Michael Brecker, Roy Hargrove and the legendary Herbie Hancock (from left) will perform Friday at the Warner Theatre.
Here’s the cool thing about accomplished musicians: Ask them what’s in their CD players — or in the case of tenor saxophonist Michael Brecker, his iPod — and it’s always something out of left field, something the musically uninitiated have probably never considered.
Like Bulgarian music.
“Actually, it’s Bulgarian wedding music,” says a laughing Brecker, who performs with legendary jazz pianist Herbie Hancock and trumpeter Roy Hargrove Friday at the Warner Theatre. “I’ve been interested in it the last couple years. They have their own indigenous instruments, but they also use a lot of saxophone, accordion, guitar, drums, bass and a lot of clarinet.”
There’s no doubt that 11-time Grammy-winning Brecker’s riffs as a jazz saxophonist could add a little spice to whatever Bulgarian wedding parties serve their guests. And it’s not that Brecker has anything against jamming to more popular tracks in his iPod — after recording with everyone from Bruce Springsteen to Joni Mitchell, heck, he might even show up on a few of them. Rather, Brecker’s rich musical taste is more a result of a long career in the music business, one that fittingly has seen him perform and record with and even reinterpret some of the best music on iTunes.
But the most consistent rhythms in Brecker’s life have been the laid-back, expressive ones of jazz — his father was an attorney and jazz pianist — and that’s what brings him to Washington this week. Friday’s performance with Hancock and Hargrove is a stop on the trio’s “Directions in Music: Our Times” tour. This tour, scheduled to hit about 25 cities through the end of March, is actually an encore of sorts. In October 2001, Brecker, Hancock and Hargrove collaborated on “Directions in Music,” a show at Toronto’s Massey Hall that celebrated the 75th birthdays of jazz luminaries John Coltrane and Miles Davis — the latter of whom was Hancock’s mentor.
“All three of us [Brecker, Hancock and Hargrove] actually have the same agent,” Brecker says. “It gave particular weight to it that Herbie liked the idea and was into it as well, because Herbie played in one of the, if not the greatest, Miles [Davis] band. That gave it extra sort of credibility, a very important part of that formula. And we had a ball.”
Apparently, so did everyone else. The show’s recording, Live at Massey Hall, won a Grammy in 2003, and this year the trio is reprising the tour, but with a different spin: They decided to honor contemporary jazz greats, a concept that evolved into a show of music they composed — or at least thought about a little.
“It’s mostly improvised,” Brecker says. “The music is left open on purpose so it can morph and change every night, which it does.”
In a way, the same can be said about Brecker’s three-decade career: He’s gone on world tours with Paul Simon as well as with his own bands and recorded with the likes of Steely Dan and James Taylor, along with Hancock, Chick Corea and Quincy Jones. In 1987, Brecker released his first record as a band leader, and after a number of other solo albums, his 2003 effort Wide Angles, with the Michael Brecker Quindectet — that’s 15 people — won two of Brecker’s Grammys.
The long and winding road to his current incarnation as an accomplished jazz saxophonist and composer is only appropriate; after all, it was the freedom of improvisation that Brecker loved about jazz music. And it was records by people like Coltrane, Davis and Hancock — the latter of whom Brecker’s known for a few decades, but whose “breadth and enormous talent and abilities” still keep him “in awe” — that were some of the first to inspire Brecker, from the time in junior high school when he played the clarinet to his eventual switch from the alto to the tenor sax.
“It wasn’t always my intention [to play jazz], but by the time I was in the tail end of high school, I was fairly bitten by the bug,” Brecker says. “I really began to enjoy improvising. I tried to learn everything I could and play as much as possible.”
And it’s still what Brecker loves to do: He’ll go into the studio this spring to record his next album. Touring is what he’s paid for, he says; playing every night “is the fun part.” That and finding the next big Bulgarian wedding band.
