Auteur

By its very nature, jazz should leave no stone unturned. Therein, an artist can record an album in an afternoon, and whether as a sideperson or leader, some can effectively release multiple albums per year.

David Weiss' last sextet record, however, was a full decade ago. Weiss boasts an amazing background - coming up in the 1980s with jazz heavies from trumpeter Freddie Hubbard to trombonist Slide Hampton - and an artistically prodigious present.

To boot, Auteur contains a Hubbard composition, 'Rebop,' which Hub never recorded. There's also a Hampton nod ('One for Bu') which musically references his relatively brief yet meaningful tenure writing for Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. "They're great tunes," Weiss says in the press release, "and nobody knows about them."

Read on to learn how this jazz veteran continues to prove the vitality of these foundational artists - heard or unheard - and how this material blends with his original tunes.


UK Jazz News: Talk about the origins of, and concept behind, your ensemble.

David Weiss: The first band I put together was called New Jazz Composers Octet, in 1996.

It had a lot of up-and-coming guys at the time: [drummer] Nasheet Waits, [late bassist] Dwayne Burno, [alto saxophonist] Myron Walden, [saxophonist/clarinetist] Greg Tardy, [pianist] Xavier Davis. It was a larger group, five horns, and it gave us a lot of room to explore.

I picked those guys because they all showed great promise as composers. I thought I'd give them [the opportunity] to expand their palette a little bit, to see what they could do if you gave them a little more to work with.

As it turned out, those guys brought amazing stuff; we rehearsed every week, and it was great. I wrote for them, of course, but at a certain point, I was starting to write music that didn't fit the octet.

In college, I had a sextet, even though I wasn't writing at all. We played all the Wayne Shorter, Joe Henderson, Freddie Hubbard, Blue Note tunes that were written for the sextet. So, I just really like the sound of it, and it certainly had its roots in that.

At the time, [saxophonist] Marcus and [twin brother] E.J. Strickland were in college at the New School. They were 19 or 20. I guess that's the other half of it: I wanted to put a band around them, because they were just amazing kids.

So, I took Dwayne Burno and Xavier Davis from the octet and did a record [2001's Breathing Room]. Then did another one, in 2004 [The Mirror]. And then the next one was in 2014 [When Words Fail], and now this one, 10 years after that.

It takes me a while to compose. I think that's part of it, and there are other priorities. Like, beginning the octet was the priority, and then the octet started working with Freddie Hubbard, and that was the priority. I put together the Cookers, and they were the priority.

But it doesn't go away. You're always trying to write for it, and it goes into a lull, and you're like, Oh, yeah. It's time to do this again.

UKJN: What about these tunes fits a sextet better than an octet? To the layperson, that might seem like splitting hairs.

DW: The sextet has a very definitive sound. Like, how Wayne Shorter used it on The Soothsayer and Schizophrenia. He wrote with a lot of poly chords and stuff like that, triads over bass notes. You had three horns, so you had triads moving in contrast to the basslines. That's a uniquely sextet phenomenon.

You can mess with it. We can have the bassline doubled against three horns moving in triads - but they have a fourth horn, and it's a very distinct sound. You don't always want to add a fourth horn to that; sometimes you do. That's why I've got the Cookers.


UKJN: I appreciate that you take your time to compose, as some musicians seem to jump the gun and ultimately add to a lot of glut in the marketplace.

DW: It takes me a lot of time to write tunes, but a lot of it is also self-editing. And if one could make the argument about the saturated nature of releases, one could argue that a lot of artists might not be self-editing much - like, Maybe that's not my best work. Maybe we just put that one away.

Or, maybe there's no reason to do a bunch of tunes by someone else. There's something to be said for that.

I also joke that the beauty of not being famous is [lacking] the pressure on you to make another record. If I was on Blue Note or Verve or something, and they felt I needed to make a record every two years, it would be a challenge for me. I might have to start relying on things where I let that standard slip a little bit.

The other tricky thing about it is: what you hate, the public [might] love. You know that simple tune that you record, [despite thinking] Why waste my time?, and it's on the radio every five minutes?

I have my standard, but my standard is maybe not all that astute sometimes. But again, I'm not under any pressure. Nobody is shoving a contract in my face and saying, "We promoted this record. We did all this stuff. Now you have to have a follow-up by this date - go!"

If I was forced to, I'd probably be able to do it. But nobody's forcing me, so you get a regular [release interval of] 10 years.


UKJN: Sounds nice to exist outside of that pressure cooker.

DW: I mean, sometimes the pressure cooker is good for you. When I got to write under assignment, when the deadline loomed, it just had to start to happen. Maybe the gun-to-your-head philosophy has its charms.

UKJN: On Auteur, you recorded compositions by Freddie Hubbard and Slide Hampton that neither recorded themselves.

DW: Both mean a lot to me. Freddie Hubbard, I worked for during the last eight years of his life.

That octet I mentioned originally started as the New Jazz Composers collective, but part of the reason I liked the octet sound was that I worked on a record for Freddie when I was working for some other people, and I wrote my first arrangement for octet for one of Freddie's records when his chops were down a little bit, and I liked the sound.

Over the last eight years of his life, we made two records together [2001's New Colors and 2008's On the Real Side]. It was an invaluable experience, for me and all the guys. Maybe Freddie's chops weren't up all the time, but Freddie could put the fear of God into anybody.

I got to work with Slide a bit. He was an arranger for hire; he wouldn't go all out, all the time, so maybe that's why some people don't consider him the best arranger ever.

But he wrote for whoever he was writing for, and you can't get that exploratory for somebody who doesn't do that. Slide was one of the most amazing, complete musicians there ever was.