Welcome to Sound Projections

I'm your host Kofi Natambu. This online magazine features the very best in contemporary creative music in this creative timezone NOW (the one we're living in) as well as that of the historical past. The purpose is to openly explore, examine, investigate, reflect on, studiously critique, and take opulent pleasure in the sonic and aural dimensions of human experience known and identified to us as MUSIC. I'm also interested in critically examining the wide range of ideas and opinions that govern our commodified notions of the production, consumption, marketing, and commercial exchange of organized sound(s) which largely define and thereby (over)determine our present relationships to music in the general political economy and culture.

Thus this magazine will strive to critically question and go beyond the conventional imposed notions and categories of what constitutes the generic and stylistic definitions of ‘Jazz’, ‘classical music’, ‘Blues.’ 'Rhythm and Blues’, ‘Rock and Roll’, ‘Pop’, ‘Funk’, ‘Hip Hop’, etc. in order to search for what individual artists and ensembles do cretively to challenge and transform our ingrained ideas and attitudes of what music is and could be.

So please join me in this ongoing visceral, investigative, and cerebral quest to explore, enjoy, and pay homage to the endlessly creative and uniquely magisterial dimensions of MUSIC in all of its guises and expressive identities.

Saturday, July 1, 2017

James Newton (b. May 1, 1953): Outstanding and innovative musician, composer, arranger, orchestrator, conductor, ensemble leader, producer, social activist and teacher


SOUND PROJECTIONS
   
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
    
EDITOR:  KOFI NATAMBU
    
SUMMER, 2017

VOLUME FOUR         NUMBER TWO  
 
JOHN COLTRANE  
Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:

EARTH WIND AND FIRE
(May 20-May 26)

JACK DEJOHNETTE
(May 27-June 2)

ALBERT AYLER
(June 3-June 9)

VI REDD
(June 10-June 16)

LIGHTNIN’ HOPKINS
(June 17-June 23)

JULIAN “CANNONBALL” ADDERLEY
(June 24-June 30)

JAMES NEWTON
(July 1-July 7)

ART TATUM
(July 8-July 14)

SONNY CLARK
(July 15-July 21)

JASON MORAN
(July 22-July 28)

SONNY STITT
(July 29-August 4)

BUD POWELL
(August 5-August 11)
 

http://www.allmusic.com/artist/james-newton-mn0000141805/biography 


 JAMES NEWTON
(b. May 1, 1953)



Artist Biography by


The African Flower

James Newton is a thoroughly contemporary artist, making elegant, sometimes eccentric, always high-minded albums that reflect a wide variety of jazz and classical influences without giving a fig about what happens to be popular at a given time. Besides producing a lovely tone quality, his flute work is highly resourceful, making use of flutter-tonguing, birdlike effects, and simultaneous vocal/flute lines, trying to push the envelope of his instrument. As a composer, Newton finds wellsprings of inspiration in John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, and Duke Ellington -- the latter whose music he transformed completely on the adventurous The African Flower album -- and he writes charts for all kinds of combinations of instruments. Newton's first musical experiences were on the electric bass as part of a Motown cover band in San Pedro, which he quit to form a Jimi Hendrix-style trio. However, he also picked up alto and tenor saxophones while in high school, not discovering the flute until he was 16. Heavily influenced by Eric Dolphy -- to whom he has been compared -- and Roland Kirk, Newton began to lean toward the avant-garde in jazz while studying classical music at Cal State Los Angeles. Soon after moving to Pomona, he joined a local band, Black Music Infinity, that was led by then free jazz drummer Stanley Crouch, with Arthur Blythe and David Murray as co-conspirators. Feeling the competitive heat on saxes, Newton decided to concentrate totally on the flute at age 22. A year after graduation (1978), he made a move to New York with Murray, where he hooked up with Anthony Davis on three LPs, played in Cecil Taylor's big band, and started recording as a leader on several small and large labels. He moved back to San Pedro in 1982 and started teaching jazz history, composition, and jazz ensemble at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. Over the years, Newton has also written several classical commissions for various-sized ensembles, and in 1990, he published a book, Improvising Flute. Alas, not enough of his recordings are currently available to give one a decent idea of his wide-ranging tastes.



http://www.jamesnewtonmusic.com/biography/ 

BIOGRAPHY


James Newton (composer/flutist/conductor)

JAMES NEWTON

Mr. Newton’s work encompasses chamber, symphonic, and electronic music genres, compositions for ballet and modern dance, and numerous jazz and world music contexts.

Mr. Newton has been the recipient of many awards, fellowships and grants, including the Ford Foundation, Guggenheim, National Endowment of the Arts and Rockefeller Fellowships, Montreux Grande Prix Du Disque and Downbeat International Critics Jazz Album of the Year, as well as being voted the top flutist for a record-breaking 23 consecutive years in Downbeat Magazine’s International Critics Poll.

In 2005 Newton decided to commence the greatest challenge of his compositional career – a trilogy of large-scale sacred works: a Mass, a St. Matthew Passion and a setting of Psalm 119. The Mass, completed in early 2007, received its premiere at the 2007 Metastasio Festival in Prato, Italy. Its U.S. premiere (an expanded choral version) occurred in 2011 with Grant Gershon conducting the Los Angeles Master Chorale at Walt Disney Concert Hall. Newton completed his St. Matthew Passion in 2014 and it received its World premiere, again with Grant Gershon conducting Coro e Orchestra del Teatro Regio di Torino, at the Torino Jazz and La Sidone Festivals in 2015. Mr. Newton is the first African American and the first composer rooted in the Jazz tradition to compose a St. Matthew Passion. His research on the final part of the trilogy, Psalm 119, will begin in the summer of 2015.

Described as a musician’s renaissance man, Newton has performed with and composed for many notable artists in the jazz and classical fields. San Francisco Ballet, Coro e Orchestra del Teatro Regio di Torino, Vladimir Spivakov and the Moscow Virtuosi, Anthony Davis, Jose Limon Dance Company, Dino Saluzzi, Zakir Hussain, Avanti Chamber Orchestra, Grant Gershon and the Los Angeles Master Chorale, Billy Hart, Gloria Cheng, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Henry Threadgill, the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group, Ensemble für neue Musik (Zurich), New York New Music Ensemble, Southwest Chamber Music, Jon Jang and Frank Wess among others.

Mr. Newton’s works have been performed at notable venues including Carnegie Hall, the San Francisco Opera House, The Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, Cité de la Musique Paris, France, Berlin National Gallery, Teatro Romano, Verona, Italy, The Walt Disney Concert Hall, Hollywood Bowl, RAI Auditorium, Torino, Italy, Blas Galindo Auditorium, Mexico City, Teatro Strehler, Milano, Italy, Theatre de la Ville, Paris, France, Parco Concert Hall, Tokyo, Japan, DIRECTV Music Hall, Rio De Janeiro, Severance Hall, Cleveland, Amsterdam Museum of Modern Art and The Whitney Museum, New York, New York.

Newton currently holds a distinguished professorship at the University of California at Los Angeles in the Department of Ethnomusicology. He has also held professorships at University of California at Irvine, California Institute of the Arts, and Cal State University Los Angeles. In May of 2005 Newton was awarded a Doctor of Arts Degree, Honoris Causa, from California Institute of the Arts.




http://www.jamesnewtonmusic.com/





“As in the seventeenth century, perhaps the composer and the improviser of the twenty-first century will coincide in the same person, now with a more complete awareness of his or her role in a global culture.  If all our diverse history and memory are welcomed to live in such a present, the horizon of peaceful co-existence between people becomes possible.  This generosity of vision on the path to a world music is Newton’s way.”

--STEFANO ZENNI

(translated by Pete Kercher, from the liner notes of the CD “As the Sound of Many Waters”, 2000 New World Records)
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“James Newton has forged an eclectic career as a jazz flautist, conductor and composer. Here, he demonstrates his skills as a creator of sacred music with hints of jazz and roots in the modernist aesthetics.”
--GRAMOPHONE MAGAZINE 

 
Jazz History Online
Retro Reviews

James Newton: "The African Flower" (Blue Note 46292)
by Thomas Cunniffe


In 1988, as my Senior Honors project at the University of Northern Colorado, I developed and taught a semester-long jazz history course. The musical examples for the course were included in a 23-cassette collection which chronicled the history of jazz from 1902 to the present. For the most part, selecting the 500 tracks for the tapes was fairly easy: between the unquestioned classic recordings and the ones I wanted to include, I usually had more music than would fit on the tapes, so the toughest part was figuring out what to omit. However, the final tape, which brought the music to the present day, was a little more challenging. I wanted to include musicians who were already established by 1988, and who I hoped would still be creative forces in the decades to come. Looking back at the playlist 28 years later, I picked well: Wynton and Branford Marsalis were well-represented, as were Terence Blanchard, Donald Harrison, Bobby McFerrin, and—performing as sidemen—Fred Hersch and Tom Harrell. The glaring exception was the track by flutist James Newton, taken from his Duke Ellington/Billy Strayhorn tribute album, “The African Flower”. Not only did I feel that Newton was an outstanding musician and arranger, I believed that many of his sidemen (including violinist John Blake, alto saxophonist Arthur Blythe, cornetist Olu Dara, vibraphonist Jay Hoggard, and drummer Pheeroan akLaff) would also become major innovators. At the time, it seemed a safe bet: “The African Flower” had already selected as one of the top albums of 1985, and all of the musicians were still very active on the jazz scene. The album also appeared on several best-of-the-80s jazz lists. However, few of the musicians on the album maintained their places in the jazz firmament.
Despite the varied fortunes of the musicians, “The African Flower” still holds up very well. Newton’s playlist includes selections from Ellington’s early days at the Cotton Club through his lesser-known works of the mid-sixties. Juxtaposing the familiar with the obscure, Newton’s arrangements retain the feel of the original scores. The opening track, “Black and Tan Fantasy” features Dara’s growling muted cornet and Newton’s flute in tight thirds over the jungle background of Roland Hanna (piano), Rick Rozie (bass) and Billy Hart (drums). Newton orchestrates searing backgrounds for Blythe and Blake, and there is a great explosion of sound before Dara’s personal (but still tradition-bound) solo. The band drops out when Hanna starts a funky stride solo. Newton takes over with a striking improvisation which he sings and plays simultaneously. The rhythm digs in as Newton builds his solo and segues into the stop-time final chorus of the composition. After the closing quote from Chopin’s Funeral March, Newton and Dara add a final wail to finish the arrangement. “Virgin Jungle” was my selection from the album for the jazz history tapes, and I still consider it the highlight of the disc. Originally a Jimmy Hamilton feature from Ellington’s “Concert in the Virgin Islands”, the work is a rarity in the Ellington/Strayhorn catalog, as it is built on a single chord. The Ellington version seems to run out of steam after 3 minutes or so, but the Newton arrangement harbors an abundance of energy throughout its 11-minute duration. Hart remains on the drum set with akLaff playing talking drums. After the opening drum duet, Newton’s setting creates an exotic atmosphere with plaintive calls on flute, bass and violin, followed by rich chords on vibes. The opening melody is delivered with brio by the front line, followed by a moody episode of collective improvisation. Hoggard plays a fluid opening solo in close consort with Rozie’s bass. Blake’s violin solo is intense and agitated with highly effective double stops. Newton keeps the intensity high, while only using the multiphonics on a few occasions. While the previous solos had featured a background figure based on the last phrase of the original melody, the group also reprises a little of the collective improvisation behind Newton. Blythe follows with a full-throated sound and melodic ideas that move between inside and outside playing, and then Dara closes the horn solos with an adventurous and mournful statement on muted cornet.
Newton connects the worlds of Strayhorn and Mingus for the last track on the first side, “Strange Feeling”, originally a movement from “The Perfume Suite”. Milt Grayson (the only musician on the album who actually performed with Ellington) provides a darkly-colored vocal over Newton’s highly vocalized arrangement. Ellington’s haunting “Le Fleuette Africaine” opens the second side. The rich colors come from the combination of Rozie’s fluttery bass line, and the delicate interplay between Newton’s pure flute, Blake’s lightly played violin and Hoggard’s understated vibraphone chords. Within a track of only four minutes, Newton, Blake and Hoggard each contribute remarkably complete and fulfilling statements. akLaff (now on drum set) fuels a brightly swinging jam on “Cottontail” which features an opening solo by Blythe which bursts with raw emotion, followed by a spritely duet between Hanna and Hoggard, and a final spot by Newton, where the flutist rides right on top of the beat as he propels the ensemble swing to ecstatic heights. “Sophisticated Lady” is an unaccompanied solo by Newton, and his performance—which excels on both a technical and emotional level—shows that he was a rightful successor to the legacy of Eric Dolphy. The album’s final track, Strayhorn’s “Passion Flower”, opens with a lush introduction by Hanna. After another deeply-hued passage by Newton, Blythe takes center stage, playing the melody originally intoned by Johnny Hodges, but with a harder-edged tone and none of Hodges’ trademark glissandos. Hanna contributes an impeccably-constructed solo in the center chorus, followed by another strongly vocalized ensemble passage. Newton plays a hyperactive half-chorus before Blythe returns to close the album.
So what happened to the members of this remarkable ensemble? For a few years, many of them continued their careers as expected, recording albums on their own and appearing as sidemen on others. In the early 2000s, things started to unravel for some of the musicians. Death took Hanna and Grayson in the first half of the decade, and Blake passed away in 2014. Blythe developed Parkinson’s disease (and a website devoted to paying his medical expenses can be found here). Dara collaborated with his son, the hip-hop artist Nas, but has not recorded a jazz album in several years. Hoggard’s website states that he has a new album out, but I have been unable to find a place to purchase it. Hart is still going strong, recording albums for ECM, and akLaff sells his current albums on his website. Newton recorded a superb follow-up album for Blue Note, "Romance and Revolution" (with a great version of Mingus’ “Meditations on Integration”) and had a highly publicized court battle with the Beastie Boys over a recording/sampling dispute. A long-time educator, Newton has recently turned his energy to composing sacred choral works, including a setting of the St. Matthew Passion. The most impressive connection to the Ellington/Strayhorn legacy has come from Anthony Brown, who plays maracas and finger cymbals on “The African Flower”. Brown’s Asian-American Orchestra recorded a dramatically re-written version of “The Far East Suite” incorporating several instruments from Japan and the Middle East. Brown’s settings represent the most significant expansion of an Ellington/Strayhorn work ever attempted. It is not for all tastes, but it is probably the greatest tangible legacy from “The African Flower”.

Content copyright 2017. Jazz History Online.com. All rights reserved.

http://www.harmonies.com/biographies/newton.htm 


Celestial Harmonies

James Newton

 

Poll-winning flutist James Newton stands in the forefront of a contemporary musical movement which continues to gather momentum on an international scale. Along with several others around the world, he leads the way in breaking down divisive categorical barriers while simultaneously creating a new and inclusive universal music.

Echo Canyon (13012-2), was entirely improvised on solo flute, recorded live, at night, outdoors, beneath a full moon, in the mountains northeast of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Over the years, Newton has completely assimilated music from America, Europe, Japan, India, Africa, South America, and elsewhere. On Echo Canyon, he spontaneously processed them through his personal psyche and transformed them. The whole of Echo Canyon constitutes an original world music, rhythmically free and lovingly connected with healing nature, that contains a near–perfect balance between intellect, spirit, passion, and form. Says Newton from his home in San Pedro, California: 
"I've composed and improvised many different kinds of music, disregarding the limitations of established stylistic categories. That's the way my art evolves, and that's the way I am a person.. I've always believed that the whole of the earth is a huge palette, and the cultures of the world are like colors. Most musicians use only a few colors. I like to use many different colors in many different ways."
Newton's musical/cultural odyssey began at an early age. He was born in Los Angeles on May 1, 1953. His father was a career army man, and James traveled with his family throughout the world. He listened to the urban blues, R & B, and gospel recordings his parents played. At the age of ten, he began listening to the Beatles and Marvin Gaye. In 1965, Newton sang and played bass in a seven-piece R & B group, and by 1968, he and his guitarist had formed a trio, playing Jimi Hendrix and other rock music.

 During his junior year at San Pedro High, Newton became interested in the flute. At eighteen, he entered nearby Mount San Antonio Junior College, and within two years he was playing European classical music eight hours a day. 
From 1973 to 1976, he played in a group that included jazz greats Arthur Blythe, David Murray, Bobby Bradford, and Stanley Crouch. Crouch introduced young Newton to the entire history of jazz, from early Jelly Roll Morton to contemporary Miles Davis. Crouch also introduced him to folk and classical music from around the world, including African Pygmy, Japanese shakuhachi, and Balinese gamelan music. 
At Cal State (1975-1977), Newton continued his studies of European classical music while playing jazz at night. In 1978, he moved to New York, where he lived intermittently until 1981, playing jazz with giants such as Cecil Taylor, Lester Bowie, and Anthony Davis. In 1982, he won his first Down Beat critics poll. In 1983 and 1984, he won both the critics and the readers polls. Newton has composed chamber music for piano, cello, and flute, performed by flute and string quartets and woodwind quintets; he has also composed for a variety of solo, duo, trio, sextet, octet and orchestral combinations.
James Newton continues to merge jazz improvisations and Eastern and Western classical music with a wide variety of world folk music. As demonstrated so well on Echo Canyon, the result is a fresh, new, higher consciousness music that taps into world cultures and historical time, addresses itself to the living present, and helps all receptive listeners grow towards a personally integrated, socially harmonious future. 

discography 


A Musician Writes It, A Rapper Borrows It: A Swap or a Theft?

 Music Notes written by a jazz musician and then used repeatedly by the Beastie Boys on an album are at the center of a debate on artistic freedom.

|GEOFF BOUCHER | TIMES STAFF WRITER

If You Can Feel What I'm Feeling
Then It's a Musical Masterpiece
But If You Can Hear What I'm Dealing With
Then That's Cool at Least
--"Pass the Mic" by the Beastie Boys


The embittered jazz musician calls it rhymin' and stealing. The shocked rappers argue that it's about a minor player manufacturing a musical controversy.


Either way, James W. Newton Jr. vs. the Beastie Boys is the latest example of hip-hop artists getting grief from musicians who view rap song collages as artistic shoplifting.

The heart of the matter is the Beastie Boys' song "Pass the Mic," which has a willowy, elongated flute sound rising above its cluster of rock instruments, breakbeats and turntable scratches. The exotic sounding tidbit, looped more than 40 times during the Beastie's track, is a six-second, three-note performance that the Beastie Boys clipped out of a 1982 recording called "Choir," a song written and performed by Newton, a professor at Cal State L.A. and former Guggenheim fellow.


Ten years after Newton released "Choir," the Beastie Boys released "Pass the Mic" on their acclaimed hit album "Check Your Head." Another eight years would pass, however, until Newton became aware that his impressive jazz resume now included a collaboration with the clownish but creative New York trio.


"I felt violated," Newton recalled this week. Newton found out when one of his jazz ensemble students casually mentioned that he had noticed Newton's name on the Beastie Boys album. Newton was skeptical until the student brought the CD to class. Then he was livid.


Samples of music, of course, are a hip-hop staple, and the Beastie Boys have always sprinkled their compositions with prerecorded music both famous (Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, etc.) and ridiculously obscure. Like other major hip-hop artists, though, the Beasties spend a considerable amount of time and money securing clearances for the music they sample.

So why was Newton upset, unaware and eager to sue? The answer involves the nuances of U.S. copyrights on composition and recorded performance as well as the fundamental importance of leaving a forwarding mailing address.

Newton's record label, ECM Records, tried to reach Newton in 1992 when the Beasties called to seek clearance on "Choir," but the musician had moved. Newton's contract with the label gave the company the authority to license out the recording and, a short time later, a check for $500 was mailed by ECM to Newton but came back as undeliverable.

Newton remained oblivious while the Beasties assumed they had taken care of the matter.

Newton and his attorney, however, argue that the Beastie Boys only did half the job. The group secured the sample as a recorded performance but they did not secure clearance for it as a composition. In basic terms, the performance clearance is for a musician's work, while the composition clearance is for the handiwork of the songwriter.

In the case of "Choir," the performer and composer is Newton, and via the copyright infringement lawsuit he filed in 2000 he claimed the Beastie's did not give him his due.


Proper Clearance

The Beastie Boys disagreed--they said the snippet was far too short and too simple to be regarded as a protectable piece of musical work. "We cleared the recording but did not clear the composition because what we used is three notes and three notes do not constitute a composition," Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys said this week. "If one could copyright the basic building blocks of music or grammar then there would be no room for making new compositions or books."

In May, U.S. District Court Judge Nora M. Manella agreed with the hip-hop stars and said the performance clearance secured by the Beastie Boys was appropriate for a shard of music that was "unoriginal as a matter of law."

Newton's attorney, Alan Korn, is readying an appeal now. He says Manella's decision is a chilling one for avant garde jazz, electronica and other genres where traditional notation and song structure do not lend themselves to easy analysis and charting in a courtroom.

A legal defense fund has been set up for Newton, who is also the conductor of the Luckman Jazz Orchestra, and a number of musicians and their organizations have spoken out on his behalf. The media coverage of the case to date has rankled the Beastie Boys who believe they have been portrayed as overbearing thieves looking to exploit a jazz academic. For a group accustomed to political and social advocacy and a well-known dedication to charity, it has been especially frustrating.

"Before spending a lot of money on the case we contacted Mr. Newton and offered him a generous out-of-court settlement in hopes of avoiding further legal fees," Yauch said. "He responded by telling us that the offer was 'insulting' and said that he wanted 'millions' of dollars. In addition he told us that he wanted 50% ownership and control of our song.... Mr. Newton's flute sound is just one of hundreds of sounds in our song. Giving him 50% ownership of our song seemed unfair."


The calculus of music creation is a common but tricky practice. There have been landmark cases involving rap sampling--most notably, Biz Markie's loss after using "Alone Again" as the core of a song--and its not unusual for sample-minded artists, such as Sean "P. Diddy" Combs, to split the profits of a song that hangs its hat on a previous work.

To Newton, "Choir" is a "defining presence" in the Beastie Boys song that borrows it. To Yauch it is "a drone in the background" that has "nothing to do with the central theme of our song." Either way, "Pass the Mic," remains a Beastie Boys favorite, popping up in their remixes, their live performances and a recent DVD release. All of it infuriates Newton who also has to swallow the fact that his "Choir"--which he composed as an ode to the spiritual music that inspired him as a youngster--has also made a cameo in the puerile "Beavis & Butthead" television series thanks to the show's use of "Pass the Mic."


"This is a work that celebrates God's place in the African American struggle for freedom in this country," Newton said. "And, for me, this has become a nightmare."


JAZZ REVIEW : Flutist Takes Audience on Thrill Ride : James Newton sometimes adds to his palette of sound by vocalizing while holding steady on his instrument.

February 25, 1991|BILL KOHLHAASE | SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

IRVINE — James Newton has never received the attention he deserves on his home turf. Though the San Pedro resident consistently tops polls as best jazz flutist and is acclaimed in Europe and on the East Coast for his compositional abilities, he performs infrequently here, usually in connection with his job as professor of composition and jazz history at the California Institute of the Arts. His well-received Blue Note recordings that honored the work of Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus were done in New York. His latest release, "If Love" on the JazzLine label, was recorded in Cologne, Germany.
Saturday, Newton was at the Fine Arts Center on the UC Irvine campus fronting a quartet as part of his current residency as the Chancellor's Distinguished Lecturer in Fine Arts. With the sympathetic rhythm section of pianist Kevin Toney, bassist Darek Oles and drummer Son Ship Theus, the flutist took the audience of 150 on a thrill ride of moods and emotions, proving that those accolades from a distance are well deserved.
Newton's "Nelson Mandela" is a good example of his compositional style, a blend of frontier-challenging adventure and traditional sensibilities. The flutist stood savoring the tune's soothing rhythmic pace before tearing off on a spirited theme that was broken by abrupt periods of stillness. The combo then wound its way through a mysterious-sounding passage, led by Newton's inquisitive flute, before the steam and sizzle of his solo.
Blessed with a clean, crisp tone, Newton sometimes adds to his palette of sounds by vocalizing over the flute, most often during blues-based passages. This isn't to cover for a lack of technical skill, which Newton has plenty of, but to color his sound and provide emotional depth. The flutist hummed, shrieked and buzzed over a wide range while he played, sometimes moving the pitch of his voice while holding steady on his instrument. The effect worked best when he added mid-range compliment to a similar flute pitch. At higher ranges, his falsetto occasionally broke into a tea-kettle-like irritating whistle or a shrill nag.
Cunning arrangements of Ellington's "Black and Tan Fantasy" and Mingus' "Sue's Changes" utilized a variety of moods and rhythmic frames for solos. Keyboardist Toney played with a hip modernism, matching intense runs with dissonant block-chord statements and surprisingly placed moments of quiet. Oles proved accurate and inventive, inserting double stops and chords strummed with his thumb on Newton's "Outlaw," a tune that recalls the quirky rhythms of Thelonious Monk's "Well You Needn't."
But Theus, a drummer who has worked with Pharoah Sanders and Horace Tapscott, proved to be the crowd-pleaser, turning cymbal-crazed solos into roiling tom-tom statements or overwhelming onslaughts against his snare. The drummer also shone in support, with percussive punctuation and seductive brushwork.
"Mr. Dolphy," Newton's tribute to the man (Eric Dolphy) he cites as his greatest influence and presented here as a duo with Theus, was the kind of energetic statement the late saxophonist-flutist was known for, and a chance for Newton to work at searing speeds. It's ironic that Dolphy, himself a Los Angeles native, had to move to New York before his pioneering ways were accepted. Let's hope Newton doesn't have to do the same.








Interview with James Newton

The following was done over the phone in late March and transcribed by Kevin Sun.


(Temporary notice: This Friday, the wonderful pianist Yegor Shevtsov is playing Newton “in the context of Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Boulez and Harrison Birtwistle.”




An excerpt of Shevtsov playing Newton is included at the bottom of this page.)


Ethan Iverson:  We’re speaking the day after Arthur Blythe left us.

James Newton:  Yes, we are. I’m flooded with emotion. I’m also overwhelmed with gratitude, and I say that because Arthur Blythe was one of the most giving people that I knew. I remember; specifically, I was playing in a jazz-rock group in Pomona. I was playing electric bass and I’d also been playing flute for a few years. Stanley Crouch lived across the street, and he said, “Your band sounds horrible, you should come hear my band, so next weekend, come hear my band and bring your flute!”

I walked into Stanley’s house, and it was Arthur Blythe, Bobby Bradford, Mark Dresser, and Stanley. (David Murray would join the band a few months later.) I sat down to listen, and I was astounded. I could hear the influence of Ornette a little bit in the shape of the music. But the other thing that struck me the most of all was just the genius of Bradford and Arthur Blythe together. It was astounding because their sounds were so significant, and they had such authority. This was about 1973, just before I think Bradford recorded Science Fiction or he had just recently done it with Ornette. Arthur was really into late Coltrane at that time. I’d never heard an alto that had that kind of weight on the bottom of the horn. It was like being in church. Trane had that thing coming out of a line of preachers, and Arthur had a similar sound in his music. The playing scooped you up emotionally, you found yourself in these spaces that were very rare and very precious and very powerful, emotionally. Hearing Arthur and then hearing this phenomenal logic of the construction of solos that Bobby Bradford would put together, where you could just see one idea and then another and then another and then the dialogue among the ideas! At this time they were playing solos for 15 to 20 minutes. When I heard them, I felt this is where I needed to be.

At that time I could barely play. I remember I asked Frank Wess about something once and I said, “Well, what did you think of that person’s playing?” And Frank Wess said, “They sound like a fart in a windstorm,” and I don’t think I was much better than that.

Everybody displayed incredible patience and gave me the opportunity to learn a lot. Performing with that level of musicians was something that had such a major impact on me. We stretched out a lot because everyone was so into Duke and the way the Ellington orchestra would hit your body was so important.

David Murray and I were just talking yesterday about how beautiful Arthur was as a human being, and you know, just a major artist on every level. And I love the things he did with Abdul Wadud and Bob Stewart, and Arthur’s work with Horace Tapscott in LA was really important. Arthur was one of the major musicians in the city before he moved to New York, and Arthur never forgot people. He was always doing things for other people.

When I came to New York, Arthur Blythe and David Murray set me up. Two weeks after I had moved in, I was at Columbia studios, doing the Lenox Avenue Breakdown recording and there’s Jack DeJohnette, Cecil McBee, Blood Ulmer, Guillermo Franco, and Bob Stewart, and wow! David Murray gave me a place to live. “Stay here as long as you need so you can save up enough money to move your family to New York.” That’s something I’ll never forget. So all of us were close, we looked out for one another, it’s something precious in my memory. David also arranged for him and me to do a month-long duo tour of Holland, which was my first European tour. The music soared.

Arthur Blythe: that’s the most compelling alto sound that I’ve ever heard in my life. I can say that without actually thinking twice about it, you know. The ability to seamlessly put together late Coltrane and Charles Christopher Parker, to make that work within a language is no small leap. He figured out a way to bring those two elements together and create something that was his own.

EI:  When you mentioned combining Bird and Trane, the first thing that comes to my mind is how they really were both bluesmen.


JN:  I’m trying to tell you! They used to call him “B. B. B.,” “Blues Boy Blythe,” you know?


I think that’s one of the things that was really stressed by both Bradford and Arthur. You had to have a close relationship to the blues and the feeling of the blues in the context of music that does not use blues form. Of course, Ellington is someone who laid it out for all of us who came after him. Also, we looked to Billie Holiday and so many others who took that approach and created art that will last for millennia and further.


So the blues was always, always in the equation. Also, a lot of us came out of the black church, and we could all hear it and feel it in Trane’s playing. I’ve thought so much about why Trane took his direction late in life. In one of the very last recordings, Expression, it’s like he’s partially coming back to changes again and including it in his previous explorations, and all of a sudden his search is coming full circle.


But what I love about Arthur is that I think he took that influence and figured out a way to do something that no one else that was touched by Trane’s music did. During that period in the 70s, Trane’s influence was probably as large as Bird’s was right after his passing, and so, yeah, Arthur Blythe, wow.


EI:  It seems to me that you’re saying a lot of music post-Coltrane influenced by Coltrane wasn’t so bluesy or connected to the church.


JN:  Yeah, in part. There were people who had those connections, and there were others who didn’t. On the other hand, I strongly feel that people should have the freedom to create in the way that they are motivated. I guess part of that mentality comes from the fact that I did not start reading music until I was 18 years old, and I did not pick up the flute until I was 16. I played by ear for a few years before I read a note of music, so I had to develop my ears. Mainly I was playing rhythm and blues, and I was also playing electric bass in a Hendrix cover band.


EI:  Ok, James so this is our cue to go back, why don’t you lay it out for us where you’re from, where you grew up, and how you got into music.


JN:  Sure. I was born in LA, May 1, 1953. We did not stay in Los Angeles for very long because my father was in the army as a career man for 20 years. We were moving all the time. I always said that I got used to the life that I lived as an adult because I had already lived that way as a child. We spent a lot of time in Germany; I remember living in Augsburg, Munich, Ulm, and Dachau. We lived in Dachau for about a year and a half; this was about 1962 and 1963. Death was still hanging like a cloud in the air. Death was pervasive. I was trying to deal with that and also trying to deal with images of American lynchings that I had seen in books and magazines. It struck me at a very young age that the lowest common denominator in humanity can drop insanely low.


Two things were gigantic in my childhood. The first is this: we would go home to the States to visit family. My mother was from Aubrey, Arkansas. (Oliver Lake is my cousin, and he’s from Aubrey!) We would go back home during the summers, and I’d have a chance to be on my grandparents’ farm, so that gave me a world of experience. I remember my father had bought a Gründig reel-to-reel tape recorder in Germany, and the word got out, and people would come to my grandparents’ farm to record. It was like my father was doing fieldwork! There’d be gospel quartets and blues singers coming to the house, and they were just thrilled to hear themselves played back on tape.


The first time that music touched me in a way I could not comprehend was in Aubrey when I was about four or five. Four women were singing a cappella in a church. They were singing spirituals, and I couldn’t recall the spirituals they were singing, but I remember my spine tingling, and I remember being transported to a space that I have been chasing for the rest of my life. I’ve always wanted to get there because it was maybe the warmest space I could imagine as a child. Nothing else felt like that, so I’ve been chasing that ever since both as a performer and composer.

And I remember another occurrence in Munich, Germany when our school went on a field trip (I can still smell the diesel fumes from the school bus) and I was 9. We went to a museum, and there was an El Greco exhibition. Seeing that art planted the seed for having a deep passion for visual art, which has continued to grow throughout my life.


The church thing and the blues thing from those experiences from down South, together with my passion for visual art, have forever changed me. They led me on a pathway. It took me a long time to understand the pathway. Sometimes you walk through life, and the revelation does not hit you immediately, it might hit you over decades. Then suddenly you arrive in this space where you have an understanding of what you’re supposed to produce as an artist. Your unique path becomes clear with a goal in mind to lay down something that is going to stand the test of time. It is a reflection of the things that are important to you: the passions that you have about artists that have influenced you and the way that you feel about your surroundings, about your family, about the political climate, how you feel about walking in nature and understanding why women and men are obsessed with trying to capture nature within the context of art for thousands of years.


EI:  What was your first instrument?


JN:  It was the electric bass. We came back to California before the riots; I remember being in South Central LA during the Watts Riots. Anyway, I started with the electric bass at 12 after my parents moved to San Pedro, Ca. I joined a rhythm and blues groups and was singing the high falsetto parts in three-part harmonies. Anthony Brown, the composer, multiple percussionist, drummer, bandleader in the Bay Area and an incredible scholar and a member of Asian Improv, was my childhood friend. We started working like crazy in a Hendrix cover band called Axis (how original!) after I left the R&B group. The Hendrix cover band’s repertoire consisted of compositions from Are You Experienced?, Axis: Bold as Love and some pieces from Electric Ladyland, along with some standard blues pieces. Hendrix has been a significant influence on what I’ve done. I still listen to him all the time. I think he’s one of the greatest orchestrators, the way he would layer the guitars and he’d have different effects on the different guitars impacted the way I approach orchestration. Hendrix also had a special relationship with the blues: This is somebody that studied both country blues and urban blues, and to this day, I can’t wrap my head around the conclusions that he drew from his studies at a young age. The way he used the blues to have a beautiful dialogue with all this experimentation that was occurring was another thing that I’ve tried to keep with me as I moved through the evolution of my musical language.
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There was a friend who played incidental music on the flute behind Death of a Salesman. That moment really hit me, and I said, hey, I want to play the flute. I was 16 and went to a pawnshop (on November 22, 1968) and got a flute that leaked like I don’t know what, but I just fell in love with the instrument right away and started practicing a lot. Eventually, I entered Mount San Antonio Junior College. My reading wasn’t that good, but by the end of the first year, I’d caught up with the people there, and maybe I moved forward a little bit more because I was practicing six to eight hours a day. I quickly learned to read because when you take so much music from recordings, you’ll hear a rhythm and you’ll say, I know that rhythm, and then you’ll look at the score, and you’ll say, “Ah, that’s what that rhythm looks like notated.”


I fell in love with Eric Dolphy’s playing and composing, and I sought out Buddy Collette to study. I studied with Buddy for at least 15 years. Even in the ‘80s when I was coming back to California from New York, I continued studying with him. I’d always come back to him to get tuned up. He was such a master teacher. Buddy Collette was still in my ear long after the early days. I’d see Buddy Collette being called to do classical saxophone gigs of contemporary music. He’d just put another mouthpiece on his instrument and make that mental shift. I remember hearing him playing a work of T.J. Anderson’s that I love, “Variations on a Theme by M. B. Tolson,” but man, what a piece and Buddy just killed it.

EI:  Collette taught Eric Dolphy, right?


JN:  Oh yes, he did.


EI:  Who else did he teach?


JN:  Charles Lloyd and so many others. Charles and I talk about Buddy Collette all of the time. Charles and I both are incredibly grateful for Buddy Collette because he was a musician’s musician. I love Charles, and I learned a great deal from him.


There’s a school, and I consider myself to be a part of it, and I’m very honored to be a part of it. Not just Buddy Collette but also Lloyd Reese, one of those seminal figures in Los Angeles music who taught Eric and taught Mingus. The way that I look at it, there’s a whole school premised on the fact that Art Tatum was in LA a lot during that time, and his harmonic thinking impacted a lot of the musicians here. Mingus and Dolphy were learning things about Tatum’s harmonies from Lloyd Reese. If you look at the essay Mingus wrote in Let My Children Hear Music; he discusses the fact that Lloyd Reese is breaking down a part of Stravinsky’s Firebird to him and he’s trying to figure out what the heck is going on. And, if we step back and look, if you have a circle with a 25-30-mile radius at that time, who would be within that circle? Tatum, Mingus, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Dolphy. All within that space!


Now let’s step back and go a little further. Jazz did not touch Schoenberg so much other than what he might have picked up from Gershwin, but Stravinsky had a relationship with ragtime and jazz for the majority of his career, and one of Schoenberg’s students was teaching 12 tone techniques to Buddy Collette and some other people. Mel Powell was similarly bridging the different communities for a different set of evolved reasons a few decades later. Reese’s tenure was so exciting. You have this beautiful wedding of traditionalism and experimentation occurring at the same time, and I’ve always tried to be between both the worlds, you know, and that model comes out of Lloyd Reese’s school. It also comes from Buddy, Eric, and Mingus and so many other people in LA in the late 40s and 50s.


A lot of people don’t know that there was a dialogue between Eric Dolphy and Bird when Bird was in Camarillo. One of the things that Bird had discussed with Eric that he wanted to get done was to have the ability to study with Varèse, and Eric kept that in himself. That’s just my humble opinion that he just kept it in his mind. He learned Varèse’s seminal flute solo, Density 21.5. Hale Smith took Eric to Varèse’s house in New York because he knew him, and after an extended session going through the work, Varèse signed a copy of Density 21.5 score, dedicated to Eric. It is in the Library of Congress.

EI:  James, this may be a tangent, but when I think about LA in the 40s and 50s, I also think of Hollywood and all that incredible music, where the musicians involved in many of the greatest film scores had to know something about jazz and know something about classical music.


JN:  It’s true. It’s entirely true. You had many film composers that were delving into contemporary classical music and jazz: I would say, you know, from early jazz up to postbop.


I’ll tell you a few things. There were segregated unions in LA. Buddy Collette and Red Callender — another significant influence for me who shaped so much of what I’m doing — helped to merge the segregated unions. Marl Young, Jerry Fielding, and Groucho Marx were important in supporting these efforts. There are always these absurd stereotypes: jazz musicians can’t read. Before Red came to Los Angeles, he was the principal bassist in the Honolulu Symphony. They were fluent in many different styles of music. One of the things that was always important about let’s say a particular LA school would be the ability to sit in some environments, including film, and be able to have all that music laid out in front of you and you sight read it with authority and stylistic flexibility. The ability to blend your sound with others was also stressed to a high degree.


Because I was a late bloomer and started the flute late, one of the things that Collette stressed over and over and over to me, and I have put a lot of time into, was sight reading. Another reason why I had to put a lot of time into it was that my father initially hated the fact that I decided to become a musician. One of the first things that he said to me was, “I didn’t’ work my way out of poverty for you to turn around and slide right back into it.” And he was very serious! When he found out that I was determined to become a musician, in his typical fashion, he did a lot of research and he said, “I heard you have to learn how to sight-read well.” He was right, it became very important, and it helped me a great deal in my career.


I’ll tell you another story that’s not well known that I learned from Mel Powell. When Stravinsky was writing Agon, he asked Conte Candoli to come to his house in Hollywood, because there were certain alternate fingerings for the trumpet that jazz musicians were using that he wanted to familiarize himself with to get certain effects that he incorporated in Agon. And Agon does not have an in-your-face jazz influence, as opposed to say the first movement of Symphony in Three Movements, which is just so full of jazz iconography.


But, yeah, so, I mean, there was this kind of hybrid musician that came out of the demands of Hollywood as well as the creative endeavors that were occurring in the African-American community during that time. There was also the impact of Los Angeles gospel, cool jazz, and R&B. It was a stylistically diverse period in the music.

Also, in LA, there’s an abundance of trees and nature everywhere. Birdsong orchestrated Eric’s neighborhood. Much later, Freddie Hubbard roomed with Eric Dolphy in Brooklyn, and Freddie told me how Eric would go up on the roof to practice and dialogue with the birds. I think the environment makes a difference, you know? So if you add that element to the equation, then you can understand that the music had to go a different way in L.A. It’s not like a hyper-urban environment in the Midwest or New York City or Baltimore. Different, like the musicians who came up out of the South who had a thing that was very specific having to do with the fact that there’s an in your face blues aesthetic occurring and spirituals and gospel music embedded in so much of that language. And just like, Dallas and New Orleans are going to give you two things that are different, but have significant commonalities having to do with how the roots of the music flourished within those particular environments.


L.A. has that thing, too, but it’s just in a different way. I loved it when Andrew Cyrille called Los Angeles, “Lower Alabama.” Yep. In other words, there are a lot of country people that were a part of the Southern migration to L.A.


EI:  After college, did you keep playing recitals of European classical music?


JN:  Oh yeah. I did that up until deep in the 1990s. I used to occasionally get with different people to play a lot of repertoire.


EI:  You must have had a graduation program or something, do you remember what that was?


JN:  For my senior recital, I played J.S. Bach’s E Minor Sonata for Flute and Harpsichord, Debussy’s Trio Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp, the Paul Hindemith’s Sonata for flute and piano, and the Ibert Flute Concerto. I still love listening to the Ibert. I love the Ibert even more because I heard from some of my elders that he came to America and upset a lot of folks because they asked Ibert who was the most important American composer and his response was Duke Ellington.


EI:  Nice!


JN:  A couple of years before he died, the Hollywood Music Society of Film Composers honored Toru Takemitsu. They asked him, who is your favorite composer, who has inspired you the most? And Takemitsu stood up, and he said, “Duke Ellington.” And I said to myself, “Aw man! That’s what time it is!”


I went through a period where I did a lot of solo flute concerts in the 70s and 80s, and in those concerts, I played works of my own. I might play pieces by Ellington, Monk or Mingus, and different colleagues of mine. But I would also play Density 21.5 by Varese, Mei or Requiem by Fukushima, Debussy’s Syrinx, and other classical solo repertoire mixed in.

EI:  Jolivet wrote some good flute music, right?


JN:  Yeah! I would practice his Concerto pour flûte et orchestre a cordes, and he also wrote a lot of amazing solo flute repertoire like Chant de Linos. I loved the polymodality in Jolivet’s music, and it’s also rhythmically compelling. He’s grown a little bit out of fashion, and that’s sad. Hopefully, he’ll have resurgence.


EI:  And then there’s Messiaen.


JN:  When I went through the music Dolphy had left with Hale and Juanita Smith. I learned a lot. I loved seeing Jaki Byard’s and Randy Weston’s music in the Dolphy collection. There were a lot of Latin composers’ scores. Dolphy was a Panamanian-American. He also had Messiaen’s Le Merle Noir. So Dolphy was into Messiaen a before he died in ’64. It is possible that Messiaen’s music could very well have inspired some of Dolphy’s own birdsong explorations.


It’s just incredible, looking at the journey of rapid development that Messiaen had, how he got a lot more specific about how birdsong worked and how he would translate it into his compositions. Then you can look the rapid development of Eric Dolphy, from the Chico Hamilton recordings when Buddy Collette got Eric that gig, to 1960. It is like the language is an exploding sonic boom. Getting back to the flute repertoire, Andrew White left us with accurate transcriptions of some of Eric’s solos, and they were harder than Berio’s Sequenza, the most challenging music in the classical repertoire of that timeframe. The transcriptions of Eric’s solo demanded so much more technically than the Berio.


So I connect Messiaen and Eric beyond the love of birdsong, there’s also this almost insatiable desire for expansion and development of techniques along with the celebration of faith and beauty.


When I was 19, and I heard the “Liturgie of Cristal” from the Quatuor Pour la Fin du Temps, that was one of those moments when I realized that I was in a space where art is playing with technique in profoundly new ways. The language is very different. It’s like you’re breathing rare air, and it took me a while to understand, “OK, I can hear the birdsong,” you know. I purchased the score quickly after hearing that first performance, and it stated, “Comme un oiseau,” “like a bird.”


There’s astonishing ability to be able to have these different planes of musical composition co-existing with independence among one another but still at the same time connecting. The harmonic cycle is different from the cycle of rhythms. I remember the rhythmic pedal has seventeen values and the harmonic loop consists of twenty-nine chords, and you have this incredible fluid birdsong that’s occurring in both the clarinet and the violin, and I believe you have a rhythmic pedal of five notes in the cello. I have to go back and look at that specifically, but one of the things is the color specificity of the musical language. The first chord starts with the double appoggiatura, resolving to an F13; and after the double appoggiatura occurs, the resolution is an F13 and check out this voicing: F G Bb C (left hand) each dyad a whole step apart, and in the right hand you’ve got Eb A D, combinations of fourths, one perfect and the other augmented. I’m going, “Whoa, wait a minute. What?” Those first two chords…it’s almost as if you do not need to hear anything else after that, they’re so profound! But it’s also those specific voicings; it’s the dynamics, it’s again the color specificity that just grabbed me to no end.


Then, in the next decade, the real birdsong revelation is dropped, and that is Catalogue d’Oiseaux, because Messiaen has observed the flight of birds in their environment and transformed that flight into musical lines. He’s dealt with a particular bird that was flying just above a lake near a cliff, and he also considered the time of the day that the music was written and other aspects of the environment. Just like other non-Western music performance must occur at different specific times of the day or evening. Messiaen pushed himself to a place where no one else could be, and very few people understood, you know? Yvonne Loriod understood where he was, but very few other people did.


Now let’s look at Eric. Everyone knows Eric loved Charles Christopher Parker to no end. You hear it in Eric’s language to the nth degree, but what he did was construct scales and modes that were his own, that he incorporated not only into the compositions but even more so in the way that he approached playing the changes, which sometimes means he’d play notes that some musicians thought were incorrect. But that’s what he was hearing. There was this beautiful and rigorous dialogue going on between Yusef Lateef, John Coltrane, George Russell and Eric Dolphy, where they were theoreticians of the highest order that were sharing their found information with one another and impacting one another’s art in profound ways, you know?

But with Dolphy, it’s not just the way that he approached harmony that was so unique, the choice of instruments was also unique. Look what he did with the bass clarinet! And he’s still my favorite flute player by far. His alto playing developed out of his love of Bird, Rabbit, Benny Carter and others.


He spoke Spanish also, which might have had an impact on part of the uniqueness and specificity of his articulation. If you go to the Library of Congress and you look at his scores, you’re going to see all these different modes and synthetic scales written underneath his compositions. Some people are thinking, “Oh, he’s just playing free.” Oh, no, not quite.


Both Eric and Messiaen…there’s like a shadow chasing them and they have to keep moving; they have to keep pushing the bar. If Eric would have lived to be 60 or 70, I can’t imagine what he would have been doing.

How many people in the music that you and I love, start off with an interval of three octaves and a half step? I’m talking about “Gazzelloni.” There’s so much Monk in his music. Monk’s harmonic voicings have a crystal clear clarity because of the way that he colors rhythm by accents, syncopations and a wide range of touches to the piano.


EI:  When you mentioned that Messiaen voicing, I thought of Ellington and Monk.
It’s that same kind of specificity, that same kind of resonance.


JN:  Oh let me tell you, you’re talking right on it. Those are my cats because of that specificity, you know? And also, the space of mind and heart to hear that specificity and run with it to define the human condition in the way that only they could do!


I stopped doing this, but I used to ask composition students to stand up and just say “I love you.” I’d have them yell it! Then I’d have them say it a little lower than yelling…then I’d have them whisper it. I did this to help them understand the change drastically in dynamics dramatically impacts meaning. The Basie band could play at such a whisper. The Ellington band could also perform at a whisper. That’s one of the things that just floored me about the MJQ: I loved it when that band played quietly with Milt hitting blues out of the park home runs. The harmonic colors become so gigantic, and the groove was swingissimmo!


I wish we could have seen Eric pushing to the limit as an elder statesman of the music. We did see Messiaen push himself to the limit when he created his opera, Saint François d’Assise. I think it took him six years to compose the music and two years for him and Yvonne Loriod to write out the parts from the score. Now that is commitment. Composing is not an art form that you can approach without realizing that if you’re going to do great things, you’re going to have to bleed — and you’re going to have to bleed a lot.


EI:  I know you’ve paid some heavy dues, James. Tell me more about becoming a jazz flute player.


JN:  My father loved Duke Ellington, and he loved the blues; my mother loved spirituals and gospel music, so that’s what I heard growing up. But I was also attracted to In a Silent Way, Bitches Brew, Live at the Fillmore, that was the music that I listened to when I was in high school, probably the music with which I was most obsessed. (I didn’t know at the time how much Hendrix had impacted Miles, and so that’s another draw in hearing the wah wah pedals and everything.) I bought Filles de Kilimanjaro, and I wasn’t quite ready for it at first, but it didn’t take long before I fell in love with it, so that was where I was coming from. I was coming out of Weather Report’s first and second albums. I was coming out of Mwandishi big time, when I heard them play at Donte’s in L.A., it was a life-changing experience. (There are two people in that band I’m now really close to, Billy Hart and Bennie Maupin.) I had heard Ornette a little bit, and I knew some of late Coltrane.

So the first day I’m spending time with Stanley Crouch and Arthur Blythe I’m just in awe. Stanley had an incredible record collection: I’m hearing King Oliver for the first time, I’m hearing Sun Ra in depth for the first time.

The first time I heard Debussy’s La Mer was when Stanley played it for me…


EI:  [laughs]


JN:  Yeah, that’s a kind of funny story because people do not associate Stanley with Debussy, they always laugh at that.


This was also the first time I heard the music of the forest people of central Africa. I became obsessive about that music because of its inherent spirituality and deep beauty. I also found out Eric was into it, and long before learning that this is music that drew Ligeti’s attention and others. Eric and Trane were learning the beauty, mystery, and deep intellectualism in the music and culture. I always thought that this music was one of the reasons why Eric’s musical language utilizes so much octave displacement. Of course, his music was also inspired by Monk’s use of octave displacement.


The other crucial gift of that period was hearing Bobby Bradford talk about the history of our music. Bradford is one of the most brilliant scholars that I know. I put Bobby and Billy Hart in the category of being teachers whose level of discourse is in the stars, with an ability to break down so many different elements of music and culture in a provocative and profound manner.

Bradford would talk about different articulations. He’d say, 

“Man, isn’t that funny, that opening phrase of ‘Half Nelson,’” and he’d give you the articulation for it. All of these experiences impacted my flute playing immensely.

Different people would come through Stanley’s house: John Carter, who became a close friend, mentor, and collaborator. David Baker came through playing rich, imminently melodic cello, which was a beautiful experience. Mark Dresser’s teacher Bertram Turetzky came through, and we played with him. His bow work was astounding, as was the rapport between Burt and Mark! Butch Morris also came through playing cornet (heavily influenced by Don Cherry) and bringing some beautiful compositions.


I also just learned so much from Stanley during that period. He would talk about literature a lot, and I was a sponge. I remember a time when four of us were living in a house together in Pomona, David Murray, Stanley, a lady by the name of Monica Pecot and myself. Outside of working and going to school, it was, you know, nonstop creation.

Stanley was incredibly patient with me and gave me a lot of love. He was a very important mentor for David, Mark, and me. When he said, “OK, you can come back next week,” it was the most joyous thing to hear those words.


I said I would bring my amplifier and my microphone. Stanley said, “F– the microphone, F– the amplifier! You put some F–ing wind in that flute!” And it started to make me think about having a big sound that could project and stand up next to the alto, stand up next to the trumpet (or Bobby was playing cornet) and have that kind of power. So that was something I worked on extensively.


Like I said, to hear Bobby Bradford and Arthur go at it: OK, this is what you have to begin to think about to construct a solo. Even though I could not do it at the time, I began to understand that these were some of the parameters about which I had to be thinking.


Eventually, they all moved to New York. I came a little later, and they all looked out for me.


EI:  Of course, these New York years would prove very fertile, there would be a lot of recording, a lot of projects, and a couple of records that stuck out to me feature Abdul Wadud.


JN:  Yeah, man!


EI:  I think he’s kind of a special musician of quite remarkable qualities. I thought maybe I could get you to talk about Abdul Wadud a little bit.


JN:  I LOVE ABDUL WADUD! Let me now tell you something. Let’s go back to the blues. Wadud knew how to play the blues and had a deep feeling for it. It’s like if you could imagine Robert Johnson playing the cello, there it is, you know?


Then let’s go to another extreme: I remember when we did Anthony Davis’s piece, Still Waters, written for the trio, with the New York Philharmonic.


(We were all impacted by Toru Takemitsu’s music. Takemitsu wrote a piece for Tashi and then created a second version with orchestra entitled Quatrain. That was similar to what Anthony did: Still Waters could be for a trio or work with trio plus symphony orchestra.)


We were on the stage at Alice Tully Hall. We walked on the stage, and the orchestra was like, “OK, who are these guys?” Almost always, when you work with orchestras, you get to the point where you have to prove something to them. There are very few times when you get the support you need right away. You need to prove to them that you know what’s going on, and you know how to navigate in that environment in a way that can make the music can happen. OK, we started rehearsing a lot of written passages with them, and after about 15 minutes into the rehearsal, the principal cellist says, Mr. Wadud, could you please tell me the fingering that you’re using for that particular phrase?” Then, it was over. We had won! The orchestra could not believe the three of us. They were like, “Who are these cats? How come we don’t know about them?”


If I had to pick five musicians that I have worked with in my life where I cherished the experience of working with them, Wadud would easily be on that list. He’d probably be in the top 3. He could work with so many different composers; he is a composer himself, he is a complete musician and so stylistically diverse and can articulate so many different styles of music with full authority. And just a cat that is so much fun to be around. I read something recently where he said, “Anthony Davis and James, those are my boys!” Well, he’s our boy! I could not imagine the cello doing what it was able to do in Abdul’s hands and hear something else. In that trio we would push each other, and some of the stuff that we demanded the other to play was close to the edge of impossibility. The improvisation impacted the composition, and there was a fluidity. There was almost exponential development with that Trio. I still have in my mind a concert we did in Basel in the early 80s. It was one of those nights where the music was almost perfect. I can’t think of any other experience where I felt that was the case. There was always this long list of things that I think each of us felt we could have done a lot better, but these cats and what we had together was special. And, I think the strongest component in that equation was Abdul Wadud. I really do.


EI:  I’ve Known Rivers is great, and if you know this music, it’s known as a classic record. But another cut that is special is the duo of you, “The Preacher and the Musician,” from Portraits, That’s an extended composition that covers a lot of area and flute and cello, it’s a vulnerable situation, but it’s a very compelling listen.


JN:  Thank you, I appreciate that very much. I wrote it for a preacher friend, Dwight Andrews, who did a lot of work with some musicians like Wadada Leo Smith, Geri Allen, Jay Hoggard and many others. He’s an amazing human being and a great inspiration


“The Preacher and the Musician” has a lot of different influences. The swing sections reflect the influence of Monk, and at the end, I was thinking about this incredible duo composition, The Jet Whistle by Heitor Villa-Lobos, that was kind of mixing some of those Brazilian elements with my compositional take on American blues and Brazilian saudade. That’s the thing about Wadud; he was comfortable no matter what diverse places you might go for inspiration.


He is a real master of the bow. The bow is connected to singing. Some cellists can kind of be near Sarah Vaughan and her airstream, which produces a dizzying array of subtle nuances and various speeds of vibrati. I love that Tomeka Reid is moving the cello forward in the younger generation with her enriching, distinctive style.


EI:  There’s a lot of records from this era. We won’t be able to go through all of them right now, but I’ll keep listening of course.


Stanley was the voice for this scene; he wrote liner notes for you and David Murray, and then perhaps there’s a change when the Marsalises come in. I wasn’t there at the time, but it feels like that there was a big shift of where the conversation was in terms of what was important in the music.


JN:  I always felt that there’s room for stylistic multiplicity. People can develop in different directions. Not everybody is going to be a Miles Davis. If we look historically, some great artists have chosen a primary style and focus and stayed within the area where they were once the innovators. I’ve always thought that that is valid. Then there are people like Mary Lou Williams, Randy Weston, Coleman Hawkins, who go through the different eras and embrace the innovations that occur and are comfortable with them. We can think about Max Roach, Eric Dolphy, and Coleman Hawkins playing together in the 60s, or Hawk and Sonny Rollins with Paul Bley, or Mary Lou Williams and Cecil Taylor.


In the 80s, we have to look at what was occurring politically. There have always been periods where things are really conservative or unwelcoming to innovation. At one point there was a migration of musicians, who were living in New York, moving to Copenhagen and other cities to be able to survive and to develop their art. We know that Tootie Heath, who we both love to the nth degree, also spent some time there.


EI:  Tootie told me directly that he felt like he couldn’t live in America anymore at that moment.


JN: Yeah. I know the feeling. There’s been a lot of investment in trying to make this nation a better place, but this is a very distorted period right now. I have my family here, and my roots are here, but if it weren’t for those factors, I might have considered making a change.

It is a shadow-filled period, but the Reagan era was a challenging time also, and I think those challenges permeated an attack on the innovative aspects of the art form.


In the first live Young Lions recording, there was a lot of diversity. A lot of different musical styles coexisted, but I think what happened is that fewer of the major press covered the avant-garde. I can remember before the Young Lions concert, Newsweek magazine printed a feature on David Murray, Anthony Davis, and me, with President Kennedy on the cover. There were also things in Vanity Fair that would crop up that would garner a lot of attention.


EI:  Henry Threadgill did an ad for Dewar’s Scotch.


JN:  Oh yeah, now we’re talking about one of the great geniuses of the music. I heard Air when I first moved to New York in 1978, I think it was February, Charlie’s Beefsteak House, I sat there and listened to three sets, and I said, Well, maybe I need to go back home to LA and practice another six months and then come back. I mean, they scared me to death. The music was that great, and I felt like that band was golden, and it should have flourished.


But people like Threadgill, Geri Allen, Anthony Davis, Jane Ira Bloom and some other artists stated, “We are composers.” And that was part of the difficulty. The focus in the early days with a lot of the more conservative Young Lions was on playing standards. They did write their own music, but …


EI:  But not experimental music…


JN:  …Not experimental music, and we were not ready to let experimental music die on the vine because there’s a conservative shift in what’s receiving attention. The good news during that period was that you could work like crazy in Europe. There were 100s of boutique jazz labels that afforded you the ability to document your music. Over here, Bob Cummins of India Navigation and Jonathan M.P. Rose of Gramavision displayed broad tastes, both paid royalties, and Rose recorded the musicians at a very high technical level and did not sweat on making sure that the music was documented in a very sophisticated fashion…

…But what are you going to do? The shift occurred. I felt very blessed, I felt very fortunate, and some other people were able to do really well, but let’s talk about some of the pain because I think we do have to address the pain. There were attacks on Anthony Braxton that I would put in the category of being just downright cruel, and that bothered me to no end. He is my friend, and his music has consistently been a source of great inspiration. The environment became: either you’re doing it like us, or it’s not happening. There was some manipulation occurring. Being an artist of color is tough in this society. Being an artist in society is difficult, to begin with, as is the struggles that exist for women in the music. Women artists of color have to face both the pervasive racism and the sexism that exists in our society.


Marsalis’s critique of Braxton had an impact on Braxton’s livelihood for a period. This is a man who had the responsibility of co-supporting his family with his wife, Nickie. Braxton really broke new ground. We need people that are on the front line taking chances; otherwise we wouldn’t have Duke, Billie Holiday, Monk, Mary Lou Williams, Gil Evans, Jon Jang, Nicole Mitchell, Steve Coleman, Jason Moran, Kei Akagi, Jen Shyu, Craig Taborn, Aruan Ortiz, and others. Marsalis is a great trumpet player whom I’ve heard on the stage at Carnegie Hall playing side by side, nothing but respect; this guy is playing the mess out of the trumpet. But there’s room for everybody to do what needs to be done, and a dominant agenda in jazz stylistically is like bringing Coca-Cola to a five-star dinner, rather than an excellent vintage of Château Lafite-Rothschild.


This period was also personally challenging because Stanley and I often found ourselves in opposition politically and in our views about what should or should not be happening with the music. Our friendship has remained because we have a bond that goes back to those early days and most of all, Duke Ellington is number one for both of us.


Back to the cultural divide between traditionalism and experimentalism: when I did look back, I saw something different than some of the traditionalists. Innovation has always been the focal point of the tradition. Look at all the different styles of music that Jelly Roll Morton put together to lay down the compositional foundation for jazz. It came out of Scott Joplin (the original blueprint) but also so many other aspects of his unique view of his hometown and his travels throughout the nation. He mixed Blues, Ragtime, French and Italian Opera, and many diverse dance forms. What is called jazz has always been multicultural and has had a fluidity with mixing (on every level) that has always been far ahead of society in which it was created.


In the early 80s, there were times when a lot of us just said, well, we’ll have to spend a little bit more time on the airplane and the trains, and we did fine. As we got further into the ‘80s, there were some tough periods. In 1985, I was a guest artist at Cal Arts. We performed a lot of music from the Luella recording. John Clayton played bass so beautifully; he had just come from Amsterdam where he was principal bassist in one of the orchestras there. The students started a petition for me to join the faculty and I started teaching. I knew that I would lose a lot of money by giving up touring for part of the year, but I knew that long term, it would be the right decision and that’s turned out to be true. Most importantly, it provided me with the gift of being able to have much more time for my family.

And in those first few years at Cal Arts, here are some of the students that I taught: Ravi Coltrane, Ralph Alessi, Scott Colley, Willie Jones III, Marcus Shelby…I can just go on and on, Pedro Eustache, who’s an incredible flute player. I studied with this guy as I was teaching him because he was so great. So I realized that there was a lot I could learn in 
 the teaching process.


EI:  In 1984 you made an epic and virtuosic recording called Echo Canyon, which is flute composition and improvisation with crickets and other natural nightlife heard clearly in an amphitheater. I feel like there’s some kind of Afro-American patterning that I can recognize as sort of American Black Experimental Music. Braxton, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra.


JN:  There’s a lot of discussion now about Afrofuturism, that captures part of what you’re discussing. Hendrix is also in that equation of Afrofuturism. If we look at what Sun Ra did, it was amazing. They had to make sure Sun Ra got one of the first Moogs. Sun Ra had something really special to give the world. And I remember in 1978 in Pisa, Italy, I opened solo flute for the Sun Ra Arkestra in the amphitheater. After my set was over, you know, I was able to spend time with the band that was so beautiful and I got to know different players in the orchestra. It was very powerful and very compelling. I remember another time where Ra held court on a flight from New York to Amsterdam, and we had about a four-hour bus ride to Groningen (I was with David Murray and Anthony Davis), and I just sat there, I barely said a word, I just sat there and took it all in.


Cecil Taylor. Ah, man. Unit Structures, Conquistador, those were really important, as were Indent and Spring of Two Blue J’s, those two solo recordings.

That’s my culture. It’s who I am. But my parents always taught me; if you can learn from something or someone else, learn it. On Echo Canyon, there are cuts that are impacted by the Japanese shakuhachi tradition, and the imprint of Toru Takemitsu’s November Steps, where he puts the shakuhachi and biwa in front of the orchestra instead of forcing them to come together still lasts within me. He has them in contrast, not wanting them to come together; he wants the foreignness of the orchestra to hit the shakuhachi and the biwa. Now that’s a conception I can live with! Watazumi Dōso Roshi was a shakuhachi player who had a control of his airstream that served as a great model for me in controlling my airstream as a flutist.


EI:  This makes me think of the orchestras of Ellington and Mingus where outrageous characters have their own existence within the symphony in a way that you usually can’t have in European music.


JN:  You’re so right. Cat Anderson in that “Madness in Great Ones” in Such Sweet Thunder. Oh my Lord!

Cecil Taylor had a big band. We rehearsed for three and a half weeks. I sat next to Steve Coleman in the band, and he knew everyone’s part and his own because the music was transferred orally. Now, we’re actually getting somewhere. That’s the kind of thing that almost became taboo during that period in the early 80s.


That never bothered me! If musicians wanted to say, “Hey, I’m not so comfortable with writing out music, I’m going to teach the piece to you by ear,” what’s wrong with that? That’s part of the history, that’s a part of the tradition. Now, Cecil’s scores were letters going up and going down as the pitches were rising and falling, and they exhibited his incredible calligraphy. So we learned his music. He would play it; then we would figure it out and know what the rhythms were. One time, he said, “OK, you play this line like this, then I want it to go retrograde,” and one of the musicians said, “What is retrograde?”


I jokingly said, “You don’t know your Schoenberg? What’s up with you, man?”


There’s a way that people say, “This person can’t play because he or she cannot do this or do that.” But my attitude always has been, “Well, let’s look at what it is that they can do, you know?”


EI:  I think there’s a Duke Ellington quote about this as well.


JN:  Mmm, I really would love to hear that.


EI:  I don’t know it exactly, but something like, “If the man can only play this one Bb well, then write that one Bb.”


JN:  Yeah, exactly! Plus look at how much music of Duke’s happened at the end of a recording session, when he needed another piece, and he would say, “Rabbit, I want you to do this.” “Rex, play this.” There’s nothing wrong with that, as there’s nothing wrong with coming into a place and reading a whole lot of music because that’s what the composer desires.


EI:  This is the transition to the next section, James, because at some point you began producing written scores for European classical musicians. Not too many other major jazz players more or less put down their instrument to became a completely erudite formal composer.


JN:  Well, how blessed was I to have Hale Smith as a mentor, you know? And I think we can also go back to Lloyd Reece. Gunther Schuller used to talk about the scores that Mingus would write for orchestra, The Chill of Death and other pieces, so this was just something that LA composers would do. I know you’ve covered George Walker. My friend Anthony Davis: Malcolm X and Still Waters, inspired me when we performed it with the New York Philharmonic and the Brooklyn Philharmonic. But then there is Florence Price, Margaret Bonds, and so many others. Olly Wilson was another important mentor.


I have to tell you something really heavy: I met William Grant Still when I was about 19 or 20. Another composer Eugene Hemmer that knew him well took me to his house in Los Angeles. I had just written my first string quartet at the age of 19; it was 12-tone. We talked, and there were times when he would say, “Excuse me,” and he would talk to someone else in the room that I could not see. And then he would come back into focus; I mean the focus that I could understand. He might have been in more focus when he was talking to people who weren’t in the room. This struck me. I only had about an hour in his home in Los Angeles, but that experience planted a lot of seeds.


I always listened to a lot of classical music. I felt that moving from improvised to through-composed music is like moving from mixed media or painting to sculpting. There’s something else that can be defined by that specific process shift. Steve Lacy said that the difference between composing 15 seconds of music and improvising it is that you have one chance to improvise it and you have all the time in the world to write 15 seconds of music. I think about that a lot. Mingus said that composition is improvisation slowed down. (I’m paraphrasing both of them.)


Of course I also listened to Duke and Mingus and Mary Lou Williams a lot, and some other people that I’ve been crazy about through the years. What I started to think about as I’m putting this together is: how much I love Duke Ellington, even though I’m operating in a through-composed environment (which he did sometimes create in, not often, but sometimes he would go there, to that space, to get something specific, and Strayhorn certainly would at times also). I felt a need to get that other part of me out. I’m a lot of musicians in one musician, and I wanted to also contribute to that long line of composers that I discussed. Messiaen influenced me, yes I’m influenced by Stravinsky, Ligeti, Toshio Hosokawa, love Toru Takemitsu, Verdi, and Mozart. Henri Dutilleux: his harmony and orchestration just kill me; I’m so into this cat, you know? There are just so many different people from whom I’ve learned.


But then we run up against it. To get my major works done, I’ve had to go to Italy most of the time, or other parts of Europe. It’s very difficult to get my work done in the States. Outside of Wynton Marsalis, I can’t think of any African-American composer that’s getting played all of the time in the United States in the idiom that we’re discussing. It’s like you run up against a brick wall. A number of my mentor composers have faced that, but there was a period in the 60s and 70s where the big five felt a need to program the best African-American composers. I remember Gunther Schuller conducting the New York Phil in Hale Smith’s Ritual and Incantation. That rarely happens anymore.


EI:  There wasn’t even a 90th birthday celebration for George Walker.


JW:  That’s unbelievable.


At the same time, occasionally, it is not about color. If we think about the way Bartók struggled in our country at the end of his life, we know that composers just have a hard time, period.


But often it is about color, or it’s about gender. In both these areas, we still have a long way to go.


But you know what, this is not going to stop me from writing the music that needs to come out. You get research funds from the institution that you work with, and that’s certainly helped, for example in the case of the large-scale St. Matthew Passion. But I’m compelled to compose this music. The research money isn’t enough; it is what I feel inside.


You recommended Yegor Shevtsov for my piano pieces. We just recorded: he played them so beautifully, he was well prepared, and he embraced the stylistic multiplicity. I feel vindicated when I heard his performance of those piano pieces because some people did not want to take the time to learn them. And that’s just where you have to have the strength to know the value of your music.


EI:  What was your first larger piece that was through composed that you were satisfied with and got a premiere of?


JN:  Hmm, that’s a good question. I’d probably say the 91st Psalm, which was done on my 30th birthday at the Music Center in Los Angeles with the New American Orchestra, which was an orchestra that did film music and commissioned creative composers. The 91st Psalm, it was for lyric soprano soloist and piano soloist. It was a sister and brother duo (Gwendolyn and Cecil Lytle) and in the orchestra were heavy Hollywood studio musicians that had deep classical music training like great flutist Louise DiTullio: she recorded with Stravinsky and so many others, she was so great, man could she play. I’d say that was the first one.


Getting back to Mel Powell: While I was at Cal Arts, Mel gave me some very good advice about structuring the music and thinking about form in multiple ways. He would sometimes take me and say, “James, come into the room for a minute,” and he’d take out a Brahms Intermezzo and play it and he’d break down the form, and he had a lot of interesting suggestions. The other beautiful thing about him was that he was so soulful. Both of our works premiered during an Ear Unit concert. That was meaningful.


There’s a huge body of music that I’ve been blessed to have come through me. The encouraging news is that Grant Gershon and the Los Angeles Master Chorale are going to conduct my Saint Matthew Passion at Walt Disney Concert Hall in 2019. We’re more than halfway now on this new chamber music CD, and I’m really pleased, there’s a solo trumpet work, performed by Daniel Rosenboom, and now 30 minutes of piano music. There’s a solo harp piece that’s going to come next, then some chamber music pieces that we’ll get done between now and the end of the year.


EI:  This is all great news. If I can, I’m going to travel out to Disney Hall and see the Saint Matthew Passion, James. It’s an incredible work. I’m touched that you sent me a copy of the score with a dedication, I really treasure that!


JN:  Thank you.


EI:  I don’t think the recording on YouTube, while well worth hearing, actually does complete justice to the score.


JN:  It is the first performance of a large work, which breaks new ground rhythmically and culturally. It is a challenge that traverses the distance across music inspired by spirituals, actual spirituals and jazz-inflected contemporary music that demands many cultural shifts from the performers. Teatro Regio di Torino is a beautiful opera company full of great players and a remarkable chorus. The rhythms in the Passion are written very specifically, and the polyrhythmical language is something that takes time to understand. I thank Stefano Zenni (the curator of the Torino Jazz Festival) and Alessandro Galoppini (director of the artists for Teatro Regio di Torino) who worked hard to support the premiere because of the value that they saw in the work. The musical director Giancarlo Noseda and his wife were also incredibly kind. We learned a lot from that initial performance and we have a good idea about things to focus on in the next. New works that traverse new territory can take time to fully reveal themselves. We learned so much during the rehearsals and premiere. I am also happy to state that almost no score revision was needed after the premiere. Grant Gershon will continue do a really great job with it the second time around, and the singers in the Los Angeles Master Chorale are very flexible. They performed my Mass in their 2011 season at Walt Disney Concert Hall. I am so grateful for the support of Teatro Regio di Torino, Grant Gershon and the Los Angeles Master Chorale.

We performed Duke Ellington’s Sacred Concert music in 2004 at Disney Hall. Grant conducted the Los Angeles Master Chorale, and I conducted the Luckman Jazz Orchestra. It made a lot of sense to co-conduct many sections so that proper focus could be given to both the choir and jazz orchestra. Oh my goodness, it was just a phenomenal experience. Then we did the sacred music of Mary Lou Williams in 2006 with a few of Ellington’s sacred works. The pianist in the orchestra, Lanny Hartley, did a great job orchestrating different sections of Mary Lou’s Mass. The Master Chorale also performed her St. Martin de Porres, which is so beautiful. Then in 2011, we revisited Ellington’s Sacred music.


These experiences really changed me. I began to think more and more about my church roots and leaving behind a body of sacred music. When the call came to me to do this, part of the message was, “Remember the slaves.” Remember the abducted Africans (your ancestors), and remember the Hebrew slaves. That’s what I heard. As artists, we have to obey, and as a person of faith, I have to obey what I’m called to do. I just have to do it.

The language of my fully notated music changes a lot, but as I see it, the folk traditions are there. In the first part of the Passion, there is an a capella choral piece that is a blues.


EI:  The second Lament at Gethsemane right?


JN:  That’s right!


EI:  Uh huh. I’m on to you James; I know what you’re doing! [laughter]


JN:  Go on, Ethan.


EI:  Ok, I think that’s the right moment to end the interview.

—

Very special thanks to James Newton for allowing these score and audio excerpts to be reproduced on DTM.

Because there’s so much about Dolphy and Wadud in this interview, James himself suggested “Mr. Dolphy” from Luella.  With John Blake and Gayle Dixon, violin; Abdul Wadud, cello; Jay Hoggard, vibes; Cecil McBee, bass; Billy Hart, drums.


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The next three are my own selections from the vast Newton discography.


“O’Keeffe” from Echo Canyon (1984) shows an improvisor informed by multiple traditions manipulating a tiny motive (and my god, what a flute sound):


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“Kyrie” from Mass (2006) from New World CD Sacred Works (Elissa Johnston, soprano; Tracy Van Fleet, mezzo-soprano; Daniel Chaney, tenor; Abdiel González, bass-baritone; Gary Woodward, flute; Gary Bovyer, clarinet; Ralph Morrison, violin; Kazi Pitelka, viola; Cécilia Tsan, cello; David Young, bass; Vicki Ray, piano; Lynn Vartan, percussion; Grant Gershon, conductor).

Hearing this opening track was one of the most pleasing shocks I have had in recent memory. The blend of idioms is starkly successful. Most formal scores written by musicians best known for jazz associations are not nearly so commanding or detailed.

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Gethsemane (2009) is played by Yegor Shevtsov for a CD that is still in production. There are jazz chords and kind of funky atmosphere, but the unusually diverse articulation and endless scroll of mutating material is from another realm entirely. (Great playing, Yegor!)



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THE MUSIC OF JAMES NEWTON: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH JAMES NEWTON:  

http://www.jamesnewtonmusic.com/videos/

James Newton flute / Abdul Wadud cello:

 

James Newton is featured performing "The Preacher And The Musician" in the late 1970s.

Between 1978 to 1981 James Newton lived in New York where he began playing extended chamber jazz, as leader of a trio featuring cellist Abdul Wadud and pianist Anthony Davis.

Newton expanded his trio to a quartet with the addition of vibraphonist Jay Hoggard and successfully toured Europe during the early '80s. 

James Newton - The African Flower 1985- (FULL ALBUM):

 

Bop, Post-Bop 1985
Tracklist:
1. Black and Tan Fantasy (Ellington, Miley)
2. Virgin Jungle (Ellington, Strayhorn)
3. Strange Feeling (Ellington, Strayhorn)
4. Fleurette Affricaine (Ellington)
5. Cotton Tail (Ellington)
6. Sophisticated Lady (Ellington, Mills, Parish)
7. Passion Flower (Strayhorn) 

James Newton Quartet - Jazz vor mitternacht 3-4.avi:

 

Jazz vor mitternacht - James Newton Quartet
10 Leverkusener Jazztage 1989 (1)
playlist 03- 04:
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list...

James Newton is featured performing "The Preacher And The Musician" in the late 1970s.

Personnel:

James Newton, flute
Abdul Wadud, cello

Between 1978 to 1981 James Newton lived in New York where he began playing extended chamber jazz, as leader of a trio featuring cellist Abdul Wadud and pianist Anthony Davis.

Newton expanded his trio to a quartet with the addition of vibraphonist Jay Hoggard and successfully toured Europe during the early '80s.

commentator: Dieter Hens


James Newton - flute
Mike Cain - piano
Billy Hart - drums
Scott Coley - bass

JAMES NEWTON Quartet:  "Black and Tan Fantasy"

JAZZ SET WEST SD 1994:

 

Composer-flutist James Newton studied with Buddy Collette in Los Angeles in the 1970s and has since worked to expand the vocabulary and technique for the flute in modern jazz. He has performed and recorded with Anthony Davis, Frank Wess, David Murray, Red Callender, Arthur Blythe and the Asian Anderson.

He has been described by the New York Times as "an excellent performer who carries the more rough-and-tumble sounds of Dixieland Brass into experimental territory." 

Anthony Davis & James Newton Quartet live in Moers '79:

 

Recorded live at the 8th Moers Festival, Moers, Germany, on June 3rd, 1979

James Newton--flute
Anthony Davis--piano
Rick Rozie--bass
Pheeroan akLaff--drums

James Newton Quartet - Chivas Jazz Festival #3:

   

Chivas Jazz Festival 2003
DirecTV Music Hall, São Paulo.

"James Newton Quartet"

James Newton : flautas
Mike Cain : piano
Santi Debriano : contrabaixo acústico
Billy Hart : bateria

James Newton - Axum (1982)

 

James Newton - "The Dabtara"

From James Newton's 1982 solo album 'Axum'

James Newton - "After you said yes":

From the album "I've Known Rivers"

 

James Newton--Flute

Anthony Davis:  Piano

Abdul Wadud: Cello

Anthony Davis-James Newton Quartet w/George Lewis, "Forever Charles":

 

From the album HIDDEN VOICES (India Navigation 1041), 1979. Anthony Davis, piano; James Newton, flute; George Lewis, trombone; Rick Rozie, bass; Pheeroan akLaff, drums. "Forever Charles" composed by James Newton. 

The "James Newton Quartet" perform at Direct TV Music Hall in San Palo, Brazil in 2003.

Personnel:

James Newton, flute
Mike Caine, piano
Santi Debriano, contra bass
Billy Hart, drums


Exposed to blues gospel and R&B music during his youth in Los Angeles, James Newton took up playing the flute in high school inspired by Eric Dolphy.

He was a member of Stanley Crouch's "Black Music Infinity" band from 1972 to 1975 along with Arthur Blythe, David Murray, and Bobby Bradford.

Moving to New York in 1978 he led a trio consisting of pianist Anthony Davis, cellist Abdul Wadud, and himself specializing in extended chamber jazz and Third Stream.

In the early '80s James Newton formed a quartet and toured Europe followed by five years as the musical director of the "Luckman Jazz Orchestra."

He has held professorships at the University of California, California State University, and the California Institute of the Arts.

Newton published two music instruction books "The Improvising Flute" (1989), and "Daily Focus For The Flute" (2007).
The "James Newton Quartet" perform at Direct TV Music Hall in San Palo, Brazil in 2003:

James Newton Quartet - Chivas Jazz Festival 2003:

 

Personnel:

James Newton, flute
Mike Caine, piano
Santi Debriano, contra bass
Billy Hart, drums

Exposed to blues gospel and R&B music during his youth in Los Angeles, James Newton took up playing the flute in high school inspired by Eric Dolphy.

He was a member of Stanley Crouch's "Black Music Infinity" band from 1972 to 1975 along with Arthur Blythe, David Murray, and Bobby Bradford.

Moving to New York in 1978 he led a trio consisting of pianist Anthony Davis, cellist Abdul Wadud, and himself specializing in extended chamber jazz and Third Stream.

In the early '80s James Newton formed a quartet and toured Europe followed by five years as the musical director of the "Luckman Jazz Orchestra."

He has held professorships at the University of California, California State University, and the California Institute of the Arts.

Newton published two music instruction books "The Improvising Flute" (1989), and "Daily Focus For The Flute" (2007). 
 

James Newton interview, 2001

LA Weekly
2/21/01
by Greg Burk
Metal Jazz

James Newton is pissed off. He’s also happy and excited, and the latter conditions are the ones you notice, because his face expresses them more easily. To get the full range of Newton, listen to his flute playing, which alternates between the most delirious beauty and the steeliest daggers; you’ll hear clearly that he’s a warrior as well as an artist. What makes him happy and excited now is that he’s got some new tools.
Last fall, Newton, 47, became a full-time faculty member at Cal State L.A. — the school he graduated from in 1980. It’s a good fortification from which to battle the carnage of Proposition 209, the anti-affirmative-action initiative passed overwhelmingly in 1996. Newton was teaching at UC Irvine at the time, and soon noticed the scenery getting paler. But he believes that his new/old school has the right attitude: “Cal State L.A. is saying, ‘Come here, we want you to have a voice.’ I have some absolutely first-rate students. And there’s a hunger for the knowledge.”
Newton will be teaching music, as he’s done — alongside a global schedule of performing and recording — for over two decades. He’s also been named director of music programming and research for CSLA’s Luckman Fine Arts Complex, and director-conductor of the Luckman Jazz Orchestra, a multistarred aggregation playing its first concert this weekend. Additionally, Newton has scheduled a blockbuster guest concert for April 28, featuring jazz masters Randy Weston (solo piano) and Yusef Lateef (playing with Adam Rudolph & Eternal Wind). The Luckman series will include blues, Latin and classical concerts as well.
Newton’s desire to nurture equal opportunity has personal roots; he doesn’t come from privilege. His father was a military man, later helping Newton’s mother manage apartments.
“My parents were very anti-elitist, and that’s really rubbed off on me,” he says. “I lived in a poor section of San Pedro. I never was hungry or anything, but my parents worked their way up.”
The ethnically mixed seaport environment helped Newton appreciate different cultures. In addition to his African-American ancestry, he holds a special affinity for Mexican expression, and his Chino Hills house is a gallery for his favorite visual artists. A painting by William Pajaud shows the walls of Jericho tumbling down under the im-pact of Joshua’s powerful music. Another, by Jesus Cervantes, portrays a worker being ground up like meat in a cruel machine. A dry-point etching by Francisco Toledo represents wasps so large and detailed, the viewer doesn’t know whether to examine them or flee. Much of Newton’s aesthetic pulls between the beauty and the sting.
Newton’s studio is packed with electronic equipment, which he’s currently using to score and provide preliminary synthesizer sketches for Clan Destinies, a ballet he’s writing for the José Limón Dance Company. He runs the computer program for one movement, a joyfully trippy piece with a lot of counterpoint. Then he plays something completely different, a hip-hoppish take on Jimi Hendrix’s “Little Miss Lover” with an innovative slosh-wipe groove.
Newton hails from the first generation of jazz performers directly aligned with the Hendrix axis. He was playing bass and singing “Tears of a Clown” in an R&B band when he first heard “The Wind Cries Mary” in 1967, and was changed forever. Though he’s been changed many times since, he’s always kept the influences of previous loves: Miles, Trane, Dolphy, Rahsaan, Mingus, Duke, Ravel, Messiaen, Mahler, Berg, Bartók, Lutoslawski, Takemitsu.
The influences of friends have been at least as deep. At 19, Newton and band were learning Weather Report tunes in a Claremont space when he discovered that Stanley Crouch, then primarily a drummer rather than a cultural commentator, was rehearsing his own group across the street.
“Stanley would come over, and he would say, ‘What you guys are playing is no s******  ,’” recalls Newton, though you can be sure Crouch did not abbreviate. “‘You should come hear my band.’ So one day I went. Mark Dresser was playing bass, Arthur Blythe was playing alto saxophone, Bobby Bradford was playing cornet, and there was a legendary trumpet player, Walter Lowe, who was this amazing visual artist too. And I just stood there with my jaw wide open. So they said, ‘Get out your flute.’ I’d only been playing it for three years.”
Newton, already studying with Dolphy’s teacher, the great multiwind player Buddy Collette, was proficient enough to stay in the band, playing “King Oliver, Cecil Taylor and everything in between.” Through this crowd he met saxist David Murray, who later helped him break into the New York scene.
Since then, Newton has done about everything a musician can. He had a successful album, African Flower, with Blue Note in 1985, only to have the same label pay him not to record two years later as the retrospective Age of Marsalis came to dominate. He’s played with Herbie Hancock, Kenny Burrell, Mingus Dynasty and anyone else who needs the kind of flutist who’s been named No. 1 in the Down Beat critics’ poll 19 years in a row. He’s made jazz, classical and electronic music all over the world. Some of his best recent recordings include the brilliant Suite for Frida Kahlo (Audioquest, 1994), the wild Good To Go with the Andrew Cyrille Trio (Soul Note, 1997) and the neoclassical As the Sound of Many Waters with the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (New World, 2000).
Asked how his flute — you know, the little silver rod your sister tootles on — can penetrate so deeply, convey so many layers of passion, Newton says he practiced a lot and had great teachers. And?
“Duke and Messiaen both taught me a lot about the correlation between color and emotion. I’ll have visual images when I’m composing or playing, of certain colors and certain emotions, and I try to think at the level of nuance that the greatest writers have. The flute is the tool, but the body and the spirit and the soul, that’s the real instrument.”
His eyes water; his throat catches slightly. “And . . . I try to think of being an openness, where I just say, ‘Use me, Lord.’ It’s not about me. It’s about Him.”
Newton says his music, as well as his educational role, has much to do with knocking down those Jericho walls of money and race. And in teaching, a profession he practiced both at L.A.’s Wind College with John Carter and at CalArts before entering the statewide system, there are barriers involving what the hell jazz is.
“Jazz education has been one of the downfalls of the creativity of the music in the last 20 years,” he says. “I’ve tried to approach education from the perspective of the person finding his or her own voice. Science is a big, integral part of music, but another important part is the codes that exist. Some of those can’t be explained, they have to be felt. So I try for a precise and rigorous approach, and another approach that’s very intuitive, and bring them together. The most perfect model is Duke Ellington — you can have a composition like ‘C Jam Blues,’ with two notes, and then you can have the Black, Brown and Beige suite on the other end of the spectrum. The music has to be distilled, of course. You want to maintain certain things. But the thing you have to maintain the most of all is change. It’s always been about change, about taking big chances.”
Newton brings his theories to bear in the Luckman Jazz Orchestra, in which he uses the radical “conduction” methods of Butch Morris, where the conductor prompts spontaneous improvisations in his group — in this case including veterans such as trumpeter Snooky Young, trombonist George Bohanon, saxist Charles Owens, baritone saxist Jack Nimitz and bassist Dr. Art Davis, as well as younger sparks such as tuba player William Roper. They’ll be approaching Ellington, Mingus, Miles, Gil Evans and James Newton compositions in their own way.
“We’re not going to sound like other big bands. You have to put wild cards in your orchestra. You get your traditionalists, and you get your wild cards. That’s what Duke always did. I like the right notes, but I really love the wrong notes, too. When we walk onstage, I know: That music, with those players, is gonna be smokin’.”
 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Newton

James Newton


From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

James W. Newton (born May 1, 1953 in Los Angeles, California]) is an American jazz and classical flautist.[1]

Contents

 

 

Biography

 

From his earliest years, James Newton grew up immersed in the sounds of African-American music, including urban blues, rhythm and blues, and gospel. In his early teens he played electric bass guitar, alto saxophone, and clarinet. In high school he took up the flute, influenced by Eric Dolphy.[2] In addition to taking lessons in classical music on flute, he also studied jazz with Buddy Collette. He completed his formal musical training at California State University, Los Angeles.

From 1972 to 1975, together with David Murray, Bobby Bradford, and Arthur Blythe, Newton was a member of drummer (and later critic) Stanley Crouch's band Black Music Infinity. From 1978 to 1981 he lived in New York, leading a trio with pianist and composer Anthony Davis and cellist Abdul Wadud. These three played extended chamber jazz and Third Stream compositions by Newton and Davis. With Davis, Newton founded a quartet and toured successfully in Europe in the early 1980s. Afterwards, he performed with a wide variety of musicians, including projects by John Carter and the Mingus Dynasty. Newton has released four recordings of his solo improvisations for flute. Since the 1990s Newton has often worked with musicians from other cultural spheres, including Jon Jang, Gao Hong, Kadri Gopalnath, and Shubhendra Rao, and has taken part in many cross-cultural projects.
Newton has performed with the New York Philharmonic, Brooklyn Philharmonic, L'Orchestre du Conservatoire de Paris, Vladimir Spivakov and the Moscow Virtuosi the Los Angeles Master Chorale, Southwest Chamber Music, California EAR Unit, New York New Music Ensemble, and the San Francisco Ballet.

He served for five years as Musical Director/Conductor of the Luckman Jazz Orchestra and has held professorships at the University of California, Irvine, the California Institute of the Arts, and California State University, Los Angeles. In 1989 he wrote and published a method book entitled The Improvising Flute. In 2007 he published Daily Focus For The Flute.
He has also composed classical works for chamber ensemble and orchestra, as well as electronic music. In 1997 he wrote an opera, The Songs of Freedom. In his compositional output, he specializes in chamber music and writing for unconventional instrumentations. He has also written a symphony and composed for ballet and modern dance. In 2006 he composed a Latin Mass which premiered in Prato, Italy, in February 2007.

Accolades

 

He has received Guggenheim (1992) and Rockefeller fellowships, Montreux Grande Prix Du Disque, and Down Beat International Critics Jazz Album of the Year. He has also been voted the top flutist for 23 consecutive years in Down Beat magazine's International Critic's Poll.

Beastie Boys lawsuit

 

In 2000, Newton sued the alternative rock and hip hop group Beastie Boys (and their producer, record companies, publishers, and music video-related companies) for repeatedly using a six-second, three-note sample of "Choir," Newton's 1978 composition for flute and voice, in their song "Pass the Mic". Newton declined a settlement offer and, in a counter-offer, demanded "millions" and 50% ownership and control of "Pass the Mic", despite the sample being only one of hundreds of sounds in the song.[3]
In the federal district court case, Newton claimed that the group infringed his copyright on the composition by making use of the three-note sequence embodied in the sampled sound recording. The group argued that copyright law treats sound recordings and the underlying compositions as separate entities with different thresholds for originality; a six-second audio clip must be licensed from the record company, but under the de minimis doctrine, a mere three notes of a composition need not be licensed from the composer or publisher.
With summary judgment in 2002, the court agreed with Beastie Boys, holding that the group had fulfilled its legal obligation by licensing only the sound recording in 1992. At that time, Beastie Boys paid a fee of US$1,000 to ECM Records, the record label to which Newton had previously given contractual permission to license the sound recording.[4] As is standard procedure in copyright cases, Beastie Boys then asked the court for Newton's lawyers to reimburse Beastie Boys' lawyers for $492,000 in legal fees, but the court declined to award costs.[3]
Newton appealed, but in 2003, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the lower court's decision in favor of Beastie Boys.[5] Newton petitioned the court to re-hear the case en banc, but this resulted in a 2004 amended opinion in which the court strengthened its position.[6]

Discography

 

As leader

 

 

As sideman

With Arthur Blythe
With John Carter
With Buddy Collette
With Chico Freeman
With Leroy Jenkins
With David Murray

References








  • Allmusic biography

  • NY Times article on Dolphy's influence

  • Yauch, Adam (Sep 17, 2002). "[statement re] james newton case". grandroyal.com. Archived from the original on Dec 2, 2002.

  • Newton v. Diamond, 204 F.2d 1244 (C.D. Cal. 2002).

  • Newton v. Diamond, 388 F.3d 1189 (9th. Cir. 2003).

  • "Beastie Boys Emerge Victorious In Sampling Suit". Billboard. Nov 10, 2004.


    1. LA Times Review

    External links

    James Newton is featured performing "The Preacher And The Musician" in the late 1970s.

    Personnel:

    James Newton, flute
    Abdul Wadud, cello

    Between 1978 to 1981 James Newton lived in New York where he began playing extended chamber jazz, as leader of a trio featuring cellist Abdul Wadud and pianist Anthony Davis.

    Newton expanded his trio to a quartet with the addition of vibraphonist Jay Hoggard and successfully toured Europe during the early '80s.
    James Newton is featured performing "The Preacher And The Musician" in the late 1970s.

    Personnel:

    James Newton, flute
    Abdul Wadud, cello

    Between 1978 to 1981 James Newton lived in New York where he began playing extended chamber jazz, as leader of a trio featuring cellist Abdul Wadud and pianist Anthony Davis.

    Newton expanded his trio to a quartet with the addition of vibraphonist Jay Hoggard and successfully toured Europe during the early '80s.
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