2009-04-01
Downbeat - Feature
Weiss wrote the new album’s title track, a catchy, loping and twisting tune that was funded by a grant from Chamber Music America.
Downbeat
April 2009
I want to be a trumpet player now,” David Weiss said. “I moved here to play trumpet and other things happened. All this stuff comes your way, and it sounds interesting. But then it mushrooms and you are doing that all the time.”
Weiss, 44, has been playing trumpet and leading bands around New York for more than 20 years. And yet, his natural abilities as an arranger, composer, producer and organizer have often kept him behind the scenes. With a new band and a new focus on playing, Weiss is making up for lost time.
Weiss is probably best known for his work with Freddie Hubbard. For most of the last decade of the trumpeter’s life, Weiss led the octet with which Hubbard toured and recorded two albums, guiding the ensemble by playing,
writing arrangements and producing recordings.
“Freddie had a great impact on me,” Weiss said. “But the influences he had are more about his approach to music and what he was able to do, not anything tangible trumpet-wise. I said this at the memorial service, because everybody was talking about what a character he was. Well, underneath all that he was a dead serious musician. He took his music seriously. He was openminded, always curious, worked harder than anybody and had a clearer vision. Those are the things you want to strive for and those are the lessons learned from him.”
The band Weiss led to back Hubbard was the New Jazz Composers Octet (NJCO), which Weiss founded in 1996. The octet was inspired by some arrangements Weiss did for one of the first record dates Hubbard did after his lip troubles began. Weiss wrote eight-part arrangements to give Hubbard plenty of support. Though he had no plans to work further with Hubbard, he
liked the small big band sound and recruited some other up-and-comers for a band designed to highlight new jazz writing.
The NJCO—Weiss, Myron Walden, Jimmy Greene, Steve Davis, Norbert Stachel, Xavier Davis, Dwayne Burno and Nasheet Waits—released its first album in 1999 and has earned respect over the years with great players and ambitious writing that push the envelope of straightahead jazz. In November, the group released its third album, The Turning Gate (Motéma).
Weiss wrote the new album’s title track, a catchy, loping and twisting tune that was funded by a grant from Chamber Music America. For Weiss, the irony of the octet is that while it has been a vehicle to write and explore ideas, it has never been a context for him to play. He rarely soloed on stage with Hubbard, and with the NJCO Weiss typically stays busy leading the
ensemble. He jokes that his own writing is better suited for saxophonists to solo over, and on The Turning Gate he takes just one short solo.
“I don’t need to solo on every tune and show everybody who I am and what I can do if it’s not going to give me the strength to do all the things that the group requires,” he said. “The physical demands of the instrument can put your ego on hold. A lot of the time I focus on getting the tunes to sound the way they should. With five horns you play hard; it’s forceful music and you
want to play it a certain way.”
In recent years, Weiss has recorded two albums with a sextet that includes Marcus and E.J. Strickland on Fresh Sound/New Talent. But again, his relationship with the label often pulled him away from his horn, as he acted for years as talent scout and producer, supervising recordings of artists like Jeremy Pelt, Robert Glasper and Marcus Strickland before they
were well known.
Groups like his sextet and the NJCO show Weiss looking forward, writing and arranging new vehicles for improvisation. But the trumpeter also finds himself looking to the past for inspiration. He continues to organize and lead a series of ambitious tribute bands filled with rising stars and jazz legends. These include Endangered Species, a big band that performs the music of Wayne Shorter; Charisma, dedicated to the music of Lee Morgan; and The Cookers, inspired by the classic Hubbard/Lee Morgan trumpet battle album, Night Of The Cookers. Weiss was also the guy who nudged trumpeter Charles Tolliver to dust off his big band charts a few years ago.
Weiss plays with all of these projects, but writing and arranging for his own groups and artists like Phil Woods, Abbey Lincoln, Rodney Kendrick, Tim Hagans and Marcus Printup often kept him busier than he thought was good
for his playing.
“A big writing thing would come up and I wouldn’t touch the horn for two weeks,” he said. “I’d get called for stuff to play trumpet and after being in headphones writing all week I wasn’t at my best. I’m just trying to get the focus back.”
To that end, Weiss’s new horn-on-the-lips band is a quintet called Point of Departure, after the 1964 Andrew Hill album, and includes tenor saxophonist J.D. Allen, guitarist Nir Felder, bassist Luques Curtis and drummer Jamire Williams. Weiss intends to release a live recording of the group this year (he does not have a label set to release the recording).
“As a trumpet player, I’m trying to figure out a new sound, a different harmony that isn’t based on diatonic scales,” he said. “I’m creating my own scales. It wasn’t just about finding a new group, but finding a new approach to music, a new way to go up and down the horn. This group has given me the freedom to develop my voice.”
The group sounds nothing like the NCJO. It plays repertoire from the mid-to-late 1960s, some of it fairly obscure, by artists like Hill, Shorter, Tolliver and Herbie Hancock. “It’s all from that two- or three-year period.” Weiss said. “I’ll blame it on the Miles Davis Quintet with Herbie, Wayne, Ron and Tony.
They took the harmonic thing as far as you can go. The music of that period had an openness, and it’s still ripe for exploration. A lot of that stuff was recorded once and put away. Wayne Shorter didn’t record Speak No Evil, hire a publicist and do a world tour. He went back to playing with Miles. Ninety percent of the Blue Note stuff was recorded once and put away, so a lot of the music from that period didn’t get explored like it could have.”
Three of the tunes in the band’s book are by trumpeter Charles Moore, who recorded two albums for Blue Note in the ’60s with a Detroit collective called Kenny Cox and the Contemporary Jazz Quartet.
“They were the first band that heard the Miles Davis Quintet and said, ‘We like that kind of flexibility, so we’re going to write tunes that put that into a form,’” Weiss said. “They created this format to solo over that is wide open. They would write tunes with open sections. All the Charles Moore tunes have the same device where he goes to three. You contrast four against three and the downbeats create this interesting rhythmic thing. They also created cueing systems. The horn player cues the next section by playing a line. But we took it further by saying we can do anything.”
The band plays free, but with a driving inthe- pocket feel that builds on the originals. In particular, Felder’s dreamy and angular electric guitar and Williams’ cymbal-heavy drumming keep the band rooted in the present, and only the heads sometimes betray their vintage after the lengthy solo sections. Weiss is not afraid to let the solos spin out. Many of the tunes on the unreleased album clock in at more than 10 minutes, while some, like Moore’s “Number 4” and Shorter’s “Paraphernalia,” double that.
Reviving ambitious 1960s repertoire seems an unlikely avenue to success in today’s jazz world, but Weiss is happy to follow his vision, playing smaller rooms so that he can do his own thing. Although a lot of the music was first
recorded around the time he was born, he is confident that what he is creating with Point of Departure is contemporary.
“If you approach it like they did—that it’s open and can go anywhere—it’s as timely,” he said. “It’s about the musicians you choose, as long as they look at it fresh every day.” The other project Weiss focuses on these days, one that also keeps him playing at the top of his game, is the Cookers, an all-out hard-bop blowing band.
“That band started in 2002 or 2003 when I was asked to do a Night Of The Cookers thing for a club in Brooklyn, to get all the guys from the record,” he said. “I got James Spaulding, Pete La Rocca and Larry Ridley. Harold Mabern couldn’t do it so we made it a Freddie Hubbard alumni thing and got Ronnie Mathews and Kiane Zawadi.
“I love that kind of music, and if I play it I don’t want to play it with guys my age or younger,” he continued. “If I’m going to embrace that stuff, I want to do it with those guys because they’ve got the passion and the energy, and they were there.”
The current Cookers lineup includes Billy Harper, Eddie Henderson, George Cables, Cecil McBee and Billy Hart, with younger players like Craig Handy or Burno along for some dates.
Weiss hopes to record soon to catch some of the fun he has on stage with players that were influences on him when he was young.
“Those are the guys I grew up on,” he said. “I keep telling Eddie that the first record I heard with trumpet was a record of his called Sunburst. When I put Harper’s Capra Black on in college—
damn! So, yeah, it’s fun. “Those guys, most of them are 65, at least, but when I finish a gig, I feel like the old man. I’m so exhausted after those gigs and Eddie Henderson’s like, ‘All right, let’s go to a jam session.’”
Weiss stands at a transition point in his career in which he hopes to free himself as much as possible from the paying gigs that keep him away from the horn and his own musical vision.
“My focus will be the octet for writing,” he said. “Point of Departure is for playing and The Cookers is for getting my ass kicked.” DB
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