Stefon Harris’s big beat
By JON GARELICK | November 20, 2006
RELAXED: “ ‘African Tarantella’ is about the existence of variety in one space.” |
Stefon Harris’s ideas have sometimes seemed beyond his reach — but that’s okay, unlike a lot of workaday mainstream virtuosos, he’s at least had a few. The 33-year-old vibist/percussionist/composer was studying classical percussion at the prestigious Eastman School of Music when he was bitten by the jazz bug and switched to the Manhattan School of Music. He worked high-profile sideman gigs around town and while still in his 20s scored a deal with major label EMI’s storied Blue Note imprint. Harris has featured himself as a composer from his very first CD, A Cloud of Red Dust (1998) — no tribute “covers” albums to the Elders here, just lots of original tunes, varied ensembles, and a broad stylistic range that takes in everything from classic hard bop to contemporary funk. His 2003 album The Grand Unification Theory was a self-conscious attempt to “contain multitudes,” as Whitman says. It was a cinematic canvas of disparate instrumentation and genres within a unified suite. If some of the slower sections were a bit grand (Harris does know how to play timpani, after all), his sense of groove was unerring, and there was always something going on. In the jazz-friendlier radio days of yore, the straight-up boogaloo “Velvet Couch” — with its Latin beat and hooky melody — might have been a hit single.Harris’s newest Blue Note CD, African Tarantella . . . Dances with Duke, is the first to draw heavily on another composer. In this case, sections from two of Duke Ellington’s later extended works — The New Orleans Suite and The Queen’s Suite — precede three sections from Harris’s own The Gardner Meditations (a piece he began working on in 2002 when he was in residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum). Listening to the first track, Ellington’s “Thanks for the Beautiful Land on the Delta,” you might think Harris has miscalculated. Whereas Duke gives the lead melody statement to the great tenor-sax Paul Gonsalves, Harris takes on that role himself. Gonsalves strides through the mix; Harris’s vibes are almost buried in it. But when I returned to the album after talking to Harris on the phone, I could hear some of what we discussed: the varied backdrops that bring Duke’s cross-rhythms into bold relief, Greg Tardy’s clarinet solos against pizzicato strings (cello and viola), Steve Turre’s hocketing trombone parts. In fact, it sounds as if there were two trombones.
“Yes, there’s some bass trombone on the bottom blurting out some really low C’s,” Harris tells me as he’s driving around central New Jersey, where he lives (after assuring me he has both hands on the wheel). “I think there may be some bass clarinet in there too, I’m not quite sure.” He laughs, as he does often during our conversation. “When I’m in the studio, I’ll listen to the playback and I’m saying, ‘Oh man, I bet this would work,’ and I go write another part really quickly.”
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