Jazz Monthly.com Interview with bob james

“Jazz Monthly Feature Interview” Bob James

Smitty: Welcoming back to JazzMonthly.com is one of the great innovators of music. He’s just an incredible musician. When it comes to making great music he has no demarcations! He’s created, once again, a magnificent new project. It’s called Angels of Shanghai. Please welcome back the incomparable Mr. Bob James. Bob, how ya doin’, my friend?

Bob James (BJ): I’m doing great, Smitty, and it’s a pleasure to be talking with you.

Smitty: Absolutely, my friend. Thank you. The pleasure’s all mine as well. Well, you have done it again with this great record and I must say that when I first heard about this project, I said, “You know, who would’ve thought?” But you have seamlessly created something very unique in that you’ve got these incredible players from the Far East and you’ve blended your own style here, and yet you created something new within Bob James as well.

BJ: Well, it’s been a major labor of love, a project that’s so dear to my heart, because it was a big challenge and I knew I was taking on something so different and had no idea what direction it was gonna take when I first started out, but now that it’s completed and I have had such good reaction to it, it’s a very heartwarming feeling.

Smitty: Absolutely, man. That’s great. Talk a little bit more about what your thoughts were coming into this project because I’m sure you had some sort of goal of what you wanted to accomplish here, because this is just something that you don’t hear every day, but what a wonderful project.

BJ: Well, there’s a lotta elements to it, Smitty, one of which is that I have been traveling more and more to the Far East and it seems like there are so many interesting opportunities over there in various foreign countries, not just Japan. Japan has been a big supporter of jazz and our music for so many years and I’ve been going there at least once a year for a long, long time and have made many friends there, but a lot of the other countries in the Far East are exploring and taking more interest in our very special field of jazz and this creates a lot of opportunities, but it also, I think, creates a challenge for us to not just go over there and have it be a one-way street, just playing our music and then coming back home again. I really wanted to learn from the great opportunity that I had and this project turned out to be just a fantastic way of learning about how music is the universal language.

Smitty: Yeah, I like that, music is the universal language.

BJ: I didn’t speak any Chinese when I started out and, by the way, I have yet to actually perform live in China. I’m hoping to correct that situation very soon. But the reason why I chose the Chinese instruments and that sound came about for a combination of reasons. There was an introduction that I got to visit Shanghai and listen to the very talented musicians and I became very fascinated, but also China represents probably the oldest tradition and it was almost a kind of a neutral way for me to start learning about the sounds and trying to figure out whether I could make some kind of a marriage between East and West.

Smitty: Well, I think you have. I think you’ve created a fantastic harmony here with this project in that these are some of the best players there and yet you bring with yourself, Nathan East, Harvey Mason, and all that you’ve accomplished in your career to this project. Talk about what it was like when you first started to get in the studio with some of these great players, some of the things that were fascinating to you.

BJ: On my very first trip over there, it had been arranged for me to visit the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, which is a very high end music school there in Shanghai and maybe very similar to the stature that Juilliard has in this country, and they had arranged for me to listen to an audition of their best students, and on that very special day we ended up in this room, which fortunately had a piano in it, and I first listened to five of these musicians play on their traditional instruments and I was blown away by their virtuosity and the interesting sounds, but I hadn’t really prepared anything in the way of music so I was a little bit at a loss as to how to begin to communicate with them.

We had a translator that day that was sort of intimidated that he was almost tongue tied, and me not being able to speak any Chinese and these students not speaking any English, I was afraid we’d end up at a stalemate, so I just decided that I would try to improvise a little bit and go to the piano and try to see if I could find some kind of a scale or sound or some melodic riff or something that would strike a familiar chord enough that maybe they would join in with me, and I was kind of pessimistic about it because it seemed to me from the music that I heard them play that they weren’t really improvisers the way we think about it in the jazz field, but much to my joy and surprise, they immediately joined in and were very willing to explore along with me, and we started just creating this piece from scratch that was a kind of hybrid.

I think none of us really knew exactly what we were doing and I had tears running down my face. It was so exciting, maybe one of the most exciting things that’s ever happened to me in music, and it was on the strength of that day, really, that I decided that I had to somehow try to expand that magical moment into some kind of a CD project.

Smitty: That is incredible, man; I’m getting a little emotional myself as I listen to you. Well, I wondered about some of those things as well, but when I listen to this record, it’s almost like I don’t know if I can relax and enjoy it yet because I’m so amazed by it, you know what I mean? (Both laugh.)

BJ: That’s a uniquely nice compliment. I love that.

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.

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.

BJ: I’ve had some people talking to me about that track and I worried that I might have been a little far out on a limb because I also wanted to go one step further than just thinking of the project in the sort of conventional jazz terms from the West, but I’ve had the occasion recently to become a little bit more involved in the hip hop world, both because a lot of my old records have been sampled by hip hop artists, which has been very flattering, but I’ve also been a bit hands on in trying to see if I could learn anything from that world and the way that they put the music together so differently than the way we have in the past and the way they treat women differently and the way they treat these chunks of sounds that are looped and repeated and so forth, so there’s definitely that element in the “Dream With Me” piece which I kinda created having spent that time in the studio getting all this kind of raw material from them, and I took little chunks of it. I didn’t want to intimidate them with trying to just write things down and having them play them literally; I wanted them to open up and just play whatever came into their head and then worry about how I would use it later, and that piece “Dream With Me” literally came about as a result of taking a lot of those chunks and then just combining them into hopefully like a hypnotic mood piece.

Smitty: Yes, and it’s a kickin’ track, man. I really love that one. Well, now, the record is out here in the U.S. now as of April 10th?

BJ: Yes, it’s just barely out and it’s very exciting for me. It’s like the kind of bringing the dream to a conclusion, coming full circle with it, getting it introduced in Asia, where I kind of theorized that there might be a more receptive audience for it at first, where the people, your listeners, were more accustomed to hearing those sounds, and then if I could survive that, then taking on the challenge and the responsibility of getting it released here in the U.S.

Smitty: Yes.

BJ: Fortunately I have wonderful support from my record company, Koch, who has really embraced the project, and I believe they really understand it and are willing to take on the challenge of trying to promote something that is so different and might strike some people’s fears as being more foreign than they think that they’re able to deal with.

Smitty: Yes. Well, I hope that this is the first of more projects like this and with these great players that you’ve done this project with. And I applaud everyone at Koch for their usual “Out of the Box” approach in support of this great record.

BJ: Well, thank you for the encouragement. I’ve had some fun reactions during that Asian tour on that very first time when I was in Thailand, in Bangkok. Immediately I had some musicians come up to me saying “Why don’t you do a project with traditional Thailand instruments? We have all kinds of similar things to the Chinese instruments, you know. Do a project with our music.” The same thing happened to me in Korea and the same thing in Indonesia and the same thing in Japan. “Our traditional instruments are different and they have their own unique characteristic and we’d love to hear them combined with jazz as well.” So if I had enough ambition and if there were enough years in my lifetime, I think I could do a whole series like this.

Smitty: Yes, man. Well, I hope that you have some years left to do at least a couple more of these, man, because this is fascinating music and I really think that the public here in the U.S. will embrace this as well.

BJ: Well, I sure hope so too and we’re gonna give it our best to make sure they get introduced to it and we’ll see what happens. Regardless of that, the passion has been there for me. It’s been a wonderful experience and the wonderful thing to me about the recording media is that it now exists and you never know when people are gonna find it.

Smitty: Yes, very true.

BJ: I’ve had a few pieces of music in the past that didn’t quite get people’s attention when they first came out, but then lo and behold, 20 years or more later, suddenly somebody finds it and responds to it in a positive way and that’s a great aspect of being in the recording field.

Smitty: Yes indeed. Well, Bob, I want to personally thank you on behalf of all your many fans for this great project and all that you do in the jazz world, and I would say keep doing what you do, my friend, and keep your improvisational spirit strong.

BJ: Thank you, Smitty, and let me definitely thank you for your enthusiasm and willingness to help me introduce the project and make people aware of it.

Smitty: Yes indeed. It’s my pleasure. We’ve been talking with the incredible Mr. Bob James. Once again he has created an extraordinary new project. It is called Angels of Shanghai. This is a must for your CD player. Bob, thanks again, my friend, and let’s get together again in the future soon.

BJ: I hope so. It’s been a pleasure talking with you.

Baldwin “Smitty” Smith

For More Information Visit www.bobjames.com and www.kochrecords.com