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https://soundprojections.blogspot.com/2018/01/mark-turner-b-november-10-1965.html
PHOTO: MARK TURNER (b. November 10, 1965)
Mark Turner
(b. November 10, 1965)
Biography by Matt Collar
A highly inventive saxophonist, Mark Turner found acclaim with his meticulous, harmonically rich approach to modern creative jazz. Drawing upon the innovative sound of artists like John Coltrane, Warne Marsh, and Joe Henderson, Turner emerged in the early '90s playing his cerebral, classical-influenced brand of jazz. He gained early notice with albums like 1998's In This World and 2001's Dharma Days, working alongside such similarly inclined contemporaries as Brad Mehldau, Kurt Rosenwinkel, and Brian Blade. Beginning with 2009's Sky and Country, he built a close association with the ECM label, splitting his time between collaborating with his Fly trio (with bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Jeff Ballard) and helming ambitious solo dates like 2014's Lathe of Heaven, his 2018 duo session Temporary Kings with Ethan Iverson, and 2022's Return from the Stars.
Born in Fairborn, Ohio in 1965, Turner grew up in Southern California where his parents exposed him to a fertile mix of jazz, R&B, and gospel. Starting out on clarinet in elementary school, he quickly gravitated toward the saxophone, inspired in part by the fact that his father, who died when Turner was not yet two, had played the instrument. While music was a driving passion, he initially studied design and illustration at California State University, Long Beach and played in various jazz ensembles before transferring to Boston's renowned Berklee College of Music. During these years, he studied his idols, dissecting the solos of artists like John Coltrane, Lester Young, Joe Henderson, Warne Marsh, and others. Graduating in 1990, he moved to New York City, where he quickly found himself an in-demand performer, playing live and recording with Leon Parker, Ryan Kisor, and Jimmy Smith. He also began leading his groups, and by the early '90s, had begun developing his own distinctive approach to jazz, playing highly intellectual, probing solos rife with nuanced harmonies and motivic development. It was a sound he displayed on his 1995 Criss Cross debut, Yam Yam, playing alongside the similarly thoughtful talents of guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel, pianist Brad Mehldau, bassist Larry Grenadier, and drummer Jorge Rossy.
In the late '90s he signed with Warner Bros. and issued a handful of highly regarded and deeply probing albums including 1998's Mark Turner, in which he was joined by fellow rising sax star Joshua Redman, and 1998's In This World, with Mehldau and drummer Brian Blade. He finished out his run at Warner with 2001's Dharma Days, a quartet date once again featuring guitarist Rosenwinkel, as well as bassist Reid Anderson and drummer Nasheet Waits.
Around this time, the birth of Turner's first child found him pulling back from leading his own groups. Instead, he took on session work, often as a member of Rosenwinkel's band, and appeared on albums by saxophonist Lee Konitz, bassist Joe Martin, and vibraphonist Matthias Lupri. Turner made a brief return to his own work issuing Fly, the eponymous debut album from his trio with bassist Grenadier, and drummer Jeff Ballard. There were also dates with bassist Omer Avital, saxophonist David Binney, drummer Billy Hart, and others. Returning to more active work as a leader, Turner signed with ECM and released Sky and Country, his second trio album with Fly. A third Fly album followed for the label in 2012's Year of the Snake. Also in 2012, joined drummer Hart, Bad Plus pianist Ethan Iverson, and bassist Ben Street for All Our Reasons, also on ECM. He then paired with pianist Baptiste Trotignon for the duo album Dusk Is a Quiet Place on the Naïve label.
He returned to his own work for ECM with the ambitious Lathe of Heaven in 2014. Inspired by writer Ursula K. Le Guin's 1971 dystopian science fiction novel, Lathe of Heaven showcased the saxophonist's pianoless quartet featuring trumpeter Avishai Cohen, bassist Joe Martin, and drummer Marcus Gilmore. He collaborated again with pianist Iverson on 2018's Temporary Kings, before releasing 2019's Where Are You, a trio album with pianist Kevin Hays and drummer Marc Miralta. Mark Turner Meets Gary Foster, an archival 2003 duo concert between the two saxophonists, also appeared in 2019. In 2022, Turner reconvened his quartet for Return from the Stars, again featuring bassist Martin, as well as trumpeter Jason Palmer and drummer Jonathan Pinson.
https://www.allaboutjazz.com/musicians/mark-turner/
Mark Turner
In a career that spans two decades and encompasses a broad array of musical ventures, saxophonist Mark Turner has emerged as a towering presence in the jazz community. With a distinctive, personal tone, singular improvisational skills and an innovative, challenging compositional approach, he’s earned a far-reaching reputation as one of jazz’s most original and influential musical forces.
A New York Times profile of Turner titled “The Best Jazz Player You’ve Never Heard” called him “possibly jazz’s premier player,” noting his reputation amongst his peers and his influential stature in the jazz world.
2013 finds Turner entering an exciting new creative phase, with his varied talents showcased on a variety of notable new recording projects. Later this year, he’ll release his sixth album as a leader—his first under his own name in a dozen years. He’s also featured on new or upcoming releases by pianist Stefano Bollani, guitarist Gilad Hekselman, pianist Baptiste Trotignon and the Billy Hart Quartet, of which Turner’s been a member for nearly a decade and with whom he recorded two previous albums. He’s also continuing his work as a member of Fly, a collaborative trio with bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Jeff Ballard.
Those projects add to an already expansive body of work that encompasses Turner’s own widely acclaimed albums and an assortment of collaborations, along with his prolific work as an in-demand sideman. Turner’s diverse discography includes collaborations with many of jazz’s leading lights, including Kurt Rosenwinkel, Lee Konitz, James Moody, Dave Holland, Joshua Redman, Delfeayo Marsalis, Brad Mehldau, Reid Anderson, Omer Avital, Diego Barber, David Binney, Brian Blade, Seamus Blake, Chris Cheek, George Colligan, Gary Foster, Jon Gordon, Aaron Goldberg, Ethan Iverson, Jonny King, Ryan Kisor, Guillermo Klein, Matthias Lupri, OAM Trio, Mikkel Ploug, Enrico Rava, Jochen Rueckert, Jaleel Shaw, Edward Simon and the SF Jazz Collective.
Born in 1965 in Ohio and raised in Southern California, Turner grew up surrounded by music. “There was always a lot of R&B and jazz and soul and gospel going on in the house all the time,” he recalls. “This was in the early ’70s, when the whole integration and civil rights thing had begun to go mainstream, and my mother and stepfather were in the first wave of young black professionals and intellectuals who moved to upper-middle-class white neighborhoods. They and their friends were always going out to see live jazz. I was intrigued by that, and I was intrigued by the whole history of jazz music and African-American culture, as well as the music itself. And my father, who died when I was one and a half, had played saxophone, so maybe I was looking for a connection with him too.”
After starting out on clarinet in elementary school, Turner gravitated towards saxophone in high school, while also exploring his talent for the visual arts. Although he briefly studied design and illustration at Long Beach State University, his passion for jazz ultimately led him to pursue a career in music. Turner’s meticulous, analytical work ethic led him to study and dissect the work of such saxophone giants as John Coltrane, Joe Henderson, Dexter Gordon, Sonny Rollins, Warne Marsh and Lester Young in the pursuit his own musical voice.
“I really got into it and worked really hard, just trying to figure out who I am,” he says, adding, “That’s how I am with everything. It took a while, and it was kind of an arduous struggle, but it allowed me to figure out what I wanted from music. Even when I was spending my time sounding like other people, I felt like that was part of my path to sounding like myself. The more you spend time with the form and the language, the more your own personality comes out.”
After graduating from Boston’s prestigious Berklee College of Music in 1990, Turner moved to New York, where his rapidly developing talents were quickly recognized. Between 1995 and 2001, he recorded five albums of his own—Yam Yam, Mark Turner, In This World, Ballad Session and Dharma Days—while keeping busy as a sought-after collaborator and sideman.
“It was around 1992 that I began to notice or feel that what I was doing was uniquely mine,” Turner asserts. “It had been two and a half years of struggle, but the summer of 1992 was the period where I was finally able to hear it. Maybe no one else would notice, but that’s where I could see how things were gonna go.”
Despite his growing reputation and influence, Turner intentionally pulled back from working as a leader after 2001′s Dharma Days, focusing much of his energy on parenthood while channeling his creativity into numerous collaborative projects.
“The last record I made was right when our first child was born, and that had a lot to do with me pulling back from being a leader for awhile,” Turner states, explaining, “Being a leader is so intense and you really have to put your whole self into it, and I just felt like I wanted to be there for my kids. When you’re a leader, you’re carrying a lot of weight and responsible for a lot of things that have nothing with music. Being a sideman, you basically just have to worry about being there and doing a good job. But my kids are 10 and 13 now, so it’s a little less demanding and I’ve got more room now to do more things that I feel strongly about.”
Of his forthcoming album, a quartet effort with Avishai Cohen on trumpet, Joe Martin on bass and Marcus Gilmore on drums, Turner notes, “I spent a lot of time on the compositions, which I usually do. The blowing is important, but I don’t think about that when I’m writing. I just write the tune, and then we see if we can improvise on it or not. Some of the new tunes are long and kind of involved, and some of them are kind of my version of being pyrotechnical. I just wanted to explore, and I wanted to be able to go in there with a band that would be flexible and have the craftsmanship and the foundation to play something difficult and still make it sound musical.”
Despite his long-awaited return to recording as a leader, Turner still values his collaborative work and has no plans to cut back on it.
“I would never want to solely be a leader, and if someone handed me the chance to do that, I’d say no,” he says. “I like to interpret other people’s music. I learn from doing that, and it’s a big part of what I’ve become as a musician. In the situations where I’m the leader and writing the music, it’s a combination of everything I’ve heard and everything I’ve done,. The way that I write and the way that I play and the bands that I bring together are all a representation of all of the musical situations that I’ve been in, and I’d never want to give that up.”
Arts
The Best Jazz Player You've Never Heard
THE tenor saxophonist Mark Turner is possibly jazz's premier player, and at the same time he's a very typical one.
A few months ago I had an experience that starkly demonstrated how important Mr. Turner is among younger musicians. While reporting on the Thelonious Monk Institute saxophone competition in Washington -- an annual contest that has become something like the Van Cliburn competition of jazz -- I heard 15 young players. As expected, most of them drew much of their sound from one source: John Coltrane. There was no mistaking that gruff, keening tone, those scale-based patterns.
But to my surprise, the second most prevalent sound among the 15 was very different. It was lighter, more evenly produced from the bottom to the very top of the horn, in long, chromatic strokes. At first I thought it was the sound of Warne Marsh. But there was no reason to think that Marsh, who died in 1987 and was always a minority taste, had suddenly become au courant. Then I realized that it was the sound of Mark Turner.
Outside of jazz's small world, however, I can't remember holding a conversation with anyone who has heard of Mr. Turner. This is how it often works in serious mainstream jazz, a discipline that bears comparison to serious painting or poetry in that it is often accused of being dead yet continues to evolve and even find a modest audience.
Mr. Turner should have his own regular band, as the more successful artists in jazz do. (He'll play with Ben Street on bass and Jeff Ballard on drums in his JVC show at the Village Vanguard on June 27 -- a trio that looks as if it may become regular in time.) Within the limited circle of jazz clubs across the country, Mr. Turner tends to play with young, top-shelf rhythm-section musicians like the drummers Brian Blade and Nasheet Waits, the bassists Larry Grenadier and Reid Anderson, the pianists Ethan Iverson and Brad Mehldau. In the past, he hasn't been offered enough steady work to keep musicians like those with him. To maintain a high-level band, you need an international audience and a lot of festival gigs. To get a lot of festival gigs, it helps to have a major-label record deal.
Mr. Turner lost his in December, after four releases. At first, his association with Warner Brothers looked as if it could last. He is a standard-bearer. His music is intellectual and rigorously composed, defined by long, flowing, chromatically complex lines that keep their stamina and intensity as they stay dynamically even. He has learned how to play the highest reaches of his instrument, the altissimo register, with a serene strength, never shouting for the effect that audiences love. The overwhelming sense about Mr. Turner is that he wants to get on with his work.
Musicians can't say a negative word about him. (''His music is the freshest thing around,'' said the singer Luciana Souza, an accomplished composer. ''I want to write like that. It's 'out' music that still sounds very musical and consonant.'') Mr. Turner writes his own material; he is lean and handsome; he has a thrift-store-cool fashion sense: large-collar shirts, cardigans and 1970's earth tones.
But in the end, Mr. Turner's music may have been too rigorous for Warner Brothers and he isn't the sort who might turn his music around to sell records. There was some disconnection between artist and label. An album, ''Ballad Session,'' conceived by Warner Brothers as a corrective to the notion that Mr. Turner was all intellect, ended up becoming a collection of candlelight jazz standards like ''Skylark'' and ''All or Nothing at All.'' Mr. Turner had originally wanted to record an album of ''slow music,'' as he called it -- pieces from all over the map, including original tunes and works by Olivier Messaien and Aphex Twin.
Finally, as explained by Matt Pierson, senior vice president of jazz at Warner Brothers, it came down to brute numbers. The albums didn't sell well (in major-label terms, that means at least 10,000 copies). The company couldn't justify the cost of the marketing that it routinely puts into its releases, which can run to $50,000 -- easily twice what an independent label would spend.
''It's fine,'' Mr. Turner said of the end of his relationship with the label. ''I was considering trying to get out of it myself. Nothing against Warner, but I feel relieved and open and free.''
Since being dropped by Warner Brothers, Mr. Turner says he has had no calls from record labels.
Some jazz recording executives say that broader audiences don't have the patience to deal with compositions like his -- moody, with long, difficult-to-remember themes. But the fact is that Mark Turner is a great jazz musician during a particularly bad time for being a great jazz musician.
Jazz does not stand alone anymore as a viable, self-sustaining department within most major record companies. Most are following the successful example of Nonesuch, which has sprinkled a few jazz artists among its list of new classical music, singer-songwriter rock, Cuban and African oldies and chic unclassifiables like Laurie Anderson. Since the mid-90's, when major labels were let down by the failure of a mostly press-driven ''renaissance'' that had encouraged them to sign young jazz bandleaders in the vein of Wynton Marsalis and Terence Blanchard, jazz is now seen by record executives as one of many possible kinds of ''adult'' music. (The big exception is for the back-catalog jazz reissues, which are far outselling new work.)
Verve -- an important label in jazz since 1956 -- has cut half of its traditional jazz roster in the last year, canceling contracts with respected names like Russell Malone, Kenny Barron and Christian McBride; it is putting its energies into promoting the singers Diana Krall and Natalie Cole. Blue Note, the other well-known strictly jazz imprimatur, has just had its first gold album (with sales of more than 500,000 copies) in nine years: ''Come Away With Me,'' by Norah Jones, who is not a jazz artist but a folk-rock singer. Not surprising, the label is looking for more of her kind and less of Mark Turner's.
Mr. Turner is quiet and self-assured but essentially noncompetitive. (During an interview with him at a Midtown Manhattan restaurant, my tape recorder barely registered his voice; when I suggested that his sound had been studied by some of the saxophonists who regularly played at the New York jazz club Smalls in the mid-90's, he demurred by saying nothing.)
Among younger jazz musicians, he inspires admiration for his approach to practicing and living as much as for his playing. Mr. Turner, a Buddhist, lives in New Haven with his wife, Helena Hansen, a doctoral candidate in anthropology at Yale University, and two children; he enjoys the quiet of a town where there is no jazz scene to speak of.
''I went and practiced with him once,'' said the saxophonist Bill McHenry, who is 29. ''He showed me these music books of things he writes out; just in one book of 36 pages he had tons of different chords and exercises. Because of the purity of his approach, he influences a lot of different people in that way -- either like me, who does freer stuff, or someone else, who does straight-ahead music: it doesn't matter.''
It took some time for Mr. Turner to find his own voice on the instrument. He was born in Ohio, grew up in Cerritos and Palos Verdes, Calif., near Los Angeles, and played saxophone in high school. (He was also a dedicated break-dancer, who broke his front teeth attempting a back flip.) After a brief period studying design and illustration at Long Beach State University, he went to the Berklee College of Music in Boston, in the late 80's, where he quickly became known as a super-studious musician who had explored Coltrane more deeply than anyone around him.
''I was fairly methodical,'' Mr. Turner remembered. ''I almost always wrote out Coltrane's solos, and I'd have a lot of notes on the side.''
Wasn't he afraid of becoming trapped inside Coltrane's voice? ''No,'' he said, sanguinely. ''By doing it, I knew I would eventually not be interested in it anymore. Also, I noticed that if you looked at someone else who was into Trane, and if you could listen through that person's ear and mind, it would be a slightly different version. That's who you are -- it's how you hear.'' After exploring Coltrane, Mr. Turner approached the work of Joe Henderson, Dexter Gordon and Sonny Rollins in the same meticulous way.
By the early 90's, he said, he had exhausted his interest in ''a line of tenor players who do pretty much what most tenor players do today. That is, more of an aggressive sound, with a vocabulary that's come to be a bit programmed.'' When he moved to New York in 1990, he turned to a new figure, who bumped him into a new place: Warne Marsh.
Best known as a fellow-traveler of the pianist Lennie Tristano, Marsh represented the opposite of aggression: he was a linear, melodic improviser who managed to merge spontaneity and research, playing nearly Bach-like melodic lines. As he listened more closely, Mr. Turner found that there was a link between Marsh, Coltrane and Mr. Henderson. And that was Lester Young, the great light-toned saxophonist of the swing era.
Mr. Anderson, the bassist, puts it more precisely. ''He uses harmonies that are his language of harmony; he hears the melody within those harmonies. Sometimes they're complex, and on the surface are almost nonfunctional. But they're of course fully functional. He's dealing on that high level that perhaps only the initiated can appreciate.''
https://markturnerjazz.com/
Biography
2013 finds Turner entering an exciting new creative phase, with his varied talents showcased on a variety of notable new recording projects. Later this year, hell release his sixth album as a leader—his first under his own name in a dozen years. Hes also featured on new or upcoming releases by pianist Stefano Bollani, guitarist Gilad Hekselman, pianist Baptiste Trotignon and the Billy Hart Quartet, of which Turners been a member for nearly a decade and with whom he recorded two previous albums. Hes also continuing his work as a member of spbobet , a collaborative trio with bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Jeff Ballard.
Those projects add to an already expansive body of work that encompasses Turners own widely acclaimed albums and an assortment of collaborations, along with his prolific work as an in-demand sideman. Turners diverse discography includes collaborations with many of jazzs leading lights, including Kurt Rosenwinkel, Lee Konitz, James Moody, Dave Holland, Joshua Redman, Delfeayo Marsalis, Brad Mehldau, Reid Anderson, Omer Avital, Diego Barber, David Binney, Brian Blade, Seamus Blake, Chris Cheek, George Colligan, Gary Foster, Jon Gordon, Aaron Goldberg, Ethan Iverson, Jonny King, Ryan Kisor, Guillermo Klein, Matthias Lupri, OAM Trio, Mikkel Ploug, Enrico Rava, Jochen Rueckert, Jaleel Shaw, Edward Simon and the SF Jazz Collective.
Born in 1965 in Ohio and raised in Southern California, Turner grew up surrounded by music of Bola Tangkas Online. There was always a lot of R&B and jazz and soul and gospel going on in the house all the time, he recalls. This was in the early 70s, when the whole integration and civil rights thing had begun to go mainstream, and my mother and stepfather were in the first wave of young black professionals and intellectuals who moved to upper-middle-class white neighborhoods. They and their friends were always going out to see live jazz. I was intrigued by that, and I was intrigued by the whole history of jazz music and African-American culture, as well as the music itself. And my father, who died when I was one and a half, had played saxophone, so maybe I was looking for a connection with him too.
After starting out on clarinet in elementary school, Turner gravitated towards saxophone in high school, while also exploring his talent for the visual arts. Although he briefly studied design and illustration at Long Beach State University, his passion for jazz ultimately led him to pursue a career in music. Turners meticulous, analytical work ethic led him to study and dissect the work of such saxophone giants as John Coltrane, Joe Henderson, Dexter Gordon, Sonny Rollins, Warne Marsh and Lester Young in the pursuit his own musical voice.
I really got into it and worked really hard, just trying to figure out who I am, he says, adding, Thats how I am with everything. It took a while, and it was kind of an arduous struggle, but it allowed me to figure out what I wanted from music. Even when I was spending my time sounding like other people, I felt like that was part of my path to sounding like myself. The more you spend time with the form and the language, the more your own personality comes out.
After graduating from Bostons prestigious Berklee College of Music in 1990, Turner moved to New York, where his rapidly developing talents were quickly recognized. Between 1995 and 2001, he recorded five albums of his own—Yam Yam, Mark Turner, In This World, Ballad Session and Dharma Days—while keeping busy as a sought-after collaborator and sideman.
It was around 1992 that I began to notice or feel that what I was doing was uniquely mine, Turner asserts. It had been two and a half years of struggle, but the summer of 1992 was the period where I was finally able to hear it. Maybe no one else would notice, but thats where I could see how things were gonna go.
Despite his growing reputation and influence, Turner intentionally pulled back from working as a leader after 2001s Dharma Days, focusing much of his energy on parenthood while channeling his creativity into numerous collaborative projects.
The last record I made was right when our first child was born, and that had a lot to do with me pulling back from being a leader for awhile, Turner states, explaining, Being a leader is so intense and you really have to put your whole self into it, and I just felt like I wanted to be there for my kids. When youre a leader, youre carrying a lot of weight and responsible for a lot of things that have nothing with music. Being a sideman, you basically just have to worry about being there and doing a good job. But my kids are 10 and 13 now, so its a little less demanding and Ive got more room now to do more things that I feel strongly about.
Of his forthcoming album, a quartet effort with Avishai Cohen on trumpet, Joe Martin on bass and Marcus Gilmore on drums, Turner notes, I spent a lot of time on the compositions, which I usually do. The blowing is important, but I dont think about that when Im writing. I just write the tune, and then we see if we can improvise on it or not. Some of the new tunes are long and kind of involved, and some of them are kind of my version of being pyrotechnical. I just wanted to explore, and I wanted to be able to go in there with a band that would be flexible and have the craftsmanship and the foundation to play something difficult and still make it sound musical.
Despite his long-awaited return to recording as a leader, Turner still values his collaborative work and has no plans to cut back on it.
I would never want to solely be a leader, and if someone handed me the chance to do that, Id say no, he says. I like to interpret other peoples music. I learn from doing that, and its a big part of what Ive become as a musician. In the situations where Im the leader and writing the music, its a combination of everything I've heard and everything I've done. The way that I write and the way that I play and the bands that I bring together are all a representation of all of the musical situations that Ive been in, and Id never want to give that up.
With an impressive musical history already under his belt and more on the way, Mark Turner is clearly on the verge of a creative renaissance. As The New York Times noted, His best work is clearly still ahead of him.
© 2018 Mark Turner Jazz All Rights Reserved
http://jaleelshaw.blogspot.com/2011/06/mark-turner.html
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
MARK TURNER!
MARK TURNERFor a while I've been inspired by Marks sense of harmony, range, and control of the horn. But what stands out just as much as all of those qualities is his humility and sense of self control. Upon meeting him, you will find him to be a very cool, quiet person, almost in a meditative state. If you get a chance to sit down and talk to him, you'll find he has lots of information and is just seriously cool. I have a lot of respect for this guy. Nuff said... Here's a recent Q & A between the maestro and I.
Jaleel: I know you were born in California. Can you talk about what it was like growing up in California, how you came to play the saxophone, and who some of your early influences were? Also, how old you were when you started to get serious and realized this is something you wanted to do as a career? Was Berklee your first choice?
Mark: Actually I was born in Ohio, Wright Patterson Air Force Base. My father was a Captain in the air force...his job was navigator in B52 bombers. We later moved with my stepfather(bio father died in plane crash) to L.A. (where I grew up) when I was four. I started playing the clarinet in school band in 4th grade(age 9). There was also a citywide marching band in which I was also involved. I played clarinet until 9th grade when Jazz (big) band was an option so I switched to alto and later tenor (11th/12th grade).
Some early influences were my saxophone teacher Bill McNairn who was strongly inlfuenced by Lester Young, Zoot Sims, Al Cohn. Also My parents had some Sonny Stitt/Gene Ammons records, My Favorite Things, Stardust(John Coltrane) Sonny Rollins(The Bridge), Sonny Side Up(Dizzy Gillespie), some Brecker Bros. Also my parents listened to music a quite a bit - partiularly lots of R&B (Stevie Wonder, Al Green, The Spinners, Earth Wind and Fire, Marvin Gaye, Otis Redding etc). Regarding getting serious, not sure how to answer that as I'm still working on that part.
That said, serious meaning consistant daily practice/ involvment in music...started to take shape first or second year of college then by the third I was "serious" about music. Berklee was my first and only choice as I didn't really know about any other music schools on the east coast. Incidentally, by the way I got to Berklee that was my third year of college. Notion of Music as a career? That was gradual and was never really sure. Just took it a day, month, year at a time while it became a more consistent part of my life.
Jaleel: How was your experience at Berklee College of Music? Who did you study with and what were some of the things you focused on when you were shedding at this time? Also, who else was studying at Berklee at this time?
Mark: My time at Berklee was generally good. When I came I didn't know anything so there was nothing to lose(musically) and everything to gain. I learned from the other students as much as from the teachers. At that time there was Josh Redman(across the Charles river), Seamus Blake, Chris Cheek, Chris Speed(NEC), Antonio Hart(Tony back then), Donny McCaslin, Jordi Rossy, Danilo Perez, Roy Hargrove, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Scott Amendola, Scott Kinsey, Laila Hathaway, Delfeayo Marsalis, Jim Blake, Skooli Svereson, Dan Rieser, Jeff Parker, as well others. Teachers were George Garzone, Joe Viola, Billy Pierce. At that time I was mainly trying to learn the vocabulary(transcribing) and play the saxophone reasonably well(technique/time). Basically learning how to play. I wasn't as interested in originality as in fundamentals. How could I approach making this music mine if I don't really know what it is and or cannot speak its language? I'm still learning it as the process is gradual but at that time it was more fundamental than the present for the most part.
Jaleel: One of the first things I noticed when I first heard you was your control over the horn, your range, and your sense of harmony. What are some things that you practiced regularly? Are these things you are pretty much consistent with today?
Mark: Much of that (harmonic sensibility, horn range) were things that came after Berklee. Although foundation started there. After transcribing a lot I had learned from that process things other than vocabulary such as voice leading/harmony, note groupings, ornamentation, pacing, phrasing, swing/time, sound. Transcribing helped me to learn how to assimilate/integrate information in my own way. So I tried to find ways to combine/continue these things without transcribing. For example play a two five with voice leading( two to six voices all smooth voice leading), see all common tones including all alterations/change of chord color, change cadence with final chord the same, keep cadence change final chord, use note grouping of some type, triads, intervals, use ornamentation etc. Range came out of necessity. There were things I wanted to play that required it. So these are all things that I still work on. Maybe content changes but the format is similar.
Jaleel: Another thing I've noticed about you is that you are a very centered, focused, and humble. On the gigs I've done with you, it sometimes seems like you are meditating before you play. Sometimes doing yoga too. How has this helped you today and do you think it has had an influence on your playing?
Mark: I just try to keep things in perspective and maintain mindfulness on the task at hand. Perspective(what is really important in the relative and absolute, what is one's role/intention in a given situation) helps keep the ego( belief/clinging to an inherently existent I/self. Which includes all things associated with self such as... my body, my mind, my hopes, my fears, my desires, my aversions, my friends, my enemies, my material possessions, me, me, me and on and on etc) in check. Besides, ego is the killer of imagination...drags you down. Have no time for it. Mindfulness/Meditation help to keep the mind clear, focused, pliable. Yoga and running help to keep body/mind reasonably healthy. I'm a slow learner so I need time. Don't want this body to fail too soon.
Jaleel: As both a great saxophonist and composer, who would you say are your biggest influences in music and why?
Mark: Although this not a musical influence I would say at this point my grandfather Lewis Jackson is my greatest influence. Born to a working class family, died an aeronautical engineer, college educator, multimillionaire. If you met him you would never know it. He didn't talk about himself, what he lacked, or what others had. He just did. Keep in mind that he did this during the height of twentieth century segregation, before civil rights laws passed in the sixties. He and my grandmother lived in the same modest home until his death and left almost all of their money to education, the arts, and other charities. He was curious, imaginative, practical, intelligent, action oriented, and generous up to the end of his life. He died as he lived.
John Coltrane. More or less the same reasons as my grandfather but of course applied to music, craft, and culture. I would like to add adventure combined with taste and elegance. power/strength with tenderness and lyricism, blues/folklore with complex harmony/melody. Maintains center no matter what. Sound
Joe Henderson. Master of fast tempos, time, and pacing. Always in the rhythm section, over it on command. In other words he wields/galvanizes the rhythm section...does not simply play his language over it. One of the fathers of quickly moving form(in composition) which we now take for granted. Master of playing different "styles" /bands and giving each what it needs while maintaining his musical integrity/language. Always makes everyone else sound good. Blues/folklore. Maintains slick, cool, swagger no matter what. Sound
Warne Marsh. Master of invention. Rarely repeats himself. Willing to fall/stumble(musically) to find a new melody. Improvises at all costs. Relies primarily on content, placement, anticipation rather than volume/ dynamic range and inflection. Brings an inward contained/concentrated energy rather then an outward spread. Maintains cool no matter what. Sound.
Wayne Shorter. Prolific, varied, composer. Conjurer. Wide imagination. Covers full range of emotion. Sound.
Thelonius Monk. In terms of composition and playing. Great attention to detail. Says a great deal with only what is necessary. Covers full range of emotion. Fully aware. Conjurer. Blues/folklore. Chords. Sound. Use of space.
Lester Young. Melody. Use of space, pacing. Says a lot with little in a short time. Intelligent, witty improviser. Blues/folklore. Sound.
Miles Davis. The power of one note.
Duke Ellington. Prolific composer. Able to take a format and write on it inexhaustibly. Chords.
Morton Feldman, Arnold Shoenberg, Bach, Beethoven. Harmony, Form, Chords, Space
Issac Asimov, Ursula K. LeGuin. Imagination. Ability to created a world/paradigm that lives on it's own terms
John Lennon/Paul McCartney, Stevie Wonder. Great song writers
All musical colleagues.
I could go on and on but need to stop somewhere.
Jaleel: Lately, I'm realizing a lot of the masters have moved out of NYC. And I've been reading some great books that talk about how EVERYONE used to live in NY and how there was a little more networking going on amongst the older and younger musicians back in the day. I'm also seeing a lot of great musicians move out of the city and even the country to pursue their careers. But it's something I'm kind of afraid to do. Do you feel a connection to NYC musically? How important is it for you to be in New York?
Mark: I do feel a connection to NYC musically although I don't feel a necessity to stay here. I did live in New Haven for nine years. There is no other energy like it anywhere else in the jazzworld. It is and has been important to get a taste of it. I would not be what I am (musically) if I had not lived here at some point...at the very least to experience the culture as I believe it is still here(NYC).
Jaleel: You were one of many great jazz artist that were signed to a major label and experienced the collapse of those labels. I still remember running into you at the Vanguard and you telling me that Warner Bros. Jazz was basically no more. How was it to experience something like that first hand and how do you feel about the direction the music scene is going as far as recording goes?
Mark: On many levels it was good experience. If put back in same time period I would do it again but with a different head. Namely I did not realize how much power I/we musicians have. The people I knew at Warner Bros. loved music and worked really hard to keep it going/living. Regarding collapse, everything arises, abides, and falls/ born, lives and dies. So what else is knew? Something is being born/created in terms of recording. More creative freedom. Home made recording. Mobilization from musicians/ community.
Jaleel: What do you work on now when you practice? Do you still transcribe?
Mark: I practice sound mostly. Time in various ways. Vocabulary, technique, Voice leading, Ear training, Mind exercise. I don't transcribe much...little bits here and there from any type of music
https://www.allaboutjazz.com/mark-turner-empathy-warmth-and-generosity-mark-turner-by-kurt-rosenwinkel.php
Mark Turner: Grounded in a Spiritual World
I remember being at Berklee and listening to Mark in the practice room. A lot of people used to gather outside his practice room at various times and just listen to him. He would be in there ten hours a day, usually. And then I heard him in a cafeteria concert—I think he was with Paul LaDuca and Jorge Rossy—and he was playing a lot like John Coltrane. He was really in deep; he was absorbing everything he could from Coltrane at that time.
People's first impression of Mark is usually of a stoic remoteness to the atmosphere around him. It's interesting, because I had that feeling too, but now that I know him so well, I know that that's just a first impression. Once you get to know him and his playing, you feel its empathy, its warmth and generosity. But my first impression was like, "Woah, this guy is deep into this very rarefied area." We didn't really hook up until a couple years later, around 1992, in New York, when I had a trio with Ben Street and Jeff Ballard. At one point we were playing and somebody was like, "You know, Mark's living down the street. We should call him." So we called him and he came over and it was like, boom! That was it. Then it was a quartet. And we just went from there.
We got a weekly gig at Small's jazz club. Over the next excellent seven years, we pretty much only played local gigs, so we had a lot of time on our hands; we weren't really busy like we are now. We would play our Tuesday night gig, and the rest of the time we'd be practicing on our own. I'd be writing a lot of music, and we'd get together two or three times before the next gig and rehearse the new material. We had some other gigs together, too—we had one at the Three of Cups, another club in New York, and in the beginning, we were playing a mix of standards and my music. I remember this one time, I think we were playing "Satellite" by Coltrane, and it was at the end of the song, we were vamping out, and Mark and I started playing together, sort of soloing together, and the four of us hit this zone. It was almost like we blasted out of the atmosphere and found ourselves in this different solar system and everything we did was just magically going together. And I remember, particularly, this one moment that Mark and I had: we played a run together—we were improvising, but we played exactly the same notes, not just one or two but an entire phrase. It was amazing. That was when I think we all realized the potential that we had as a group. I think it encouraged us to work harder and do more. We were always feeling this kind of magic chemistry between us, and we continued to develop over the next ten years.
When we became a quartet, that started feeding into my writing. My writing was developing with the sound of the group, which was developing from the sound of my writing, and also developing from everything that we were listening to together—Keith Jarrett's American Quartet or Duke Ellington or Joe Henderson or Sonny Rollins—all these different touchstones that we all had in common. And then, as we were practicing together, the way that everybody was interacting would start to inform the way I would write. And because Mark and I were developing our own personal styles in the presence of one another, there was a lot of cross-pollination. He would grab something from me and I would grab something from him, and in between songs, we'd be working stuff out. We were developing our own personal language together. His playing definitely informed my playing and my writing, and vice versa.
One of the things that's particular to us is this mind-reading thing where we can play a rubato melody and play every single note exactly together, no matter what or where we put it. And, interestingly, this also goes for written music. I made a record called Heartcore, and it was music that I made in my studio, and I asked Mark to come over and play on something and I didn't really have a chart. All I had was a short-hand scribble that I'd written out for myself that was almost illegible. I gave it to him and was like, this is all I have, and he just read it and just knew what it was. He played incredibly, completely on-target, everything perfect. It happened again on my most recent album, Caipi, which is kind of similar to Heartcore, and I had him come into the studio, and again, it was just a bunch of dots on the staff without any stems or any rhythmic delineations, just a bunch of note heads bunched together. I hadn't bothered to write it out for myself because I knew what the rhythms were, but that was the chart I had for him. It was a mess. And the same thing happened, it was hilarious. He just knew, he just knows! There's a real feeling of closeness there.
One of the most special things about Mark is the absolute egolessness of his involvement with music. He can do anything he wants on the saxophone; his abilities are completely unlimited. But he never has any particular agenda; he's just responding to the music at that moment, and his concern is with shaping the whole performance or song. So that results in a few things: it results in patience, and taste, and maturity, and empathy and graciousness and grace and blending and making and generosity. And then, in those moments where it's needed, because of the same reasons, he might just absolutely tear the roof off. And he can do that because of that natural, stable place from which he's coming. He's always a very grounded presence.
Mark is one of the most dedicated people I've ever met, both musically and in terms of his personal, spiritual journey in this life. He's very methodical. He's very patient. I remember when he almost cut off his hand with the electric saw: everybody was in shock—except for him! And the first time I talked to him after that, he was like, "Yeah, you know, I've had a pretty good run. It's okay." He had already accepted, and was already okay with, the prospect that he'd never play again. To me, that really illustrates where he's grounded. He's not grounded in this world; he's grounded in a deeper—not deeper, but larger—spiritual world. He's able to let go of any worldly things because he knows that his true root and home is in this larger, spiritual, cosmic world.
And another little anecdote about him that's really funny is: Because of where he's coming from, nothing around him really bothers him. And when we started to play internationally in concert halls, I remember many times, we'd be playing and he would take a solo and then I'd be taking a solo and then I would look to cue the melody out —and he wouldn't be there! And I'd turn around and he'd be behind us, on the floor, doing yoga! And I'd look at him and I'd be like raising my eyebrows like, "Here we go! It's coming around!" and he'd give me this look—like a thousand-mile stare. Actually, it was more of a complete, unaffected, no expression, just looking at me like—blank. And it always made me laugh. 'Cause you always knew he would be there—he'd just be nailing it. That was funny, 'cause that happened all the time, he was always doing that. It made me love him a little bit more each time.
Photo credit: Per Kreuger
https://jazztimes.com/features/mark-turner-road-to-recovery/
Mark Turner: Road to Recovery
The first doctor he saw at the emergency room on Nov. 5 of last year was somewhat dubious about the prospect of Turner regaining the use of his fingers. An orthopedic surgeon had a more optimistic prognosis-six to eight months and he’d be back in the saddle again. “I didn’t touch the sax for two months after the surgery,” says Turner. “For the first month I did physical therapy twice a week, then once a week for the second month. I did some acupuncture, too. And I had to do certain exercises for the first three months, every two hours, all day. After two months I started fingering the sax five minutes every few days and three months after surgery I began practicing maybe two hours every few days.”
By the end of February, less than four months after his surgery, Turner was back on the bandstand, performing at the Village Vanguard in pianist Edward Simon’s quartet. The following month he played a weeklong engagement at Birdland with Italian trumpeter Enrico Rava, pianist Stefano Bollani, bassist Ben Street and drummer Paul Motian, in support of Rava’s new CD, New York Days (ECM). And in early April, Turner joined the members of his freewheeling collective Fly (bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Jeff Ballard) for a weeklong engagement at Jazz Standard to celebrate the release of their extraordinary ECM debut, Sky & Country.
During all these gigs, Turner could be seen alternately flexing his fingers and making a fist whenever he wasn’t playing. “I have to keep them going because they get stiff,” he explains. “I have to keep them limber so they work.”
While he appeared to play with the same effortless fluidity, daring intervallic leaps and remarkable command of the altissimo register that have been Turner signatures since his 1998 self-titled debut for Warner Bros., he is not yet back in peak playing form.
The same single-minded determination that allowed Turner to very thoughtfully and methodically forge his own unique vocabulary on the instrument-one that owes more to Warne Marsh and Lennie Tristano than to earlier towering influences John Coltrane and Joe Henderson-has been a key to his comeback. “It’s never going to be all the way back,” he says of his injured left hand. “I’m not going to be able to make a full fist, but I’m definitely on the road to recovery and it gets better and my hand gets stronger every day. My technique is a lot more specific now. I don’t have the leeway that I used to. There are certain things I have to do; otherwise, I can’t play certain passages. So I have to learn how to play flat-fingered. But it’s OK. It makes it even more intense.”
Both Sky & Country and Rava’s New York Days were recorded around the same time last year (February), at the same studio (Avatar in Manhattan), using the same engineer (James Farber). Both ECM projects were, of course, produced by Manfred Eicher, yet they have distinctly different sonic characteristics. The Rava recording utilizes a lot more reverb in the mix than the Fly recording, though Sky & Country is actually a “wetter” mix than Fly’s previous outing, 2004’s self-titled debut on Savoy Jazz. As drummer Ballard notes, “The presence of the drums is really in your face on the new one. If you compare it to our first record it doesn’t sound anything like it at all. There’s a very strong, very robust sound to the whole record. It’s close and you hear detail, but with the reverb it kind of spreads a little bit more than the first record.”
On Ballard’s kinetic “Lady B” and his funk-laden title track, Turner’s evocative “Anandananda” and long-form composition “Super Sister,” or Grenadier’s spacious meditation “CJ” and his swinging “Transfigured,” the freewheeling collective demonstrates uncanny chemistry. Onstage together at Jazz Standard, whether they were running down the elegant and restrained “Fly Mr. Freakjar” or burning their way through John Coltrane’s “Satellite” (a blistering romp based on “How High the Moon”), their approach was intimate and conversational from bar to bar. And their roles shifted easily from tune to tune.
“There’s some pieces where I play just melodies on the drums and then Larry plays more of a function of the rhythmic element,” says Ballard. “And Mark can assume that role of comping, as he did on the gig the other night behind my drum solo on ‘Satellite,’ just offering a bit of a push in there. The moment was calling for that and he answered.”
“On certain tunes, the bass is supplying the more fundamental rhythmic thing and then Jeff is coloring against it,” adds Grenadier. “The focus is always shifting so that the person who is commandeering any particular aspect of the music is always moving around the band.” They’ve had quite a lot of time to develop their musical relationships. “Jeff and I probably first played together in 1982 at a Jamey Aebersold camp,” says Grenadier. “And then Mark and I first played together in 1984 at a California All-State Jazz Band concert at the Monterey Jazz Festival. So we definitely have a long history.”
The first time all three played together was at a 1991 jam session at the West Side loft where Grenadier and Ballard were living. “Larry knew Mark from Berklee,” recalls Ballard, “and so he asked him to come by and play. And it clicked right away.”
The first time the trio recorded together was a track for a 2000 compilation album called Originations, executive produced by Chick Corea to showcase the individual members of his Origin octet. Ballard had been the drummer of Origin since joining in 1997, and for this session (the track “Beat Street”) he recruited Turner and Grenadier and billed it as the Jeff Ballard Trio.
Over the years there have been working situations where two of the three members of Fly might overlap in one band. Ballard and Turner, for instance, played together in Guillermo Klein’s Los Guachos in the late ’90s and later put in several years together in guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel’s band. Says Ballard of Turner, “When I first heard Mark play long ago he was absorbing everything piece by piece, and really not sounding like himself at all. At first he sounded like Trane, then he sounded just like Joe Henderson. And then, suddenly-bam!-he started coming out. He and Kurt developed this great language together and it was really something different.”
Says Turner, “At a certain point I just decided there were certain things I need to do. And it wasn’t so much, ‘I need to find myself.’ I just wanted to have more fun with music and learn how to improvise. I had acquired all this other vocabulary from other people-Trane and Joe Henderson-and it wasn’t fun anymore. So I just went on this search to figure out how can I really learn to truly improvise and I just devised all these different ways to practice. I started to figure out what are the nuts and bolts of music and I came up with some techniques of my own. And eventually it came out to be whatever it is I am now.”
Mark Turner Quartet - live @ Pancevo Jazz Festival [2014]: live at 17.Pancevo Jazz Festival, Aplollo hall, Pancevo, Serbia, 05.11.14
MARK TURNER QUARTET:
Mark Turner - tenor saxophone
Avishai Cohen - trumpet
Joe Martin - double bass
Marcus Gilmore - drums
https://stagebuddy.com/music/music-feature/review-mark-turner-quartet-jazz-standard
Decidedly modernist, Turner, his main musical partner-in-crime Avishai Cohen on trumpet, as well as Joe Martin on bass and Justin Brown on drums were intoxicating to listen to and mesmerizing to watch. Amazingly in sync with one another, Turner and Cohen often seemed to merge into a single instrument for a time before occasionally drifting away from one another (Turner literally leaving the performance space and hanging out by the stage door for minutes at a time) to create an evening of music that was quite suspenseful and ultimately satisfying. If these two masters have different styles, I could not detect them.
The utter seriousness with which these artists entered the stage and prepared to play set the tone for the evening. There would be no jokes and almost no speaking to the audience at all in-between the music selections. There were five pieces, all of them quite long and each of them very complex. This was the jazz equivalent of contemporary chamber music. Atonal, sometimes arhythmical, but always impeccably played and gripping. Nothing seemed to have been set in stone and yet nothing was left to chance. The quartet started things off with "It’s Not Alright With Me" and immediately showed the audience some fascinating improvisation from Turner and Cohen, symmetrically placed on stage like two bookends. Justin Brown’s drums were dreamlike and hallucinogenic. "Ethans Line" was dissonant, atonal and through it all Martin’s bass and Brown’s drums created the sound of distant thunder. Cohen’s trumpet sounded like a child that is lost and trying to find its way home. And as in every piece, Tuner joined him to play a nearly identical melody before letting him alone to explore. "Left-Handed Darkness" was my personal favorite, a drunken, dizzy-sounding melodic line that was punctuated by the sharpest bass chords I’ve ever heard. Haunting and melancholy, it was the soulful and occasionally menacing highlight of the evening.
There were remarkable duets, not just between the front-and-center Turner and Cohen but also between Martin and Brown. Martin’s most powerful drum solo came towards the end of the evening. It was a rapid yet velvety-soft tour-de-force. Brown kept the symbol sounding constantly (this seems to be a trademark of his, and it is magical) His playing was so fast it was a blur, yet the sound was soft and exquisite.
In an eclectic schedule of talented performers at the Jazz Standard, it is wonderful to hear exquisite playing in this highly modern style. It is also gratifying to experience such an appreciative crowd.
http://www.westword.com/music/mark-turner-the-world-is-magical-and-theres-no-reason-to-ever-be-bored-6044385
Mark Turner: "The World Is Magical and There's No Reason to Ever Be Bored"
"Basically it's about the changing nature of reality," Turner says of the book. "That's it not as solid as we think it is, and that at any point things that could be changing yesterday everyone could have purple and we wouldn't know because some guy dreamed it up and we had no idea what's really go on. It's just that reality is stranger than fiction.
"Even if you have in dreams in your own life, you want to do something to make it real. We are the universe. We make it real every time, every day. Just that. It's pliable. Don't get stuck in your rut, and make things happen. The world is magical and interesting and there's no reason to ever be bored. So that's basically the vibe."
Turner, who practices Buddhism, says the idea of impermanent nature of reality and that it's not as solid as we think it a Buddhist notion, but he adds that the novel itself happens to deal with similar issues. Part of one of the tenants of Buddhism, he says, is that all things are impermanent, and that notion carries over to way he approaches music.
"In terms of writing music and playing music I would say that it's important to remain concentrated to try in the moment and not be worried about the future or the past, not worry about discursive thought when you're trying to improvise," he says. "It's too slow. It's like trying to be in a fight when you're thinking about it or tying your shoes and you think about it. Or not worrying about, for example, if you're improvising getting overly worried about things changing or the fact that maybe you played something you didn't like or writing something and being overly concerned about a past mistake, or a past triumph and getting over it or getting attached to it so much that you can't move forward."
And moving forward is something Turner has been doing professionally for the last two decades and with his earlier five albums as a leader, starting with Yam Yam, his 1995 debut on Criss Cross. While he's has kept active performing with Hart's group and with Fly, Lathe of Heaven is Turner's first album as a leader since 2001's Dharma Days.
"I'm not so into being a leader for leader's sake," he says. "You know, being in the limelight, being in the front and all that. I'm only a leader for basically practical and musical reasons because there are things you get to do as a leader that you wouldn't otherwise get to do, for example, as a sideman. So, part of it is just that I wasn't ready to deal with all of it when I was younger."
Around the time of Dharma Days, Turner and his wife had children, and he was "trying to be a viable, responsible, skillful parent the best I could and trying to be a viable, responsible, skillful saxophone player was pretty much all that I could handle. Trying to be a leader too would basically make me at the very least mediocre of all three. I wanted to try to do at least two things well.
"If I had a huge desire to be leader and I really just wanted to be leading bands no matter what I might have done it anyway but I basically waited until the time was right. My time freed up enough so that would be able to handle being a leader and fulfill my other responsibilities because being a leader you have to do a bunch of other things that have nothing to do with music. You probably spend half your time or more dealing with promoters and all kinds of other stuff. As a side man you basically just deal with music."
Joining Turner on Lathe of Heaven are trumpeter Avishai Cohen, bassist Joe Martin, who Turner has played with in various groups over the last 15 years, and drummer Marcus Gilmore, who Turner says all very detailed players and that they all pay great attention to specifics about the music whatever situation they're in, which is something that's true for most musicians that he like playing with and that he's associated with.
"What these three in particular do in a way that I thought would be appropriate for these songs that I wrote," he says. "They're all complimentary to each other."
That's more than evident both in the live setting and on the stunning and captivating Lathe of Heaven, which features songs inspired by Bad Plus pianist Ethan Iverson, who Turner plays with in Hart's quartet, Stevie Wonder and another science fiction author, Peter F. Hamilton, who's Night's Dawn Trilogy and short-story collection A Second Chance at Eden prompted the title of Turner's song "The Edenist."
Catching Up with Saxophonist Mark Turner
After a 12-year break, the consummate sideman readies a new leader project
In those last dozen years Turner has been involved as a sideman in many projects by some of the top names in jazz, among them guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel, pianist Brad Mehldau, bassist Dave Holland and many others. Since he recorded his last album as a leader, Dharma Days (Warner Bros., 2001), Turner has also contributed to many other musicians’ recordings, among them alto sax player David Binney, bassist Omer Avital and the young guitarist Gilad Hekselman. Turner has also, since last year, been a member of the SFJAZZ Collective and is also co-leader in Fly, a trio completed by Larry Grenadier and Jeff Ballard and born in 2004.
We caught up with Turner to inquire about his re-emergence as a leader
At last, you are going to record a new album as a band-leader.
Yes! This is a project with a new quartet: trumpet player Avishai Cohen, bassist Joe Martin, drummer Marcus Gilmore and me. We are recording with ECM and we are also introducing the new band at the end of June at the Village Vanguard.
Are the tunes all your own compositions?
Yes, it’s all my music. They are all originals.
You had lot of time to write the music.
[Laughs] I didn’t write them along the last 10 years! I just finished all the music like a year ago.
So did you compose them with a view to recording this new album?
Yes, I had the idea in mind. I don’t just write in the abstract. I knew which guys are going to play it. I mean, I wanted them to play the music.
Do you have a lot of material?
Yeah… I think we will record nine tunes, maybe 10. They are long songs so maybe we have to do eight… I don’t know.
What’s the mood of the album, ballads or energetic music?
There is just one ballad. The mood? I don’t know how to explain it. You know, it’s like modern intense jazz. There are long-form tunes that change in different sections that you never hear again; you hear something and then it goes into something else. There are those tunes and then quite a few that have different kinds of lines. They are kind of exciting, I guess. There is a lot of information, a lot going on.
So there will be a lot of things that just musicians will understand.
Well, maybe. There are a lot of things that musicians will like to listen to, but it is pretty melodic also. If something is more complicated there is always something that leads you melodically, something you can sing.
And there is not a harmonic instrument.
No, nothing like that! [Laughs] No prisoners! There is no safety land, no blanket! Totally raw.
Will you replace the harmony with a dialog texture between the saxophone and the trumpet?
Yeah, we give a kind of harmony; that’s why the trumpet stands, to give it more body. It’s not like a saxophone trio, because just with the groove it is not really music. One more instrument gives more harmony… that’s it, a little bigger. I’ve never played with a trumpet player, I’ve never been curious about it. So it’s a certain kind of majestic strength the trumpet has that it can give to a quartet like that, a certain kind of power. I think it’s full.
Are you going to use electronic effects with the horn voices?
No, it’s totally raw. There is nothing extra to make it softer or anything like that.
Why did you spend all this time without leading a personal project?
Maybe because I have a family, that’s my main reason. I am not on the road all the time. I like to be at home. I wanted to be involved, I wanted my children to know me and I wanted to be close to them. So being a leader takes a lot of energy, a lot of time to write tunes.
You’re one of the most accomplished jazz saxophone players in the world and yet you haven’t recorded an album as a leader for 12years. Were you training to be the best sideman, or what?
That’s funny! I don’t know, I can’t answer that. Like I said, I have a sideman because I have a family; if I were single maybe I would have made more records as a leader. And about my position as a sideman, I don’t know. There are a lot of saxophone players with a great sound too, that play a lot. But I can’t say if I am a good sideman or not, that’s what other people have to say. I mean, if you get older and you are, like, 60 years old and you have been a journalist, and you did a lot of good work and you feel good about it, it’s automatic: other people and history decide whether you were a great journalist or not. It doesn’t matter what you say. It’s not something I can say.
How would you define your musical voice? The majority of the critics say that you are a cerebral, mathematical, man. Do you agree?
I can agree partially. I would say that everything I do comes from emotion and intuition. I think I am quite the opposite. You know, if something is very aggressive it’s emotional, and something that is quiet is gonna be cerebral. I don’t agree with that. But I do think a lot about music. I spend a lot of analytical thought on how to make music, and I practice and I spend my time. Yes, that part I do, but the inspiration of all that stuff is not about mind; it’s emotion and intuition.
What other projects are you involved with now?
Fly is kind of going on slowly but we’ll have a tour next fall, and I am going to play with Tom Harrell in October. I am gonna be recording with him in October too, and I think we’ll be playing at the Vanguard. And he is doing the same configuration-trumpet, sax, bass and drums-and that’s kind of interesting for me. His music is totally different; he’s super great. I did few gigs with them last fall and it was fantastic so I can’t wait for that! And I am also teaching in New York.
What’s the most important thing that you try to teach your students?
The main thing is probably to pay attention to what they are doing. I would say practice but not practice playing-figure out who you are, figure out what you want and figure out how to do it. That’s the main thing.
You found yourself through the music.
Yes, actually. That’s the main thing. I think a lot of students pay too much attention to what’s outside themselves without paying attention to what is going on inside and how to bring it out. So I try to improve that. If you want to play, you have to put all the talents you have in the music; it is not something that comes to you. You have to do something.
What’s the best lesson you have learned from your life in music?
It’s difficult to put it in one word, but I think the main thing is that in order to help other people you need to help yourself. In other words, if you want to sound good you have to make other people sound good.
https://jazztimes.com/departments/before-and-after/before-after-with-mark-turner/
Before & After With Mark Turner
The influences of a towering modern influence
JazzTimes
Turner’s long absence out front also did little to diminish his outsize influence. At 49, his singular sound has echoed through a generation of younger saxophonists including Ben Wendel, Melissa Aldana and Noah Preminger, but his status as one of the leading contemporary tenor players belies a cool, gnomic composure and an eternal student’s humility. Turner has advanced tenor vocabulary, but his trademark lithe tone, angular chromaticism and motivic approach to improvisation have a well-established history.
Turner plans to return to the studio with the same quartet early in 2016. In addition to maintaining a busy touring schedule with bands led by trumpeters Tom Harrell and Ibrahim Maalouf and drummers Hart and Colin Stranahan, Turner is a voracious and perceptive listener on and off the bandstand, still finding time to transcribe solos by his favorite players. Several of those are included here in his first Before & After session with JazzTimes, conducted at Columbia University. Turner had worn out the grooves on many of the selected tracks while he was in college, and seemed transported to an earlier time. Even from his perch, Turner still has a thing or two to learn from the masters.
1. Lester Young & Coleman Hawkins
“I Can’t Get Started” (The Complete Jazz at the Philharmonic on Verve [1944-1949], Verve). Young, Hawkins, tenor saxophones; Buck Clayton, trumpet; Kenny Kersey, piano; Al McKibbon, bass; J.C. Heard, drums. Recorded in 1946.
BEFORE: This is so killing. Is it Lester and Teddy Wilson?
AFTER: It hurts! Did Hawk just come to sit in? Wow, that was so great. So all you needed to bring to complete the big four would be Don Byas and Ben Webster. I guess I’ve heard a fair amount of Lester in the middle ’40s, but here he still sounds like he did in ’39, ’40 or ’41. I’m not sure when the big change happened between then and the early ’50s. On that take, it sounds like earlier.
2. Joe Albany
“All the Things You Are” (The Right Combination, Riverside). Albany, piano; Warne Marsh, tenor saxophone; Bob Whitlock, bass.
Recorded in 1957.
BEFORE: I haven’t heard this one. Damn. I want to transcribe this-just the melody alone. My first guess is Warne and [pianist Sal Mosca].
AFTER: Now that I listen to it, that’s definitely not Sal. Sorry, Sal. I take that back. Prime Warne Marsh for sure-the way he plays the whole range of the instrument, especially the way he goes into the altissimo. There are other players who play in the altissimo, but listen to the timbre that he uses, the way that he accesses that part of the instrument. I don’t know if this is the best wording to use, but he relies on content as opposed to drama for the engagement of the musical statement. And then there’s the way that he feels. I don’t know if there’s any such thing as total improvisation, but I think Warne takes it pretty far, as far as he can take it, really flying by the seat of his pants while never completely losing it. He’s always right on the razor’s edge. That solo felt contained, but I also felt like my hair was on edge, like I was about to scream at the same time. I love that aspect of him, and that’s what I want.
3. Hank Mobley
“Remember” (Soul Station, Blue Note). Mobley, tenor saxophone; Wynton Kelly, piano; Paul Chambers, bass; Art Blakey, drums. Recorded in 1960.
BEFORE: I haven’t heard this in a while. It’s a great one. I was about to transcribe this a little while ago. I should go back and do it. Hank is in the same tradition as Lester Young. So many saxophone players came out of Lester Young. With Hank, the swing is right in the pocket, which is not easy to do. Sometimes I think about that solo on [Miles Davis’ 1961 recording of] “Someday My Prince Will Come,” where he plays and Trane plays. When I was in school, people would say, “Oh, Trane slayed Hank,” and I never felt that was true. It’s another expression that was equally valid, just on another aesthetic plane. He’s so relaxed it’s incredible. He never loses his composure, especially at that tempo, where that’s kind of easy to do. With a rhythm section like that it’s easy to feel like you need to push, but he sits right back in it like a Cadillac.
4. John Coltrane & Don Cherry
“Bemsha Swing” (The Avant-Garde, Atlantic). Coltrane, tenor saxophone; Cherry, cornet; Percy Heath, bass; Ed Blackwell, drums. Recorded in 1960.
BEFORE: It sounds like Trane, just from the melody. I think that’s Don Cherry but I’m not sure. I remember this. I used to have this record. It’s great. I remember when I listened to it in college. I haven’t listened to it since then. Ed Blackwell and Don Cherry had a thing somewhere else [the Ornette Coleman Quartet] and Trane was stepping into it. It’s interesting hearing how he navigated that. I always think of Blackwell, Cherry and Ornette as wide in terms of the way they access the music, and Trane seems to be very focused in the way he plays his lines, harmonically, his sound. Ornette’s [sound] is very wide for alto; it’s like open space, out in Texas, in the West, compared to Trane. In terms of matching sound, I would hear maybe Sonny [Rollins] in the ’60s; the way he played would match [the Coleman band] more than Trane does. Not that it’s good or bad, but they would be more together in their aesthetic.
5. Sonny Rollins
“East Broadway Run Down” (East Broadway Run Down, Impulse!). Rollins, tenor saxophone; Freddie Hubbard, trumpet; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Elvin Jones, drums. Recorded in 1966.
BEFORE: Damn! I haven’t heard this in a long time. Sonny Rollins. It sounds like Elvin on drums.
This is his last album before the second hiatus.
It’s one of the great, classic recordings and it probably influenced everybody in some way or another. I love all periods of Sonny, but I would say one of my favorites for different reasons is the middle ’60s. There’s this record, a bunch of live ones, my parents had one that I listened to in high school, and also the soundtrack to Alfie. His sound changed and I love it. It’s wide and focused and maybe a little bit dry. It’s just incredible narrative improvisation as opposed to his counterpart, Trane, at that time, who was also taking very long solos. They’re both storytelling, but Sonny feels more like a novelist and Trane is [taking a] journey to the top of a mountain and then coming back down with information to give us all. They’re two different paradigms, but both of them are necessary.
6. Wayne Shorter
“From the Lonely Afternoons” (Native Dancer, Columbia). Shorter, tenor saxophone, piano; David Amaro, guitar; Wagner Tiso, electric piano; Dave McDaniel, bass; Roberto Silva, drums; Milton Nascimento, guitar, vocals, composer. Recorded in 1974.
BEFORE: I haven’t heard this in a long time. This is Native Dancer. I used to love this record. Milton Nascimento, Airto [Moreira, who appears elsewhere on the album]. I just remember the incredible economy that Wayne has. He’s like Lester and Trane all in one guy. He’s a master of the low register. In the middle ’70s, Wayne’s sound is incredible. I think he’s playing a hard-rubber [Otto] Link mouthpiece; they call them “Early Babbitts.” Somebody else who I think played that setup, who I’m really digging right now, is Clifford Jordan, who did Glass Bead Games.
You’re talking about the 1974 album that includes the song “John Coltrane.”
[The ’60s are considered] prime Clifford, but I love him in the ’70s. In the ’80s and early ’90s, often, and maybe collectively, people felt that the ’70s were a wasted or dark period. But it was so fruitful! There weren’t as many mainstream swinging records, but there were so many great ones then-to me, some of the greatest. A lot of those guys who were young in the ’60s became even more mature and adventurous in the ’70s, like on Native Dancer, for example. Some of my favorite music came from the ’70s.
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http://www.musicianguide.com/biographies/1608003537/Mark-Turner.html
Jazz saxophonist Mark Turner is known for his intense, intellectual musical style, as well as his deeply thoughtful approach to life. Although he has been heralded by critics, some note that his music may be too rarefied for the commercial market; he produced several albums with Warner Bros. before losing his contract with that label at the end of 2001. Since that time, he has continued to play and to reassess his musical goals.
Turner was born on November 10, 1965, in Fairborn, Ohio, but moved to Orange County, California, with his family at the age of four. As a child, he was equally interested in music and art and initially planned to become an illustrator, although he began playing alto saxophone in high school, and took up tenor saxophone two years later. Turner's parents were both music lovers and jazz fans, so he was exposed early to recordings of some of the finest jazz musicians. The first saxophone recordings he owned were by John Coltrane, Sonny Stitt, and Gene Ammons.
Turner studied design and illustration at Long Beach State University, but in 1987 transferred to the Berklee College of Music in Boston. In a biography on his agent's website, Turner said, "Obviously the mediums are different, in that music happens in the moment and art doesn't in the same way. But I see similarities in the creative processes."
At Berklee, Turner studied with noted saxophonists, including Billy Pierce, Joe Viola, and George Garzone, and made connections with other musicians who would eventually play on his albums. They included guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel, drummer Jorge Rossy, saxophonists Joshua Redman, Chris Cheek, Seamus Blake, and Antonio Hart, pianists Geoff Keezer and Anthony Wonsey, and bassist Dwayne Burno.
In a press release issued by his agent, Turner described this period: "We'd play all the time.... That thing of playing and practicing, having a place to just play, and then go back and practice, then have another session, the balance of those two is a perfect circle. I was also around people who were doing things I couldn't do, people that I wanted to learn from."
In an interview in Jazz Weekly, Turner told Fred Jung that during this time, he particularly admired saxophonist John Coltrane because of Coltrane's philosophy that musicians should focus not on ego but on "becoming a selfless musician and playing for more of a lofty purpose." Turner told New York Times writer Ben Ratliff that in school, he was completely absorbed in Coltrane's music, saying, "I was fairly methodical. I almost always wrote out Coltrane's solos, and I'd have a lot of notes on the side." He knew at the time that he would not end up copying Coltrane, that he would simply learn from him and move on to find his own sound. He also noted, "I noticed that if you looked at someone else who was into Trane, and if you could listen through that person's ear and mind, it would be a slightly different version. That's who you are--it's how you hear." After learning from Coltrane's work, Turner focused his meticulous study on the work of Joe Henderson, Dexter Gordon, and Sonny Rollins.
In 1990 Turner moved to New York, where he met Warne Marsh, whose playing of the tenor saxophone emphasized long, linear, melodic improvisation, in contrast to the more aggressive sound of Turner's earlier inspirations. In addition to Marsh, Turner discovered the music of Lester Young, whose style fell between these extremes. His first album, Yam Yam, was released in 1994; his self-titled second album, on the Warner Bros. label, included a mixture of musical genres, combining what Ron Wynn in Weekly Wire called "introspective unison exchanges with [saxophonist] Joshua Redman ... to lush, passionate statements." Wynn also noted that pianist Edward Simon, bassist Christopher Thomas, and drummer Brian Blade didn't "simply sit back and accompany the leaders. Constantly adjusting, prodding, and changing tempos, they help prevent Turner from coasting or losing steam." His third album, In This World, was also released by Warner Bros. in that same year. Turner told Jung, "I feel relatively good about it. I was happy with the way everyone performed on it." He viewed the record as a continuation of what he had done on Mark Turner, calling it "a nice progression."
In 2000 Turner released Ballad Session, a collection of pieces composed by other musicians. Although he planned to feature his own music on his next two albums, he told Jung, "I kind of wanted to [perform other people's music] for the last time for a while and move on." In the Philadelphia City Paper, Nate Chinen wrote that Turner's 2001 album Dharma Days "both extends and deepens the tenor saxophone's distinctive oeuvre," and that Turner "improvises with the same alluringly elusive quality that distinguishes his compositions."
In December of 2001, after four releases with Warner Bros., Turner's contract with the company expired and was not renewed. New York Times writer Ben Ratliff noted that this was a shock, since Turner's "music is intellectual and rigorously composed, defined by long, flowing, chromatically complex lines that keep their stamina and intensity as they stay dynamically even." Ratliff also praised Turner's use of the difficult higher notes of the tenor saxophone, noting that other musicians "can't say a negative word about him" and that they admire the freshness of his music. However, Ratliff wrote, "In the end, Mr. Turner's music may have been too rigorous for Warner Bros. and he isn't the sort who might turn his music around to sell records."
A representative of the company told Ratliff that Turner's contract wasn't renewed because his records didn't sell enough to satisfy the company. "It's fine," Turner said to Ratliff. "I was considering trying to get out of [the contract] myself. Nothing against Warner, but I feel relieved and open and free." By June of 2002, though, Turner still had not had any calls from other record labels. This was not surprising, Ratliff noted, since many labels had cut or scaled back their jazz departments and moved into other kinds of music. Even labels like Verve and Blue Note, formerly jazz specialists, had begun emphasizing other musical genres.
In addition to fronting a group, Turner enjoys being a sideman to other musicians and told Ratliff that he wanted to be part of a cooperative band that shared composing and publishing credits. This modesty and self-effacement, Ratliff posited, might be why had trouble finding a label, quoting saxophonist Donny McCaslin: "His demeanor is reserved, and his playing reflects that. He has an introspective sound. Maybe people aren't seeing what's there." Bassist Reid Anderson told Ratliff, "He uses harmonies that are the language of harmony; he hears the melody within those harmonies.... He's dealing on that high level that perhaps only the initiated can appreciate."
Turner lives in New Haven, Connecticut, with his wife Helena Hansen, a doctoral candidate in anthropology at Yale University, and their two children. Turner, who is a Buddhist, told Jung that his introverted, introspective personality helped him to focus on his music, saying, "Silence and quiet time helps for that, at least for me, to center myself, just to figure out what my priorities are." Of his goals, he remarked that he wanted to "become a stronger musician, composer, and all that. But even more than that, just to be a giving, selfless person. Having a better understanding of the meaning of living. That is my main goal."
Mark Turner's Career
Early influences included John Coltrane and Warne Marsh; first album, Yam Yam, released on Criss Cross label, 1994; followed by Warner releases Mark Turner and In This World, 1998, Ballad Session, 2000, and Dharma Days, 2001; contract with Warner Bros. expired, December of 2001; also works as a sideman in othFamous Works
- Selected discography
- Yam Yam , Criss Cross, 1994.
- Mark Turner , Warner Bros., 1997.
- In This World , Warner Bros., 1998.
- Ballad Session , Warner Bros., 2000.
- Ballad Session (with bonus track), WEA, 2000.
- Dharma Days , Warner Bros., 2001.
Further Reading
SourcesPeriodicals
- Guardian (London, England), May 29, 1999.
- New York Times, June 16, 2002; July 2, 2002.
- "A Fireside Chat with Mark Turner," Jazz Weekly, http://www.jazzweekly.com/interviews/turner.htm (September 18, 2002).
- "Dig the New Breed: Young Jazz Has a Lot to Offer," Weekly Wire, http://weeklywire.com/ww/07-20-98/nash_music-records.html (September 19, 2002).
- "Mark Turner Biography," Hopper Management, http://www.hoppermanagement.com/bios/mark_turner_bio_e.htm (September 18, 2002).
- "Mark Turner Quintet," Philadelphia City Paper, http://www.citypaper.net/articles/051701/mus.picke.shtml (September 18, 2002).
https://www.npr.org/2014/09/04/345821427/in-tenor-saxophonist-mark-turners-new-album-the-music-unfolds-like-a-narrative
Review
Music Reviews
In Tenor Saxophonist Mark Turner's New Album, The Music Unfolds Like A Narrative
Turner's new quartet album Lathe of Heaven gets its name from Ursula K. LeGuin's novel. A lot of action happens at thoughtful medium tempos, and there's beautiful dissonance in the two-horn harmonies.
Tenor saxophonist Mark Turner records a lot as a member of the trio Fly and as a side man. But his new album is his first under his own name in over a decade. Jazz critic Kevin Whitehead says, Turner's a thinking person's improviser.
(SOUNDBITE OF MARK TURNER SONG)
KEVIN WHITEHEAD, BYLINE: Tenor saxophonist Mark Turner has a reputation as a cool customer. His improvising is more about the instant composing of lucid lines than blunt self-expression. Turner's new quartet album "Lathe Of Heaven" marks his third appearance on ECM Records this year, and the music he's written lends itself to that label's aesthetic. A lot of the action happens at thoughtful medium tempos, and there's some beautiful dissonance in the two-horn harmonies. But the players get a few moments to quicken their blood. Joe Martin is the bass player and Marcus Gilmore's on drums.
(SOUNDBITE OF MARK TURNER SONG)
WHITEHEAD: Mark Turner tends to take his time and mostly avoids big emotive gestures some saxophonists rely on. His lean tone never gets in his way. Turner has a simpatico frontline partner in Avishai Cohen. The Israeli trumpeter's brash trio albums show his debate to Don Cherry and his plump round sound here, and the loving way it's captured recall a fellow disciple, the Italian romantic Enrico Rava. Like Mark Turner, Avishai Cohen brings a sense of order to his playing. He can draw a line and follow it.
(SOUNDBITE OF MARK TURNER SONG)
WHITEHEAD: Mark Turner's "Lathe Of Heaven" takes its title from Ursula K. Le Guin's novel, where the nature of reality keeps shifting. Turner says he thinks of his music as unfolding like a narrative, and you can hear the parallels. The music doesn't give up its secrets too fast as he parcels out his themes and subthemes establishing mood through the slow accumulation of details. The slinky melodies map out the terrain foreshadowing the improvised action and interaction. That lets Mark Turner get of novelistic unity of effect. This clean plotting makes a cooler brand of jazz cool all over again.
(SOUNDBITE OF MARK TURNER SONG)
GROSS: Kevin Whitehead writes for Point of Departure and Wondering Sound and is the author of "Why Jazz." He reviewed "Lathe Of Heaven," the new album by saxophonist Mark Turner's quartet. It's on ECM label and comes out next week.
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Every Single Tree in the Forest: Mark Turner as Seen by His Peers, Part One
Prologue: 1984 – 2008
Southern California, spring, 1984:The two tenor saxophonists in this high school band could easily be mistaken for members of the basketball team. Seated several chairs apart, they are fairly tall—taller than the average jazz musician, at least—and, more importantly, play with unusual maturity for seventeen-year-olds; in fact, so do all their peers in the California All-Star High School big band, which is currently rehearsing for an upcoming performance at the Monterey Jazz Festival. The saxophonists are named Mark and Donny, and they will soon graduate from Palos Verdes High School and Aptos High School, respectively. In a few months Donny will catch a plane to Boston to attend Berklee College of Music, where he will pursue his dream of becoming a professional saxophonist; Mark will stay in California to attend Cal State Long Beach to study art. Although Mark derives immense pleasure from playing the saxophone, he has other interests: he has always had a sharp eye for design and illustration, and he more recently developed a fondness for break dancing. For Mark, the life of a professional saxophonist does not appear to be in his future.
Boston, winter, late 1980s:
The practice rooms at Berklee College of Music are packed and Chris Cheek, class of ’90, is ready for a break. He sets his saxophone down on the lone chair in this stale, little cubicle and steps into the hall where, peeking out from the churning noise of students practicing, something catches his ear. He follows it several doors down and peers into the window, where a gangly, rail thin saxophonist is diligently practicing a Coltrane solo, the transcription copied by hand. He notices the remarkable tidiness of the penmanship, more like the work of an experienced draftsman than a music school student. The transcription sits alongside pages of what appear to be notes, this particular student’s personal appendix to Coltrane’s musical language. Cheek stands and listens for a few more minutes, then walks back to his cubicle and shuts the door.
Boston, fall, 1998:
Tower Records stands monolithic at the intersection of Newbury Street and Massachusetts Avenue. A glacial procession stretches down the block as eager fans await their shrink-wrapped, midnight-release copies of Prolonging the Magic (Cake, certified platinum September 1999), S’il suffisait d’aimer (Celine Dion, U.S. release, second best-selling French album of all time behind Dion’s D’eux), and other new releases. When one young man finally reaches the front of the line, he causes a minor commotion. “What did you say you wanted a copy of?” A weary employee hastily abandons the stacks of pop, rock, and hip-hop albums at the counter and disappears deep into the store, and several minutes slip by before he resurfaces with the mystery CD.
The next day, the same young man, a Berklee freshman saxophonist from Houston named Walter Smith III, starts picking out melodies by ear from his new acquisition: In This World, Mark Turner’s second release for Warner Brothers. A few hours later, Smith steps out into the hall to clear his ears. He pauses for a moment when he realizes he is still hearing fragments of songs from the album in his head, and then realizes the sounds aren’t in his head; they’re seeping out from practice rooms throughout the entire floor.
Boston, fall, mid-2000s:
At morning rehearsal at the New England Conservatory, the ensemble coach calls a standard, something simple to give the students a chance to blow and get their chops warmed up. The coach counts off the tempo and sits back to let the students take over. When everyone has finished taking a solo and the song comes to a close, the coach looks at the tenor saxophonist. “You know, in this music you’ve got to find your own voice,” he says. He pauses to scan the room, as though to broadcast his teacherly contemplation, before returning his gaze to the saxophonist. “Now, I’m hearing a lot of Mark Turner in the room, but Mark Turner’s not here today. I played with Mark last week. He’s probably in New York somewhere.” The saxophonist looks increasingly uncomfortable. “I didn’t come here to hear Mark. I came here to hear you.”
Brooklyn, fall, 2008:
A few days before his forty-third birthday, Mark Turner is splitting firewood in his house as he regularly does. He favors a power saw. Setting to the work at hand, he is focused and careful, just as he is when he plays the saxophone. This time, however, there is an accident. The rotation of the saw exerts a deep pull, sometimes drawing the wood into the blade with sudden surges. This time, the left hand guiding the wood to the blade is too slow and as the saw takes the wood into it, the left hand is pulled in with the wood.
1. In This World
– Chris Cheek, saxophonist
“He’s somebody I can’t say I know that well, and I don’t think anyone knows him that well except maybe his family. I wonder what Ben [Street] would say about him.”
– Ethan Iverson, pianist
“I don’t feel like I know Mark that well—but I don’t say that as a lack, like ‘I wish I knew him better’ or that he’s a man of mystery.”
– Ben Street, bassist
“I personally feel like I’m still just getting to know Mark. He’s got kids and a family and a busy career, so I don’t really get to see him that often.”
– Ben Wendel, saxophonist
“I know a lot of people know him better than I do.”
– Miguel Zenón, saxophonist
The Mark Turner Leg Spring is now so prevalent among saxophonists at jam sessions that non-jazz nerds might mistakenly conclude that the behavior is an essential component of modern jazz saxophone practice. It is not, but it has become one of several predominant traces of tenor saxophonist Mark Turner, who turns fifty this November. Like a ghost, his sound and even his physical mannerisms seem to follow saxophonists everywhere. “It speaks so highly to Mark’s playing,” says Tom Finn, a Brooklyn-based alto saxophonist who studied with Turner from 2010-2011 at New York University, and who is among a younger generation of Turner-influenced saxophonists. “If you can create a cliché, it’s like, you’ve done it, you know?”
As a leader, excluding collaborative and co-led projects, Turner has released only six albums over the past twenty years. Students today often release début albums fresh out of music school, but Turner released his fairly late, at twenty-nine. Although he has recorded widely as a sideman—his Wikipedia page lists about fifty sideman credits—his output as a leader is conspicuously leaner than that of similarly influential peers like tenor saxophonists Joshua Redman and Chris Potter, with fifteen and eighteen albums, respectively.
But the numbers reveal little about an artist whose magnetic sound has burrowed deep in the ears of already several generations of saxophonists now, an infectiously distinctive voice on the horn that has been described variously as “dark,” “dry,” “even from top to bottom,” and “translucent,” and whose melodic inventions and compositions have been called “intellectual,” “harmonically advanced,” and driven by “long, serpentine lines.”
2. Cast in His Image
It’s perhaps a sign of the times that, whereas Charlie Parker’s most extreme followers sought out heroin and other substances in the 1940s and 1950s in the misguided hopes of becoming like their idol, Turner has inspired young followers in matters of healthy living, most conspicuously yoga and vegetarianism, which has not escaped the notice of other musicians.Toward the end of a recently published interview, trumpeter Nicholas Payton, perhaps best known for popularizing #BAM, or “Black American Music” (a campaign to rebrand and reclaim “jazz,” a moniker which he associates with longstanding commercial and cultural exploitation), commented:
Hey, if you’re really a yoga-loving person and you’re really juicing, if that’s authentically you, that’s fine—like Mark Turner, like that’s who the fuck he is—but a lot of people are posing like Mark Turner or faking it. That’s who Mark authentically is … But other people are afraid to be themselves, and I think that’s reflected in the music.Every generation has artists who are unavoidable—not so much the elephant in the room, but the elephant parked in the middle of the road, blocking the way.
There was a time in the late 1970s and 1980s when one couldn’t go to jam sessions without encountering sound-clones of Michael Brecker, a virtuosic saxophonist whose blazing, laser focused sound and sheer speed were as widely imitated then as Turner’s style is today. As one anonymous older saxophonist reportedly said of this era,
“Michael Brecker ruined the eighth note for a generation of tenor players,” specifically referring to the unmistakably personal way Brecker would phrase the notes in his lines, which often unrolled in a series of individually attacked tones, each decorated with a trademark twang.
Similarly, Turner has dominated the modern jazz saxophone eighth note, contributing to the trend towards eighth notes in jazz becoming straighter—that is, less of the long-short, unstressed-stressed delivery and more of an even unfurling—according to tenor saxophonist Ben Wendel, who first heard Turner’s music as a student at Eastman School of Music in the late 1990s. (He spoke on this same topic for a 2011 Times article.)
“He has no reservations completely getting absorbed within a player, like really going all the way in and reading about their history and really trying to—‘imitate’ is kind of the wrong word—but really embody the spirit of that player,” Wendel says. “But he also feels strongly that everybody can’t help but sound like themselves at a certain point, so he doesn’t have any fear of getting swallowed up himself, losing himself.”
“It got pretty obsessive,” he says. He was not alone. “I’d definitely say that for anyone under forty, maybe even above, it’s kind of like the sound. At this point, you can almost tell how old someone is by if they sound like Trane, they’re over forty; if they sound like Mark, they’re under forty.”
But at a certain point, he felt it had gone too far.
“I used to go in the Berklee practice rooms and sit there for hours and learn little things of Mark’s and perfect them,” says Smith, “but then I had to stop because I realized that it wasn’t just me—it was everybody that was doing it. I would go out in the hallway and everyone was working on the same stuff, so intentionally at the time I had to be like, ‘Okay, I have to find something else that’s not so popular right now.’”
There are no shortcuts to identifying and nurturing the components of a personal sound. Aping the surface elements of a distinctive player can be a stopgap measure to cast the illusion of personal style, but that only lasts as long as others can’t identify the source. “I heard a lot of players who I thought were super-original, until I heard Mark,’ says Finn, “and then I was like, ‘Okay, that’s where everything is coming from.’”
3. Family Tree
– Mark Turner, Interview with New York University’s Steinhardt School (April 2015)
The mythology of jazz, especially as it pertains to influence and perceived artistic lineage, is often a fishy combination of anecdotal evidence and simplification for the sake of convenience. As alto saxophonist Myron Walden, a 1994 graduate of the Manhattan School of Music, points out, tracing influence in jazz has long been a dismal science resistant to neat, linear narratives and discrete episodes of cause-and-effect. “When you understand influence—how it has the ability to infuse with who you are or you with it and become it—you would know that I’m not just going to mimic or be influenced by one artist,” he says. “In the beginning, you might focus on one guy to try to understand what he’s doing, but in developing a style or in embracing music, you open up to the plethora, because everyone has something.”
The prevailing narrative surrounding the genesis of Turner’s now-instantly recognizable sound is that he began in college much like his peers, emulating and learning to reproduce with exacting detail the nuances in phrasing and articulation that distinguished the masters of his chosen instrument: John Coltrane from Joe Henderson, Joe Henderson from Wayne Shorter, Wayne Shorter from Sonny Rollins. The turning point, as the story goes, came shortly after college, when Turner discovered Warne Marsh, a relatively obscure white tenor saxophonist who weaved sinuous lines with a lighter, almost feathery sound that was a far cry from the rougher, gruffer sound favored by most of his black contemporaries. (Marsh’s influence on Turner has been given extensive critical attention elsewhere, notably in a 2008 master’s thesis by Jimmy Emerzian written at Turner’s first college, Cal State Long Beach.)
“The Warne Marsh stuff sticks out because it was so unusual at the time, but I think at the end of the day it’s a little bit of a miscue in terms of what he actually is up to,” says Iverson. “In terms of the way he plays, what he’s aspiring to and personalizing is John Coltrane’s spirituality.”
Many musicians interviewed for this essay referenced Turner’s practice of Buddhism, and several commented on potential connections between Turner’s spirituality and his musical personality. For example, Wendel wonders if there’s a connection between creative meditation on a single idea and the role of Buddhism in Turner’s life, “a deep exploration in a small kind of way,” as he puts it. Wendel offered a secondhand account of Turner describing his own learning style to someone as the opposite of the “forest before the trees.”
“He has to see every leaf on the tree before he sees the tree. Some people, they see the big picture really fast, whereas for him it’s about the microscopic and the detail, and expanding out,” Wendel says. “He’ll explore, let’s say, some triadic or chord formation, all the hundreds of possible variations of that throughout the horn in a really detailed way, and then move on.” It’s this thoroughness in his practice, Wendel says, the expansion of the small to the large, which lends such unusual gravity to Turner’s note choices. One pitch somehow reveals previously invisible designs like a ray of sunlight cast upon a silvery spiderweb.“When he’ll play a single note and the note sits in an unexpected place within the chord—and maybe ‘not quite in the chord’—it has this weight to it where it’s almost as though you can hear all the implied tonality underneath and around that note, because he’s explored that,” he says. “It’s like he’s hearing that note in a really different way. It’s not random.”
“They have something that’s coming up from underneath the music, and it sort of sits in the rhythm section right alongside it,” Iverson says, comparing Turner to Henderson, another influential tenor saxophonist and composer born about a decade after Coltrane.
Saxophonists and horn players in general often get bad reputations for steamrolling rhythm sections, eagerly spilling licks they’ve rehearsed in the practice room on the pianist, guitarist, bassist, and drummer serving as collective placemat. Turner, Iverson says, is no such saxophonist.
“It’s this other kind of invitation to the dance, which I believe is an essential thing to Joe Henderson. He’s really inside the band, and Mark is like that, too.”
But that’s not to undervalue Coltrane’s persisting influence. Iverson adds:
The problem with modern jazz playing a lot of times is that it just lacks that vulnerability. Coltrane, for as much shit as he played, always had that vulnerability, and that’s what really inspires us all, [including] all the non-musicians who love Coltrane. Everybody understands when a Coltrane record comes on, some of that feeling and that sound, loneliness and vulnerability—even when he’s burning the house down. That’s the thing that we all tend to miss in our modern jazz burn these days, but Mark has that.Iverson was not the only musician interviewed who compared Turner to Coltrane.
“When we listen to someone like Coltrane, for example, we, as musicians, hear things very differently than a regular person would,” says alto saxophonist Miguel Zenón, a 1998 Berklee alumnus and long-time colleague of Turner’s in bands such as the San Francisco Jazz Collective. “A regular person might hear a certain energy or a certain spiritual thing, but we hear hard work. We hear practice. When I hear Mark, it’s kind of the same: I can tell that this guy spent a lot of time practicing and working this stuff out.”
Having had Turner in his band for nearly a decade and having observed the steady rise of the saxophonist’s star among critics and musicians alike, Hart takes the comparison to Coltrane a step further.
“Mark’s very lyrical, and that’s one of the things that moves me. A lot of students now can get around their instruments, but I don’t hear the lyricism. Now, you think about something like if I had to replace Mark,” he says. “Of course, I had to deal with some possibilities, but there was nobody I could say, ‘Okay’ [snaps fingers]. Nobody. So then, for the first time, I had to think about it like when Miles had to replace Coltrane.”
Demand for Turner continues to rise, but supply remains inflexible as imitations and substitutes abound. Turner has indeed become irreplaceable in Hart’s band as in other bands. This may be partly for the reason Walden suggests, that Turner studied not just a few great saxophonists but embraced the multitude; however, saxophone ancestry is only a part of the puzzle. Turner’s centered yet elastic playing says as much about who he studied as it does about the community of peers he came up with and the scene that he dove into headfirst as a young man: New York City in the 1990s...
Kevin Sun is a Boston-based saxophonist, composer, and author of the blog A Horizontal Search. He is a member of Great On Paper, a postmodern jazz collective that will release its début album within the next six months, and has been a longtime contributor to Jazz Speaks, the official blog of NYC's The Jazz Gallery.
Every Single Tree in the Forest: Mark Turner as Seen by His Peers, Part Two
4. They Were All Monsters
“I couldn’t believe the amount of saxophone I was hearing in one room at that time,” Walden says, recalling that Turner shared the apartment with drummer Jorge Rossy, who appeared on Turner’s first album, and tenor saxophonist Joshua Redman.
In those years Walden played regularly with bassist Omer Avital’s band at Smalls Jazz Club, a West Village basement club that has been open since 1993 (save for a period between 2003 to 2006) and has long been a major venue and popular spot for late night hangs and jam sessions. Avital’s band at one time featured Walden as the lone alto alongside a trio of tenors that often included Turner, plus bass and drums.
Considering how the myth of the lone practicing musician has persisted over the years—Charlie Parker practicing eight hours a day in a woodshed out in the Ozark Mountains, or John Coltrane practicing day and night, before and after the gig, and even during the break between sets—it isn’t hard to see why Turner would be lumped into this perceived lineage. In numerous interviews, articles, and liner notes, an overwhelmingly popular descriptor is “studious,” with an implication of solitary discovery, but all of this practice took place in the shadow of an immediate, everyday necessity: going out and playing with others.
“When the saxophone player takes a solo, and he burns the house down, and the leader calls you next—it’s like, ‘What now?’” he says, his voice building with intensity. “He just burned the house down! The stage is still smoldering, and now you have to step up to the plate. That is the test, and we had to deal with that multiple times within a night.”
Imagine following Mark Turner, he says, or any of the great saxophonists who shared the bandstand at the time, which may have included other young virtuosos such as Greg Tardy and Charles Owens. “You have to have the fortitude to stand up and say, ‘This is who I am,’” Walden says. “That’s not easy when ‘the pressure’s on.’”
What’s more, there was little precedent at the time for Turner’s Tristano-influenced cool, his deliberate moderation of instrumental histrionics while playing for audiences conditioned to expect a firestorm every time. In this regard, the burden of the saxophone lineage was perhaps even heavier for Turner, who bore the stamp of a then-unpopular, underrepresented sound, than for peers more easily identified with the surface aspects of popular saxophonists such as Michael Brecker and John Coltrane.
In retrospect, Turner’s commitment to the understated sound approach taken by Warne Marsh and other Lennie Tristano-associated saxophonists steered mainstream reception favorably toward those artists. “I didn’t know a note of that when I was younger. I just thought it was like the bad, unseen white guys from the era where the much hipper shit was all the black cats out burning,” Iverson says. “Mark’s interest in it almost sort of validated it … for him to be like, ‘No, these guys are really happening’—that was a signpost not just for me, but for all sorts of people. I’m sure of it.” (Iverson has written on Tristano and company extensively on his blog.)
In addition to the challenge of resisting the saxophone trends of the time, there also was the simple matter of the instrument having seemingly been explored to its outer limits. It isn’t as though saxophonists in the 1990s felt there was nothing left to do, but expanding upon the monumental technical progress made by previous generations would mean first catching up to Brecker, Coltrane, and other innovators.
Tenor saxophonist Chris Cheek, who graduated with Turner from Berklee in 1990, recalls the awe in which his peers held their immediate forebears, including Joe Lovano, born thirteen years before Turner, in 1952, and Brecker, born three years before Lovano. “Mark has really pushed the boundaries of the instrument, I think, and it would be hard to say how that started,” he says. “We heard Joe Lovano playing a lot of high notes and different sounds and textures, and that kind of expanded our awareness of what was possible.”
As McCaslin indicates, among the more conspicuous traces of this lineage is the now-common use of the altissimo register, very roughly the saxophone equivalent to falsetto. (Saxophonists will testify, however, that consistently and accurately sounding one’s first altissimo note will likely take months longer than squeezing out a falsetto note.) The altissimo has been a feature of saxophone playing since the early 20th century, but how it has been exploited and, in recent years, naturalized in the modern jazz saxophone vernacular is a major part of the story of Turner and his generation.
Whereas searing high note cries à la Coltrane became standard practice for the Brecker generation, the altissimo of Turner’s generation, which includes peers such as tenor saxophonists Seamus Blake, Cheek, McCaslin, Potter, and Redman, among others, bears a signal difference. Rather than primarily working up to sustained high notes as a climax within a solo, they phrase entire melodies and complex lines in the highest register, effortlessly executing phrases that saxophonists generations before would have found demanding even in the mid-range.
“As a saxophone player, one of the things that jumps out is just his range, the way he plays the altissimo,” says Zenón. “Even when I heard him the first time, that jump[ed] out, because it’s not usual—maybe now it is, but then it wasn’t.”
5. Labyrinths
Beyond his technical prowess and distinctive sound, Turner also seemed to be at the right place at the right time when, soon after moving to New York, he was invited to join guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel’s quartet, which featured Turner, bassist Ben Street, and drummer Jeff Ballard. At the time, they were all relatively unknown, but before long they were “jazz famous,” as music school students like to say.Rosenwinkel’s band synthesized their diverse musical influences into a language arguably as recognizable today as bebop. Still, describing this music without getting into theoretical arcana remains a challenge: Iverson identifies a “sort of advanced polychordal or modal sort of language that’s the base of that sound,” while pianist Edward Simon, who has recorded with Turner on numerous occasions, including on Turner’s eponymous début for Warner Brothers, describes the music in an email as “chordal and intervallic, veering on the edge of atonality.”
Turner himself offers a vivid description of his early compositions in the liner notes to his first album, Yam Yam (1995):
I’m not thinking about painting, but that’s a very accurate way of looking at the tunes … They’re basically melodies played off of melodies. Harmony isn’t necessarily functional. It’s more like whatever color is needed. There are common tones, and the forms are odd on purpose.As harmonically sophisticated as Turner and Rosenwinkel’s music is, jazz harmony has had no shortage of restless explorers in the decades since Coltrane’s passing. In the case of Turner, his influence on improvisers may have as much to do with his nimble traversal of these harmonic labyrinths as the mazelike architectures themselves.
“Mark has this way of threading these complex chord structures so that it’s authentic to the changes, but at the same time seems really improvised, in the way that a Warne Marsh solo is really improvised,” Iverson says, observing that musicians prior to Turner, when faced with harmonically complex forms, tended either to play “pretty much on the grid”—that is, stuck to spelling out difficult harmonies for fear of losing their way—or else to quickly abandon the harmony in favor of rhapsodizing and free association. Both were effective methods, but they had become conventional, even safe.
“Usually there’s some kind of inverse relationship between how many notes you’re playing and how fast you’re playing them, and how melodic or how well-considered each one is, because you have limited time and limited melodic imagination,” says pianist Aaron Goldberg, who has played with Turner in numerous bands over the years, including Rosenwinkel’s quartet in the aughts. “What made him unusual was his ability to weave very long lines that were provocatively interesting to a sophisticated ear, yet [to] have them always be in a very tight relationship to the changes as they were going by. He always had that and he still has that.”
“He took it a step further, taking the lines you’d hear Warne or Tristano play [where] it almost sounds like they’re thought out and pre-played,” says alto saxophonist Alex LoRe, a 2009 graduate of the New England Conservatory of Music who, like Finn, is among the youngest post-Turner generation of improvisers. “But when you practice a certain way, you learn to develop these lines off the cuff.”
With the right collaborators and years of experimentation both on the bandstand and in the practice room, Turner slowly but surely connected the dots, one note at a time, so that others could follow his lead.
6. A Spiritual Discipline
As of this writing, the third most-viewed Mark Turner video on YouTube, behind “Kurt Rosenwinkel – ‘Zhivago’” (+398K views) and “Kurt Rosenwinkel Group – ‘Jacky’s Place’ [2006]” (+130K views), is entitled “Mark Turner warming up!!!,” with over 50,000 views since being uploaded in November 2006. Providing a complement to Finn’s quip about the significance of creating clichés, one user commented four years ago: “You know you’ve made it when a video of you *warming up* has over 33 thousand [sic] views.”“I’m not sure how he feels about it, but I feel there’s a certain family duty with this music,” says Street. “I really want to join what people have been building on—and not just make some new thing for the sake of my show-biz ego or something like that. I think we’re just fascinated by how this all started how many thousands of years ago.”
Turner, whose own voice has been largely absent from this piece until now, has been interviewed more and more frequently in recent years. In this short YouTube clip advertising his latest release, Lathe of Heaven, he speaks candidly about his continually developing relationship to the blues and the African-American roots of jazz:
For the last five years or so, I’ve just been trying to figure out: what is the blues and what does that mean to me? You know, you’re in school, you’re a jazz musician, you should deal with blues and swing, but I think it needs to be personal and meaningful and have some kind of reference that you can touch and hold and do something about—because otherwise I think the blues can be banal. And I’ve heard it, I hate to say, done in that way all too often, and I actually believe the blues to be sacred, like a spiritual discipline, and it needs to be taken seriously [emphasis added]. So I’ve in a way avoided it because I felt I would disrespect it.Turner’s profound awareness of this heritage has been an abiding feature of his work since the beginning of his recorded career; to wit, the title of his first album, Yam Yam, comes from the nickname of his maternal grandfather, Lewis A. Jackson, whom Turner described in an interview as his “greatest influence,” period, and the liner notes end with a three-paragraph dedication to Jackson. (Turner’s second album, his eponymous début on Warner Brothers, similarly includes a dedication to his paternal grandfather Harrison Brown and leads off with none other than “Mr. Brown.”)
7. Seeing the Forest
Although Turner is known for his thorough, detail-oriented preparation, he just as importantly maintains a longer view toward his time and his world. According to Iverson, not every solo Turner plays is a home run, but he doesn’t mind; his focus is on the much bigger game.
“He’s really unafraid to fail,” Iverson says. “Career shit, making the tune work—none of that matters; he just sees it as an epic cycle, and that’s why he’s Mark Turner. That’s why he gets to these great heights, because he has this other kind of warrior in him for whom failure is just another pleasant way to pass the time, you know?”
Saxophone playing, just like anything else, has its fads, but Turner seems stylistically to have planted his feet firmly and pointing slightly inward since he moved to New York.
“Just being around someone like [Mark], it puts a lot of things in perspective and makes you think about who you want to be … what you’re willing to sacrifice for your music,” says alto saxophonist and 2000 Berklee graduate Jaleel Shaw. “Regardless of what’s happening on the scene, Mark stays Mark.”
As Turner himself points out in the NYU interview cited previously in Part One, deciding what to practice is not just a day-to-day affair, but part of a lifelong commitment toward realizing an artistic self. “A lot of that in particular is just gradually clarifying your aesthetic and trying to figure out what you need to do to reach that aesthetic,” he says. “Otherwise, you can be practicing for millennia! I mean, you can practice one or two things for hours and hours and hours, twenty-four hours a day until you die. You have to decide on something.”
“I didn’t feel entitled at all to become a musician. I still don’t,” he says in the same interview. “It’s still kind of an adventure, like I’m still trying to keep it going. I’m glad it’s still going. It could end at any moment. It could be done next year.”
That being said, Turner seems poised to carry on as he has for the past few decades, although many hope that he won’t wait so long to release his next album. (Thirteen years elapsed between his final release for Warner Brothers, in 2001, and his return as a leader in 2014. He has cited focusing on raising his children as a major reason for the wait.)
“He’s like the D’Angelo of jazz, in a way,” says Shaw, referring to the far-from-prolific but massively influential neo-soul tunesmith while laughing at the comparison—one that may not be wholly without merit, considering their colossal statures in their respective streams of African-American music.
Although many questions surrounding Turner remain unanswered and are perhaps unanswerable, one longstanding question did elicit a concrete answer: namely, the rationale behind the Mark Turner Leg Spring. Wendel, who asked Turner directly about this, explains that there is, as one would expect from him, a calmly considered logic to the unmistakable posture:
I had a feeling—and I was kind of close—that part of the reason why he turns one foot in was something about aligning the hips, because when you’re playing the sax the right hand is down so there’s always a little bit of correction that needs to happen. He basically does it a little different now where his left foot is in further ahead than his right foot and he feels that his legs are like springs on a car. He’s able to kind of balance and float his body weight differently by doing that. It’s really a physical consideration and he’s really thinking about alignment and body motion.
And now that I tried it, it’s like, "Yep, that makes a lot of sense."
Epilogue: Scenes In The Life of Mark Turner, Intimated and Imagined (with a Coda)
Mark
Turner walks into the hotel lobby with his bandmates. As they queue up
to check-in, Turner splits from the pack. He walks around the lobby and
the surrounding room, and he does not neglect the gaudy bouquet at the
literature display stand in the corner. He selects one pamphlet among
the many trifold brochures and studies the reading material. Only after
he has satisfactorily examined the brochure and replaced it to its
original spot among the tiered wire pockets does he return to complete
his check-in.*
Mark Turner takes a seat at the table of an undistinguished but fairly clean South Indian restaurant. This place has been recommended to him several times by bandmates, and he has long enjoyed good, spicy Indian food. He politely converses until everyone is served, and when his plate is finally before him, he begins to make an almost imperceptible humming sound, an indication that he is immensely pleased.*
In the customs line at the airport, Mark Turner stands beside his bandmates. They have had a long flight and are looking forward to performing before the enthusiastic European audiences whose loyalty has made touring possible year after year—but first they have to get out of customs and get some rest at the hotel. He pulls out a slim paperback from his bag, zips it closed, and calmly reads as he waits to reach the front of the line.*
As usual, Mark Turner has prepared and studied the music diligently before the first rehearsal, but the bandleader has brought in a fresh composition to read. Scanning the information before him, he begins to sound the notes to himself so that he has a sense of the compositional form. He plays the melody, then begins to play the bass part as well to hear the relation between top and bottom voices, and then begins to add a third voice between the melody and the bass to hear the quality of the chords as they move from one to another. This process does not take long, and by the time the group begins to play the piece together, it sounds uncannily as though he has been playing this music for a long, long time.*
During a private lesson, a student is working on fluency with long lines of eighth notes. The student recently attended a masterclass led by pianist Barry Harris, an octogenarian master of bebop, the language of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, and their contemporaries. As he plays, the student remembers Harris’s first words: “I bet if I went around the room and asked you to play, I wouldn’t hear a triplet out of any of you.” The triplet is a bebop trademark: three notes crammed into the space of one, lending motion and density to the eighth note line. At one point, Mark Turner stops the student and offers some advice: “Sometimes, I like to break a long line of eighth notes by playing a quarter note.”* * * * *
(Coda) Boston, fall, mid-2000s:Mark Turner isn’t in the room, as the ensemble coach has just made clear: he’s out in New York or Connecticut or somewhere, far away and anywhere but this rehearsal space at the New England Conservatory. “Don’t play Mark; play you,” the coach implores. “Play you!” He starts counting off the same tune once more and signals to the saxophonist: try again. The saxophonist squeezes his eyes shut and, against the sonic gravity of so many hours of transcription and imitation, begins to uncouple himself from the stylistic references buried deep in his ear.
Without calibrating to the sound of one of his heroes, he feels imbalanced at first, but before long something strange happens. In his mind’s eye, he is staring blankly into an enormous bullseye: no matter where he throws the notes now, they always land true and fair, right where he wants. When he finally opens his eyes, he isn’t sure how long it has been since his bandmates ceased playing behind him, but he also realizes now that he can’t see them: the palm of a hand is within an inch of his face, eerily still.
Finally, the hand closes the gap and presses gently against his forehead. “You’re finding it,” the ensemble coach says, lifting his palm. A holy quiet descends upon the room. “Class dismissed.”
Kevin Sun is a Boston-based saxophonist, composer, and author of the blog A Horizontal Search. He is a member of Great On Paper, a postmodern jazz collective that will release its début album within the next six months, and has been a longtime contributor to Jazz Speaks, the official blog of NYC's The Jazz Gallery.
Banner image: Pat Kepic; manuscript fragment (from Turner solo on "You Know I Care," by Duke Pearson): Stephen Byth
Saxophonist Mark Turner | 10 of his Best Albums
Since the mid 1990s Mark Turner has emerged as one of the most impressive and influential tenor saxophonists in the jazz world. We already mentioned him in our guide to 10 of the best modern jazz players, but thought it was time to really dive into his playing, his career and his albums…
Mark Turner’s highly distinctive sound has proved particularly popular with saxophonists the world over, and if you attend a jam session now, there’s a good chance that you’ll hear echoes of his tricky playing.
Turner was born in Fairborn, Ohio in 1965, but was raised in Palos Verdes Estates in Southern California. Then came a move to New York City, via a stint in Boston studying at Berklee College of Music.
He is known for a serious dedication to his art form, and for his softly spoken, modest demeanour, despite a career that has seen him release nine acclaimed albums under his own name and make dozens of appearances on other musicians’ projects.
So, including records with the saxophonist featured as bandleader, sideman or co-leader, here are 10 great albums that tell the story of Mark Turner’s career so far.
Yam Yam
Turner’s debut album as a leader was recorded in 1994 and released the following year on esteemed Dutch independent label Criss Cross.
It features modern guitar great Kurt Rosenwinkel (who we interviewed here), plus what was at the time the Brad Mehldau Trio: pianist Mehldau, with Larry Grenadier and Jorge Rossy on bass and drums respectively.
Fellow saxophone players Seamus Blake and Terrence Dean also appear on ‘Zürich’, which is one of five Turner originals here.
‘Tune Number One’ sounds like an updated version of ‘60s modal jazz, while ‘Moments Notice’ is a clever 5/4 arrangement of the John Coltrane classic.
Rosenwinkel, Rossy and Blake were all Turner’s fellow students at Berklee College of Music, where the saxophonist was known for being particularly studious, spending long hours in the school practice rooms. Chris Cheek, Roy Hargrove and Danilo Perez were also at Berklee at the time. Of this period – in the late 1980s – Turner said:
Warner Jams, Vol 2: The Two Tenors
This informal session from 1997 places Turner in a quintet setting alongside veteran saxophonist James Moody, who was playing bebop with Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis in the 1940s.
The different styles of the two frontline players makes for an interesting comparison, with Turner’s cerebral, behind-the-beat approach contrasting with Moody’s ebullient, bop-rooted sound.
Lucky Thompson’s blues ‘The Plain But The Simple Truth’ kicks off proceedings in a powerful fashion, while an up-tempo version of Gershwin’s ‘The Man I Love’ is another highlight.
Turner has often recorded complex original material, but is equally comfortable applying his unique sound to standard forms.
In This World
The rhythm section here is similar to the one heard on Yam Yam, but drummer Brian Blade joins the band on two numbers.
The diverse repertoire includes the Henry Mancini standard ‘The Days of Wine And Roses’ and the Beatles song ‘She Said She Said’, as well as a number of original compositions, including ‘Lennie Groove’, one of his best known tunes, which is a tribute to the pianist Lennie Tristano.
The tenor player Warne Marsh, a student and disciple of Tristano, is often cited as a major influence upon Turner’s complex, snaking linear approach and his cool, dark sound, although he has also undertaken deep study of the work (including extensive transcription) of John Coltrane, Joe Henderson and others.
(If you haven’t read the Warne Marsh book An Unsung Cat, it’s a must!)
Released in 1998, In This World was his second record as part of contract with Warner Bros, following the self-titled Mark Turner, which featured Joshua Redman as a guest.
Ballad Session
In 2000, in an attempt by Warner Brothers to sell Turner to a more mainstream audience, and to counter the reputation he had for making somewhat intellectual, challenging music, he released an album of smoky ballads.
His beautiful tenor sound shines through on torch songs like Hoagy Carmichael’s ‘Skylark’ and Leonard Bernstein’s ‘Some Other Time’, as well as down-tempo compositions by jazz composers, like Carla Bley’s ‘Jesus Maria’ and Herbie Hancock’s ‘Alone and I’.
Dharma Days
This 2001 effort saw him return to playing dense, challenging original music, with Kurt Rosenwinkel again on guitar, Reid Anderson (of the Bad Plus) on bass and Nasheet Waits on drums.
Dharma Days is particularly revered by fellow musicians, and David Adler of All About Jazz said:
“Turner’s labyrinthine lines and daunting harmonic language continue to set him apart from all of today’s young tenor stars. His conceptual contributions to the music are becoming nothing short of immense.”
Around this time many top names in jazz were having their major label recording contracts cancelled, and this happened to Mark Turner following this release as Warner Brothers’ jazz subsidiary essentially closed down. He seemed unconcerned:
”I was considering trying to get out of it myself. Nothing against Warner, but I feel relieved and open and free.”
Kurt Rosenwinkel – The Next Step
Guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel was one of Mark Turner’s key collaborators in the late 1990s and early 2000s: the pair played on a number of each other’s albums after studying at Berklee together, and both have come to be recognised as being among the most revered practitioners of their respective instruments in all of jazz.
Rosenwinkel’s quartet with Turner, Ben Street on double bass and Jeff Ballard on drums had built up a cult following with their performances at Greenwich Village jazz club Smalls, and in 2001 the band released The Next Step on Verve.
Highlights on this album of originals by the bandleader include ‘Filters’ and ‘Zhivago’, a real anthem of early noughties contemporary jazz.
Gary Foster meets Mark Turner
Foster is a West Coast-based alto player who is steeped in the language of the Lennie Tristano school, and who in fact appeared on a number of records with Tristano disciple Warne Marsh.
He is also a first call studio player on the Los Angeles jazz scene, who has recorded with the likes of Frank Sinatra, Mel Tormé and Michael Bublé.
Recorded live in concert in 2003, but not released until 2019, this live album sees Turner really embracing the influence of Marsh on a programme that includes tunes by cool school heroes Tristano, Marsh and Lee Konitz.
With L.A. veterans Putter Smith and Joe LaBarbera making up the chordless rhythm section, the saxophonists, who have a 30 year age gap between them, really stretch out on this material, which is all based on chord sequences from jazz standards.
Fly – Fly
Fly is a collaborative trio that sees Mark Turner joined by Larry Grenadier on double bass and Jeff Ballard on drums. All three contribute compositions to the track list here, the overall sound of which is groovy and perhaps surprisingly catchy. They also play the Jimi Hendrix song ‘Spanish Castle Magic’.
As well as his usual tenor saxophone, Turner is heard on soprano saxophone and bass clarinet on this 2004 release for Savoy Records.
In 2005 Brad Mehldau sat in with the trio during a gig in New York, and when Jorge Rossy left his working trio that year, the pianist asked Ballard to take over the drum chair in the band (alongside Grenadier, who already played bass in both groups).
Fly would make two more records, Sky & Country (2009) and Year of The Snake (2012), which both came out on ECM Records.
All Our Reasons – Billy Hart Quartet
Following his flurry of solo records for Warner Bros, Turner made a conscious decision to stop recording as a bandleader to allow himself more time to spend with his young family.
However, he remained busy touring and recording as an extremely in-demand sideman with numerous groups, and playing other people’s music is something that he has said that he particularly enjoys.
One of the more eminent bandleaders to hire him has been the great drummer Billy Hart, who previously worked with Miles Davis, Stan Getz and Herbie Hancock.
Hart’s quartet with Turner, pianist Ethan Iverson and bassist Ben Street has become one of the most impressive working groups in modern jazz, and their 2012 debut for ECM is excellent.
Iverson’s ‘Ohnerdaruth’ is based on John Coltrane’s ‘Giant Steps’, while Sonny Rollins’ ‘Airegin’ provides the harmonic sequence for Turner’s ‘Nigeria’. Hart also contributes a number of compositions.
Another revered elder statesman who has hired the tenor saxophonist is trumpeter Tom Harrell, who Turner has said was one of the first jazz musicians he listened to whilst still at high school.
He has also played with bands led by his peers and younger players: Gilad Hekselman, David Binney, Jochen Rueckert and many others.
Lathe of Heaven
Having not released an album as sole bandleader since 2001’s Dharma Days, Turner finally brought out Lathe of Heaven on ECM in 2014, the title of which is taken from the name of a sci-fi novel by Ursula K. Le Guin.
His new chordless quartet featured Avishai Cohen on trumpet, Joe Martin on double bass and young drummer Marcus Gilmore.
Turner is particularly noted for his extremely impressive use of the saxophone’s challenging altimissimo register, and for his pure and even sound across the whole range of the instrument. He has also worked extensively on voice leading, and applying piano-style voicings to linear improvisation, which often means his solos contain strikingly wide intervals.
He continued his relationship with ECM in 2018 with Temporary Kings, a duo record with pianist Ethan Iverson.
“I think Mark Turner is one of the most important players that has come along in the last 20 years, easily the most influential. He never seems to have any doubt about what he’s doing” – Ravi Coltrane
Thanks for reading and I hope you’ll be inspired to go back and check out some of these great records.
If you’re a saxophone player looking to dive deeper into your instrument, check out our list of 10 of the greatest sax players of the modern era, or this in-depth look at the set up – horns, mouthpieces & reeds – of some of the jazz legends.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Turner_(musician)
Mark Turner (musician)
Mark Turner in 2010
Mark Turner (born November 10, 1965) is an American jazz saxophonist.
Biography
Born in Fairborn, Ohio, and raised in the small Southern California town of Palos Verdes Estates, Turner originally intended to become a commercial artist. In elementary school he played the clarinet, followed by the alto and tenor saxophones in high school. He attended California State University, Long Beach in the 1980s (playing in the jazz ensembles) and then transferred to and graduated from Berklee College of Music in 1990 before moving to New York. Turner worked at Tower Records in New York City for an extended period before working full-time as a jazz musician.[1]
In early November 2008 Turner injured two fingers on one of his hands with a power saw, but as of late February 2009 he was performing again with the Edward Simon Quartet at the Village Vanguard.
He is married to the psychiatrist and anthropologist, Dr. Helena Hansen.[2]
Style and influences
Turner's sound is reminiscent of that of Warne Marsh, but he also has elements of John Coltrane in his playing. Turner has mentioned both Marsh and Coltrane as influences, and has used elements of both players' styles in his music.[3] Turner's range extends into the high altissimo register. His improvised lines tend to span several octaves and contain great harmonic and rhythmic complexity. His compositions often make use of repeated patterns, odd-metered time signatures, and intervallic leaps.
Turner claims that his music is "unfolding like a narrative". Consequently, his 2014 album Lathe of Heaven is named after Ursula K. Le Guin's novel of the same title which is based on the idea of a world where the nature of reality keeps shifting.[4]
Musical associations
In September 2014, Turner released his first album as a leader since 2001 on ECM Records;[5] it features trumpeter Avishai Cohen, bassist Joe Martin, and drummer Marcus Gilmore.[6] Turner is a member of the trio Fly, which includes himself, bassist Larry Grenadier, and drummer Jeff Ballard.[7] He also appears in guitarist Gilad Hekselman's Quartet, and drummer Billy Hart's Quartet.[8] Turner has recorded extensively with guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel, saxophonist David Binney, and pianist Aaron Goldberg, among others.[9] Turner, the ultimate jazz sideman, has played or collaborated with more than 45 jazz bands. In 2018 and 2019 alone he has played on eight different jazz albums as a sideman or collaborator. (See Sideman and Collaborators below.)
Discography
As leader/co-leader
- Yam Yam (Criss Cross, 1995)[10]
- Warner Jams Vol. 2: The Two Tenors with James Moody (Warner Bros., 1997)
- Mark Turner (Warner Bros., 1998) – recorded in 1995
- In This World (Warner Bros., 1998)
- The Music of Mercedes Rossy (Fresh Sound, 1998)[11]
- Ballad Session (Warner Bros., 2000) – recorded in 1999
- Two Tenor Ballads (Criss Cross, 2000)[12]
- Consenting Adults with M.T.B. (Criss Cross, 2000)
- Dharma Days (Warner Bros., 2001)
- Dusk Is a Quiet Place with Baptiste Trotignon (Naive, 2013)
- Lathe of Heaven (ECM, 2014) – recorded in 2013[13]
- Temporary Kings with Ethan Iverson (ECM, 2018) – recorded in 2017
- Mark Turner Meets Gary Foster with Gary Foster (Capri, 2019)[2CD] – live recorded in 2003
- Where Are You? with Kevin Hays, Marc Miralta (Fresh Sound, 2019) – recorded in 2018
- Return from the Stars (ECM, 2022) – recorded in 2019
As group
Fly with Jeff Ballard and Larry Grenadier
- Fly (Savoy, 2004)
- Sky & Country (ECM, 2009)
- Year of the Snake (ECM, 2012)
- Wonder (SFJAZZ, 2012)
As sideman
|
With Reid Anderson
With Omer Avital
With David Binney
With Jakob Bro
With George Colligan
With Benoit Delbecq
With Aaron Goldberg
With Jon Gordon
With Tom Harrell
With Billy Hart
With Jochen Rueckert
With Edward Simon
With Kurt Rosenwinkel
With Gilad Hekselman
With Matthias Lupri
With Ibrahim Maalouf
With Joe Martin
With Baptiste Trotignon
With David Virelles
|
With others
- Carl Allen, Echoes of Our Heroes (Evidence, 1996)
- Jeff Ballard, Fairgrounds (Edition, 2019) – live recorded in 2015
- Diego Barber, Calima (Sunnyside, 2009)
- Joao Barradas, Portrait (Nischo, 2020)
- Seamus Blake, Four Track Mind (Criss Cross, 1997) – recorded in 1994
- Stefano Bollani, Joy in Spite of Everything (ECM, 2014)
- Chris Cheek, A Girl Named Joe (Fresh Sound, 1998)
- Yelena Eckemoff, A Touch of Radiance (L&H, 2014)
- Robert Glasper, Canvas (Blue Note, 2005)
- Russell Gunn, Love Requiem (HighNote, 1999)
- Anke Helfrich, You'll See (Double Moon, 2002)
- Ethan Iverson, Common Practice (ECM, 2019)
- Jonny King, In from the Cold (Criss Cross, 1994)
- Ryan Kisor, On the One (Columbia, 1993)
- Lee Konitz, Parallels (Chesky, 2001)[14]
- Delfeayo Marsalis, Pontius Pilate's Decision (Novus, 1992)
- Francisco Mela, Cirio (Half Note, 2008)
- Ferenc Nemeth, Night Songs (Dreamers, 2007)
- Josh Ottum, Like the Season (Tapete, 2006)
- Leon Parker, Above & Below (Epicure, 1994)
- John Patitucci, Imprint (Concord Jazz, 2000) – recorded in 1999
- Perico Sambeat, Ademuz (Fresh Sound, 1998)
- Joshua Redman, Beyond (Warner Bros., 2000) – recorded in 1999
- Aldo Romano, The Jazzpar Prize (Enja, 2004)
- Jorge Rossy, Stay There (Pirouet, 2016)
- Enrico Rava, New York Days (ECM, 2009)
- Samo Salamon, Mamasaal feat. Mark Turner (Dometra, 2008)
- Jaleel Shaw, Perspective (Fresh Sound, 2005)
- Jimmy Smith, Damn! (Verve, 1995)
- Yeahwon Shin, Yeahwon (ArtistShare, 2010)
- Chris Wiesendanger, Urban Village (Fresh Sound, 2002)
- Mark Zubek, Twentytwodollarfishlunch (Fresh Sound, 2009)
Reviews
- In This World @ Allaboutjazz.com
- Dharma Days @ Jazznow.com
- Ballad Session @ Allaboutjazz.com
- G. Giddins: “Turner Classic Moves,” VV (April 14, 1998), 118
- G. M. Stern: “Airtime: Mark Turner: You Don’t Have to be Twenty Years Old to Succeed,” Windplayer, no.58 (1998), 10
- "Saxophonist Mark Turner's Stylistic Assimilation of Warne Marsh and the Tristano School," Master's Thesis by Jimmy Emerzian, California State University, Long Beach, 2008.
External links
- Mark Turner discography at Jazzdiscography.com
- interview short film with Mark Turner on his work with ECM Records
- Turner-Marsh-Tristano Thesis download links at Emerzianmusic.com
- Interview with Mark Turner, by Fred Jung
Mark Turner: Return to the West
“The power of unison is super,” Turner said. “It’s 10,000 years old, or more.” (Photo: Michael Jackson)
Mark Turner is sitting in a coffeehouse bakery in Westwood, California, talking in circles. Concentric, full circles, that is. The highly praised yet still underappreciated tenor saxophonist speaks softly and in thoughtful, cross-referential terms not unlike his expressive voice as player and composer, as heard on Return From The Stars, his sophisticated and soulful, quietly compelling “chordless” quartet album on ECM.
In the pandemic year of 2020, Turner made a return to his ancestral home of Los Angeles after living in New York and often working in Europe for more than a quarter century. That fruitful period found him as an emerging young artist recording with three albums on Warner Brothers, working as a sideman and ally for countless artists and building an impressive roster of projects for ECM. To date, his ECM discography includes the artful (and yes, chordless) trio Fly (with bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Jeff Ballard), work in the Billy Hart Quartet, the chamber-jazz-like Temporary Kings from 2018 (a tenor-piano duet gem with Ethan Iverson, who is also in Hart’s band) and now two distinctive albums with his own quartet.
Meanwhile, over afternoon coffee, adjacent to his current academic workplace of UCLA, Turner contemplates the full-circle sensibility of life in a city that drew his Black parents from less socially tolerant locales in Ohio and Louisiana in the mid-’60s.
“The Civil Rights [Movement] had just happened,” Turner notes. “They were young and Black and educated and they wanted to come out where things were more open and free.”
At 56, Turner and his wife, Dr. Helena Hansen, find themselves empty-nesters, and he admits that he has recently been processing his lineage out West, not only in familial terms but as a player of music connected with such influential West Coasters as Ornette Coleman, Hampton Hawes and, especially, under-recognized tenor saxophonist Warne Marsh. Marsh and his inspirational imprint are a direct link to the influence of pianist-visionary Lennie Tristano’s cerebral methodology, and that left its mark on Turner’s musical voice, too.
As testament to his evolving artistry, Turner’s next recorded outing is a project recorded in March of this year, to be released in 2023 via Giant Step Arts. A suite based on the 1912 James Weldon Johnson book Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, the music features trumpeter Jason Palmer, who is also in Turner’s quartet. It’s mostly acoustic setting and includes some synthesizer and electric bass. As Turner explains, “It’s got a little Sun Ra vibe happening. I don’t know what to call it — maybe Afro-Futurist. I love that kind of music. A bit of avant-garde is coming into it, too. And the saxophone-trumpet writing is still there, but now with chords.”
In turn, Turner played on Palmer’s 2019 album Rhyme And Reason and this year’s Live From Summit Rock In Seneca Village (both on Giant Step Arts).
As of this year, Turner’s time in the spotlight is overripe. He has been dubbed a cult hero and musician’s musician in jazz circles, a tenor player with a sound and language of his own, at once postmodernist and attuned to the lessons of pan-historical jazz lore.
Possessing a warm tone, an exploratory nature and sure command of his instrument, the somewhat mysterious and reluctant hero Turner — a prolific sideman for years — is now expanding his musical identity to include leader, composer and bandleader, and not a year too soon. The circle continues.
Return From The Stars was recorded in late 2019, just before the lockdown. Does it feel now like something flown in from an earlier chapter in life?
Yes and no. It definitely feels like there’s a lot going on with all of us, and certainly a lot going on with me, in terms of music. Yes, it was from before the pandemic; but, no, it’s part of a long continuum that I’ve come to be involved in. The earlier quartet record [Lathe Of Heaven] was a beginning, but this record — among others now coming out, and another one I just made — feels like a culmination of something, whatever that is.
I’m kind of figuring out my Blackness, what I think about that as a person who grew up on the West Coast in L.A. in the ’70s. That has always come out in music, but there are other parts or aspects that I’ve held back that are starting to come out. It’s partly because I’m old now. [laughs]
Things come out when you get older. Friends are starting to die, and parents. You’ve raised children. You’ve seen a lot of the world. Things start to come out that weren’t there when you were 30. It’s part of living.
Your horn writing for saxophone and trumpet is never predictable. There are unisons and harmonies that aren’t necessarily parallel, and contrapuntal maneuvers. Is that changeable approach important to your concept for this project?
Yeah, it’s definitely important for this quartet, but just in general. It started with writing for Fly. My tunes have two-part writing and harmony. It’s basically a two-part chorale. That part’s not new. My tunes are very contrapuntal, with just two voices.
I’m just trying to figure out what makes a melody sing. Why are some melodies better than others? What is it that makes the tune? Sometimes, it’s your phrasing. Sometimes it’s your tone quality. Sometimes it’s the shape of the melody. Sometimes it’s when you play in relationship with the rhythm.
There are all these details. That has helped me a lot to understand structure, form and all those things — basically, what makes things sing and what doesn’t.
The quartet is “chordless,” with qualifying quotations. There is always a sense of underlying chords and harmonic structure going on in the music, even if only implied. Do you even write out chord forms on your charts?
I do write out chords for people, but mostly, it’s just voice-leading and that’s it. But sometimes, I do write out the chords.
When you’re reading a chart, sometimes you just need to see a G7.
It must be comforting to see that G7.
Yeah, I write out chords and write options for the voice-leading. Sometimes the chords might be optional. It could be an inversion. Sometimes, chords have an option to be major or minor or dominant.
Sometimes unison is necessary. Sometimes you need that opaque sound that you get from unison.
But when there is more contrary motion, things become 3-D. Parallel motion or similar motion is somewhere between. It’s interesting, all the things you can do.
You follow various historical traditions, but in a jazz context, this project relates to the classic quintet format with trumpet and saxophone up front — from Art Blakey to mid-’60s Miles Davis — with piano plucked out of the equation. Was that revamping of classic models in your mind?
Definitely. There’s a lot of that going on, for sure. Some of it is obviously intuitive. This is 2022, so things connect on their own. But some of it is deliberate. The tenor saxophone/trumpet combination is just very powerful to hear it in jazz. Even if the chordal instrument information is different and the language is different, you can’t not hear the Miles and Wayne reference, for example.
But it has been reconfigured because most of the time, they were playing octaves or in unison, or sometimes in fourths and fifths. That’s one thing that’s totally different. As soon as we’re on a record in fourths or fifths and especially unison, you can’t help but think “Miles Davis!” [laughs] There’s nothing wrong with that: I’m all about it.
You fleetingly dip into that pool, but then hightail it out of there.
You’ve got to dip in. The power of unison is super. It’s 10,000 years old, or more. Unison is so beautiful and primal. The other thing is, you’re in that format but in a totally different situation, with long tunes and the saxophone, trumpet and bass being in three-part harmony, especially those saxophone-trumpet performative functions. The saxophone is on top sometimes.
With Miles, the saxophone was almost never on top. It was always the trumpet. I’m changing roles all the time.
For different parts of the song, the trumpet is king of beasts. You’ve got to let him reign. I don’t know what tenor is, animal-wise. [laughs]
One reason I started doing that is that I’ve been playing with Tom Harrell for the last three or four years, and the saxophone’s almost always on the top. It’s so simple and beautiful. It’s great to just hear that, and from a master like him, to be right next to him and hear how he does that in his compositions, when the saxophone is on the top. Usually, he’s playing the super-low trumpet. I thought “OK, I have to try to get that in.”
Also, there is Ornette Coleman’s band, which had trumpet, but Ornette was on the top a lot. OK, my instrument is tenor, but just with the feeling of saxophone on the top and trumpet on the bottom or the near bottom, there’s something powerful about that.
Ornette was obviously a pioneer and strong contender in that “chordless band” field. Did that music have a big impact on you?
Oh, man, huge. I can’t say I know a lot of Ornette heads by heart. I need to learn more. I listened to a lot of that music — Ornette in the late ’50s and the ’60s, but particularly in the ’70s. Science Fiction is my favorite. It made a huge impression on me.
And featuring Bobby Bradford, another West Coaster, and one who stayed in Los Angeles.
Yes, exactly. It’s that whole West Coast, a whole lineage of people who moved here — either they or their parents — from the Midwest and the South. It’s part of this lineage thing of my grandparents and their friends. They didn’t go north. Some people went north to Chicago. But a lot of Black people went west to L.A. It’s a totally different thing, just the way the blues sounds and their version of African-diasporic folklore and music.
I’m not a musicologist, but if you want to talk about the blues, that’s another version of it. It’s got some country in it, some mystery, some calypso in there. It’s totally different than the New York version or Chicago version.
Ornette and Dewey Redman came out from Fort Worth, Texas.
Yeah, exactly. These musicians from Northern Louisiana, Texas and Oklahoma have a totally different thing. I was thinking about Hampton Hawes.
The music is more relaxed, but still has the punch and intensity. I really relate to that. I was trying to figure out what that is and it started coming into my playing more and into my compositions. A lot of it is that space. With people like Hampton, just in his playing, he’s got that space. It’s not as dense.
You have expressed your admiration for Warne Marsh, the Lennie Tristano disciple. How did you get into him and what was it about his music that appealed to you?
All this thing about space, the West appeals to me, and he was another manifestation of that. I ran into him in person in high school. I just knew about him from his work with Lew Tabackin and Toshiko Akiyoshi. We would play some of her arrangements. I heard this weird guy playing with them, and thought, “Who the hell was that?” I was super into it.
Much later, during college, I ran into a piano player, Mike Cain, who was studying with Harvey Diamond, who was completely into the Tristano thing. Like a lot of the Tristano acolytes, if you want to call them that, they have all these bootlegs. I thought, “Oh, let me check this out.”
I was attracted just because I was trying to figure out how to improvise, with people who were really on the edge of their seat and really improvising. Improvisation is a large topic. [Most jazz musicians] were playing organized traditional information, meaning music from the ’40s and ’50s, on tunes. [Tristano acolytes] weren’t playing that.
It was something different. I was just curious: What’s that all about? I was trying to figure out how to create drama, excitement and anticipation without volume, without volume maximalism.
I liked all the other stuff, too — the maximalism, drama, volume — but it seems like that is celebrated way more than the other, and I wanted to find something else.
Your project with alto saxophonist Gary Foster, another Tristano connection, came out in 2019, more than a decade after its recording. You do a great take on Lee Konitz’s “Subconscious-Lee,” among other things, speaking of Tristano links.
Oh, yeah. Man, it was super awesome. That came out finally. I met Gary because he heard through the grapevine that I was into Warne, and he had a good relationship with Warne. So, for me, it was incredible to meet someone still living but with a connection to that school, and to play with him. It was incredible.
Thinking about projects without chordal instruments, two examples were ECM projects — Jack DeJohnette’s Special Edition, with Arthur Blythe and David Murray, and Dave Holland’s band with Steve Coleman, Kenny Wheeler and Robin Eubanks.
Yeah, that’s true. I remember the (Holland) albums Triplicate and Jumpin’ In. I transcribed some of Steve’s playing from that. This was 15 years ago or so. I heard them, but I can’t say they influenced me directly, at least not in terms of this project.
Were there any specific models you can point a finger at, in terms of conceiving of your quartet?
I wouldn’t say there was anything direct in terms of writing patterned after a certain band. It’s more like there are details about voicing or harmony or parts of tunes that relate to parts of jazz and parts of classical music.
The closing track on the new album, “Lincoln Heights,” is also the “straightest.” It’s almost a gospel/soul tune, in 6/8 — though sometimes sneaking into 9/8.
Yeah, there’s a little extra.
What’s the story behind that piece?
It’s just having a little bit of that R&B/gospel thing, which is a part of me, but which I’ve never been able to figure out how to put in before and make it not so different from the rest of the music.
You can have a lot of tunes from different genres. That happened a lot in the ’90s, with records that were eclectic and celebrated that fact. I’m not saying it’s wrong. It’s just not what I wanted to do. It’s easy to be eclectic, but hard to integrate the music.
The other thing is that I wanted to write a simple tune. I wanted to just write a one-page tune — which I usually don’t. That’s basically what it was, a simple, soulful melody. I wasn’t sure about the rhythm, but I knew it would be something like what it turned out to be, some kind of 6/8. The rest of it unfolded on its own. The other thing that ended up happening was some kind of repetitive refrain, which tapped into R&B.
After many projects on ECM, how has it been working with Manfred Eicher? Is he a kindred spirit?
Yeah, in some ways. He has been really cool and great, personally, for sure. I’ve benefitted from it and enjoyed working with him. Through classical music, he’s got that Germanic music cultural connection to music, which is interesting. When he’s in the studio, he’s able to describe what’s going on, whatever that might be. It might be dynamics or something about the form or flow or pace of the music. That’s unique to have that happening in the studio. Particularly when he’s mixing, that’s when it really goes down. He’s really great at that.
He’s very precise in what he wants, but he’s also open to make things alive, in certain kinds of music.
I can see why he would be drawn to projects like Fly and your quartet, both open and spacious, but with musical intrigue attached. For instance, he loved the old Jimmy Giuffre Trio, which he reissued several years ago.
That was super amazing. Whoo. I used to listen to that a lot, in the ’90s and early 2000s. You were asking about a direct influence — that’s one. It’s not chordal. Manfred seemed to like what we were doing enough to let us record.
On your early Warner Brothers albums, you were young but with a poise and maturity beyond your years, especially compared to the young bloods on the scene in the ’90s.
Right, the young lions. I was anti-“young lion.” [laughs]
So, you were a rebel in that case. How do you compare Mark Turner, circa 2022, and your musical self in that emerging era? Are they connected?
Yeah. I was on that trajectory then, and I was trying to figure out how to put things together. I still am. I would say the connection is like someone playing the long game. It’s like a 2,000-mile pilgrimage in the Medieval era.
Back then, maybe I was at 100 miles. Maybe I’m at mile 1,000 now.
So your musical trek is an ongoing evolution?
Yeah, totally. DB
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