Perspectives: Joe Lovano

The tenor saxophone great talks about drummer Bill Stewart, swing and time.

"I was on the faculty at William Paterson College between 1983 and 1991, and Bill came to study at William Patterson in the late eighties, which is where we met. And also, it was a really great little period there, great saxophone player, young guy Eric Alexander, who is really creating some waves today, was also there. And Joe Farnsworth, another young drummer, was there and Doug Weiss, the bass player. They're all doing some things today on the scene that are really beautiful. That's when I first heard Bill, and Elliot Zigmund was teaching the drums at the time there, and Elliot and I kind of switched students. So Eric Alexander went and studied and played some with Elliot Sigmund, and Bill came to some of my classes and we started to play duet. Shortly after that, when he left the school, he joined one of my bands and we started playing together. And that's when John Scofield first heard Bill, when he was playing with me, and I was already a member of John's band. That was 1989 or some time back them.

"He was very advanced and deeply into the music, very passionate, and had a lot of ideas, and a beautiful execution on his instrument. He came from a real musical family and was really deep into the jazz exploration. He had already, I think, went and reached out and took a few lessons and studied with Ed Blackwell, who I was playing a lot with at that time in the late eighties. It was a happening scene, very creative scene, going on in New York City. There always has been and is today but during that period there was a lot of stuff going on, and Bill was there digging everybody and contributing in his own way already at a really early age. He was really into Ben Webster and the whole history of music. Very melodic, I would say in his approach within complexity of polyrhythmic, the way he was developing. He was very advanced in the early stages with form and structure, and . . . he gets intimate in a deep way as far as structure and form, and spontaneous orchestration. He was very advanced in those respects.

"Bill's a real natural; he doesn't try to really do anything; it just flows out of him. And his sound and his touch is coming from a very natural place. He's always searched for certain cymbals and certain things. But in a way it's like as a saxophone player; you could change mouthpieces and change horns every day and you're still gonna have the same sound. It comes from some very mystical, magical place. But Bill always had a real clean beautiful tone on his drums, his attack, his touch and his cymbal sound. He really has a sense of sound. He's not the kind of cat who just plays for himself. He's really into the music, he's playing in the moment and he goes out and hears everybody body, man. He embraces all musics and really goes and hears people play and that influences you a lot all the time. I'm like that and I've always been like that too.

"I'm always wanting to play with people who play creative; that find the music within the music; that don't just let the instrument play them. There's a lot of really great drummers that play the drums. There's other cats who are really deep musicians that the drums happen to be their instrument. I've had a history of playing with some of the most creative drummers in jazz, including Mel Lewis, Paul Motion, Jack DeJohnette, Al Foster, Ed Blackwell, Billy Higgins, and what they all have in common is a sense of community and dialogue and personality. Everyone has their own personality and if that can come through within the music there's a lot of beautiful things that happen. So when I look for a drummer in my group, like Lewis Nash who plays in my nonet, for example, there's an incredible execution of ideas and freeness within the structures for the music to take any direction in any moment. I mean clarity in the time and the feeling. But for me it's really about finding the right spaces in the music so we can create things together in a clear way that the communication is the key. I've always found that in Bill's playing that . . . what you play is important to what I play, and then it's not just what you play but how you play it, in any given setting.

". . . playing with Idris Mohamad or playing with Elvin Jones, Billy Higgins, the sense of swing is . .  the essence of the music and it's the feeling of the blues. And it's feeling everything that surrounds the quarter-note pulse, all the polyrhythms that are possible from the openness of the whole-note and the half-note into the quarter-note and duple and triple-time and all the different polyrhythmic variations that come from those points: the quarter-note triplet that comes from the whole-note and triplets that come form the eighth-note, different open feelings that cats can play within. Some players play from one perceptive of the beat; other cats play from all those perspectives and the swing is really open and free and moving. So that sensation, and also drummers that come from a real rudimentary marching band style also have a real deep sense of those things. And a lot of drummers, New Orleans drummers, that introduce certain ways of playing have a deep sense of that: Blackwell, Idris Mohammed, certain players. Other cats like Billy Higgins, who embraced that way of playing but wasn't from New Orleans, had an other kind of airiness and lightness to it. It had this other buoyancy that was there, and Elvin Jones, and Max Roach. Max Roach was a real New York drummer but had that sensation and essence of whole march kind of conception. Even Paul Motion, as free as he plays and impressionistic and swinging all at the same time, has real deep sense of that feel, from Kenny Clarke, Art Blakey and Max.

"Bill embraces those players and embraces that history. There's a lot of young drummers today who don't, who play straight up and down and real ‘patternistic' and they can play great on their instrument but it's very repetitious, and a lot of the music that inspires them and that they play is very ‘patternistic' riffs or playing in certain time signatures where it's just a repetitive two bars over and over again for twenty minutes. That's boring to me; I can't get next to that way of playing; I need to play with people who are creative within that. Someone I've been playing with recently is Eric Harland – incredible drummer. He's one of the few cats who can play in seven or whatever time signature and flow through it in a totally free incredible, creative way. I'm a member of this SFJAZZ Collective these days, and playing with Eric over the last year-and-a-half has been beautiful, really different. It's really opened up a lot of things in my conception about playing through time-signatures like that.  

"Just to talk about the essence of knowing the history of the music: Bill, you could hear who he digs; you could hear Roy Haynes in his playing; you could hear Blackwell; you could hear different people in his playing, but not necessarily that he's copied them. But you can just hear that he's heard them, and dug them, and they've inspired him to be himself.

"Eric Harland . . . I feel he's coming more from a straight-eighth-type player as his roots, but he swings really hard, man! He's got a lot of diversity in his playing and he's a real amazing technician on the drums. Also, as a soloist, the way he gets around the set. He's really developing his own sound using tabla sounds and he sometimes reminds me of a timbale-type player, the way he attacks his drums and plays on the drums. He has a lot of influences that are coming through in his playing and he's developing because he's in some situations, over the last five years or something, that have given him a lot of room to grow. You know, things with Charles Lloyd and Zakir [Hussain] in trio, and the San Francisco collective that he's been a part of for the last four years or something, and other groups that he's been involved with."

For more information on Joe Lovano www.joelovano.com.