Kansas City-based saxophonist and composer Pete Fucinaro will perform at Walker’s Jazz Lounge, Friday, August 29.
The former Texan will be accompanied by the band at the core of his debut recording, “Little Window,” including drummer Alex Souris, bassist Jared Beckstead-Craan and guitarist Ethan Ditthardt. Keyboardist and vocalist Ebba Dankel is currently on the road with Jon Batiste and will not be with the group.
Fucinaro attended the renowned jazz studies program at the University of North Texas where he performed with the acclaimed One O’Clock Lab Band during his time there. Later, he graduated from University of Missouri-Kansas City with an MA in saxophone studies.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You’re a composer and a musician. Do you have a distinct memory of which came first, the desire to play or the desire to write?
I started playing guitar when I was really young and then saxophone in fifth grade band. I didn’t start writing until I was 16 or so. I feel like I wrote my first thing then and it was really bad but it was a start. From there I just kept working on it. I always enjoyed composing and playing my stuff or other composer’s stuff. That was always real fun for me. It’s always been something I’m working on and trying to get better at.
You have a great sense of melody that’s evident in the compositions.
I’m always trying to have something you can sing. When I’m playing I’m also trying to sing it. It’s something I’m [really] hearing. It’s important to me to use the melodies throughout the song [as] new material. Maybe a new melody leads to something else in the song, the composition itself or the melody can be something you use when you’re soloing. I always try to have the melody be in the forefront of everything I’m doing.
There are moments on the record when I hear things that are reminiscent of “Bitches Brew”-era Miles Davis.
The second great quartet with Miles, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter, Herbie Hancock and Tony Williams has always been a big influence to me as well as people like Ornette Coleman. That’s something that I’ve always been drawn to. I think that’s part of my identity as a musician, that influence. The people I play with, in particular Alex and Ethan, we go way, way back and we came up listening to that stuff and playing like that.
The band sounds great on the album.
This is really the first time that this band has played together. I’ve played with everyone individually, Alex and Ethan for a long time and then I met Ebba and Jared just over a year ago and I knew everyone would sound cool together and it would be a real fun time playing together. It came together better than I expected.
There’s a great arc to the record in terms of the emotions and the sonics and I have to think that that was by design.
I really fixated on it for a while, the order [of the songs], and I also like listening to records on vinyl so that was a good way to think about it, how it would be structured on vinyl and that helped me figure out a good way to organize it. But there was a lot of [moving of the sequence].
The last track on the record is called “Prelude.” I felt like it worked best there, at the end even though the name would suggest otherwise.
A little bit of humor.
I thought it was kind of funny. I thought, “Oh, that’s so stupid,” and then Alex, the drummer, said, “No, no that’s hilarious.” I said, “Yeah, that’s pretty funny.”
