Jazz veterans Yellowjackets will perform Tuesday, March 25, at McCain Auditorium at Kansas State University in Manhattan.
The stop is part of an ongoing series of dates in support of the outfit’s latest recording, “Fasten Up,” which continues the sense of exuberant exploration set forth on the 1981 debut recording. Featuring compositions such as “Will Power,” “The Unresolved Question” and “The Lion,” the record serves to remind listeners of how the group has remained at the forefront of jazz in the decades since it first emerged from the Los Angelese music scene.
Comprised of bassist Dane Anderson, drummer Will Kennedy and saxophonist Bob Mintzer as well as founding member and keyboardist/pianist Russell Ferrante, the group boasts more than 40 compositions that can find their way into live performances at any given time with new pieces from “Fasten Up” woven in nightly.
Ferrante recently spoke with KMUW about the new album, finding democracy within the band and the composition that proved most challenging for the band to work out on this new collection.
The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.
What made this the right time for a new Yellowjackets album?
We used to put out a record every year. Now, more realistically, it’s every couple of years. There’s a couple reasons: It’s an obligation, we’ve signed a contract. When we put out new recordings, it’s an opportunity to have new music to play, to explore, compositionally, maybe some other things that we haven’t done in the past. It really keeps things forward. It’s been well over 40 years that the band has been in existence, [and] I think it’s kind of the kiss of death to rely on what you’ve done and kind of recycle the same stuff over and over. It’s important to keep reinvigorating the music. It’s always a panic, though. “How are we going to come up with another 10 or 11 songs?”
In terms of the material that you present, is it something where you say, “OK, I wrote four pieces last year, I’ll bring three to the band,” or do you have material where you say, “OK, this is a Yellowjackets piece”?
The band has developed a sound, so I am thinking of that. I’m thinking of the particular musicians that we have. For example, I was able to do a solo recording a few years ago … but there was material that really wasn’t that suited for Yellowjackets. It was a little quieter and more restrained. I knew that that isn’t totally in the personality of the band. There’s maybe a song or two in a set that we could have liked that but the band and the musicians … there’s a certain energy and a punch in the music. I wanted to find material that really works for these guys in this band.
When you do get together and present the material, does it become a situation where everyone has to like it to make it a Yellowjackets tune?
Yes. Even going further, it’s understood that once you present music to the band you relinquish sole authorship or control, really. We’ve really come trust one another, and we want input from each guy. There is no leader. It really is a cooperative endeavor. No one is telling anyone what to do and that can have its plusses and its minuses, but I think the plusses far outweigh the minuses. When someone brings a tune in, they really understand that it may change and that’s OK because the end result really has everyone invested in what we’re doing.
What is that like when you’re running a tune down for the first or one of the first times, and you hear [saxophonist] Bob [Mintzer] do something that makes you sit up and say, “Oh, I hadn’t anticipated that. He’s really surprising me?”
Most of the time, they’re really good surprises. That being said, about being open to everyone’s ideas: If there is something that one of us feels isn’t quite right for the song, we can communicate that and give some gentle direction, respectful feedback. But most of the time the surprises that you hear are really improvements.
I would have to think it’s a wonderful experience in those moments because you’re watching the music really take flight.
When we present a piece to the band, usually we’ve done a MIDI demo ourselves. We’ve sketched out the idea, and there’s an audio representation of it, and there’s also a pretty detailed chart. That’s the jumping off point. Have you heard the phrase demo love?
Oh, yes.
Maybe younger musicians, and maybe in my younger days, I’ll admit to falling prey to demo love where you’ve created something and you’ve heard it so many times that you’ve become attached to that, and when real people play, “Wow, it’s different.” That’s the thing that has evolved over time, just letting go of that attachment to that little fill you played or the particular articulation or this or that. We want to be generous with our compositions and give the other guys room to be themselves.
You have a voice as a composer and a player, but you also always want to keep moving forward, so how do you keep moving forward within that framework?
Each of us keeps exploring on our own and listening to other people and being influenced by other music. There’s one piece on the newest recording that I contributed called “November 8th.” It was broadly inspired by this piece I heard by the San Francisco Jazz Collective. It was this piece [with] shifting time signatures and changing phrases. Really surprising but really engaging. I think I only heard the piece one time, but the overall impression of shifting things and some unexpected meter shifts was in my mind when I was putting [November 8th”] together.
Until two years ago, I was teaching at USC and interacting with a lot of young musicians, and they were introducing me to the music they were listening to. That was really inspiring, just to hear what not only your peers but [what] other musicians from different generations are doing. All of that’s inspiring, and we try to fold it into what we’re doing.
I’m so glad that you mentioned that piece because as much as I like the other music on the album, that one made me sit up straighter in my chair when it came on.
Oh, cool! Thank you! I think it’d something that was a little different from us. We’ve certainly written pieces that weren’t in 4/4 or common signatures, but that one, it took a minute for the band to learn, too. It was really challenging for everyone to feel. It was kind of like in 11 or a good deal of the tune [is]. We want to challenge one another, we want to challenge ourselves, the other guys, too. They rose to the occasion.
How will you go about introducing this new material in the live setting?
That’s our 27th recording. We don’t want to be totally selfish and just play all the stuff we want to play. Since the recording has been out, we’ll usually take a few tunes in the middle of the set and announce that these are some songs from our new recording, and we’ll play two or three of them. We play different ones. Not always the same tunes in the middle, and then [we] surround them with songs that maybe are more familiar from previous recordings. There’s probably 50 or 60 tunes, maybe even more, but at least that amount in the band’s repertoire right now, so every night we make a different set. We pick a different group of tunes. There may be some that make their way into other sets than others, but we really want to keep from falling into a rut and sometimes we’ll even play a tune we haven’t played in months and that can be a little precarious. In the interest of keeping things alive and keeping everyone on [their] toes, it’s something that we try to do.
You mentioned MIDI earlier and it triggered this question: You’ve seen technologies come and go. Do you have any technology related regrets?
[Laughs.] I’m sure there are certain recordings of ours where maybe we were over-enamored with the technology and, listening now, maybe 30 years later, it sounds kind of hokey or whatever, but I don’t know that it’s regret as much as at the time it was something really exciting and something that was fun to explore so we went there. I must say that acoustic music has fared very well. You can still listen to an old recording without any synths or electronic stuff and music played on really great instruments that took hundreds of years to develop still sounds really good. Some of the technology has maybe not worn as well as some other things, but overall, I think it’s part of the journey to explore new tools and see what works.
