Smitty: But when you really listen to the virtuosity of these great players and what you’ve brought to this project, it’s an incredible harmony. I know I’ve said that before, but it’s just an incredible harmony of how what you just mentioned earlier, what a universal language music really is. I mean, here you are, you come into a studio, into a room, you all speak a different language, you don’t know the other’s language, and yet look at the results of what happened in the end, you know?
BJ: Yeah, it was definitely amazing and one of the real unique things to me that put us in a neutral territory was that none of them had heard of me, none of them had heard my music, and they knew very, very little about jazz, so we were all coming at each other with just fresh energy, and I had to prove myself to them as much or more than they did to me and that became just part of the whole process, us getting to know each other, me getting to know about the unique qualities of their instruments, and them getting to know the way I worked, and on the strength of that first day, unfortunately we weren’t in the position to record anything, so I made up my mind that I would go back home, do my homework back in The States, and then come back again, which I did about six months later, having booked some time in a recording studio there, and even at that time it was still very rough.
I really didn’t know the way things were going to evolve. I had some ideas and some sketches, but I was determined to keep that sort of free spirit thing going in which we just sort of let things unfold as the music struck us on the spot, and so I did a lot of recording during the course of a week over there, just very, very rough and recording as much raw material as I could, came back home again and worked on that, refined it, used some of my studio patching together kind of techniques and all that to create some compositions, and then went back yet another time in the studio to try to refine it and finished it off from their standpoint, so it was about a three-year process from beginning to end.
Smitty: Yes, but what a fantastic three years. Also, as I was listening to this record earlier, I said “Well, now, I wanna know how the tour works out with this.” (Laughs.)
BJ: Definitely a challenge, but amazingly I had some kind of unique opportunities and of course in this business timing is everything, but I had several tour opportunities in the Far East right after the record came out over there. It’s been available in Asia for about a year and a half now and the very first performance I did was at a jazz festival in Bangkok, Thailand, and they accepted the idea that I would come with my five musicians from China along with a jazz quartet and I learned after I had already committed to doing the date that this venue was going to be a huge outdoor stage and that they expected from eight to ten thousand people, which was of course very thrilling, but on the other hand, I considered this music so intimate and so new that I had no idea how it would play in front of an audience of that size, and so I was quite nervous, I think we all were nervous, when we had that very first premiere performance, but the Thailand audience just accepted it unbelievably well.
We got just a really, really great response and that kind of gave us the confidence that if we could play in that kind of a venue, we could play anywhere, you know? But I had envisioned that the ideal environment would be a very small, intimate theater where people would be up close and getting a chance to see what these instruments really were and hear the unique sounds. But during the course of the next few months, we played at one other big festival and then also we did a tour of Japan playing in jazz clubs, The Blue Note, over there that are smaller and more intimate, and so we have had a number of opportunities to test the waters with performing the music live, so when I finally had the opportunity to put together a tour of the U.S. or a small kind of mini tour of the U.S., I was much more confident that we could make it work.
Smitty: Yes, man, I tell ya. Well, this certainly, if not before, puts the stamp on you that you truly are an international artist. (Laughs.)
BJ: Well, I’m very proud of that. I must say that this field has given me this opportunity. I think the stamp of jazz being American music makes it a very special thing in foreign countries and it gives us the opportunity of getting invited there, and to me, at least, I felt a responsibility to try to give something back and to try to learn from their culture and to try to do what actually has always been an important thing to me, is to have a kind of eclectic feeling in my music and to reinterpret either melodies or sounds from other genres and blend them into jazz.
I guess it’s been a little bit of a trademark for me because I’ve done a lot of classical themes, to reinterpret them and stuff like that, but also I should say that I think we’re in an era right now where there’s an awful lot of typecasting and this phenomenon of Smooth Jazz, which has come along and which we all are dealing with as best we can, is a kind of subgenre in jazz that was not created by musicians. It was created by the commercial music business world and at the radio level, a lot of these new Smooth Jazz stations have developed formulas almost like rules for the way they think that the music should sound, and the end result of it, to me, when I listen is very often that there’s not that much adventurous music that comes out of that format, and I think sometimes the musicians are running a little bit scared and thinking, well, if we wanna get our songs played on the radio, we’ve got to follow these formulas, and I don’t like that, frankly.
Smitty: Yes, I totally agree.
BJ: I feel it’s my job to be adventurous and to take risks and this project definitely represents that for me, and it was something that was exciting and if I have been feeling like I had to restrict myself, I never would do a project like this.
Smitty: Absolutely, and I as well as thousands around the world applaud you for your exploratory spirit in creating great music like this because this is what jazz as well as music is all about. It’s about creativity, it’s about exploring, taking risks, all those things. There’s no formula to this when you think about it.
BJ: No, you know, there can’t be. As soon as there’s any kind of formula like that, then it’s inevitable that it’ll get stale.
