The Parts You Keep

Mike Pope was a flurry of activity at the Anthony Jackson tribute concert at Matt Garrison's Shapeshifter Lab in Brooklyn this past February. From rehearsing "Race With the Devil on Spanish Highway" with Al Di Meola on his signature Fodera 6-string, to discussing a new upright he bought with Stanley Clarke, to jumping in last-minute to take a straight-ahead piano solo on "Nica's Dream," to giving a heartfelt speech to Jackson about the profound influence he has had on him and all bassists, Mike was in go-mode nonstop.

This has been standard operating procedure for the Ohio-born, Maryland-based Pope ever since he hit the ground running upon arriving in New York City in 1993, at the behest of Michael Brecker. Soon the prestigious gigs started to roll in on both electric and upright: Blood, Sweat & Tears, the Gil Evans Orchestra, Chuck Loeb, Manhattan Transfer, Bill Bruford, Mike Stern, the Chick Corea Elektric Band, David Sanborn, and Di Meola. He also put out three albums and showed off his considerable left-brain skills developing the Pope/Fodera preamp, helping design Trickfish bass amps, and launching Mike Pope Design electronics. Joining the faculty at Berklee College of Music in 2017 as an associate professor meant an even tighter schedule and more miles on his odometer.

Finally in summer 2022, Pope took a pause from the sideman-and-edu hustle to begin working on his fourth album. Released in August, The Parts You Keep [Origin Records] boasts drummer Nate Smith, keyboardist Geoffrey Keezer, trumpeter Randy Brecker, saxophonist Roxy Cross, and guitarist Amaury Cabral — a lineup with which Pope stakes new territory in contemporary jazz while nodding to tradition. Keys to the unit's combustibility are threefold: The dynamic Smith, whose penchant for the backbeat in all the styles of music he plays has earned him first-call status. The versatile and vibrant Keezer, whose active left hand dialogues with Pope throughout, while anticipating his harmonic actions — a mind lock the two have developed over three decades of playing together. And Pope, whose conceptual and technical command of the piano has helped to give him a singular voice on the 6-string bass. We connected with Mike just before his fall Berklee semester began, to learn the particulars of the project.

How did this record come together?

I took off from Berklee a few summers ago, and I thought I should try to write some music and do a record. I called Geoff first, who is a close friend and one of my favorite musicians. He recommended Roxy, who has such an individual, intentional sound and style on sax. I'd heard Amaury at Berklee and was impressed by his organic, spirited, "fusion with a Scofield tilt" approach to guitar. Randy has been a longtime mentor and advocate of mine, and I wanted him involved. Finally, I was thinking of a few drummers, and John Patitucci recommended Nate Smith, whom I love but knew the least. He's obviously very busy so it took a minute to coordinate, but when he and his manager confirmed the date, it was only a little over a month away and I realized, "Oh my God, I haven't written the music yet!" Luckily I was in a very creative space and I think the deadline contributed to the genuineness and vulnerability of the record, because I didn't have time to second-guess myself and ideas didn't get overthought. We cut the album live in my home studio, except for the string quartet, which I recorded later.

Did you have a concept going in?

Well, first I had the concept behind the title of the record, which I address in the liner notes. It came from assessing my career and coming to the realization that continually rethinking and second-guessing myself over the years was not always the right way to go. And, that so much of what I understood music to be when I was just a kid, and didn't know nearly as much, is still very valid. I kind of returned to thinking about music like I did back then, and that led me to this idea of the parts you keep. The best elements of the various versions of myself that emerged over the years, those are the things that make me who I am. So I tried to lean into what makes me unique and individual. As for a general concept, it was about making music with people I feel a connection with. I view it as the players on the record — we're all part of the timeline of jazz, the same continuum. We're just at a particular point. So I tried to represent different parts of jazz history and my own history simultaneously.


The opener, "Misgivings," is an interesting tune in three.

I wrote that about 25 years ago. It came to me almost fully formed one night while I was falling asleep, and I went to the piano the next day and fleshed it out. It's kind of an odd tune because it doesn't follow many of the conventions of jazz in terms of feel or phrasing. I tried it with various groups over the years, but I never liked the way any of them played it. It was just unusual enough that nobody seemed to get the concept, which made me unsure about the tune myself. But I thought, if anyone can draw the best out of it, it would be Geoff and Nate, and they delivered in a big way. By the way, the title isn't about my misgivings with the song but with an alternate title I had, so I decided to name it "Misgivings" in some kind of weird logic.

Your cover of Charlie Parker's "Steeplechase" has a modern feel and a cool bass tone.

I chose that song because first, it's not one that I see recorded very often, and second, it's based on Rhythm changes, which I knew everyone would be comfortable playing over. It also took me back to one of the earliest jazz recordings I was exposed to when my dad got his first CD player in 1984. He had a jazz compilation, and one of the tracks was a [trumpeter] Jack Sheldon version of the tune with members of the Tonight Show band. I wanted to do a fresh version and I was thinking about Nate and the kinds of groups he plays with, and this sort of semi-New Orleans groove came to mind. Nate completely made it his own, and then he solos at the end. Everything he plays feels incredible and is very musical — he's scary that way.

Bass-wise, I kept the part simple to give Nate room, but I also replaced my original bass track because I wasn't happy with the tone or the note lengths. The musical voice of Anthony Jackson got in my ears, so I favored the neck pickup, turned back the tone knob, put a NordyMute under the strings, and paid closer attention to note lengths and making the part feel more relaxed. I realized along the way that the first three notes of "Steeplechase" — Bb, D, F — are the same as the first three notes of Thelonius Monk's "Rhythm-a-Ning," so we played them on the downbeat to match Monk's tune, thus creating a quick little Rhythm-changes mashup.

What was your approach to covering "Giant Steps"?

It's a tune I've been trying to master for my whole career, but I wanted to take a radically different approach that wasn't swing or bossa nova or funk. I came up with an arpeggiated piano part, and then I remembered Don Grolnick's cover of Wayne Shorter's "Water Babies" on his album Media Noche [1996, Warner Bros.], with Andy Gonzalez on bass. It's extraordinary, with Don masterfully outlining the harmony with major and minor 2nds. That got me thinking in those terms, and the rest of the arrangement unfolded from there, with the additional inspiration of Wayne and Chick Corea. All of the parts are written out, and the feel has that sort of Afro-Cuban duality where it can be felt in 6/8 or half-time in two, or double-time in four.

"Dashan's Flying Ubercar" is open harmonically and has a meter change.

Yes, it's a pretty cacophonous tune; the whole idea was to give Geoff and Nate a framework to go ballistic. It was only the second tune they had ever played together, but the magic and the communication was insane. The song is literally just a tonal center and a groove motif, and I wrote the metric modulation that happens in the middle. The groove motif at one point resembles a quarter-note at about 80 BPM against the original dotted rhythm groove of 120, so I thought it would be cool to go there for a bit and then return. You can hear some Chick and Herbie influence, and for my solo I just made it a C minor blues to have something to play over.

Your support playing and soloing on the 6-string is a highpoint throughout the record. Let's talk about your history with the instrument.

The 6-string bass for me is what I've always played. I started out as a John Patitucci disciple. At age 16 I bought a Ken Smith 6-string like he had, got all of his records, got a Pöllmann upright like his, copied his look. But as I've told him, by the time I first heard him on 6-string I already had a concept in my head in terms of feel and phrasing, even though I was nowhere near executing it technically. And then I heard him and thought, Well, all right — now that's been done! As I got to know John better, I saw a lot of similarities in how we operated musically in our early years playing jazz, but there's a huge difference in our influences, and that's what separates us. John came up listening to R&B, blues, and soul music, and I grew up listening to classical music because of my parents being accomplished pianists. Even today we are aesthetically similar, but we play very different languages. And he's still a lot better than I am!

As an accomplished pianist yourself, how much does the instrument inform your soloing on the 6-string?

I think the piano applies to everything I do. There's the mechanics side of playing an instrument and the visualization side. At times I can visualize harmony on the piano when I'm playing the 6-string. I think I transfer a lot of the harmonic geometry between piano and bass. I don't tend to think theoretically as much as geometrically when I solo on the 6. I think in terms of shapes and modifying shapes. And then other times, what I play is completely uninformed by anything, and it's just my ear taking me there. That's usually when you hear me playing way outside the harmony and I'm just going off in a direction that feels good melodically. While both piano and bass figure into my improvising, it's getting to a point now where the instrument is mattering less and less.

Your cover of the standard "That Old Feeling" is notable for your solo upright bass intro and your string-quartet arrangement.

It's a song I've always loved that was also on the compilation CD my dad had, arranged and played by [pianist] Alan Broadbent. I wanted to feature Randy in the style of Charlie Parker With Strings [1950, Mercury] or Michael Brecker with Claus Ogerman [Cityscape, 1982, Warner Bros]. I had written for string quartet once before, but what's interesting is I wrote this arrangement after the band had recorded. So I had to accommodate everything Geoff played in his piano part. Between adapting his rhythmic comping and his chord alterations, it ended up being quite contrapuntal, which is what you want with string parts as opposed to having them just play pads. Especially during the solos I had the strings take a comping approach, so you hear them engaging and answering certain phrases, which creates a real sense of communication.

As for the upright intro, a little over a year ago I bought a beautiful, resonant Riviere & Hawkes bass built in 1885, and it has changed my life. I've been playing and practicing on it constantly, and my sound production and pitch have gotten much better. That got me thinking it would be cool to have one upright track on the album, as a record of my progress on it. So I replaced my electric bass part with the upright, and then I thought it would be nice to have a solo, too. There were no opportunities within the track, so I added the intro solo. I'm basically blowing over the second half of the tune, with a little cadenza at the end.

"Barolo Blue" is a blues with a funky backbeat.

I'll sometimes have dinner with John Patitucci at Berklee, as our schedules permit. He's a big fan of Italian Barolo wines, and he has turned me on to them. Not long after one of these dinners, I was watching a livestream he did from home with his wife, Sachi, and I jokingly asked if they knew "Barolo Blues." We all had a laugh and the title stuck in my mind. When I wrote the tune I was in a rush, so after I came up with the melody for the first four bars over the tonic F7, I knew if I dropped it by a half-step for the IV chord. it would outline an E7, which gives you all the alterations over the Bb7 chord. At the end of the head I wrote a turnaround rhythm, and when we were recording it I said out loud, "Where do I know this from?" And Geoff and Nate both said, "CTA," from Chick Corea's Elektric Band II album [Paint the World, 2006, GRP]. For the groove I wanted a swung funk feel, and there are a few spots where I add a little muting using my right-hand pinkie to dampen the strings.

"Past Is Prologue" is the most developed piece on the record, and the title fits with the album's theme.

I wanted something that was a composed piece as opposed to just a head and space for blowing. I wrote "Past is Prologue" when I was a student at the University of North Texas College of Music, so I was apprehensive about it sounding dated. But then I realized, given the theme of the record — trying to evoke various versions of myself — that it was an honest representation of who I was at the time, so why not try to update it to sound like the current me? Sure enough, the guys brought it to life with a brilliant, energetic performance, and I added some things in post-production, like doubling some melodies and adding strings behind Randy's solo. So, I'm glad we revived the piece. The title refers to how what happened before predicts what will happen in the future, and that certainly applies here.

The title track is your jazz arrangement/adaptation of an Ernst von Dohnányi piano piece, alluding to the considerable influence classical music had on you.

It's a beautiful, episodic piece, with the theme developing and returning in different ways. I discovered after the fact that my arrangement was true enough to the original that I was able to superimpose the original written piece, note for note, upon my jazz arrangement. I added solo sections derived from the middle of the piece, but besides the solo section, my arrangement and the original piece told me they would live in the same musical space. So I put them both there. The solo piano at the start is meant to evoke the sound of my childhood waking up to hearing my mother, Ann, playing the piano downstairs. She is 85 now, so I flew to Atlanta to have her record to the track, and she did a masterful job. Both of my parents were world-class pianists who knew Dohnányi through my father studying with him at Florida State University in the late '50s. Dohnányi is an unsung hero of classical composition who has also written some incredible orchestral music. He was very advanced harmonically. My parents used to play a two-piano duet of his that had the entire cycle of "Giant Steps" in it way before that tune existed. He used a lot of chromatic mediants, which is a theoretical classical term for chord progressions with key centers that move in major 3rds.

How has teaching at Berklee impacted your career and creativity?

Since taking the summer off to make the record, I largely credit the creative and productive space I've been in to my students. I've grown enormously as a practitioner of music from being around these young, talented people. The reality is when you closely examine what you do in order to help other people accomplish their goals, you start realizing what you need to do to grow and get better, yourself. Related to the theme of the record, I see myself in my students. I have a responsibility to make sure they understand that they're stepping into a continuum — that whatever they know and try to play had origins that came before them, and they're continuing a tradition. That said, the first thing I do with a student is try to establish who they are and what capabilities they already have. Once I establish what their identity is, I keep that at the center and work everything around it, so that I'm helping them become a better version of themselves rather than something completely different. As I've learned myself, your individuality is your only unique product, so that needs to be the focus.