Everything is connected to everything else, believes master vibes player Stefon Harris. He talks to Ray Comiskey about the need for a young audience for jazz and his new album, which unites physics, buddhism and philosophy.
MORE than in any previous generation, young jazz musicians today have to contend with the distinguished weight of the music's past. They can deal with it by becoming, in effect, curators in a museum. Or they can look elsewhere, to other idioms, other cultures, even other disciplines, for inspiration, grafting whatever takes their fancy on to their own artistic personality and hope their immune system doesn't reject it.
It's another way, perhaps, of saying that talent does what it can and genius does what it must. But if jazz is starved for genius nowadays - and time will tell if this is true or not - there are enough young players around who know they have to do something more with their lives than cultivate a heritage garden.
Like Stefon Harris. A bright, articulate, friendly 29 year old from Albany in upstate New York, Harris is one of the best things to happen to the vibes for years. Already he's seen as someone capable of being compared with the great masters of the past: Lionel Hampton, Milt Jackson and Gary Burton. And he knows both sides of the fence when it comes to the argument between what he calls "the preservationists and the creative".
"I did a residency at the Gardner Museum in Boston," he says. "They have amazing art work there, but then they have this really beautiful courtyard, with live plants, and even in that setting there's a conflict between preservation and creative. Because the plants need a certain type of light to be healthy and grow, whereas the type of light the plants need the paintings can't handle
"So they exist in the same space. But even in this setting there's this really beautiful conflict, and that's how I see the world of art right now. That's the problem we're having, and it's certainly creeping over into the world of jazz. And it's somewhat frustrating."
He laughs at the suggestion that lingering in both our minds are the names of trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and Marsalis's mentor, the critic and historian, Stanley Crouch. Each is identified with the preservationist trend, and their influence on the recent television history of jazz assembled by Ken Burns was not altogether benign. Harris's criticism of that television series, incidentally, is shrewd. "I didn't think the viewer walked away inspired to go to a jazz club. He walked away inspired to go and buy a Louis Armstrong record, or a Miles Davis record, or something like that.
"This music is a very creative, spontaneous music that really needs to be seen live," he adds. "Because when you see it live you become part of the music. You have ownership in the music as an audience member, because your energy is going to be translated into the music." He spent two years playing with Marsalis and often debated with Crouch, whom he sees as a great thinker. "I've learned a tremendous amount from both of them. Wynton Marsalis to me, at this point, has become more of a preservationist, and as long as I see him as that I don't have a conflict with him on the creative side. We each have our role.
"Like his role, as he said, with Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, is to preserve the music of Duke Ellington and Count Basie and people like that. And that's fine. But for me as an artist - I love the music of Ellington and I learned a lot from it - but ultimately I'm trying to get out what's inside of me. And if I spend all of my life trying to realise someone else's dream, I'm going to miss out on my own potential."
That's a drive that Harris has had from the start. He trained as a classical percussionist, playing the tympani and the whole percussion family, including the vibes and the marimba. Until he went to college he had no exposure to jazz.
"Once I heard Charlie Parker that's all it took for me," he explains. "But even as a classical musician I was always interested in doing it my own way. And then to hear jazz and how liberated the music sounded - every musician had his own unique personality that he or she was contributing - that was fascinating to me and it was very clear that I wanted to be a part of that, because I felt I had my own story to tell." For that reason he left the Marsalis orchestra. "A lot of other people stay, and I think some of the best musicians in the world are in that ensemble, but I think their potential is being suppressed. For me, I don't have an issue with Wynton Marsalis. It's the individual musician who opts to stay. I feel bad for a lot of them."
It also points out what he calls an interesting social dilemma. "I almost think that the music is being held captive by an older generation. If you keep playing the music from their childhood, that they can relate to, that's great. Because it's fulfilling to them; they buy tickets, they buy CDs and they love the music. And that should happen.
"So we're preserving an audience which already exists, but we're not creating a new audience, because we're not making our music relevant to the new generation - and the problem is that people of my generation can't relate to the music from their childhood. And what happens when that older audience is no longer here? You don't have a new audience.
"I don't want to have anything to do with music that doesn't evolve. That's boring. It's like once you figure it out, I'm going to move on. I'm going to study physics, or psychology, or something else that's more interesting if music becomes stagnant."
He means it. Over the past year he has been writing a commissioned suite and reading widely at the same time.
"I was studying some physics, I was studying some Buddhism, I was writing poetry. I was all over the place. And this piece of music allowed me to find the common ground amongst all my interests. So I brought all of those elements together and expressed it all through the idiom of music." The key, he says, was a theory in quantum physics: the grand unification theory. "It says the four major forces in our universe - gravity, the strong force, the weak force and electromagnetic energy - are all actually the same force. And I found that to be a very spiritual concept and that's what I apply to my own life.
"With all the different things I was studying, I began to be frustrated that I'm not spending any time learning music. But once I came across the grand unification theory it helped me realise that, wow, studying physics is studying music; studying Buddhism is studying music; studying philosophy is studying music.
"It just liberated me even further," he says. "I feel like I'm in a position where if I grew beyond music I would be totally fine with that. I absolutely love music and I can't imagine not playing music, but I see what's being expressed is even more important than the idiom it's being expressed through." The suite is due out on Blue Note early next year. It uses a 12-piece ensemble: two trombones, a tenor, clarinet, flute and trumpet, plus an orchestral percussionist, an African percussionist, and Harris with a full rhythm section and voice.
"It's a 75-minute piece and it follows a storyline from beginning to end. I feel really good that I'm so much closer to my own voice. I think each recording," - from his début album, A Cloud Of Red Dust, through the superb BlackActionFigure and the exuberant Kindred, all for Blue Note - "is becoming more individualised, and this one by far has my stamp on it the most, because it's the most liberated I've ever felt writing."
The album will be called The Grand Unification Theory. His notes for it include the quote from Einstein that says all religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree.
"When you get down to it, at the centre of the beauty of art and music and science, it really is aboutsharing and helping people escape some of the things they have to deal with in life, and connecting them more with their emotions and things like that - not only for the audience, but also for the musicians; we get the same benefit."
The Stefon Harris Quartet is at Vicar Street next Saturday at the Cork Opera House on December 15th, as part of the ESB Jazz series