those guys meant a lot to other people. There were a lot of things you wouldn’t learn as fast if you weren’t playing with Art, because he was always professional. He made the music work, and I could see how that was done. It’s one thing to know how to play and another to know how to make it connect with people.”
Today Harper plays with the Cookers, an all-star band of musicians from that early-‘60s era in New York when they were all trying to break into the music. The band is named after The Night of the Cookers, the famous 1965 album featuring a trumpet battle between Freddie Hubbard and Lee Morgan. The current members of the Cookers — Harper, Eddie Henderson, Craig Handy, George Cables, Cecil McBee, Billy Hart and David Weiss — all played with Hubbard or Morgan at some point. Unlike most jazz bands, which feature an older leader and younger sidemen, this is a band of veterans from the same generation, and that shared experience can be heard in their three albums together, most recently 2012’s Believe.
Harper’s first album under his own name was 1973’s Capra Black, the first of a dozen in all. Especially noteworthy are 1975’s Black Saint, which not only inaugurated the Italian jazz label of the same name but also won Record of the Year in Japan, and 1995’s Somalia, featuring the landmark title track. But the project Harper is most excited about these days is “Speak to Me of Love, Speak to Me of Truth,” his suite for jazz sextet and 60-voice choir. He’s trained his choir to sing the same kind of improv lingo that he and Irwin sang on the streets of Houston so many decades ago. But the most robust voice in the suite is Harper’s own saxophone.
“I didn’t know I had that big Texas sound on the saxophone until I moved to New York,” he says. “I thought that was just the way you were supposed to sound on the instrument. Arnett Cobb was down there in Fort Worth; I played with James Clay in Dallas. Julius Hemphill and Dewey Redman were still playing straight bop in Fort Worth. Don Wilkerson, who’d played with Ray Charles before Fathead [Newman], was from Houston; so was Cleanhead Vinson. Everybody in Texas tried to play that way. Maybe it was the pressure to have a full, round sound while you were marching in a school band.”
Originally published in Winter 2014, No. 57.
- See more at:
JAZZ LEGEND Billy Harper is sitting in New York’s “jazz church,” St. Peter’s, but he wants to talk about his childhood in Texas. With his golden tenor sax in his lap, he’s filming a video for a Kickstarter campaign to fund an ambitious concert for a jazz sextet and 60-voice choir. He’s talking about how he got started in music as a five-year-old singer at St. Paul’s A.M.E. in Houston and how, a few years later, he got hooked on jazz and started hanging out with a slightly older saxophonist named George Irwin.
“George introduced me to this magical musical world,” Harper recalls, “the language of the street. He’d say to me, ‘Hey, Billy, sah ba doo lay, a breek a breek a bebop, see boom bob a doo bop, whatcha gonna do?’ ‘Whoa, whoa,’ I said,” and Harper holds his hands up defensively in surprise. “But I realized he was trying to get me to answer in the same style. OK, so eventually I did: ‘Hey, bebop see bang, see tang bob a doo bop, brip, brip, brip, soo be doo be dot day.’ George and I would talk like this oh so many times. I didn’t realize that he was actually introducing me to a natural, universal jargon, which I now call improv lingo.”
Harper, who turns 71 in January, recreates this long-ago dialogue with syncopated finger snaps and punctuates it with a finger pointing right in the listener’s face. His signature haircut, a modest afro with corners cut in at the temples, is now gray, and he breaks into a laugh, amused by the memory of two teenage hipsters improvising nonsense syllables to funky rhythms as they sauntered through Houston’s Sunnyside neighborhood, befuddling every adult they passed. Harper moved from Texas to New York at age 23 and went on to record with such jazz greats as Art Blakey, Gil Evans and Max Roach, but the saxophonist forged his musical personality in Houston.
Harper’s recent album, The Roots of the Blues, an unaccompanied duo project with Randy Weston, echoes those spontaneous scat conversations with Irwin. Weston, an 87-year-old grandmaster of jazz, plays a wordless phrase on the piano, and Harper responds with a phrase of his own on the tenor saxophone. Back and forth they go through a dozen songs, never repeating what the other has played but always coming up with a variation obviously connected to the previous phrase (the album also includes an unaccompanied solo by each). Their combined 125 years of professional experience allow them to pare away all the clutter from their musical conversation so they present only the distilled essence of each tune.
“Randy and I went to Japan as a duo in 2012,” Harper explains. “From that experience, he got the idea we should record. In a duo without a rhythm section, there’s much more room; we have a lot more freedom to go further in our expression. But we can’t rely on the drummer and the bassist to handle the rhythm — we have to create the pulse just between the two of us. In some duos that’s a problem, but Randy’s a rhythmic pianist; he’s like a drummer. When he plays, you get the feeling of Duke Ellington and the feeling of Thelonious Monk, but there’s all this rhythm happening at the same time. He takes you to a place where you feel the presence of an elephant or a rhinoceros moving through Africa.”
Harper was the 31-year-old saxophonist in the Max Roach Quartet when he traveled in 1972 to Tangier, Morocco, for a jazz festival organized by Weston, who was living there at the time. Harper quickly bonded with Weston and recorded two albums with the pianist: 1973’s Tanjah and 1974’s Carnival. But the more Harper heard local African musicians, the more he was reminded of Texas.
“Africa was totally enlightening,” he says. “Everything was really making sense. I heard the rhythms I’d heard as a little boy in Houston, both from the corner bar where they played the blues and from the Wesley Chapel A.M.E. I began to understand where these rhythms came from and how they connected to American music.”
When Harper was nine, he became entranced by the gleaming metallic horns in the shop window of a music store along his route home from school. He was taken with the saxophone, if only because it had so many more keys than the trumpet. He told his parents that for Christmas he wanted a saxophone and a horse. He got only one of them.
A few years later, his uncle, Earl Harper, who’d gone to school with jazz trumpeter Kenny Dorham in Austin, got his nephew listening to Dorham and Sonny Rollins. This music was more complicated than the Louis Jordan and Charles Brown records that were popular among Billy’s friends, but the youngster relished the challenge. “It was really hip,” he remembers, “something I hadn’t heard before. Not only did most people not play like that, but most people didn’t even think like that. It was way above my head, but it gave me something to aim for.” By the time he was 16, Harper was playing in R&B bands for money and at jazz jam sessions for knowledge.
“That improv lingo with George helped in all kinds of ways,” Harper says. “Without realizing it, I was learning how to have rhythm naturally just in speaking, and that became the rhythm of how I played. It was similar to what we did in church with call-and-response. When the minister would say, ‘Oh, yeah, we got to go to heaven,’ someone would say, ‘Oh, yeah, Reverend.’”
If it was an exciting time for music, it was a difficult time for society. Segregation was so deeply entrenched in Houston that Harper never encountered Anglos except for the clerks at the stores where his family shopped. But when he went off to North Texas State College in Denton, he was part of the first group of African-Americans integrating the school. They were just 100 blacks in a sea of some 10,000 whites.
“Not everyone was staunchly segregationist,” Harper points out. “Some Caucasians were in the integration movement with us, but the fraternities weren’t like that. Every year there was a parade through town by men on horses carrying Confederate flags. We integrated the apartments in town, and sometimes we’d wake up with bright lights shining through the windows. We’d look out and see a cross burning. We got through it because we knew we had something of value in our music. It had always been like that: we always got through tough times thanks to the music in church and elsewhere.”
Harper moved to New York in 1966 at age 23 and had all his clothes and money stolen the second night he was there. But he persevered. He got a menial job at ASCAP and would bug musicians such as Miles Davis’ arranger, Gil Evans, John Coltrane’s drummer, Elvin Jones, trumpeter Lee Morgan and drummer Art Blakey to let him sit in, and they’d tell him “no” or “maybe” or “later.” But Harper was persistent, and when he finally got a chance to sit in, he was good enough that he was eventually hired for tours and recording sessions by all four men.
“I was ready for those bands,” Harper says, “but being able to say I played with all those guys meant a lot to other people. There were a lot of things you wouldn’t learn as fast if you weren’t playing with Art, because he was always professional. He made the music work, and I could see how that was done. It’s one thing to know how to play and another to know how to make it connect with people.”
Today Harper plays with the Cookers, an all-star band of musicians from that early-‘60s era in New York when they were all trying to break into the music. The band is named after The Night of the Cookers, the famous 1965 album featuring a trumpet battle between Freddie Hubbard and Lee Morgan. The current members of the Cookers — Harper, Eddie Henderson, Craig Handy, George Cables, Cecil McBee, Billy Hart and David Weiss — all played with Hubbard or Morgan at some point. Unlike most jazz bands, which feature an older leader and younger sidemen, this is a band of veterans from the same generation, and that shared experience can be heard in their three albums together, most recently 2012’s Believe.
Harper’s first album under his own name was 1973’s Capra Black, the first of a dozen in all. Especially noteworthy are 1975’s Black Saint, which not only inaugurated the Italian jazz label of the same name but also won Record of the Year in Japan, and 1995’s Somalia, featuring the landmark title track. But the project Harper is most excited about these days is “Speak to Me of Love, Speak to Me of Truth,” his suite for jazz sextet and 60-voice choir. He’s trained his choir to sing the same kind of improv lingo that he and Irwin sang on the streets of Houston so many decades ago. But the most robust voice in the suite is Harper’s own saxophone.
“I didn’t know I had that big Texas sound on the saxophone until I moved to New York,” he says. “I thought that was just the way you were supposed to sound on the instrument. Arnett Cobb was down there in Fort Worth; I played with James Clay in Dallas. Julius Hemphill and Dewey Redman were still playing straight bop in Fort Worth. Don Wilkerson, who’d played with Ray Charles before Fathead [Newman], was from Houston; so was Cleanhead Vinson. Everybody in Texas tried to play that way. Maybe it was the pressure to have a full, round sound while you were marching in a school band.”
Originally published in Winter 2014, No. 57.
- See more at:
http://txmusic.com/artists/pioneers/pioneers-billy-harper#sthash.tirQxMSw.dpuf
http://blogs.mercurynews.com/aei/2013/01/17/billy-harper-at-70-a-profile-from-2001-art-blakey-told-him-billy-im-your-favorite-fan/
http://blogs.mercurynews.com/aei/2013/01/17/billy-harper-at-70-a-profile-from-2001-art-blakey-told-him-billy-im-your-favorite-fan/
Billy Harper at 70: A profile from 2001 — Art Blakey told him, “Billy, I’m your favorite fan!”
Posted on January 17, 2013
Posted on January 17, 2013
Continuing with our 70th birthday celebration for the genius saxophonist/bandleader/composer.
Here’s something I wrote back on May 25, 2001.
by Richard Scheinin
Mercury News
When Miles Davis asked tenor saxophonist Billy Harper to join his band in the early 1970s, Harper did something many musicians would have considered insane. He told the trumpeter “No.”
Harper was a member of a very special, long-working quartet led by the drummer Max Roach at the time, and he “wasn’t just going to leave Max because Miles said to play with him, ” Harper says. “Miles was cool: ‘OK.’ It might have been another story money-wise, playing with Miles, but it was probably good for me soul-wise to stay with Max.”
If you’re looking for a musician who stands for something — say, integrity — Harper is your man. The sound of his saxophone also happens to be among the wonders of jazz: probing, piercing and positively explosive.
His flat-out solos can induce panic attacks in a listener, so watch yourself next week when Harper brings his quintet to Yoshi’s in Oakland for four nights beginning Thursday. It’s the saxophonist’s first major club engagement in the Bay Area in about 20 years, since the old days at San Francisco’s Keystone Korner, where he used to leave audiences in a sweat. Harper’s unit includes the celebrated trumpeter Eddie Henderson and is one of the best working bands in the music: tight, swinging, bursting with emotion.
If you call yourself a jazz fan, you really shouldn’t miss it. Harper, 58, is a jazz touchstone. Over the past 35 years, he has lifted the bandstands of drummers Roach and Elvin Jones, trumpeters Lee Morgan and Donald Byrd, pianists McCoy Tyner and Randy Weston, and big-band leaders Gil Evans and Thad Jones, to name a few.
To hire Harper is to baptize the bandstand with a purity of expression that’s missing from the rounded-off-at-the-edges sounds of many players today. The late drummer Art Blakey, who set Harper loose in his Jazz Messengers in the late 1960s, used to tell him, in his famous scratchy voice, “Billy, I’m your favorite fan!”
Harper takes part of his vocabulary from the experimentation John Coltrane was working through during the 1960s, but he’s no Coltrane clone. He long ago evolved his own special language on the horn — an incantatory force informed by the black church, where this grandson of a Methodist minister spent his formative years.
Embedded in the blues
Wynton Marsalis talks about the “majesty of the blues.” Well, Harper’s music has embodied that sense of nobility for decades. It is at once virtuosic and full of abandon as Harper reaches for “a touching the soul kind offeeling, ” he says, speaking from his apartment in New York. “I like to have the group be very together and very tight and very swinging. But I also like for my sound to be kind of raw and cutting. . . . I’m trying to let the real truth come through, from the source.”
I met Harper close to 30 years ago in New York, when I was a college student hosting a jazz radio show and he was one of the young gunslingers on tenor. Over the years, I’ve heard him explain where different tunes come from: this one handed to him in a dream; this one arisen from the rhythm of his footsteps on a morning jog; this one inspired by a flash of memory of his grandmother, Pearl Simpson, who raised him in Texas.
Last year, after recording his CD “Soul of an Angel, ” Harper explained the origins of a tune titled “Let All the Voices Sing.” It began as a melodic fragment that he whistled. He took notice — “Hey, maybe that’s a song” — jotted down the notes and went to work. First, he heard the tune as a march — akin to pianist Bud Powell’s “Glass Enclosure, ” which has unusual march-like rhythms. But as the melody evolved it “started reminding me more of ‘Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing, ‘ which is the black anthem we used to sing a lot in church, ” he said.
Harper sang a few lines from James Weldon Johnson’s century-old “Black National Anthem”":
Harper’s boyhood church was Ebenezer African Methodist Episcopal Church in Tyler, Texas, near Houston. By age 16, he was playing the blues in Houston night clubs. His uncle Earl Harper Jr. was a friend of Kenny Dorham, the seminal bebop trumpeter, and from the beginning Harper was influenced by Dorham’s sound: “It’s why I play the way I do, ” he says. “I hear my saxophone in relationship to voice and trumpet. The trumpet has such a brilliance, so it kind of awakens people, and that’s what I’m trying to do on the horn.”
In 1961, Harper entered North Texas State University, where he was one of the few black students on campus. He practiced eight hours a day and held down a chair in the school’s big band. On weekends, he might head to Fort Worth to play with Dewey Redman and Julius Hemphill, two saxophonists headed for fame as avant-gardists in New York. At the time they played “straight bop, and good, too, ” Harper says.
Proving ground
Dallas also was a weekend proving ground. Harper played regularly with James Clay, a legendary saxophonist. He remembers “a special jam session on Sundays with four or five saxophones: Clay and sometimes David ‘Fathead’ Newman would come off the road. There was Fred Smith, another good player, and a guy we called ‘Worm, ‘ ” he says, laughing. “I never knew his real name.”
In 1966, Harper headed for New York. On the second night, all his clothes were stolen. He phoned Charles Moffett, a drummer from Fort Worth who put him up in Brooklyn. Texas-raised Dorham also came through, though at the time he didn’t realize he was helping Earl Harper’s nephew.
Dorham told a television producer about a new saxophonist he’d heard about, Billy Harper. That’s how Harper became part of a television news documentary about four newcomers to the Big Apple: “There was a model, a business person, and a boxer — Jerry Quarry, ” who later fought Joe Frazier for the heavyweight title, Harper says.
Professional success came as a result of talent and circumstance. One day, Harper spotted Gil Evans, the arranger, on a midtown street and introduced himself. Evans took a chance and brought Harper into his big band, which included Elvin Jones on drums.
Jones is the most titanic of jazz drummers, the force behind John Coltrane’s earthshaking quartet. He was among the first drummers in New York to admire Harper’s rhythm-charged improvisations. Next came Blakey, who took Harper to Finland and Japan, and then Roach.
By the early ’70s, Harper was climbing the saxophone popularity polls in Downbeat magazine, the jazz bible. One year, he and Michael Brecker — one of today’s big-name players — were side by side in the Top 10.
Somehow through the years, Harper missed out on the celebrity status thatsome of his fans expected for him in the United States. But you know what? He really doesn’t care. He travels with his band to Poland, Japan, Malaysia and Brazil — or Baltimore, for that matter — and the music rarely fails to move people. Never annointed by the major labels — Harper isn’t one to follow the whims of the industry — he has still managed to record a couple dozen albums and CDs. (Many are available through his Web site jazzcorner.com/harper or via e-mail through the Billy Harper Fan Club at explorejaz@aol.com.)
Success in the recording industry “is a contrived kind of thing, ” Harper says. “I don’t focus on particular material goals. My goal is to make sure that the music really touches people and that I am doing all that I can musically. I was granted this gift, and I realized a long time ago that I should share it with people, whether I was making money or not making money.”
It’s possible, he concedes, that record company executives labeled him early on as a musician “who will not bend. And I don’t care. I’m just trying to tell the truth. There’s not any bending about that.”
http://www.jazzreview.com/cd-reviews/bebop-hard-bop-cd-reviews/blueprints-of-jazz-vol.-2-by-billy-harper.html
BeBop / Hard Bop - CD Reviews
Blueprints Of Jazz, Vol. 2 by Billy Harper
There is truly something wonderful and spiritual about Amiri Baraka’s spoken word "rap" on this recording. It’s not rap as we think of it in 2008, in terms of Hip-Hop, but as the beatniks thought it, "to expound with poetry above a jazz inflected music that has the same openness and thoughtful intellectual conception in its construction as used in the process of putting the words together." Baraka, who also wrote the words, "raps" on two of the tracks, "Africa Revisited" and Knowledge Of Self." In each tune he speaks mainly of development; whether it’s about jazz or the individual, though usually the two are inseparable, Baraka finds a way to word dance in much the same way Ken Nordine uses words to create rhythm in his "Word Jazz."
Against, with and in-the-midst of Baraka’s cerebral and historical word play jazz icon deserving wider attention, saxophonist, singer, and composer Billy Harper’s band lets it rip. Their hard-edged post-bop is a perfect foil for the scholarly intonations of Baraka’s ideas. Harper’s band plays with a sharpness of color and clarity of line so lacking by many of today’s artists. It’s obvious these musicians don’t just play jazz, they live, breath and eat it on a daily basis, for how can musicians be some rambunctiously exciting if it’s not their entire disposition and meaning in life to create music so alive and vivacious.
It is this spirit that is displayed on every single cut of Talking House Records’ second volume of music by master artists. While Harper may be a lesser known innovator and style-setter to most, he speaks with knowledge of the masters. Harper began singing at sacred functions at the age of five in Houston, Texas. By the time he was 14 his quintet started gaining serious area recognition. Later studies in saxophone and music theory at the, now, University of North Texas, helped broaden his scope, and ever since he moved to New York in 1966 his is a name that has always been associated with the respect for traditional jazz’s lineage as he, himself, continues finds ways to move forward.
That the strong post and hard-bop on this recording is true to jazz’s nature goes without saying to those who know this artist and his proclivities. That it’s done so well and with such honestly is also nothing new. An artist who has worked within the musical scene and created such consistently high levels of artistry for so long is to be celebrated, and this recording does this. Whether his band is blowing blues interjected lines, as on "Time and Time Again," or bringing meaning to ballads as on "Thoughts and Slow Actions," or swing-line feels as in "Who Here Can Judge Our Fates," or singing the most soulful version of "Amazing Grace" recorded in the last 10 years, Harper and his group excel throughout.
Additional Info
Artist / Group Name: Billy Harper
CD Title: Blueprints Of Jazz, Vol. 2
Genre: BeBop / Hard Bop
Year Released: 2008
Record Label: Talking House Records
Wynton Marsalis talks about the “majesty of the blues.” Well, Harper’s music has embodied that sense of nobility for decades. It is at once virtuosic and full of abandon as Harper reaches for “a touching the soul kind offeeling, ” he says, speaking from his apartment in New York. “I like to have the group be very together and very tight and very swinging. But I also like for my sound to be kind of raw and cutting. . . . I’m trying to let the real truth come through, from the source.”
I met Harper close to 30 years ago in New York, when I was a college student hosting a jazz radio show and he was one of the young gunslingers on tenor. Over the years, I’ve heard him explain where different tunes come from: this one handed to him in a dream; this one arisen from the rhythm of his footsteps on a morning jog; this one inspired by a flash of memory of his grandmother, Pearl Simpson, who raised him in Texas.
Last year, after recording his CD “Soul of an Angel, ” Harper explained the origins of a tune titled “Let All the Voices Sing.” It began as a melodic fragment that he whistled. He took notice — “Hey, maybe that’s a song” — jotted down the notes and went to work. First, he heard the tune as a march — akin to pianist Bud Powell’s “Glass Enclosure, ” which has unusual march-like rhythms. But as the melody evolved it “started reminding me more of ‘Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing, ‘ which is the black anthem we used to sing a lot in church, ” he said.
Harper sang a few lines from James Weldon Johnson’s century-old “Black National Anthem”":
Lift ev’ry voice and sing,
Til earth and heaven ring.
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty…
Harper’s boyhood church was Ebenezer African Methodist Episcopal Church in Tyler, Texas, near Houston. By age 16, he was playing the blues in Houston night clubs. His uncle Earl Harper Jr. was a friend of Kenny Dorham, the seminal bebop trumpeter, and from the beginning Harper was influenced by Dorham’s sound: “It’s why I play the way I do, ” he says. “I hear my saxophone in relationship to voice and trumpet. The trumpet has such a brilliance, so it kind of awakens people, and that’s what I’m trying to do on the horn.”
In 1961, Harper entered North Texas State University, where he was one of the few black students on campus. He practiced eight hours a day and held down a chair in the school’s big band. On weekends, he might head to Fort Worth to play with Dewey Redman and Julius Hemphill, two saxophonists headed for fame as avant-gardists in New York. At the time they played “straight bop, and good, too, ” Harper says.
Proving ground
Dallas also was a weekend proving ground. Harper played regularly with James Clay, a legendary saxophonist. He remembers “a special jam session on Sundays with four or five saxophones: Clay and sometimes David ‘Fathead’ Newman would come off the road. There was Fred Smith, another good player, and a guy we called ‘Worm, ‘ ” he says, laughing. “I never knew his real name.”
In 1966, Harper headed for New York. On the second night, all his clothes were stolen. He phoned Charles Moffett, a drummer from Fort Worth who put him up in Brooklyn. Texas-raised Dorham also came through, though at the time he didn’t realize he was helping Earl Harper’s nephew.
Dorham told a television producer about a new saxophonist he’d heard about, Billy Harper. That’s how Harper became part of a television news documentary about four newcomers to the Big Apple: “There was a model, a business person, and a boxer — Jerry Quarry, ” who later fought Joe Frazier for the heavyweight title, Harper says.
Professional success came as a result of talent and circumstance. One day, Harper spotted Gil Evans, the arranger, on a midtown street and introduced himself. Evans took a chance and brought Harper into his big band, which included Elvin Jones on drums.
Jones is the most titanic of jazz drummers, the force behind John Coltrane’s earthshaking quartet. He was among the first drummers in New York to admire Harper’s rhythm-charged improvisations. Next came Blakey, who took Harper to Finland and Japan, and then Roach.
By the early ’70s, Harper was climbing the saxophone popularity polls in Downbeat magazine, the jazz bible. One year, he and Michael Brecker — one of today’s big-name players — were side by side in the Top 10.
Somehow through the years, Harper missed out on the celebrity status thatsome of his fans expected for him in the United States. But you know what? He really doesn’t care. He travels with his band to Poland, Japan, Malaysia and Brazil — or Baltimore, for that matter — and the music rarely fails to move people. Never annointed by the major labels — Harper isn’t one to follow the whims of the industry — he has still managed to record a couple dozen albums and CDs. (Many are available through his Web site jazzcorner.com/harper or via e-mail through the Billy Harper Fan Club at explorejaz@aol.com.)
Success in the recording industry “is a contrived kind of thing, ” Harper says. “I don’t focus on particular material goals. My goal is to make sure that the music really touches people and that I am doing all that I can musically. I was granted this gift, and I realized a long time ago that I should share it with people, whether I was making money or not making money.”
It’s possible, he concedes, that record company executives labeled him early on as a musician “who will not bend. And I don’t care. I’m just trying to tell the truth. There’s not any bending about that.”
http://www.jazzreview.com/cd-reviews/bebop-hard-bop-cd-reviews/blueprints-of-jazz-vol.-2-by-billy-harper.html
BeBop / Hard Bop - CD Reviews
Blueprints Of Jazz, Vol. 2 by Billy Harper
There is truly something wonderful and spiritual about Amiri Baraka’s spoken word "rap" on this recording. It’s not rap as we think of it in 2008, in terms of Hip-Hop, but as the beatniks thought it, "to expound with poetry above a jazz inflected music that has the same openness and thoughtful intellectual conception in its construction as used in the process of putting the words together." Baraka, who also wrote the words, "raps" on two of the tracks, "Africa Revisited" and Knowledge Of Self." In each tune he speaks mainly of development; whether it’s about jazz or the individual, though usually the two are inseparable, Baraka finds a way to word dance in much the same way Ken Nordine uses words to create rhythm in his "Word Jazz."
Against, with and in-the-midst of Baraka’s cerebral and historical word play jazz icon deserving wider attention, saxophonist, singer, and composer Billy Harper’s band lets it rip. Their hard-edged post-bop is a perfect foil for the scholarly intonations of Baraka’s ideas. Harper’s band plays with a sharpness of color and clarity of line so lacking by many of today’s artists. It’s obvious these musicians don’t just play jazz, they live, breath and eat it on a daily basis, for how can musicians be some rambunctiously exciting if it’s not their entire disposition and meaning in life to create music so alive and vivacious.
It is this spirit that is displayed on every single cut of Talking House Records’ second volume of music by master artists. While Harper may be a lesser known innovator and style-setter to most, he speaks with knowledge of the masters. Harper began singing at sacred functions at the age of five in Houston, Texas. By the time he was 14 his quintet started gaining serious area recognition. Later studies in saxophone and music theory at the, now, University of North Texas, helped broaden his scope, and ever since he moved to New York in 1966 his is a name that has always been associated with the respect for traditional jazz’s lineage as he, himself, continues finds ways to move forward.
That the strong post and hard-bop on this recording is true to jazz’s nature goes without saying to those who know this artist and his proclivities. That it’s done so well and with such honestly is also nothing new. An artist who has worked within the musical scene and created such consistently high levels of artistry for so long is to be celebrated, and this recording does this. Whether his band is blowing blues interjected lines, as on "Time and Time Again," or bringing meaning to ballads as on "Thoughts and Slow Actions," or swing-line feels as in "Who Here Can Judge Our Fates," or singing the most soulful version of "Amazing Grace" recorded in the last 10 years, Harper and his group excel throughout.
Additional Info
Artist / Group Name: Billy Harper
CD Title: Blueprints Of Jazz, Vol. 2
Genre: BeBop / Hard Bop
Year Released: 2008
Record Label: Talking House Records
Tracklist: Africa Revisited, Knowledge Of Self, Another Kind Of Thoroughbred, Thoughts And Slow Actions, Time And Time Again, Who Here Can Judge Our Fates?, Amazing Grace, Cast The First Stone? (...If You Yourself Have No Sins) and Oh... If Only
Musicians: Billy Harper (tenor sax, vocal), Amiri Baraka (spoken word), Francesca Tanksley (piano), Aaron Scott (drums, percussion), Keyon Harrold (trumpet, French horn), Charles McNeal (alto sax), Clarence Seay (bass), Louis Spears (bass)
Label Website: http://www.threcords.com/
Rating: Five Star
http://justiceforjazzartists.org/2014/05/23/saxophonist-billy-harper-publicly-endorses-justice-for-jazz-artists/
Saxophonist Billy Harper Publicly Endorses Justice for Jazz Artists!
Saxophonist Billy Harper has publicly endorsed Justice for Jazz Artists’ mission in support of hard-working musicians around the City.
Harper, an internationally acknowledged star of the jazz saxophone, moved to New York in 1966 and soon began attracting attention from some of the giants of the genre – Gil Evans, Max Roach, Thad Jones, Mel Lewis, Lee Morgan, Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. He performed, recorded and toured in Europe, Japan, Africa and throughout the United States from 1966 to 1979 with these groups, as well as with his own group, the Billy Harper Quintet.
The Billy Harper Quintet began receiving notoriety of its own. In 1966, Harper and his ensemble group were highlighted on the NBC-TV special, “The Big Apple.” With more exposure came bigger audiences and greater demand for live appearances.
Throughout Harper’s career, there has been a pattern of spiritual growth and innovation. Says Harper:
As a teacher and lecturer, Harper has taught at Livingston College, Rutgers University, and The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music. He has also received a special grant from the New Jersey State Council for the Arts to teach improvisation at 15 high schools. Awards and honors included 3 Music Composition Grants; two from the National Endowment for the Arts, and one from the Creative Arts Program. He also received the International Critics Award for Tenor Saxophone for two years consecutively.
As a recording artist, Billy Harper’s album, “Black Saint” exploded on the international jazz scene in 1976. The reviews all applauded his innovations and prompted the Modern Jazz League of Tokyo to name the album, “Jazz Record of the Year – Voice Grand Prix.”
Welcome Billy Harper, and thanks for your commitment to securing a strong future for jazz and jazz musicians in New York City and beyond.
Harper, an internationally acknowledged star of the jazz saxophone, moved to New York in 1966 and soon began attracting attention from some of the giants of the genre – Gil Evans, Max Roach, Thad Jones, Mel Lewis, Lee Morgan, Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. He performed, recorded and toured in Europe, Japan, Africa and throughout the United States from 1966 to 1979 with these groups, as well as with his own group, the Billy Harper Quintet.
The Billy Harper Quintet began receiving notoriety of its own. In 1966, Harper and his ensemble group were highlighted on the NBC-TV special, “The Big Apple.” With more exposure came bigger audiences and greater demand for live appearances.
Throughout Harper’s career, there has been a pattern of spiritual growth and innovation. Says Harper:
“My feeling is that music should have a purpose. In the past, it always has been used for healing and uplifting and meditation. And that’s the way I see my music. I’ve had people come up after a program to tell me that they felt a spiritual healing from the music. When that happens, then I feel we’re fulfilling what we’re supposed to do. If people are entertained, that’s ok too. But I certainly see a purpose in my music beyond that.”
As a teacher and lecturer, Harper has taught at Livingston College, Rutgers University, and The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music. He has also received a special grant from the New Jersey State Council for the Arts to teach improvisation at 15 high schools. Awards and honors included 3 Music Composition Grants; two from the National Endowment for the Arts, and one from the Creative Arts Program. He also received the International Critics Award for Tenor Saxophone for two years consecutively.
As a recording artist, Billy Harper’s album, “Black Saint” exploded on the international jazz scene in 1976. The reviews all applauded his innovations and prompted the Modern Jazz League of Tokyo to name the album, “Jazz Record of the Year – Voice Grand Prix.”
Welcome Billy Harper, and thanks for your commitment to securing a strong future for jazz and jazz musicians in New York City and beyond.
http://www.jakefeinbergshow.com/2016/04/the-billy-harper-interview/
The Billy Harper Interview:
Posted by jakefeinbergshow on Apr 23, 2016 in JazzBilly Harper [Download]
http://articles.latimes.com/1988-09-01/entertainment/ca-4526_1_billy-harper
For Billy Harper, Spirituality Swings
September 01, 1988
by DON HECKMAN
Los Angeles Times
Billy Harper is not a name that reverberates with recognition in the West Coast jazz community. Based in New York City's Westbeth artists' community, working primarily on the East Coast and overseas, the 45-year-old tenor saxophonist will make a rare one-night appearance this evening at Marla's Memory Lane nightclub.
"I've only been out here a few times," he said in a phone conversation a few days ago. "Once with Lee Morgan and two or three times with my own group. For the last few years I've mostly been on tour overseas or working around New York."
Harper's brief stop in the Southland comes at the tail end of a two-week tour of Japan that included several Peace Concerts marking the anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He also helped establish a relationship between two distant cities.
"In an earlier visit," Harper explained, "I had met the mayor of Kishiwada, a suburb of Osaka, and he expressed interest in establishing a kind of city-to-city relationship with New York.
"So I contacted Mayor Ed Koch, and he agreed to send his greetings via a videotape for us to take along on this trip. It was a typical Koch performance. He looked into the camera and said, 'Mayor Hara!,' in that style of his.
"The Mayor of Kishiwada didn't understand a lot of English, but he understood his name, so he was happy. They even played the whole thing on the television news that night."
Harper has had similarly rewarding experiences in other parts of the world. Before he went to Japan he visited Morocco as part of the Randy Weston group, and he spoke fondly of a lengthy South American tour taken by his own quintet a few years ago.
But Harper's primary concern at the moment is his visibility in this country. A veteran of small-group work with Art Blakey and Max Roach, as well as of the big bands of Thad Jones and Gil Evans, he has long been admired by critics and jazz aficionados but is less known to the wider jazz audience.
"This is a good group I've got now," he said, "with Eddie Henderson on trumpet, Francesca Tanksley on piano, Newman Taylor Baker on drums and Clarence Seay on bass. And all my time is focused toward getting people to hear it.
"We've been traveling to different parts of the world for years and we've had great response everywhere, but we just haven't done it enough here in the States.
"Some of the music we play is a bit free form, but all of it swings. I see it as sort of an expression of many of the things I've done with other people. But now the coloration is all mine instead of someone else's."
A strong advocate of acoustic jazz and traditional roots, Harper also spoke intensely about the music's potentially enriching qualities.
"My feeling," he explained, "is that music should have a purpose. In the past, it always has been used for healing and uplifting and meditation. And that's the way I see my music.
"I've had people come up after a program to tell me they felt a spiritual healing from the music. When that happens, then I feel we're fulfilling what we're supposed to do. If people are entertained, that's OK too. But I certainly see a purpose in my music beyond that.
"What that purpose is, hopefully is to relate directly to the heart and soul of the listener and not just to the dance that is inside them, even though the dance has to be a part of it, too." Harper described his youth in the African Methodist Episcopal church in Houston as the source of his spiritual foundation, but he has moved on since then to explore many other pathways.
"I guess I've been to almost every denomination and every kind of religious service," he said. "But I feel an expression of spirituality that's much wider than any organized religion can get to. And since I'm a musician, I'm fortunate, because I can express that spirituality through my music.
"I've got a piece called 'Trying to Make Heaven My Home,' " he continued, "which was inspired by a black spiritual called 'A City Called Heaven' that I used to sing in a choir when I was small.
"That song is a kind of representation of my past, in terms of where my music gift comes from, and my future, in terms of where I want it to go. I feel that, as I try to make heaven my home, whether it's on earth or when I die, I'm simply celebrating the roots I came from.
"Don't get me wrong. I'm not a monk. But whether I'm going to a church or not, the connection with spirituality that comes from my roots is what makes me grow inside and what makes my music grow."
Harper laughed: "Now if we can just get it to grow a little more in this country, things'll be just fine."
http://www.openskyjazz.com/2013/11/randy-weston-billy-harper-on-the-roots-of-the-blues/
Randy Weston & Billy Harper on The Roots of the Blues
November 28, 2013
by The Independent Ear
Randy Weston and Billy Harper‘s long partnership has culminated in their first duo recording, The Roots of the Blues, recorded by French producer Jean-Phillippe Allard for Universal and recently released stateside by the Sunnyside label. Ace producer Allard has been at the console for such Weston record dates as Spirit! The Power of Music Verve/Gitanes 1999), Earth Birth (Verve/Gitanes 1995), Khepera (Verve/Gitanes 1998), Saga (Verve/Gitanes 1995), Volcano Blues (Verve/Gitanes 1993), Marrakech in the Cool of the Evening (Verve/Gitanes 1992), The Splendid Master Gnawa Musicians (Verve 1992), and the classic The Spirits of Our Ancestors (Verve 1991). The latter featured three distinctive, spiritually adept tenor men – Pharoah Sanders, Dewey Redman (the tenor exchange between those two on an extended version of “African Cookbook” is worth the price of the CD alone), and Harper. But the Weston/Harper hook-up goes back further than that auspicious record date.
In 1971, as part of his overall plan to develop an African cultural beachhead in Tangier, Morocco that would serve as a hub for African and African Diaspora culture, while continuing to operate his African Rhythms Club in the northernmost African city, Weston began planning a grand festival – which would eventually become the first primarily jazz festival in Africa. As part of his planning he recruited his boyhood friend Max Roach and arts activist Mary Jo Johnson as his US-based liaisons to secure and arrange travel for the US artists Randy planned to bring to the festival. The idea was to produce a festival that would find US and African artists collaborating creatively. The US artists who committed to playing the festival, which commenced September 1-3, 1972, included Mandrill, Pucho & the Latin Soul Brothers, Odetta, Hubert Laws, Ahmed Abdul-Malik, and Max Roach’s Quartet, with Cecil Bridgewater on trumpet, Juney Booth on bass, and Billy Harper. However for some then-unexplained reason Max was not on the flight! Additionally, Dexter Gordon and trumpeter Richard “Notes” Williams joined the lineup from Europe.
Randy puzzled over Max’s absence for years, not learning until after Roach’s passing that the reason he didn’t make the flight was to maintain marital bliss, Max’s wife being very much pregnant at the time. Come festival time – at a grand outdoor venue that was actually a converted bull ring stadium, a setting Weston described as fraught with the usual logistical nightmares of a short-funded start-up (the Moroccan government fell short of its promised financial support), Max’s band soldiered on without him, Harper even taking to the traps for part of the performance, which he also did handily for Hubert Laws set. Though clearly an artistic success, the festival dug such a deep hole for Weston that he was forced to padlock his African Rhythms Club and return home to Brooklyn to recoup. Obviously Billy Harper left a major impression on Weston, such that in recent years whenever a performance calls for or affords him the option of having a tenor player in his band, Weston calls on Harper.
In preparing the liner notes for The Roots of The Blues, I interviewed both Weston and Harper on the project, starting with Weston, with whom I had the advantage of a 10-year head start from writing his autobiography African Rhythms.
Photo by Alan Nahigian
From my recollection of your discography, The Roots of The Blues must be your first duo record?
Randy Weston: Yes, I always love the sound and imagination of Billy Harper. For a long time I wanted to record in duo with Billy. I first played with Billy in Tangier, Morocco when he came over for my festival with Max Roach’s group. I heard the sound I like, that Texas sound, and [Harper] being from Texas he’s a great blues player. When Billy plays the tenor its like an orchestra – the call & response is always there; I always hear the black church in his playing; he’s always singing through his horn. As far as why we work well together, it’s the magic, that big, black sound he gets. Billy’s sound (he has Somali roots) comes straight out of Africa, but it’s a universal sound – that cry, it reaches your soul. He plays that modern saxophone but it’s very poetic. You listen to his solos and it’s a full composition, you hear the whole history of the tenor.
Talk about some of the compositions on this recording.
RW: “The Healers” is one for our ancient ancestors that came out of the Nile Valley civilization; they are the foundation of what we do today. We have to remember those ancient people that created the music we play today.
I definitely hear some of your low end theory, that depth that is characteristic of your lower register playing on “Blues to Africa”.
RW: [Laughs] Only on the Bosendorfer! The lower register represents the earth, the elephant and the way the elephant strides inspires that lower register on “Blues to Africa.” The way [elephants] walk [laughs], maybe it’s because I’m big too! I love the sound of that lower piano register – and you get that only on the Bosendorfer!
“Take the A Train” is symbolic because coming up in Brooklyn the A train gave us the opportunity to get to Manhattan more directly, and [A Train] was written by one of my idols, Billy Strayhorn. [Editor’s note: Weston played piano at Strayhorn’s funeral.] Like the old blues players Billy tried to capture the sound of the train with that piece. It’s a great composition and the A train gave us in Brooklyn an opportunity to get up to Harlem much quicker.
“How High the Moon”: Musicians started playing that a lot in the 40s and 50s; it was the first piece I heard Lucky Thompson play and I loved it. I played with Lucky once in Brooklyn; what an honor!
“Body & Soul”: Coleman Hawkins, obviously. [Editor’s note: In African Rhythms Weston tells the story of how as a 12-year old in 1938 when Hawkins recorded his monumental version of “Body & Soul,” he ran out and copped three copies of the single with an allowance advance, playing two copies endlessly at home, with his record player on blast, tilted out his bedroom window to entertain the neighborhood, wrapping up the third copy for safe keeping.] What I do is in the beginning I play a melody based on the bridge of the piece before Billy comes in, which I call “Soul and Body.”
“Congolese Children”: Some of my early listening to African music came up in the Berkshires. I heard some music from the region around Lake Kivu [one of the African great lakes, which borders the Congo and Rwanda] in the Congo. That’s when I began to incorporate rhythms and harmonies of Africa in my music.
“Blues to Senegal”: The first time I took my band to Africa was in 1967, and our first concert was in Dakar. I heard Dou Dou N’Diaye Rose, the great master drummer who inspired me. My son Azzedine created a rhythm based on a Senegalese drum pattern that fit with this melody.
“Carnival”: Inspired by Bobby Benson [musician and owner of the Lagos nightclub Caban Bamboo], just being in his club in Lagos, it was like a carnival. The first time I recorded this was in Montreux; Billy [Harper] was there with Gil Evans, and Don Moye was there with the Art Ensemble of Chicago; they’re both on the record.
“Timbuktu” was inspired by several things: my father talked about Timbuktu as one of the great ancient civilizations and I always wanted to visit there. This piece is a combination of a prayer and the greatness of Timbuktu in the ancient times. The piece deals with sadness, love, history and dreams.
“Roots of the Nile” depicts the beginning of the Nile Valley civilization; it’s a tribute to the ancient people of the Nile Valley civilization.
“Cleanhead Blues”: I played two weeks with Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson up in Albany and it was quite an honor. Not only was he a great blues singer, he was a great saxophonist as well.
Billy Harper on The Roots of the Blues:
Billy Harper by Greg Turner
How did you meet Randy and what’s been your overall experience knowing and playing with him down through the years?
Billy Harper: I met Randy Weston during a European tour that I was doing with Gil Evans; this was in the 70s. We immediately joined our musical forces together and recorded an album called Carnival, a live performance at one of the main festivals in Switzerland. But the first genuine meeting was in Africa. I was invited as part of the Max Roach Quartet to perform at Randy’s festival in Tangier, Morocco. Although I did perform on saxophone – Max had sent the band ahead of time, but when the event started there was still no Max – so I played drums a bit; one such occasion was behind Dexter Gordon, and also Hubert Laws.
There are so many stories to be told in relating to the saga that involves the overall experience of knowing and performing with “Chief” Randy Weston, that probably the most significant one highlights the direction and values that are emphasized in the truth of understanding the history and origins of so much of Western culture, via the true birthplace of us all – Africa. As this awareness was passed down from Randy’s father, through the understanding of Randy, it has also been passed down to us – meaning all of the musicians, or for that matter all persons who have come in contact with Randy Weston – the supreme speaker and teacher of the “flame of truth” – whether the focus of the moment is the music that we play as “jazz musicians”, or the history that we live as “human beings” in this world. Our humanity is connected to music, and vice-versa.
What made you decide to play your piece “IF One Could Only See” as your solo saxophone contribution to The Roots of the Blues?
BH: It was at the request of Randy Weston himself that I decided to contribute my composition. This is a song that I played as a solo when Randy and I performed in duet recently in Japan at a spiritual shrine. This song was given to me, in a dream. In this dream, I was walking down Seventh Avenue in Manhattan and I was carrying an empty tape recorder. As I strolled along not really paying attention to anything, this humongous hand reached down from the heavens and there was a cassette tape in it! So I accepted the tape, placed it in the empty cassette player… and one of the most beautiful melodies was played. I woke up immediately and played what I had heard. I named it “If One Could Only See.” The philosophical meaning of the title is so vast that it explores the possibilities of the goal of perceiving truth (real truth) in all that we see, whether it relates to truth in life, love, history, events that are denied or distorted, events that have occurred and were thwarted, all those things that mankind has a tendency to hide. The truth can be seen through our hearts… if we can learn to use our hearts… if one could only really see.
http://jazztimes.com/articles/117598-randy-weston-billy-harper-raising-spirits-telling-stories
November 28, 2013
by The Independent Ear
Randy Weston and Billy Harper‘s long partnership has culminated in their first duo recording, The Roots of the Blues, recorded by French producer Jean-Phillippe Allard for Universal and recently released stateside by the Sunnyside label. Ace producer Allard has been at the console for such Weston record dates as Spirit! The Power of Music Verve/Gitanes 1999), Earth Birth (Verve/Gitanes 1995), Khepera (Verve/Gitanes 1998), Saga (Verve/Gitanes 1995), Volcano Blues (Verve/Gitanes 1993), Marrakech in the Cool of the Evening (Verve/Gitanes 1992), The Splendid Master Gnawa Musicians (Verve 1992), and the classic The Spirits of Our Ancestors (Verve 1991). The latter featured three distinctive, spiritually adept tenor men – Pharoah Sanders, Dewey Redman (the tenor exchange between those two on an extended version of “African Cookbook” is worth the price of the CD alone), and Harper. But the Weston/Harper hook-up goes back further than that auspicious record date.
In 1971, as part of his overall plan to develop an African cultural beachhead in Tangier, Morocco that would serve as a hub for African and African Diaspora culture, while continuing to operate his African Rhythms Club in the northernmost African city, Weston began planning a grand festival – which would eventually become the first primarily jazz festival in Africa. As part of his planning he recruited his boyhood friend Max Roach and arts activist Mary Jo Johnson as his US-based liaisons to secure and arrange travel for the US artists Randy planned to bring to the festival. The idea was to produce a festival that would find US and African artists collaborating creatively. The US artists who committed to playing the festival, which commenced September 1-3, 1972, included Mandrill, Pucho & the Latin Soul Brothers, Odetta, Hubert Laws, Ahmed Abdul-Malik, and Max Roach’s Quartet, with Cecil Bridgewater on trumpet, Juney Booth on bass, and Billy Harper. However for some then-unexplained reason Max was not on the flight! Additionally, Dexter Gordon and trumpeter Richard “Notes” Williams joined the lineup from Europe.
Randy puzzled over Max’s absence for years, not learning until after Roach’s passing that the reason he didn’t make the flight was to maintain marital bliss, Max’s wife being very much pregnant at the time. Come festival time – at a grand outdoor venue that was actually a converted bull ring stadium, a setting Weston described as fraught with the usual logistical nightmares of a short-funded start-up (the Moroccan government fell short of its promised financial support), Max’s band soldiered on without him, Harper even taking to the traps for part of the performance, which he also did handily for Hubert Laws set. Though clearly an artistic success, the festival dug such a deep hole for Weston that he was forced to padlock his African Rhythms Club and return home to Brooklyn to recoup. Obviously Billy Harper left a major impression on Weston, such that in recent years whenever a performance calls for or affords him the option of having a tenor player in his band, Weston calls on Harper.
In preparing the liner notes for The Roots of The Blues, I interviewed both Weston and Harper on the project, starting with Weston, with whom I had the advantage of a 10-year head start from writing his autobiography African Rhythms.
Photo by Alan Nahigian
From my recollection of your discography, The Roots of The Blues must be your first duo record?
Randy Weston: Yes, I always love the sound and imagination of Billy Harper. For a long time I wanted to record in duo with Billy. I first played with Billy in Tangier, Morocco when he came over for my festival with Max Roach’s group. I heard the sound I like, that Texas sound, and [Harper] being from Texas he’s a great blues player. When Billy plays the tenor its like an orchestra – the call & response is always there; I always hear the black church in his playing; he’s always singing through his horn. As far as why we work well together, it’s the magic, that big, black sound he gets. Billy’s sound (he has Somali roots) comes straight out of Africa, but it’s a universal sound – that cry, it reaches your soul. He plays that modern saxophone but it’s very poetic. You listen to his solos and it’s a full composition, you hear the whole history of the tenor.
Talk about some of the compositions on this recording.
RW: “The Healers” is one for our ancient ancestors that came out of the Nile Valley civilization; they are the foundation of what we do today. We have to remember those ancient people that created the music we play today.
I definitely hear some of your low end theory, that depth that is characteristic of your lower register playing on “Blues to Africa”.
RW: [Laughs] Only on the Bosendorfer! The lower register represents the earth, the elephant and the way the elephant strides inspires that lower register on “Blues to Africa.” The way [elephants] walk [laughs], maybe it’s because I’m big too! I love the sound of that lower piano register – and you get that only on the Bosendorfer!
“Take the A Train” is symbolic because coming up in Brooklyn the A train gave us the opportunity to get to Manhattan more directly, and [A Train] was written by one of my idols, Billy Strayhorn. [Editor’s note: Weston played piano at Strayhorn’s funeral.] Like the old blues players Billy tried to capture the sound of the train with that piece. It’s a great composition and the A train gave us in Brooklyn an opportunity to get up to Harlem much quicker.
“How High the Moon”: Musicians started playing that a lot in the 40s and 50s; it was the first piece I heard Lucky Thompson play and I loved it. I played with Lucky once in Brooklyn; what an honor!
“Body & Soul”: Coleman Hawkins, obviously. [Editor’s note: In African Rhythms Weston tells the story of how as a 12-year old in 1938 when Hawkins recorded his monumental version of “Body & Soul,” he ran out and copped three copies of the single with an allowance advance, playing two copies endlessly at home, with his record player on blast, tilted out his bedroom window to entertain the neighborhood, wrapping up the third copy for safe keeping.] What I do is in the beginning I play a melody based on the bridge of the piece before Billy comes in, which I call “Soul and Body.”
“Congolese Children”: Some of my early listening to African music came up in the Berkshires. I heard some music from the region around Lake Kivu [one of the African great lakes, which borders the Congo and Rwanda] in the Congo. That’s when I began to incorporate rhythms and harmonies of Africa in my music.
“Blues to Senegal”: The first time I took my band to Africa was in 1967, and our first concert was in Dakar. I heard Dou Dou N’Diaye Rose, the great master drummer who inspired me. My son Azzedine created a rhythm based on a Senegalese drum pattern that fit with this melody.
“Carnival”: Inspired by Bobby Benson [musician and owner of the Lagos nightclub Caban Bamboo], just being in his club in Lagos, it was like a carnival. The first time I recorded this was in Montreux; Billy [Harper] was there with Gil Evans, and Don Moye was there with the Art Ensemble of Chicago; they’re both on the record.
“Timbuktu” was inspired by several things: my father talked about Timbuktu as one of the great ancient civilizations and I always wanted to visit there. This piece is a combination of a prayer and the greatness of Timbuktu in the ancient times. The piece deals with sadness, love, history and dreams.
“Roots of the Nile” depicts the beginning of the Nile Valley civilization; it’s a tribute to the ancient people of the Nile Valley civilization.
“Cleanhead Blues”: I played two weeks with Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson up in Albany and it was quite an honor. Not only was he a great blues singer, he was a great saxophonist as well.
Billy Harper on The Roots of the Blues:
Billy Harper by Greg Turner
How did you meet Randy and what’s been your overall experience knowing and playing with him down through the years?
Billy Harper: I met Randy Weston during a European tour that I was doing with Gil Evans; this was in the 70s. We immediately joined our musical forces together and recorded an album called Carnival, a live performance at one of the main festivals in Switzerland. But the first genuine meeting was in Africa. I was invited as part of the Max Roach Quartet to perform at Randy’s festival in Tangier, Morocco. Although I did perform on saxophone – Max had sent the band ahead of time, but when the event started there was still no Max – so I played drums a bit; one such occasion was behind Dexter Gordon, and also Hubert Laws.
There are so many stories to be told in relating to the saga that involves the overall experience of knowing and performing with “Chief” Randy Weston, that probably the most significant one highlights the direction and values that are emphasized in the truth of understanding the history and origins of so much of Western culture, via the true birthplace of us all – Africa. As this awareness was passed down from Randy’s father, through the understanding of Randy, it has also been passed down to us – meaning all of the musicians, or for that matter all persons who have come in contact with Randy Weston – the supreme speaker and teacher of the “flame of truth” – whether the focus of the moment is the music that we play as “jazz musicians”, or the history that we live as “human beings” in this world. Our humanity is connected to music, and vice-versa.
What made you decide to play your piece “IF One Could Only See” as your solo saxophone contribution to The Roots of the Blues?
BH: It was at the request of Randy Weston himself that I decided to contribute my composition. This is a song that I played as a solo when Randy and I performed in duet recently in Japan at a spiritual shrine. This song was given to me, in a dream. In this dream, I was walking down Seventh Avenue in Manhattan and I was carrying an empty tape recorder. As I strolled along not really paying attention to anything, this humongous hand reached down from the heavens and there was a cassette tape in it! So I accepted the tape, placed it in the empty cassette player… and one of the most beautiful melodies was played. I woke up immediately and played what I had heard. I named it “If One Could Only See.” The philosophical meaning of the title is so vast that it explores the possibilities of the goal of perceiving truth (real truth) in all that we see, whether it relates to truth in life, love, history, events that are denied or distorted, events that have occurred and were thwarted, all those things that mankind has a tendency to hide. The truth can be seen through our hearts… if we can learn to use our hearts… if one could only really see.
http://jazztimes.com/articles/117598-randy-weston-billy-harper-raising-spirits-telling-stories
Randy Weston & Billy Harper: Raising Spirits, Telling Stories
Flowing through personal and cultural history
02/04/14
by John Murph
Telling stories is pianist Randy Weston and tenor saxophonist Billy Harper’s main objective on their joyous new duet disc, The Roots of the Blues(Sunnyside). The two veterans tackle 14 cherry-picked compositions, mostly from Weston’s oeuvre, that accentuate the legendary pianist’s long-established mission to invoke the spirits of the expansive African Diaspora. “I’m always trying to tell stories about African people—of our culture and our genius—whether we’re in the motherland, in the Caribbean or in the United States,” Weston, 87, explains. “We have so many stories to tell. I learned that from Count Basie, Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong. They [acknowledged] that we’re not just playing music, we’re keeping the foundation and history of our people and we’re telling stories about what’s happening with our people at that particular time.”
In addition to revisiting such Weston classics as “Berkshire Blues,” “Carnival” and “Blues to Africa,” the duo delivers poignant readings of the standards “Take the ‘A’ Train,” “Body and Soul” and “How High the Moon.” As with some of Weston’s compositions, those too aim at expressing specific aspects of African-American life. Regarding “Body and Soul,” Weston wanted to pay tribute to one of his earliest musical idols, Coleman Hawkins, with whom he got to record in 1959. The standard becomes an ideal vehicle to showcase both Weston’s thick, orchestral approach to the piano and Harper’s hefty tone and rhapsodic approach to melody. Their urbane reading of “Take the ‘A’ Train” evokes the giddy excitement Weston had when the namesake train became a fixture in New York City’s landscape. “Before [the A train], to get to Harlem from Brooklyn you had to change trains. So when the A train arrived, we could go directly from Brooklyn to Harlem and go the Apollo Theater,” Weston recalls.
Harper contributes only one composition, “If One Could Only See,” and goes it alone. It offers a perfect opportunity to luxuriate in his economical yet inventive melodic phrasing and his soulful timbre, the latter of which betrays his Texan roots. In fact, it was how Harper exudes that iconic Texas tenor sound that attracted Weston. “Sound is extremely important to me,” Weston explains. “When I heard Billy it was a combination of that big sound like Arnett Cobb and Illinois Jacquet. And at the same time, Billy told me that his sound came out of the black American church. He used to sing, and he puts his voice inside the horn. In addition to that, when Billy solos, he’s really telling stories.”
The Houston-born Harper attributes some of that Texas tenor legacy to playing in military bands, which required a full-bodied sound. “I think the real secret is that most of [the Texas tenors] were in the marching band, like me,” he explains. “So there was a necessity to play with a big, nice sound while you’re walking. That’s hard to do.”
Weston and Harper’s friendship dates back to 1972, when the pianist was living in Morocco, where he produced a jazz festival in Tangier. Weston invited Max Roach’s ensemble, of which Harper was a member. But when the group arrived in Africa, everyone made it except the leader. Forced to go onstage without Roach, Harper steered the group on drums; he also sat in on drums behind Dexter Gordon and Hubert Laws at the festival. The following year, Harper appeared on Weston’s LP, Tanjah, then later on The Spirits of Our Ancestors and Saga.
Although the two have collaborated intermittingly during the past five decades, they exhibit a tremendous rapport on The Roots of the Blues. Weston thinks it’s because they share a common musical heritage. “It just comes out. When we play together, we just go with the flow,” he says. “We know each other so we take spiritual trips together, because, for me, part of the music is always taking that chance—go with Mother Nature, because she’s always improvising and is always creating.”
“When Randy speaks, your awareness is just automatically expanded about understanding where cultures begin and how important this music is,” adds Harper. “Between meeting him [in Tangier] and the time we got to recording this disc, the music became just a compilation of information from myself and Randy—and of so many of his stories about history and the connections between music and spirit.”
Originally published in January/February 2014 issue
THE MUSIC OF BILLY HARPER: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH BILLY HARPER:
Billy Harper - "Call Of The Wild and Peaceful Heart"
Black Saint BSR 0001
1975
Black Saint BSR 0001
1975
Billy Harper - "Capra Black”
Capra Black (Strata-East) (1973):
Billy Harper Quintet - “Priestess”:
Texas-born composer and tenor saxophonist Billy Harper and his quintet, released on Soul Note, a co-label of Milan's other avant-garde label, Black Saint, in 1979. Musicians - Horace Arnold (Drums); Billy Harper (Sax); Fred Hersch (Piano); Everett Hollins (Trumpet); Louis Spears (Bass).
Oliver Lake Organ Quartet w/ Billy Harper - at The Stone, NYC - Oct 25 2014:
Oliver Lake - alto saxophone
Billy Harper - tenor saxophone
Freddie Hendrix - trumpet
Jared Gold - organ
Chris Beck - drums
Billy Harper - "Croquet Ballet”
From "Black Saint" (1975):
Billy Harper (Tenor Saxophone)
Virgil Jones (Trumpet)
Joe Bonner (Piano)
David Friesen (Bass)
Malcom Pinson (Drums)
Capra Black (Strata-East) (1973):
Billy Harper Quintet - “Priestess”:
Texas-born composer and tenor saxophonist Billy Harper and his quintet, released on Soul Note, a co-label of Milan's other avant-garde label, Black Saint, in 1979. Musicians - Horace Arnold (Drums); Billy Harper (Sax); Fred Hersch (Piano); Everett Hollins (Trumpet); Louis Spears (Bass).
Oliver Lake Organ Quartet w/ Billy Harper - at The Stone, NYC - Oct 25 2014:
Oliver Lake - alto saxophone
Billy Harper - tenor saxophone
Freddie Hendrix - trumpet
Jared Gold - organ
Chris Beck - drums
Billy Harper - "Croquet Ballet”
From "Black Saint" (1975):
Billy Harper (Tenor Saxophone)
Virgil Jones (Trumpet)
Joe Bonner (Piano)
David Friesen (Bass)
Malcom Pinson (Drums)
Billy Harper--"Soran-Bushi"
Billy Harper--Tenor saxophone
Everett Hollins-- Trumpet
Harold Mabern-- Piano
Greg Maker-- Bass
Horace Arnold-- Drums
Billy Hart--Drums
Recorded in 1977
Amiri Baraka and Billy Harper--”Africa”
(Composition by John Coltrane):
Billy Harper—"Knowledge of Self”-- (With Amiri Baraka):
Knowledge of Self (With Amiri Baraka)
Billy Harper Sextet
Blueprints of Jazz, Vol. 2. ("Amazing Grace")
℗ 2011 Talking House Records
Released on: 2011-01-23
Billy Harper - “Somalia”-- (Somalia, 1993)
Billy Harper (ts, cowbell);
Eddie Henderson (tp)
Francesca Tanksley (p)
Louie "Mbiki" Spears (b)
Horacee Arnold (d);
Newman Taylor Baker (d)
Madeleine Yayodele Nelson (shekere)
Gil Evans Orchestra— Japan-- July 1972 --Billy Harper Video: "Thoroughbred” (Composition by Billy Harper):
Piano-- Gil Evans
Rhodes-- Masabuma Kikuchi
Trumpet--Hannibal Peterson
Billy Harper Quintet
BMW Jazz Festival—Live performance in POLAND with voices:
Billy Harper -- "Light Within”:
Billy Harper's "Capra Black" featuring Billy Harper and the UMO Big Band Finland:
"Capra Black" - This composition stands out as the title track on Billy Harper's first album as leader. It is also featured on the album "Warriors" recorded by the Cookers in 2010. Here it is performed by a big band, arranged by Dennis Mackrel.
Billy Harper's "Dance, Eternal Spirits, Dance" featuring Billy Harper and the UMO Big Band Finland
Composed by Billy Harper and arranged by Mark Masters:
Billy Harper and the UMO Big Band Live in Finland on February 13, 2009.
(This composition also appears on Billy Harper's "Black Saint" album in a quintet setting)
Billy Harper Quintet (with voices)--"The Awakening"
(Composition and arrangement by Billy Harper)
Live performance in San Paulo, Brazil cathedral (Date unknown)
Billy Harper - "Soran Bushi", B.H:
Billy Harper Quintet July 1990 at the Pori Jazz Festival in Finland.
Billy Harper (ts)
Eddie Henderson (tp)
Francesca Tanksley (p)
Louie Spears (b)
Newman Taylor Baker (dr)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Harper
Billy Harper
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Billy Harper | |
|---|---|
Billy Harper performing at the Jazz Standard in 2007
|
|
| Background information | |
| Born | January 17, 1943 Houston, Texas |
| Instruments | Saxophone, flute |
| Labels | Black Saint, Strata-East, SteepleChase, Evidence |
Billy Harper (born January 17, 1943, in Houston, Texas) is an American jazz saxophonist, "one of a generation of Coltrane-influenced tenor saxophonists" with a distinctively stern, hard-as-nails sound on his instrument.[1]
Contents
Biography
In 1965 Harper earned a Bachelor of Music degree from the University of North Texas.[2]Harper has played with some of jazz's greatest drummers; he served with Art Blakey's Messengers for two years (1968–70); he played very briefly with Elvin Jones (1970), he played with the Thad Jones/ Mel Lewis Orchestra in the 1970s, and was a member of Max Roach's band in the late 1970s.[1] He has also been a frequent member of Randy Weston's ensembles, and in 2013 they recorded their first album as a duo, entitled The Roots of the Blues.[3] Harper performed on Gil Evans' 1973 album Svengali, and contributed two of the most-performed tunes in the band's repertoire: "Priestess" and "Thoroughbred".
Harper's 1973 album Capra Black "remains one of the seminal recordings of jazz's black consciousness movement--a profoundly spiritual effort that channels both the intellectual complexity of the avant garde as well as the emotional potency of gospel".[4] The Italian jazz label Black Saint was launched with Harper's 1975 album Black Saint. His later releases have mostly been on SteepleChase and Evidence.
Discography
As leader/co-leader
- 1973: Capra Black (Strata East)
- 1974: Jon & Billy (Trio) with Jon Faddis
- 1975: Black Saint (Black Saint)
- 1977: Love on the Sudan (Denon)
- 1977: Soran-Bushi, B.H. (Denon)
- 1979: Knowledge of Self (Denon)
- 1979: Trying to Make Heaven My Home (MPS)
- 1979: Billy Harper Quintet in Europe (Soul Note)
- 1979: The Awakening (Marge)
- 1980: The Believer (Baystate)
- 1989: Destiny Is Yours (Steeplechase)
- 1991: Live on Tour in the Far East (Steeplechase)
- 1991: Live on Tour in the Far East Vol. 2 (Steeplechase)
- 1991: Live on Tour in the Far East Vol. 3 (Steeplechase)
- 1993: Somalia (Evidence)
- 1998: If Our Hearts Could Only See (DIW)
- 2000: Soul of an Angel (Metropolitan)
- 2009: Blueprints of Jazz Vol. 2 (Talking House)
- 2013: The Roots of the Blues (Sunnyside) with Randy Weston
As sideman
With Art Blakey- Live! vol. 1 (Everest, 1968)
- Moanin (LRC, 1968)
- Intensity (Prestige, 1972)
- Charles III (Prestige, 1973)
- Blues in Orbit (Enja, 1969–71)
- Where Flamingos Fly (Artists House, 1971)
- Svengali (Atlantic, 1973)
- The Gil Evans Orchestra Plays the Music of Jimi Hendrix (RCA, 1974)
- There Comes a Time (RCA, 1975)
- Great Friends (Disques Black & Blue, 1986)
- Flute In (Blue Note, 1971)
- Consummation (Blue Note, 1970)
- Potpourri (Philadelphia International, 1974)
- Suite for Pops (Horizon/A&M, 1975)
- Priestess (Capri, 1990)
- Explorations (Capri, 6/30/2004)
- We Remember You (Fresh Sound, 1972)
- The Last Session (Blue Note, 1972)
- Lift Every Voice and Sing (Atlantic, 1971)
- Live in Tokyo vol.1 (Denon, 1977)
- Live in Tokyo vol.2 (Denon, 1977)
- The Loadstar (Horo, 1977)
- Live in Amsterdam (Baystate/RVC, 1977)
- Confirmation (Fluid, 1978)
- Love Dance (Muse, 1975)
- 47th Street (Delmark, 1996)
- Freebop Now! (Delmark, 1998)
- With Love (Mosaic/Blue Note, 2006)
- Emperor March: Live at the Blue Note (Half Note, 2008)
- Journey (Birdology, 1993)
- Tanjah (Polydor, 1973)
- Carnival (Freedom, 1974)
- The Spirits of Our Ancestors (Antilles/Verve, 1991)
- Saga (Verve, 1995)
- The Roots of the Blues (Sunnyside, 2013)
