By Melissa Ingells, WKAR News
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/wkar/local-wkar-972775.mp3
EAST LANSING, MI – MSU's Professors of Jazz play at the Creole Gallery in Old Town Lansing Saturday night [6/11/2011]. It's part of a partnership between the Jazz Studies department at MSU and the Arts Council of Greater Lansing. The objective was for different Professors to compose pieces based on their own personal experiences.
Saxophonist Diego Rivera and the Professors will play a suite Rivera wrote called "The Spanish Tinge." WKAR's Melissa Ingells spoke to Rivera this week about the creative process of writing the suite.
AUDIO:
DIEGO RIVERA: Usually when I write, when I get into a project like this, what I usually have in mind before going into the project is, well, who's going to be playing this music? So in a sense, I kind of write for the person, I kind of write for the ensemble. Knowing their musicianship and knowing, you know, kind of like the style everybody plays in, when I sit down to write I almost hear their voices in my head. So it makes it a little bit easier in that sense. Some would think that's actually kind of limiting, well, you're only writing for this one person, but it's actually it's quite, it's quite liberating.
MELISSA INGELLS: Well, certainly there's a precedent for that in classical music that, you know, there'd be some great violinist like Sarasate and everybody's lining up to write stuff for him.
RIVERA: Oh yeah. You know, a lot of the same sentiments go into composing something like this, composing a suite where you're having to pace yourself and having to pace between the tunes. Say, well this would be a good tune to feature Randy (Gelispie) on, or this would be a good one, or I can almost hear Rodney (Whittaker) solo on this tune. You know, he would love this change right here, or he would love this movement or harmony, or, you know, things like that.
INGELLS: It sounds like, you know, not only is it interesting from the standpoint of creating new music, but it sounds like it has the potential to be a lot of fun.
RIVERA: It's always fun. You know, we always have a lot of fun. There's no point in doing it if it's not fun. But, yeah, it's really enjoyable to hear the music kind of come alive, because, for as much as you know, you may think you're writing for a particular person, when you get to the bandstand, it never really turns out that way. But on the good side.
And the music actually comes alive because, you know, Rodney seems to have a better idea of how to play the bass than I do in my head. You know, and Randy, Randy's just a well of information. I mean, we always say, you know, Randy's probably forgotten more than we'll ever hope to know.
INGELLS: Tell me the content of the suite that you've written, kind of where it starts and where it goes.
RIVERA: Well, the suite really starts out in New Orleans. There were a lot of Mexican musicians that came up through Mexico who really made their presence known, first at the World's Fair and the Cotton Exposition in New Orleans. They became a lot of the early educators there in New Orleans, like, some of the earliest jazz musicians became students of some of these musicians from the Mexican cavalry band, and from you know, a lot of these musicians that were migrating up from Mexico to New Orleans because there was a lot of work and they were open to music of all types from around the world, and region. So it starts there.
From there it moves on to New York, where you have a lot of Cuban musicians, and you have a lot of, you know, bebop musicians working together, primarily musicians like Dizzy Gillespie, and Mario Bauza, Chano Pozo, and you know, musicians like that, Machito and his Orchestra. And it really kind of outlines the fusion between Latin music and bop.
So the second piece works actually both as a Latin tune and as a straight-ahead bop tune, so it's kind of interesting.
And then, one of the other genres within the, under the umbrella of jazz, that's considered Latin jazz, although it doesn't necessarily come from a Spanish-speaking country, is bossa nova, and Brazilian jazz. But really, what I try to point out with that one is that the link between, like, Latin music and jazz and the Caribbean and jazz and those sort of things is that it's all kind of tied together through the African experience.
Because, you know, you take the samba, which is indigenous to, you know, Africans that came over to Brazil, it's put together and packaged in a way where you can hear that common thread, through the Caribbean, through Latin America, through even the U.S., with the influence and the African-American experience. So, although it doesn't necessarily come from a Spanish-speaking country, you know, the African influence is kind of like the unifying element, the common thread that runs through everything.
And then the last piece is a little bit more modern. It shows the reciprocal influence of jazz on Latin music, and a lot of what you have going on, you have a lot of musicians from you know Latin America and South America and the Caribbean who are influenced by jazz. Whereas, you know, a lot of the early jazz musicians were influenced by the music from Latin America, now you have that reciprocal influence. So it really kind of like ties up the whole story of how interconnected and how closely related those two styles of music are.