Smitty: Exactly.
BJ: Because when people just follow those formulas, they’re just repeating the same things over and over again, and the most interesting thing to me about jazz from the very beginning, when I first passionately fell in love with it and decided that I wanted to pursue it as a way of life, was that danger, creating music on the spot, that you had no idea what it was gonna be, but there you were having to come up with something, to react to something that the other musicians were playing, to start a dialogue, to give our listeners that same feeling of going into unknown territory and hopefully coming out with your head above water.
Smitty: Absolutely. When I think about the formulas that we have seen today that you mentioned and when that restriction is placed on musicians to try to force them into a box, I liken it to telling a fellow human that you no longer have the freedom to speak or to say how you feel anymore.
BJ: Mmm.
Smitty: You know?
BJ: Yes, it’s exactly like that. It’s a kind of fear that doesn’t really make sense, it’s not necessary, and I think it’s underestimating people’s listening ability to even the laymen, even people who are not fully educated in the subtleties of our music. I believe that people want to have some spirit of adventure when they listen.
Smitty: Absolutely. It’s like the old saying, “Too much water in the desert will make you sick.” (Both laugh.)
BJ: I love that.
Smitty: You know?
BJ: It is true.
Smitty: And isn’t it true that as humans we love variety, we love improvisation, our lives are improvisational, isn’t it? Because we don’t do the same thing every day, you know?
BJ: Yeah.
Smitty: So we don’t wanna hear the same thing every day either. (Laughs.)
BJ: There’s something else….I was reading a comment the other day about how the worst thing that you can do is to try to please all the people all the time.
Smitty: Right.
BJ: And you can never do that.
Smitty: No.
BJ: And there always will be people who are indifferent with what you do and hopefully there are some people that love what you do.
Smitty: Yes.
BJ: But to me the first challenge is to try to set your own standards as high as you can to try to please yourself and come up with the best thing that you can from within before you start looking out and worrying about whether somebody’s gonna like it or not, because you really don’t know if their taste is so different and you could go crazy trying to anticipate that or trying to figure out even what it is.
Smitty: Absolutely. You’re so right. Well put. And isn’t it great when we have someone introduce something new to us, you know? And we love that. Well, I know someone that was very excited about this project because his comments are in your liner notes, and that’s JJ Ma.
BJ: Yes, JJ is just a brilliant talent and such a wildly enthusiastic young man. He’s only 20 years old right now, just approaching his 21st birthday and the spirit of his comments are very much in the spirit of the way he makes music himself. He composes in addition to playing this very exotic—exotic at least to us—instrument called the ER-Hu, which is a bit similar to a violin but it only has two strings, and he is such a genius on that instrument that during the course of when we were in the studio on one of our breaks, I looked over and there he was strolling over to the piano, sat down and played this incredible version of Chopin and then he shifted over and played some George Gershwin tunes, and the kid could do anything. He’s pretty amazing.
Smitty: Wow. Well, that’s always wonderful when you can meet fellow musicians that have that sort of virtuosity and that enthusiasm to create great music.
BJ: I think there’s something that I noticed very strongly also was the change in openness in the new Chinese way of life and thinking about politics. There was a period which we all know very well in which it wasn’t really possible to study that much about Western culture or European culture in China, and it’s only been in the last ten years or so that things have opened up to the point where the young Chinese students are being exposed to things from the West and to the American art forms such as jazz, and so to them, these kids, it’s very, very fresh. It’s very new. Those of us who’ve been around for quite a long time, jazz is a very stable part of our environment, so much so that I think many people just take it for granted, but not so over there. They approach it with so much fresh enthusiasm that it generated its own sort of excitement to me.
Smitty: Wow. That’s fantastic, man. And just thinking about some of the songs here: “Celebration.” What a great opening number for this project, you know? And it gives you that feeling of a celebration of cultures coming together and blending and creating something fresh and new. And my favorite is “Dream With Me.” I love that track.
