Something old, new, borrowed and blue

Saxophonist Dave Binney has played with everyone from Aretha Franklin to Jamiroquai. But then, his musical taste is broad, he tells Ray Comiskey.

'There's not much music I don't like," says Dave Binney. "And immediately, if it feels honest and it's well done, I like it. It doesn't matter what it is. It all seems the same thing to me, ultimately. Some people just stay within jazz, or pop, or classical, but to me it's all the same thing. It's all music.

"I can hear what Coltrane was going for," he adds. "I can definitely hear that in rock'n'roll. I definitely hear it in Stravinsky, I hear it in Merle Haggard, country music. I hear the same thing, the same cry or energy."

Like the music of Charlie Parker or Louis Armstrong, it strikes a chord of common humanity? "That's exactly what I'm talking about. And it's funny to me when people say 'oh, I don't like that kind of music'. That always makes me a little leery of someone. How can you write off a whole genre when there's all these people that are very honest within it? I just think the most complete artists I know kind of know about other aspects and other areas of their craft."

It's an attitude that has taken the great alto saxophonist, a major figure on the cutting-edge jazz scene in New York - and a considerable artist in the jazz world in general - on a wide-ranging musical journey professionally. He has played in everything from the big bands of Maria Schneider and the late Gil Evans, after the latter's death, to such vastly different groups as Steve Bernstein's wildly idiosyncratic Sex Mob, mainstream guitarist Jim Hall's Quartet and Uri Caine's singular Bach and Mahler Projects.

That kaleidoscopic quality is also evidenced in the recordings he has made under his own name, including some of his most recent, such as South, Balance and the deceptively straight-ahead Bastion Of Sanity. And the aptly named "Welcome to Life" sextet he brings to the Belfast Festival and to Dublin this week is packed with like-minded players. Tenor saxophonist Mark Turner, guitarist Adam Rogers, pianist Craig Taborn, bassist Scott Colley and drummer Brian Blade are a virtual roll call of the best and brightest in jazz at the moment.

But what's the impulse behind all this genre-bending? Curiosity? "I think so," he answers, "and maybe in some respects - I can't say it's attention span, because I've done the same thing since I was 12 years old, so I've been pretty dedicated - but at the same time, if I do the same thing too much I start to get bored with it, so I sometimes want to move on, and then I'll come back to things."

Miami-born, Binney grew up in California outside Los Angeles, in a house where his parents listened to jazz all the time. He didn't care for it much then.

"I liked Fly and the Family Stone and I loved Jimi Hendrix. That was the first guy I really got into. And I think even early Elton John I liked a lot. Now I go back to it, I love that also still. Some of those early records were great. And then I think what got me into jazz was I remember my father listening to a saxophone player named John Klemmer, sort of like a smooth early jazz player."

That led to another saxophonist, John Coltrane. "That really made me want to get a saxophone. I remember listening to My Favourite Things and literally walking out of the room to my family, who were watching TV, and I said: 'I want to play saxophone' and they were kind of stunned. A couple of weeks later I had a saxophone." It was an alto; he was too small to take on a tenor!

"And then I remember the other guy that really got me, and still gets me: Wayne Shorter. I remember that album, Native Dancer. That's still one of my all-time favourite recordings. It was a huge influence on me. Also I was attracted to electronics. I was always looking for something new."

The "something new" stretched from the Herbie Hancock of "Headhunters" rock fame, to Chick Corea, Weather Report and Joe Zawinul, and older players such as alto saxophonists Cannonball Adderley and, perhaps surprisingly to some, Duke Ellington's Johnny Hodges.

He was similarly eclectic in his choice of teachers when he moved, at 19, to New York for a year-long stay that turned out to be permanent; he studied, albeit briefly in some cases, with alto saxophonist Phil Woods, soprano Dave Leibman, and tenor George Coleman.

"Phil Woods and George Coleman were very methodical. Leibman was much more philosophical and aesthetic and, you know, what it is to play music, why we play music and all of that. I think he's become as a teacher a little bit more organised in his presentation, but when I went to him he would just talk to me. We would hardly play. I learned a lot about what it was to play music with him and he hooked me up with my very first record deal."

By the mid-1990s he was established enough on the New York scene to play with the likes of Aretha Franklin at Carnegie Hall, go with soul funkmeister Maceo Parker and play with Jamiroquai, as well as appearances with the Schneider and Evans orchestras. And he set up his own label, Mythology Records, in 1998.

What was it like playing in the Maria Schneider and Evans big bands? One is essentially a long-form writer, the other open to the point of minimalism. "Well, the Gil Evans orchestra was very, very open, to the point where sometimes I wanted more writing, because I loved Gil's writing so much I wanted to play the written music a lot, but we didn't.

"With Maria it's sort of the opposite. She's such a great, beautiful writer that there was a lot of writing. She allowed for a lot of soloing, too, which was nice, but sometimes like with big bands I wanted it to be more open. That's what I try to do with my music, if you notice. I sometimes write a lot, but the solo things will usually be very open."

His Bastion of Sanity CD on Criss Cross is one that epitomises such a balance. "I always try to combine that, because I find that's what interests me. I love playing nice writing, but I also like just stretching out and, playing quartet, I always think of the Coltrane quartet, that sort of energy. And tapping into that sort of improvisational thing is definitely my interest in any live playing.

"A lot of times I like to have things that go into different sections, and I don't like sometimes to have two soloists playing on the same section. I like soloists to play in different places. That's sort of a goal of mine, to try to do that but keep it as organic and as open as Coltrane did."

Despite the varied nature of his career, he plays and records frequently with a small circle of musicians: people like those in the Welcome to Life band, and tenor saxophonist Chris Potter, pianist Edward Simon, and the amazing Jacob Sacks/Thomas Morgan/Dan Weiss young rhythm section he brought to Dublin last year.

So what does he look for in a musician? "I suppose the same thing that I look for when I listen to music: honesty and passion, somebody who needs to do it, rather than somebody who just enjoys it, someone who's trying to push it forward a little bit and playing beautiful things, and really being obsessed with it. I think another important thing - when you're putting a band together - is just personality. You need to have someone you get along with, because, yeah, you can make great music with people you don't really get along with, but there will still be problems eventually, especially if you have to travel together.

"Another thing about Chris and the other people you mentioned - Taborn and Weiss and Rogers - you know, they're all really smart people, very, very intelligent, and that really brings something to openness and also to the music - I mean, things to draw on even outside of music - emotions and elements that all can contribute to it."

Binney has some interesting observations to make about musical attitudes of the younger members of the jazz community. "I teach a lot and I notice that a lot of young people are very open to a lot of new music, any kind of music, but at the same time they don't listen to a lot of stuff. I don't know what it is, but they don't have that desire to go out and get every new record that comes out. They're open to it if you play it for them, but they don't know about it.

"But I still think there's plenty of music being made. Some of the best music ever is being made right now. I've been listening in the past few days to a pop band that's just incredible and they're becoming very big: Death Cab For Cutie. It's sort of American college rock. They're from Seattle. It's well done, really great tunes and really great lyrics, too, which is unusual in this day and age. There's a lot of music being made of that calibre right now."

And Welcome to Life is part of it.

Dave Binney's Welcome to Life group plays at Whelan's in Dublin on Fri, and at the Spring & Airbrake at the Belfast Festival on Sat