Jalylah Burrell

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Seattle-bred, Brooklyn-based cultural critic Jalylah Burrell riffs on anything and everything.

New Slang: Young Jazz Trumpeter Christian Scott on Sound & Substance

Posted 10/22/2007 at 9:23 AM | Comment?

Christian Scott Photo Credit: Kiel Scott

24-year-old trumpeter Christian Scott called in for this interview late and breathless. Detained at a New York subway stop after a car carrying him was besieged by a gun-brandishing cop despite no sign of criminal activity amongst the commuters, he was aghast and a little bit amused at the sheer ridiculousness that ensued. The 'only in New York' moment just briefly fazed the quick witted New Orleans native who remains confounded by the storm of ineptitude and indifference that flooded his birthplace, a catastrophe he assails on his sophomore album Anthem (2007), a brooding reflection on a city sunk. In addition to opening up on the Hurricane Katrina debacle, Scott spoke pointedly to his sound, influences, peers and beginnings as he prepared for tonight's one-nighter at New York's Blue Note jazz club, after which he'll make a few stops on the eastern seaboard, return home for the Voodoo Music Experience and cross the Pacific for Tokyo's Fujitsu Concord Jazz Festival.

VIBE: A lot has been made of the fusion of genres (funk/jazz/rock) in your music. Is that an organic outgrowth of your influences or is this an intentional thing that you’re doing?

Scott: I guess it’s a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B, especially for the second album, Anthem. We don’t really intellectualize what we're doing too much because we wanted it to be natural, a natural progression musically. All the guys in my band are from 27 and 21 years old. We were born in the eighties and we want our music to sound like (what) we've been listening to up to this point. It’s very current. I think the safest way to describe the music is more or less a convergence of neo soul, indie rock, it has hip hop sensibilities as well, and there is even some western classical-- some nineteenth century western classical music--as well that has been highly influential in a lot of the compositions. I think the best way to describe it for this generation is that it’s music for this generation from players from this generation. It’s not like you go to a jazz club and they're playing songs that are seventy years old and there is a seventy one year old lady there and she remembers when she heard Charles Mingus play that song. It's new music for our generation.

Being that the jazz audience isn't known to be particularly young, what made you gravitate towards it outside of your uncle, jazz saxophonist Donald Harrison’s influence?

Being from where I'm from, there is a lot of social steering in New Orleans and it's the type of city where there a lot of people who would perceive themselves as second class citizens. You're undereducated so that they can have a labor class and all this stuff. So a lot of times what happens is one of the main means for a lot of young African Americans to actually get beyond that circumstance is to play music. So I played sports a lot growing up, I boxed, I think the main thing that I did the most was actually-I wanted to play music. I knew since I was a kid that I wanted to be a musician.

So did you always want to play the trumpet?

I actually wanted to play the saxophone but my uncle was a saxophonist so I decided the best way to be in his band and to play with him was to play a complementary instrument, which ended up being the trumpet.

You were talking about indie rock influences and neo soul influences, could you pinpoint specifically a band or an artist from some of those genres who influenced you?

I'll just name some of the stuff that I've been listening to recently: a band called Elizabeth and the Catapult-I actually went to school with Elizabeth, her name is Elizabeth Ziman and she just put out this EP out on iTunes-I like the Shiny Toy Guns and Radiohead. I've been listening to a lot of J Dilla stuff, recently, because I had been working a little bit with Mos Def and Robert Glasper and those guys love J Dilla.

It's funny that you mention Robert Glasper because I was saying to someone recently that if I had to recommend a jazz CD to somebody who doesn’t listen to jazz, I would probably recommend your records or Robert Glasper's.

I've known Rob since we were kids, like, since we were eleven or twelve, and that's one of my best friends in the world and it's strange to be in this situation right now where people kind of point to us and kind of perceive as the two guys for this generation that are making the sound palette. So it’s kind of strange because I've known this dude since we were booger eaters.

You mentioned J Dilla. I was listening to something off of the Anthem record, I think it was "Cease Fire." That bass line...

The bass line; It's on Bilal's album with Mos Def and Common on the track.

So how did that come into being?

We were in the studio just messing around because for some reason, my band, we work so much, we play live so much that when we go into the studio, we finish albums really quickly. So we were done. We did some straight ahead tracks and some Miles (Davis) fusion type of stuff and I was like, "Yo, let's try something over this bass line," and I came up with this little melody and it started making me think of relationships and dancing to that song and being crazy to that song on the Bilal album (1st Born Second, 2001). I think its "Reminisce." We ended up playing and it sounded cool so I changed the harmony a little bit. The chords that we superimposed on top of it are a little bit different but the bass line is essentially the same.

Looking back to your first album, why the decision to cover "So What," and can you explain what you did to distinguish your version from the original and mark it as your own?

It's funny. It's almost the exact same story because most of the music on my album is highly stylized and conceptual music but for "So What" and "Cease Fire" we were in the studio and we were done and I was like, "well, alright, let's have some fun and track some stuff," and when we did it Donald (Harrison) was in the studio and he wanted to solo on it. So I was like "let's get it done. If you guys want to do it, we'll do it." Conceptually, it didn't really fit perfectly with the first album but it was a cool little time capsule of what it would sound like if cats did it today.

To be continued… Click here for Part II of the interview.

Look for the second half of the interview tomorrow and, for those in New York, check out Christian Scott tonight at the Blue Note. Sets are at 8 & 10 PM. Cover is $15 at tables and $10 at the Bar, not including a $5 drink minimum.

Stream a few selections from Anthem on Christian Scott's MySpace page.

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