Smitty: Right.
GV: Now I can share stories and insight about their personalities and about the creative process and sometimes it’s just little tidbits or maybe a tidbit about Grover [Washington Jr.] since I spent so much of my professional life in his band, so I think it’s an important work because, especially with instrumental music, sometimes people are not able to get a hold of who is this person behind the sound?
Smitty: Great perspectives.
GV: So we need ways to make people closer to the person behind the sound and that’s one of the things that I try to do in presenting music.
Smitty: Great approach and I know your listeners really appreciate that. You not only have your own radio show, I think it’s a beautiful thing when an artist like yourself has a club, has his own club!
GV: Jazz Base.
Smitty: Yeah, man, you got a radio show, you got your own club, what more can you ask for? (Both laugh.)
GV: Well…
Smitty: Wow!
GV: I just enjoy life and I enjoy new challenges and I’ve been blessed to have excellent opportunities and great personal and business relationships, so the club is a combination of all those things, a combination of all those blessings, because it certainly is a great opportunity and it’s the result of great relationships.
Smitty: Yes it is.
GV: And it’s also a way to kind of give back.
Smitty: Yeah.
GV: Because having the club allows me and the whole production team the ability to showcase talent who may not get the chance to be heard. The club is in Reading, PA, which during the Berks Jazz Fest for 10 days out of the year, I mean, it’s like it’s the Mecca for jazz.
Smitty: Yes, it is.
GV: Because you have 130 shows during the Berks Jazz Fest over 10 days and some of the leading artists in contemporary and traditional jazz. But then when everybody goes home, for so many years there was very little jazz. So the Sheraton Hotel said “Wait a minute. There’s gotta be a better way to do this. Let’s create a club and, Gerald, would you like to host it? Would you like to be the kind of force behind the scenes with the club?”
Smitty: The marquee, yeah.
GV: And I loved the idea because now there’s jazz year-round in Reading, which has a great local fan base. And all of these amazing regional artists are getting exposure to do what they do and on top of that, now it’s a great venue for national artists who are on tour. We’ve had Acoustic Alchemy, we’ve had the Rippingtons and Gregg Karukas, Joyce Cooling. So many artists come to the Jazz Base on the East Coast tours and it’s a little club, seats 150.
Smitty: Yeah.
GV: But all the musicians love the vibe, they love the proximity to the audience, you know, they can just about reach out and touch the audience.
Smitty: I know. (Both laugh.)
GV: And the audience loves it too because they get to hear these great artists up close and personal.
Smitty: Yeah, it’s in a great location and that city, like you said, has a great fan base in that area, but I love the spirit of Reading, how they turn out for Berks Jazz, and I mean they’re totally supportive, hundreds of volunteers, and everyone’s working so hard and smiling and having a great time. I love that week up there.
GV: People, the volunteers that you mentioned, they plan their vacations around Jazz Fest to make sure they’re available to help out during Jazz Fest, and it’s expanded over the last 18 years from being this one-day event with a couple concerts to being this 10-day event that really draws people now from around the world, so it’s expanded beyond this regional phenomenon to really a worldwide phenomenon, and certainly it is a destination on the East Coast. When you talk about jazz, you gotta mention the Berks Jazz Fest.
Smitty: Oh yes, oh yes, and I tell ya, it’s one of the premiere jazz festivals and it’s a great time of year to kick it off, you know? It’s one of those, you know, the gates are open when Berks starts. The official year is here now.
GV: That’s right, that’s right. It’s sort of the kickoff to the whole summer touring season. It gives people a sneak preview on the great music to come.
Smitty: Yeah, absolutely. It’s a great gig. You have been blessed, my friend.
GV: I don’t take it for granted. (Both laugh.)
Smitty: Yeah, I know what you mean and that’s a cool thing too. Let’s talk about your great new record, it’s called Your Move. The first track, “Hear Now!” Now, you really cut loose on this song and I heard some things from Gerald Veasley that I hadn’t heard before. That must have been an exciting time for you because that was my thought. I said “You know, he must’ve been really excited about this track. If he wasn’t excited about any other track on this project, that one you had to be excited about” because, I mean, you really just showcased a whole different side that says “Hey, man, I got some chops that you haven’t heard. Check this out,” you know? (Both laugh.)
GV: That’s funny. I just had another kind of image of an athlete that you’re used to seeing him do one thing but he has another skill in his back pocket, and I think of how Donovan McNabb, the great quarterback here in Philadelphia with the Eagles, he’s really tried to, over the years, become a better passer in the pocket, just standing there reading the defense and throwing the accurate pass, but people recognized early on his ability to run, but he’s always kind of—or through the years he’s used that very sparingly, that natural ability to just, when he gets in trouble, just take off with the ball and just run it, and will play and play, whereas a quarterback with such speed and agility where he would just run. So I’m using that as an example because I, as a recording artist, really made a conscious decision to not do as a bass player what everyone else was doing.
Smitty: Nice.
GV: In other words, I wanted to bring a melodicism to the bass world in terms of playing contemporary jazz, not that I will be the first, but that certainly, that was something that I really wanted to bring, really—a soulful quality to playing the bass as a melody in the way that a saxophone player played. But at a certain point, in the back of my mind I always knew that I would have to address, you know, running the ball, which to me is, “Just do what you do, just be funky as all get out.”
So when Chuck played this tune for me—“Hear Now!”—when I first heard it I was thinking, okay, first of all, it’s Chuck Loeb who’s presenting songs to me, a guitar player playing the role of a bass player, and a pretty good bass player too, but I’m thinking, okay, so this is his concept of what he thinks the bass should sound like, and I’m saying “Well, no, I’m not really that but I’m this melodic bass player. I play sweet melodies, man. I’m this jazz improviser.” Then I got real. I said “Wait a minute. I can also play funky. Let me just do one of these tracks and see how it comes out.” And you are exactly right. I had a ball doing it. It was almost like a release. An ability to show another side, so yeah.
