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A few months shy of 65, saxophonist Dave Liebman may be having the
busiest time of his career, now in its fifth decade. In the past 12
months, nearly a dozen releases have demonstrated the tremendous stylistic
breadth of a musical oeuvre that kicked into high gear early, when, in the
short span of three years, Liebman participated in three recordings that
remain important touchstones for their artists: guitarist John McLaughlin's My Goals
Beyond (Ryko, 1970), drummer Elvin Jones' Live at the
Lighthouse (Blue Note, 1972), and trumpet icon Miles Davis' On the Corner
(Columbia, 1972), the latter an album whose innovations went
underappreciated until many years later.
On January 11, 2011, Liebman is being awarded the 2011 Jazz Masters
Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), and it's a
milestone for both the saxophonist and his generation. In addition to
being publicly honored at the annual awards ceremony, which takes place at
New York's Frederick P. Rose Hall (the home of Jazz at Lincoln Center),
the fellowship includes a $25,000 bursary. Though this is not a huge
amount of money when compared, for example, to the MacArthur Fellows
Program (which carries a whopping half-million-dollar, no-strings-attached
grant), the ever-organized, always forward-thinking Liebman has already
put that money to good use, hiring a both a publicist (Braithwaite and
Katz's Ann Braithwaite) and a web-savvy person (Michael Crowell) to
increase his overall presence on the public's radar and his specific
visibility in the world of social media, with a revamped Facebook page.
But how much impact will the fellowship actually have on his career? "I
don't think it's gonna do a lot; I've spent the money already," Liebman
says, laughing. "I don't see my price going up or my popularity going up;
that's not a side effect. The best thing is, your bio, three years from
now, will say 'NEA Jazz Masters,' and that's nice. But in the real world,
my answer to this is two-fold: one is objective, the other subjective.
First of all, I am the first one of my generation to get this--I'm the
youngest, if you don't take into account that the Marsalis clan is getting
it this year also [a fellowship is also being awarded, in 2011, to the
Marsalis Family as a group: Ellis,
Branford, Wynton, Delfeayo and Jason]. I'm the youngest individual,
let's say. And I think, as I am saying to everybody, it's a reflection of
the fact that the '70s is finally kosher--that we weren't just a blip on
the screen that tried to play rock and roll and get across. We actually
kept going, some of us, and I can name about 10 other people who certainly
deserve to be looked at for this award, and that means that not all was so
bad in the so-called Fusion Era.
"It's very funny that I'm getting the award opposite Marsalis," Liebman
continues, "but in this respect, when Marsalis came on the scene and
basically drew a line in the sand, guys of our generation got lost in the
cracks, and now this is the establishment saying, 'Excuse me, there are a
lot of guys there who deserve it.' From a cultural and historical
standpoint, I think is interesting. Of course I certainly do not consider
myself in the same breath as, say, Wayne Shorter or Miles Davis or
whoever of the 120 guys who have received the award. I mean, some of them,
yes, but most of them are just way beyond anything I could ever dream of,
and I have to pinch myself, in a certain way, that I'm up there with those
guys. If I went down the list, some of them I could say, 'This guy stands
to the left' and 'That guy stands to the right,' and the guys on the right
are the real deal. I'm okay, but from day one the real deal is these guys
who are at a really, really high level to which I aspire--and am hopefully
getting better at--but musically, they're in another category. I'm just
glad to be up there with them. The others? I'm cool; I'll stand beside
some of them. But a few guys? I can't believe I'm in the same breath as
Miles Davis, for God's sake, or [Elvin] Jones; I never thought of that!"
How Liebman got to this point is a story in itself: one that reveals
the truth of being a working musician, but one that also shines a light on
Liebman's particular strengths as an organizer, a band leader and a
champion of jazz education.
Born and raised in New York--Brooklyn, specifically--Liebman grew up at
a time when jazz education was not what it is today--where clubs and lofts
were the schools and jam sessions the teachers. "It's a New York story,"
Liebman begins. "I was from New York; I was there from the get-go. In some
cases, that worked against me because I played before my time, and guys
don't forget; on the other hand, I was there, on line, and living in a
loft, and I knew that I had to play every day to get better. I wasn't the
kind of guy who could wake up every morning and just be great. And in
those days, that meant getting a loft and having drums, piano and a bass,
literally; having some mu tea, because we were all macrobiotic, some
stimulants of sorts; and doing our job, which was to come up anytime you
wanted to play. At that time, it was mostly free jazz--just playing your
horn.
"Guys knew guys, and it's not unlike it is now, where you
get jobs and you get recommended, usually by a guy you know on your own
instrument," Liebman continues. "The first time for me, I was with Pete La Roca because [drummer] Bob Moses--who was already a friend
of mind and way ahead of me--he said, 'Pete La Roca is looking for a
saxophonist and Jim Pepper can't
make it. Would you like to go?' That was my first time, playing with Steve Swallow, Chick Corea and Pete La Roca.
"For example, with Ten Wheel Drive [a brass-heavy jazz-rock outfit
emerging at the time of Chicago and Blood, Sweat and Tears], [I got the
gig] through my friend from the club date days in the Catskill Mountains.
He got the job on trumpet, recommended me, and I auditioned.
[With] Elvin [Jones], it all went through [bassist] Gene Perla. Basically, Gene said,
'I'm gonna get you and [Steve]
Grossman the gig,' and eventually Joe Farrell was moving on. He got me
to sit in one night, and I got the gig with Elvin.
[The gig with] Miles was because I was living with Chick [Corea] and Dave [Holland] in the same loft. I
was around, Grossman was there ahead of me [with Davis], and I was with
Elvin.
"So in a certain way," Liebman concludes, "these things that happened
to me, and of course formed the basis of my career, were because you were
around--and, of course, you were good enough to get going; obviously I was
good enough to be accepted. But, really, you had to just be
there, be on it, and be with guys who were moving ahead as well. It's who
you hitch your horse to; it really was like that in those days. We didn't
have dozens or hundreds of musicians [like there are now]; in my
generation we had maybe 20-30 guys, so you knew everybody and you saw them
every night because the clubs--they were where you bought a beer and sat
all night. So there was a community. Within that community there were
cliques--there were the downtown guys, the uptown guys, the Dixieland guys
and the free guys, but it was much smaller than it is now, so you
could navigate your circles and have some kind of relationship, and that
would grow because someone would say, 'I know a guy and he plays
saxophone. Let's hear him.'"
In those days--the mid-1960s through to the early 1970s--the New York
scene was hot, but it was also small, in relative terms. But
things aren't all that different when it comes to the players themselves,
according to Liebman; only the scale has changed. "If we'd stopped in 1955
or 1965, and said, 'Let's look,' there might have been 20 good tenor
players playing in New York City, and [among those 20], 'This guy's a
little more generic, this guy has something personal to say and this guy
doesn't have it together yet.' But now, instead of 20, there's 200 or
2,000! And the volume makes it seem different than it's always
been, or different than before. But individuality is not something anyone
or any school can teach. The need to express oneself and have something of
value to say that's absolutely unique, it's not a common thing, and that's
always been true of artists, in general. Now, we're just seeing more of
it, that's all."
Liebman considers himself fortunate, growing up when he did. "I came in
at the right time," he explains. "It was time for a middle-class white boy
to get in there [laughs]. I'm not the only one; look, there was Michael and Randy Brecker, Richie Beirach, you name it. Our
generation was the postwar baby boomers who had parents that enabled us to
do what we wanted. That's really the truth, because without that we'd all
be schoolteachers or working in a factory, like the generation before
that. By the '60s, if you were middle-class in America--and I'm being very
general now and observing sociologically, which is not my field--I think
that we really were the first generation to do what we wanted to
do, rather than being about survival.
"Our parents were making a living and encouraging us to be who we
wanted to be and not to be like our fathers--not to go out to the field
and work," Liebman continues. "We were urban, liberal people and arts were
important--that was the culture of the day, and equally, there was a very
uneducated poor class also--obviously, things happened in the ghettos in
'68, all the black-white stuff. But, in general, guys like me had a
chance, and we could have easily gone into something else; it could have
been another art. If it had been two years later and I'd heard Jimi Hendrix when I heard [John Col]Trane, I can almost promise
you I'd be playing guitar. I could see it; he could have had that effect
on me, because it was so mind-blowing and so above the earth, coming from
somewhere else. We were ready for it, and we were being exposed to it;
this was really an explosion of communication of media, not comparable to
what we have now with the computer, obviously, but to what came before, in
the '60s, when you had only three TV stations in most cities and you had
just records. The youth culture was announced, and we were the
beneficiaries of that. For the lucky few of us who heard jazz at the right
time and said that's what we liked, that's why this happened. I must say,
we were like fish out of water compared to jazz beforehand, which was
mostly black. We kinda turned it around because of the number of white
guys that came out of my generation.
"We
were the eclectic generation," Liebman concludes, "because of our
influences; because in the '60s, you finally had Ravi Shankar next to Béla Bartók
string quartets. It wasn't difficult to get, and people were finally
starting to listen to this stuff in a more regular manner. Bird [Charlie Parker] and great people
like Stravinsky, we all know that; but for it to leak down to a
17-year-old kid in the middle of New York, who could hear the Bulgarian
Girl's Choir in 1964 because [Bob] Moses turned him onto it, and the next
thing go see Trane live at the Half Note, and then rock and roll. I've
gotta say that, in the end, if there's one real reason, one event or one
thing that really changed the way that jazz was perceived, it was the
rock-and-roll explosion of the '60s, and what it meant to be people of
that generation. Because you couldn't escape it, asit was tied to
political and social things, because of the whole hippie shit and
Vietnam--that really changed everybody. In other words, even if it wasn't
the music, it was just such a shock that my generation had to
reflect change to what came before."
If there's a single scene that defined jazz in New York in the 1970s,
it was the loft scene, with musicians living together in lofts that,
outfitted with pianos, basses, drums and more, became 24/7 musical
laboratories where much of the music that began to emerge from Liebman's
generation was first seeded. But beyond the creative aspect of the scene,
Liebman was instrumental in cofounding Free Life Communication, a
collective of musicians (many of them famous today, but just getting
started then), who were able to go beyond the solitary experimentation of
the loft and out into the world, through public performance.
"In the 1960s-'70s, when I got into the loft scene and was playing so
much of this free jazz, we were playing for ourselves--endless sessions,"
Liebman explains. "Bob Moses, Lenny
White, Chick Corea, both Breckers, Bob Berg, and other people not so
known--dozens of guys were coming up, and it just dawned on me. I remember
talking to Moses and saying, 'You know that collective in Chicago [the
Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, or AACM], and in
St. Louis, with Oliver Lake and
those cats?' So--me being, I guess, already good at administrating and
organization--these were my first tests, so to speak. But having some
talent in that respect, I said, 'Let's do something; we gotta get out
there into the real world.'
"So we called a meeting," Liebman continues. "I'd written about it, and
we had 30 guys sitting on the floor in my loft on West 19th Street, and I
said, 'Guys, you know, we just gotta get something together because we're
sitting in the loft playing for each other. We gotta get out. Where are we
gonna go?' We weren't good enough to be at the clubs--not yet, especially
since we were also playing such avant-garde stuff, mostly--so I said,
'What we've gotta do is go to museums and libraries and churches, and put
the concerts on.' So Bob Berg came up with the name. We had a discussion:
Anthony Braxton had come up to
speak to us that night, and Leroy
Jenkins--two separate times during this four- or five-hour
meeting--and we got it together. We got a lawyer who got us 501(c)
nonprofit [status], and we got an accountant, and then--lo and behold--we
got a grant from the New York State Council of the Arts, and we got into a
building called The Space for Innovative Development--that was built by a
philanthropic society, The Rubin Foundation, that was supporting
orchestras at that time--and they took us on as their avant-garde music
group.
"I can't tell you how amazing it was," Liebman recalls
enthusiastically."They came up to my loft, Mr. and Mrs. Rubin--a
three-floor walkup on 19th street, my loft, spray- painted, with
multicolored material stapled to the ceiling--and these two sophisticated
people, limousine outside, they came up to hear the group. We played--me
and Moses and I forget who else--for 45 minutes and it was completely
free--we gave them some tea, and they were very nice. The next thing I
know, we have a space in a building--three thousand square
feet--with a pristine piano and wood floor, and money from the New York
State Council for the Arts to buy pillows! We bought, like, fifty
pillows, so that people would come and lay out on the pillows. And we did
300 concerts the first year."
Free
Life Communication wasn't about making money, at least not directly. But
it gave its members an opportunity to grow in front of an audience, which
brought a whole different kind of energy and drive to its performances. It
led to paying gigs for many of its members and, ultimately, the
dissolution of the collective. "It was all-volunteer," Liebman says. "We
got funding for one year, we had this space given to us for free, and had
a piano given to us for free. I was the president, Richie [Beirach] was
the vice president, [bassist] Frank
Tusa ... we kinda ran it because Moses, who originated the idea,
wasn't the kinda guy to do day-to- day stuff. We had a secretary, a
treasurer ... the whole deal, and I must say that in my life, when I look
back at that time--something that not many people know about-- besides
having this grassroots, self-help, free music organization, in certain
ways that was my introduction to how to organize, beyond organizing music
in a group, which is a very different thing.
"My mother was an organizer," Liebman concludes, "and she said, 'You've
gotta read Robert's Rules of Order and parliamentary procedure,'
and I was running these meetings according to the law. We were nonprofit,
we had to do a tax statement and everything, and this went on for a couple
years. But then the need for it disappeared for guys like me, because
that's when I got the gigs with Elvin and Miles; we all started to get
work. The organization went on for a few more years and then petered out,
but it was quite something. At one point, we had 60 members, dozens of
concerts, almost all exclusively free jazz à la [John Coltrane's]
Ascension (Impulse!, 1965). I mean we're talking
20-saxophone-players-playing- In the "small town in a big city" environment of the 1970s New York
jazz scene, where everybody knew everybody, at least in musicians'
circles, there was an opportunity to really appreciate how so many of the
musicians who came up through that time--and some, beforehand--got to be
who they ultimately became. But even the most innovative musician with the
most distinct voice has to start somewhere, and few musicians (if any) can
deny that, at one time or another, they wore their musical influences on
their sleeves. "Each guy I'm gonna name," Liebman begins, "each guy had a
certain distinct thing that they played. Steve Grossman had the
Impressions (Impulse!, 1963) era of Trane down; I had the '65-66
period; and Michael [Brecker] went back to the early Impressions
period. "
Liebman has particularly vivid recollections about Bob Berg, who died
in a tragic car accident in 2002, at the age of 51. "Bob was the 'old
Trane' guy, as Jerry Bergonzi
would become," Liebman recalls. "Bergonzi was not from New York, but he
lived there for a while during this period, and he was Wayned-out; he only
wanted to play like Wayne [Shorter]. We all played like somebody, and Bob
was the old Trane guy; he played in that group where he's most well-known
[for this kind of playing]: Eastern Rebellion, with [pianist] Cedar Walton. That group was a real
hardcore, hard bop group, and we loved it--that was Bob's thing. What
happened to Bob is that he did Miles [Berg played with Davis from 1984-87,
appearing on the trumpeter's You're Under Arrest (Columbia,
1985), as well as the posthumous The Complete Miles Davis At Montreux:
1973-1991 (Sony, 2002) box set], and I don't know why or how, and may
God bless him, may he rest in peace, but he ended up sounding more like
Michael [Brecker] than Michael. I never really understood why, because he
didn't sound like that in the beginning. He was known for Eastern
Rebellion, and that was great."
Archivist Sam Stephenson's "The
Jazz Loft Project," which is only now making available previously
unheard or unseen recordings and images by legendary photographer W.
Eugene Smith from the late 1950s through early 1960s, holds special
meaning for Liebman, as it further reveals some perhaps surprising roots
of musicians who have since become world-renowned. "It's about a guy who
had a loft that ended up being just a few doors from where I had my last
of four or five lofts in the '80s," Liebman says. "But this is the late
'50s into '65, which was before my time. Smith set the loft up for people
to play, and had the microphones, tapes and pictures. I was just listening
to the radio the other day, going up to Boston to get my daughter, and
man, there was this one tape with Chick Corea, it's gotta be '61-'62, and
he's playing exactly like Bill Evans, and there's another
session where he sounds exactly like Bud Powell. And then there's Paul Bley from '64, playing on
changes; you cannot believe the tempo that Paul Bley--who you
never associate with playing fast tempos--was absolutely killing.
It was a whole scene. These loft tapes were hidden for years. It's one of
those finds--a Mozart's bones kinda thing."
And while most musicians met through the club scene or the loft scene,
others still met each other in, perhaps, the most unlikely of places. "Ralph Towner-- when he first came to
New York in the '60s, I was playing with a big band somewhere in Queens or
Brooklyn," says Liebman. "This has gotta be '66, '67, '68, and I was maybe
in high school or just starting college, and the pianist in the big band
was Ralph Towner [laughs]. I didn't even know he was a guitarist."
Most musicians who have managed to accomplish what Liebman has, have
plenty of which to be proud. But beyond his talents as a saxophonist, a
composer, a bandleader, and a cofounder of Free Life Communication,
Liebman has another major life accomplishment, one that is focused on
continuing the in-jeopardy practice of mentoring: the oral tradition
that--before the emergence of high-profile institutions like Berklee
College of Music, the Manhattan School of Music and the New England
Conservatory--ensured that younger jazz generations were groomed by those
who came before. Liebman founded the International Association of Schools
of Jazz in 1989, and in its 20-year existence the IASJ has grown to
include schools from over 40 countries worldwide.
Sometimes life works and lessons learned from past
experiences set a person up for greater challenges to come; the
organizational skills Liebman honed with Free Life Communication gave him
the perfect background for the far-more-ambitious IASJ. But other aspects
of Liebman's early years also contributed and consolidated. "I started
with music [in University]; I thought I'd get a music degree and do some
teaching," says Liebman. "There were no jazz programs at that time, and I
did not want to leave New York, so Berklee, Miami--the three or four that
existed in America at the time--were not on the table. I didn't want to
leave New York because I knew, for one thing, that if I wanted to get
better at this, you couldn't leave New York. Therefore, the best thing was
Queens College, which was a city school well known for its music
department. Of course, when you said music at that time, you were not even
talking a saxophone major, number one, so that meant clarinet; and number
two, the first day you walked in they give you a list of four years of
listening that you'd be required to know, which began with Palestrina and
worked its way up to Stockhausen. Now, I was not that up on my classical
shit; I didn't know it, I didn't like it, I didn't care for it that much.
I mean, I played a certain amount of it as an instrumentalist, but it
wasn't on my calendar, man, because I was looking at Miles and trying to
transcribe Trane and all that. So I quickly realized that I could not be a
music major, and switched to psychology the second semester, which in
those days was the catchall when you didn't know what you were doing
[laughs]--English and literature became it, and now, maybe, it's business
management--every 10 years it changes for those people who have no idea
what the fuck they want to do [laughs].
"In any case," Liebman continues, "I did love history. I was
quite good at it in high school--I won some contests. I was really pretty
good at it because I loved it, and I'd had a great teacher. So I said,
'Let me just major in something I like, let me go to a school with a
little more prestige,' and so forth, and so I went to NYU, which at that
time had a campus up in the Bronx--a very pristine, amazing campus in the
middle of a hellhole--and I majored in history and got my Bachelor of
Science in American history."
But like many aspiring musicians, Liebman may have been going to school
for something completely different by day, but by night, it was another
story. "I basically led two lives," Liebman recalls. "I was going to
school and then going downtown to play and try to get my shit together.
This is pre-loft, when I was 18-22; the loft followed right after that. So
that was my education credits, and I don't know how that reflected, but
really, you've gotta remember that people didn't talk much about music.
They didn't really take lessons with anybody; you just hung out with them,
maybe. Until I got with Jamey
Aebersold--I don't know where he called me up in the late '70s, but he
said, 'Could you come and do one of my things?' He said 'a clinic,' and as
naive as this sounds, I didn't have any idea what a clinic had to do with
music [laughs].
"So, I said, 'Clinic? What do you mean?'" Liebman continues. "He said,
'Oh, you know'- -he had that twang in his voice--and said, 'You know,
you'll have some saxophone players, you'll have 100 people. Just play a
set, and that'll be it.' And then I walked into a cauldron because, man,
those guys--David Baker, Jerry Coker, Dan Hærle, Jamey Aebersold--those
four guys and their legions could teach a fly how to sing the blues. I
mean, they had it together, at least up until 1960. They could
explain what jazz was and how you played it, and I never saw it organized
like that before--or since, for that matter. And they were so humane and
great about it, and they could all play; it wasn't just about
getting up there. They were great guys, and so I started to do clinics
with Jamey, and realized, 'You know what? This teaching thing is
viable. It certainly looks like it's growing. It's a great way to
pay back for the good fortune I had of being with Elvin Jones and
Miles--this is like me offering apprenticeship, this is me mentoring, and
it's a source of income,' which you needed if you were a jazz musician at
that time. I wasn't making that much money playing jazz, and I wasn't
going to play commercial sessions. I wasn't going to do like what Brecker
did; I wasn't gonna go into the studio and play eight bars for
anybody.
The Loft Scene: Free Life
Communication
International Association of Schools of
Jazz
| “When I'd see Trane or Cannonball or Miles when I was a kid--when those guys walked into a club ... man, the vibe. That's what I wanted to be: this underground heavy that everybody was almost afraid to talk to because of their skills.” |
"And the teaching thing was natural for me," Liebman says. "I don't
know why, but I had a knack for it and I liked it--I liked organizing and
trying to explain my stuff. That was in the '80s, and was the beginning of
doing clinics worldwide--with Quest we did it, or I did it alone, and I
was going to countries and talking to guys in France about what I just did
in Germany, and they didn't know who the guys were across the border. I
said, 'This is ridiculous, everybody knows Miles Davis, and everybody
knows "Blue Bossa"; we've got more in common than we don't.' The
Common Market was about the biggest deal Europe had in the '80s--they had
nothing. So I said, 'You know what, I've got a certain amount of prestige,
I'm in a position where I could probably be writing and instigating some
interest; maybe get these people together.'
"And that was the formation of the organization," Liebman
continues. "I wrote letters and people said, 'Yes, that sounds great--like
the United Nations of jazz.' So I called a meeting at my publishers'; they
gave me their premises. I remember sitting in this restaurant in the
afternoon--I think it was April 29, 1989, in a small town near Stuttgart,
called Rottenburg--writing that I'll be there and anyone who really wants
to do this, come and meet me. And, lo and behold, 15 countries showed up.
And that's 20 years ago; now we have over 40 countries, on every
continent. To be able to organize people--especially people like artists
and musicians, not the normal type of person--and to put something
together that's both idealistic and on the ground and running and
does really well? I had a sense of not just knowing how to organize on a
real, practical level, but how to be a leader and bring disparate people
together, who have a common bond but are as individual as jazz musicians
are. My first meeting of IASJ, I had 15 countries sitting at a table with
me--trusting me, coming all the way to Germany from as far away as Japan
and the States and Israel and Europe--saying, 'What do you want to say?
What do you want to do?' And it was because of Free Life, really, that I
had those abilities.
"This is not mega-mega," Liebman concludes, "but my meetings are with
100-150 people--50 students who, by the end of the week, will
know each other. The mantra here is cross-cultural communication via the
vehicle of jazz. That's the mantra, and that's what I wanted to do. I
don't care about the teachers knowing each other, like the IAJE was
[International Association of Jazz Educators, which went under in 2008].
IAJE was more administrative and teachers and stuff, and showing off your
band and wearing uniforms. I just want 50 kids from 50 countries to
eventually get together in six different groups, and by the end of the
week put on a great performance- -and jam all week, just get to know
other; and, via that, the teachers and administrators sharing how you
finance, how you choose your students, what's your syllabus, how do you
get your books--real administration problems. So our meetings are
two-pronged: the students doing their thing, and then my chairman, he
takes care of the teachers, has pedagogical meetings and that kind of
stuff, like a conference. When someone asks, in music, 'What is your best
thing?' I say, 'Forming this organization is definitely, by far, the
heaviest thing I've done."
With Liebman involved in so much recording--across a broad section of
labels ranging from the majors to the independents, in countries from
Germany and France to England and the United States--he has somehow
managed to be a survivor in a time when many artists are facing clear
difficulty getting their music out, let alone heard. At a time when the CD
is often little more than a business card, how to survive a landscape
where DIY studios make it possible for hundreds of new jazz releases every
month, and where the near-complete desertion of major labels means zero
recording and promotional budgets? "I always say, in our business--and
maybe arts in general--If you are cool, if you have any kind of foothold,
you'll grow in stature. We get better, number one; and number two, we get
more status as survivors, and we're not getting downsized like everybody
else," Liebman says, laughing.
"Because I'm so eclectic and I'm aggressive, I can find some
way to put out a record, and that's to my advantage," Liebman explains. "I
once had this discussion with Chick Corea, years ago, that if I was
beholden to a label, yes, there'd be the great advantages--if, of course,
it was a viable label--a Blue Note, something like that. You get promotion
that you won't get any other way. But if I was tied to a label, I wouldn't
artistically be able to do the variety of things I'm doing; there's no way
a contract would stand for me to be putting out three records at the same
time, although we have very little control because some of these records
are five years old when they're released, some are ten years old, and some
come out within three months. You have no control over the business
anymore. You used to attempt to have some control, and in some cases you
could say, 'Please don't put out a competitive record within three months;
it doesn't do anybody any good.' You would say that to another label and
they might abide by that, but these days, it's such a hit-and-miss thing,
so it looks like I have a lot coming out. But it's an advantage and
disadvantage: an advantage because I can artistically do what I want, but
a disadvantage because, of course, with most of these labels, I'm lucky if
they sell a couple hundred copies."
Industry doom-and-gloom reports of the demise of the CD--or any hard
media--seem premature, if for no reasons other than the burgeoning revival
of interest in vinyl, and that most people who want to take music home
after attending a show are not enthusiastic about slapping 20 dollars down
at a merchandise table, only to walk away with a card that's a download
key; they want something tangible in their hands. Many artists are selling
more music from the stage than any other place, but it's still not always
enough. "There's a definite advantage," Liebman says, "but, of course,
that means you have to have a show, and that's another aspect of the
business. I always say there's a lot of smoke and no fire--it
appears that people are busy, and in certain ways they
are busy. But it's highly competitive, because every young kid on
the block is willing to play for half of what you make.
"So, let's say the opportunity exists," Liebman continues. "It's not
like you go out on the street and sell your CD. You have to have a gig,
and to make it viable, to sell a couple hundred, you have to have a
thousand people there to sell ten percent ... or five percent. It's a
little bit of a catch-22 in that there's the image that we're getting a
lot done, that we're selling a lot of records off the stage, but most guys
are only selling a couple dozen or, at most, maybe one or two hundred.
We're not talking about three, four, five thousand, like it used
to be. That's the problem, and that's why. I don't know who can stay in
business, as far as record companies go, because there's no way for them
to make money. We self-produce, that's what we do; the young guys
self-produce on Facebook, and maybe they hit a vein and sell a couple
hundred, but it is not good at this point.
"You have to combine all things now," Liebman explains. "At the
Manhattan School of Music [where Liebman currently teaches], we make a big
deal about a three-part attack for the masters students: they have to know
how to teach, and we teach them how to teach; they have to write
everything from orchestra to solo piano; and they have to perform, of
course. We figure the 21st Century musician has to be equipped in all
three ways. Longevity is the only way to win, and I tell my students, 'If
you're consistent, and every day is a new day, and you play your ass off,
you will get something in 20 or 30 years, but you really do have
to stay in line that long."
And, of course, without
the promotional support of record labels, most musicians also have to
become businessmen and self-promoters with web- and social-networking
savvy. Musicians who want to do nothing but focus on the music will,
without the support of others, find it very hard to make a living.
"There's a certain amount of that," is Liebman's response, "but again it's
hit-or-miss, and only one out of a hundred will get the recognition. For
every Vijay Iyer, there's 30 cats
who may play better than him, probably, but they're never gonna get past
first base. They're not gonna have a promotion machine to help them, so as
much as they can do, great, and let's see what happens, but it really
is a jungle out there. The biggest thing--besides the way the
business has changed, and aside from the cultural and economic changes--is
that we have so many guys coming out of school who play good, or good
enough. Supply and demand is way out of kilter--it's never been so bad.
It's always been bad in arts, but it's even worse in classical music,
dance ... everywhere."
The dearth/death of the club scene has also contributed to the
challenge of more and more graduating musicians who are technically
proficient but have few places to actually evolve a voice. "My daughter's
going to Emerson College in Boston," says Liebman, "so she's connected up
with all the Berklee folks; they have a little club where they do jam
sessions on Saturday night, and couple guys have a gig and they play from
six until eight, then they bring in a singer after that, because it's a
bar. New York has Smalls and Fat Cat and 55 Bar. Every city with a couple
schools has some outlet for the kids to play--those that can play
and those that are aggressive enough--but it's a drop in the bucket for
them to be able to develop their sound."
And the days where a touring group could set up in a club and spend
five or six nights-- often two or three sets per night--getting both tight
and loose are long gone; most musicians spend far more time
getting to each gig than they actually spend at it. "FedEx just
came with my itinerary for next week [in Europe], and that's exactly what
we're doing," Liebman says. "We're on two--if not three--trains each and
every day, for twelve days; we are leaving at six in the morning, most of
the time, and we're getting there at four in the afternoon. We're going
from Vienna to Köln, and we are playing our one or two sets, maybe, in a
club. I have the train tickets right in front of me, and no plane--all
trains for 12 days, and, of course, nobody's gonna complain, because we're
just so glad to play."
The European tour Liebman is referring to is a series of dates he just
completed, in December 2010, with his longstanding Dave Liebman Group. The
band has released over a dozen records and is one of the
longest-running--and hardest-working-- ensembles in contemporary jazz.
Responsible for milestone recordings like Conversation
(Sunnyside, 2003), Blues All Ways (OmniTone, 2007), and the
recent Turnaround: The Music of Ornette Coleman (Jazzwerkstatt,
2010), the group's bassist and guitarist--Tony Marino and Vic Juris, respectively--have been
with the group since its inception, while drummer Marko Marcinko replaced original
percussionist Jamey Haddad in
2003. Starting out as a quintet, the group trimmed down to a more
travel-capable quartet when pianist Phil Markowitz--who continues to work
with Liebman in Saxophone Summit, a reed celebration that also features Joe Lovano and Ravi Coltrane--left in 2001.
While the empathy among everyone in the group is, at times, uncanny,
the connection is particularly vital between Liebman and Juris--a
linguistically sophisticated and sonically expansive guitarist who
deserves to stand beside greats of his generation like Pat Metheny, John Scofield, Bill Frisell and John Abercrombie, and whose Omega is the
Alpha (Steeplechase, 2010) has been largely overlooked. Much as
bassist Dave Holland's
thirteen-year-old quintet acts as the core for other projects, Liebman has
recruited members of Dave Liebman Group for other projects, including his
Dave Liebman Big Band, responsible for 2010's Live / As Always
(MAMA Records). It's clear that the members of the group value the
opportunity to work with Liebman; equally, he sees himself as having no
small responsibility to keep things happening for the group.
"It's rare that we get to play almost every night for 12 days--and
believe me, I don't take it lightly," says Liebman. "I'm very gratified
that I'm able to get this for the guys and be able to put them to work.
I'm very proactive as a leader, because to keep the same guys--which,
through thick and thin, I try to insist upon--we don't have a lot of work
and we don't make a lot of money, so the only thing I have is that they're
playing with me, and the challenge of this music. Because it's for the
music. I'm not trying to make it like we're carrying a cross here, but it
is for the music. My job with these three guys is to make it so
that there's a challenge and a reason to come out and play with me.
"That truly has to be for the music," Liebman continues. "So I have to
keep that in mind and keep things moving. I have a book that's bigger than
most jazz groups in the world- -we have 80-100 tunes--and I recycle here
and there and change things. Basically, I really always want to keep the
slant different. Right now I'm already thinking about what we're gonna do
two years from now. We're in a completely different direction at the
moment--electric bass only, Vic is playing a lot of colors and sounds, I
am playing only soprano, and we are playing freer, sonically--a more rocky
kind of vibe. I just finished with a whole cycle and I wanted to change
the music, so that's our new sound for now."
Liebman
has recently released Ornette Plus, a live recording that's only
available at shows and as a digital download from his website. It features
extended versions of three tunes from Turnaround, as well as a
thrilling, 30-minute look at Juris' "Victim," first heard on
Conversations. "'Victim,' Vic's tune--it's natural," Liebman
enthuses. "I've been talking about this for the last year, and Vic, he's
the main engineer; I've been talking about going in this direction and,
for some reason, that night, 'Victim' got into that space a little bit.
I'm just thinking of moving in a completely different direction because I
want to have this group until the day I die, so I've gotta keep it going
[laughs]!"
For those who've had the pleasure of meeting Juris, it's immediately
clear that he's simply not interested in any of the games required to push
his visibility to the next level; instead, his reputation continues to
grow slowly, yet inexorably and inevitably, just as his own talent
continues to evolve and expand. "I think, sometimes, some of it is
synchronicity, the way the cookie crumbles," Liebman explains. "But some
of it is certainly publicity and PR, and it all begins with the persona of
the person. I'm not going to talk for Vic, but this is a guy who's one of
the sweetest, nicest, calmest, gentlest, non-promotional guys of all time.
And smart--it's not like he doesn't know what's happening, it's not like
he's drifting. He just doesn't want to take part in the game--it's all
bullshit to him. And I must say that in my case--and I'm not comparing--
over the years, I didn't want to play ball with the guys, the companies. I
just didn't wanna do it. I don't want to have anybody telling me what to
do, and because of that, I'm hit or miss. I'm fine and I'm not
complaining, but you must cede control somewhere, and if you're not that
kind of personality, then most likely you're not gonna get above the
radar.
"But you know what," Liebman continues. "When I went to the Village
Vanguard, when I was a kid in the '60s, and I'd see Trane or Cannonball or
Miles, or whatever, and I was 15 or 16 years old--when those guys walked
into a club ... man, the vibe. They'd just walk to the stage and
take their horn out, and everybody--guys like us-- would be so
reverential, like: 'What's he thinkin'? What's he doin'? What'd he eat for
dinner? He's the heavy cat in the room.' That's what I wanted to
be. I didn't look at the guy--the equivalent then--who had the
5,000-person audience. I wanted to be the guy who was this underground
heavy that everybody was almost afraid to talk to because of their skills.
I always think of James Brown,
when he said this so clearly, because he knocked around for a long time,
and he said, 'Man, if you just keep knocking on enough doors, one will
open.' That's it.
"We lead a great life, man," Liebman concludes. "We are surrounded by
incredible, high-level music, with people who are, by and large,
honest--who are into it, in it for the music. Any young person who goes
into jazz is obviously not gonna be the next Sting. At the top of the line, if
you do a Wynton [Marsalis] or a Herbie [Hancock] or something like that,
that's like three guys, maybe five guys, and even that ain't that much
compared to anybody in pop music. So you must go into this with a love of
the music and the tradition, and that's very good, because it separates
the people, the wheat from the chaff. As soon as I meet somebody in this
music, I can be pretty sure that they're honest and sincere.
"This is probably one of the busiest times I've ever had. Some of it is
self-induced because of the award; I'm using some of that money to
reinvest in myself, because this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. So
that has raised my visibility a lot--and, of course, the number of records
released, and we just happen to have had a lot of work with the group this
past fall. And Saxophone Summit has had some work. It will slightly slow
down this year, but it's been hectic, and there has been some press, and
I've finally got a little promotion."
Having been around the recording industry since the early '70s, Liebman
has experienced its many changes firsthand, and adapted his own viewpoint
as to what the goal of recording has become. "The record business has
basically dissolved, in terms of the old model, and now it's kind of like
a kamikaze mission: hit and run," Liebman asserts. "The point of recording
for me is two-fold, and one is hopeful: hopefully it'll sell and everyone
can make a little money. And even before this crisis, it was a farfetched
idea, because cats like me didn't make a lot of money. But the other
important thing for me is to catalog the music and to be done; to say, 'I
did that, and it's done and it's the best I could at that moment.' Because
recording is the top of the food chain, as far as performance goes,
there's rehearsal, there's jam sessions, there's live, and then there's
recording, which brings out the most perfection and the best in you, and
demands that you come up to the highest level.
"Live is the most challenging of all because you can't correct your
mistakes, but my point is that recording is a mirror--you're under a
microscope, and a microphone will catch everything, and that's not true
when you're playing live," Liebman continues. "And that's a good thing.
You try things; you're hanging, you're in a club, you don't have a plan or
an agenda, you're just playing, and that's great. But, on the other hand,
an artist should be able to pull his shit together when he has to. And
it's like if I'm gonna give a speech, I can't get up there and ramble for
two hours; I've gotta have my good 30 minutes together. I think that's a
skill that helps one grow as a musician. Obviously, playing live is
essential and has to be happening, and there's a certain built-in
contradiction in recording anything. Jazz is about live and about the
moment, and here we are magnifying the moment forever on a plastic disc,
for someone to hear a thousand miles away, 10 or 20 years from now. That
kinda contradicts everything jazz is about, because the next minute will
be completely different.
"In the end, especially now, because of technology--even in the '60s
you could still take tape and cut it--now you can replace a breath with
another breath and nobody knows the difference," says Liebman."I think the
only real way to know how somebody plays is to hear them live in front of
your eyes, because even a live recording can be doctored. To tell you the
truth, I don't trust anybody, because I know that if I can fix something
by the push of a button, or my engineer can do it, I am doing it.
My ethics aren't that big; hey, man, if I can fix it I'm gonna fix it. So
I know that probably 95 percent of what you're hearing is not what it was.
That's a generality, but somewhere in the high percentage points. If
you're hearing a so-called 'record' now, you can be pretty sure that it's
not what they played. If it's live, less so; but it's still possible that
you're not really hearing what they played. Auto-tuning--you look good,
you feel good, it's ridiculous, really. And that's why live, for jazz,
remains the main game. It is the final proving point for somebody who's
sitting 10 feet away from you and hearing you play. That's really it, in
the end.
"If I can make a fix I will," Liebman concludes, "if I've got another
take from another day that sounds the same. And another thing you do if
you're doing a live recording is you get to the gig in the afternoon and
do a couple tunes then, because the sound will be the same at night. The
big band record, Live / As Always there's a title, "New Vista,"
that isn't on the CD but is going to be on a DVD of the gig. I remember
telling the audience, after we were finished with the performance, 'We're
going to take advantage of your presence. The official performance is
over, but the first tune was a fuck-up and we're doing it again. The
engineers are in place, and I'm taking advantage of that fact. Even though
it's midnight, you can take it or leave it, but please be silent.' There
is a certain amount of doctoring that I'd do live, but of course, it's
much less than you can do in the studio."
Liebman's current group goes back 20 years, but the saxophonist has
other musical relationships that go back much further. He's formed a
number of significant partnerships with pianists over the years, including
Copland, Markowitz and Mike Nock,
but his longest-standing friendship dates back to the late '60s with Richie Beirach, his partner in a
number of groups including Lookout Farm, Pendulum and Quest, not to
mention a series of duo recordings, including the woefully out-of-print
Forgotten Fantasies (A&M/Horizon, 1975) and Double
Edge (Storyville, 1985), recently reissued by the label, along with
two early Quest discs--Quest II (1986) and Midpoint
(1987)--as the double-disc Searching for the New Sound of Be-Bop
(2010).
The two share a profoundly deep language, combining Liebman's inherent,
post-bop expressionism with Beirach's distinctive blend of jazz harmonies
and the classical vernacular of more outward-thinking composers who
spanned the 19th and 20th centuries, which garnered Beirach's nickname,
"The Code." "Richie is the original root," Liebman explains. "We met in
school and jam sessions in Queens. Eventually, he was living in Manhattan
and he started hanging out with me. This was 1968-69, and we were very
compatible personally and musically, and we've been able to learn from
each other for so long. We have a new record--me, Richie and Lee Konitz--coming out in March, and
we have a new duo record coming out next September. We're not actually
working that much; Richie's in Leipzig [Germany], though he has to retire
in another year, when he's 65, and he'll be back here. Up until now, he's
only been coming to the States twice a year, so maybe there'll be more
opportunity for us to schedule things.
Quest formed in the early '80s, teaming Liebman and Beirach with
bassist Ron McClure and drummer Billy Hart. The band worked regularly
throughout that decade and well into the '90s, and has experienced
something of a revival the past couple years, first with its 2005 reunion
tour and subsequent album, Redemption--Quest Live in Europe
(HATology, 2007), then with Storyville's Searching for the New Sound
of Be-Bop (2010), and finally with the group's most recent release,
Re-Dial: Live in Hamburg (OutNote, 2010).
Along with bassist Cecil McBee,
Hart is also a member of Saxophone Summit, which is gearing up for some
renewed activity in 2011. "We just came home from Europe," Liebman says,
"and we're playing Birdland in New York in February and recording--just
for ourselves at this point. In Europe, we did [Coltrane's]
Meditations every night. I do that piece every five years, as
well, in November [2010] I did an orchestral version of the suite--which
Gunnar Mossblad, my big band guy, arranged for orchestra at Manhattan
School of Music--which hopefully will come out. Eighty-five people playing
Meditations--man, it was mind-blowing. But on the tour with
Saxophone Summit, we did it because it's been 45 years since Trane
recorded it-- November 23, 1965, actually. Every couple years we try to
get it happening.
"It's so much fun, and Meditations, man, an hour-and-a-half
each night; we did it for six nights in Europe. I love that band: the
heaviest guys on their instruments, with the amount of history--Cecil's
75, Jabali [Billy Hart]'s 70, and then down to me, [Phil] Markowitz and
Joe and Ravi. We're spanning 30 years of jazz history; I mean, the guys
I'm playing with--just the rhythm section, let alone me and Joe--it's like
the history of jazz, and when you get onstage with guys on your own
instrument, who play at that level and who are into it like that, with a
rhythm section like that--no kids in this rhythm section, man, no young
whips--I mean guys who have been doing this for 50 goddamn years... That's
an all-star band that I'm the titular leader of, and I just try to get it
together, with all the things everybody does.
Liebman also released Five on One (Pirouet), a fine disc with
a new group of old friends, called Contact, in 2010--Marc Copland,
guitarist John Abercrombie,
bassist Drew Gress and, of course,
Billy Hart. "The one common denominator for almost all of my groups is
Billy," Liebman says. "Billy is my main drummer." Clearly the work of an
egalitarian collective, which did one tour around the time of the
recording, hopefully Contact will reconvene again in the future. Even
Lookout Farm--the innovative, world-music-informed group that broke
Liebman's name as a leader with its eponymous 1974 release on ECM--got
back together for a gig at Birdland in 2010 to celebrate its 35th
anniversary, though it wasn't recorded and there are currently no plans
for future gigs. ("It was supposed to be a Quest gig," Liebman explains,
"but Billy had overbooked.") Liebman is also completing a biography, in
collaboration with noted author Lewis Porter, to be published in the next
couple of years by Scarecrow Press.
And so, while Liebman suggests things might slow down a bit this year,
a quick rundown of his schedule suggests otherwise. "When you go to my
website, under 'Groups,' you see the Dave Liebman Group and Big Band--two
of my own projects," Liebman explains. "You'll see 'Other Groups,' and
there's like eight things there. Those are really all my things, and
probably will be till the clock runs out. They're all different
relationships--[Steve] Swallow and [Adam] Nussbaum in We Three, Ellery Eskelin, Tony Marino and Jim Black, called Different But the
Same, Saxophone Summit, and various duos with Phil [Markowitz], Marc
[Copland], Richie [Beirach]; my game is juggling everything and keeping
the calendar organized, but I am very fulfilled. If I go down just playing
those 8 to 10 projects plus the European guys I know [Liebman also
released Eternal Moments (Bee Jazz) in 2010, a duo record with
French pianist Jean-Marie Machado], then I'm in good shape and I'll have
plenty of music to play for the rest of my life."
But how does a white, middle-class kid from Brooklyn find his way to
the NEA Jazz Masters Fellowship? With a legacy like Liebman's,
both in his own extensive discography as a leader and on classic albums
like Elvin Jones' Live at the Lighthouse--which has been
transcribed, in its entirety, by a Norwegian saxophonist and one-time
student of Liebman's, Petter Wettre--it's really not much of a stretch.
But it's particularly important that Liebman's win finally opens what may
well be a floodgate of overdue recognition for artists who somehow got
lost between the innovations of the '60s and the neocon movement of the
'80s. Musicians like Liebman, who grew up in the '60s and began their own
innovations in the '70s, ultimately changed the shape of jazz to come;
it's just taken a few more decades to realize it and come to terms with
it. "The '70s generation was already seeing the result of our initial
forays in the way of art, drugs, everything--the whole lifestyle of us
baby boomers born after the war," Liebman says.
"We came first," Liebman concludes, "and by the late '70s, things were
already more formalized--and, by the way, more readily available
and commercialized. It wasn't as pure. By then, there was fusion
to make money; the innocence was already gone then, and that's why you
have Spyro Gyra and so on. So what
we have is the '70s generation growing up with very clear examples--you
could go and hear Larry Coryell or
Weather Report--and you didn't
have to search it out, depending on where you lived, and you could see it
all because we had already done our work. The truth is, the '70s
generation came up and could afford to dance around a little more; but, on
the other hand, a certain amount of water under the bridge meant the
innocence was gone. How do you play it straight and really find the way
that is amenable to your own personality, depending on who you are? I
really never thought about being an artist--about art for art's sake--it
was just what we did.
Jean-Marie Machado/Dave Liebman, Eternal Moments (Bee Jazz, 2010)
A Plethora of Projects and Partners
Selected Discography
Quest, Re-Dial: Live in
Hamburg (OutNote, 2010)
Quest, Searching for the New
Sound of Be-Bop (Storyville, 2010)
Dave Liebman Big Band, Live / As Always
(MAMA, 2010)
Richie Beirach/Dave Liebman/HR Big Band, Quest for
Freedom (Sunnyside, 2010)
Contact, Five on One
(Pirouet, 2010)
Dave Liebman Group, Turnaround: The Music
of Ornette Coleman (Jazzwerkstatt, 2010)
Dave Liebman/Michael
Stephans, Nomads (ITMP, 2009)
Dave Liebman/Pendulum,
Mosaic Select 32:
Live at the Village Vanguard (Mosaic, 2008)
Dave
Liebman/Roberto Tarenzi/Paolo Benedettini/Tony Arco, Dream of Nite (Verve,
2007)
David Liebman Group, Blues All Ways (OmniTone, 2007)
Mike
Nock/Dave Liebman, Duologue (Birdland, 2007)
David Liebman, Lieb Plays
Wilder (Challenge, 2005)
Dave Liebman/Phil Markowitz, Manhattan
Dialogues (ZOHO, 2005)
Dave Liebman/Ellery Eskelin, Different But the
Same (HATology, 2005)
Michael Brecker/Dave Liebman/Joe
Lovano, Saxophone
Summit (Telarc, 2004)
Dave Liebman Group, Conversation
(Sunnyside, 2003)
Dave Liebman/Richie Beirach, Mosaic Select
12 (Mosaic, 2004)
Lars Danielsson, Far North
(Dragon, 1994)
John Scofield, Who's Who? (Arista/Novus, 1980)
Steve Swallow, Home (ECM, 1980)
Dave Liebman, Lookout
Farm (ECM, 1974)
Miles Davis, On the Corner (Columbia, 1972)
Elvin Jones,
Live at the Lighthouse (Blue Note, 1972)
John McLaughlin,
My Goals Beyond (Ryko, 1970)
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