BA Podcast #82: Kenny Garrett!
The saxophonist talks Miles Davis, Pharoah Sanders, and more
Before we begin: I interviewed Shabaka Hutchings, who has recently given up the saxophone in favor of flutes, for Stereogum. It was a really interesting conversation, especially when he talked about the lack of overt rhythm in his new music and what his live shows are like now. Check it out here.
At this point there have been four episodes of the Burning Ambulance podcast in 2024, so to quote Keanu Reeves in John Wick, “Yeah, I’m thinkin’ I’m back.” The first episode of this current “season” featured a conversation with pianist Ethan Iverson, and the second was an encounter with bassist Rufus Reid. The third featured modular synth composer Arushi Jain, and the latest episode is an interview with saxophonist Kenny Garrett. Click here to listen.
Kenny Garrett has been playing for more than 40 years. Originally from Detroit, he joined the Duke Ellington Orchestra in the late ’70s, when it was being run by Ellington’s son Mercer. He also played with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, and with Donald Byrd, Woody Shaw, and Freddie Hubbard. He was a member of a “young lions” group put together by Blue Note Records in the ’80s called Out Of The Blue that also included the late drummer Ralph Peterson, and he was already recording as a leader when he was invited to join Miles Davis’s band in 1987. He played on the album Amandla, and was part of the Davis band all the way until the end of Miles’s life in 1991. Davis even made a very rare guest appearance on one of Garrett’s albums, Prisoner Of Love from 1989.
Kenny Garrett’s discography as a leader has taken him in a lot of really interesting directions. His 1995 album Triology, with Brian Blade on drums and either Charnett Moffett or Kiyoshi Kitagawa on bass, is a really intense, high-energy record that kind of marries bebop language to post-Ornette Coleman freedom, but the real key to the whole thing is the way he executes these really complex melodies on tunes like John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps,” Wynton Marsalis’s “Delfeayo’s Dilemma,” and Mulgrew Miller’s “Pressing the Issue.” It’s a tremendous showcase for his technical command of the saxophone. But the album that first got me interested in his work was Beyond The Wall, a 2006 release that was a collaboration with Pharoah Sanders that also featured Mulgrew Miller on piano, Bobby Hutcherson on vibes, Robert Hurst on bass, Brian Blade on drums, and on some tracks there were strings and harp and Chinese instruments, and a six-member vocal ensemble. It’s not spiritual jazz in the way that term is used now, and it’s not world music, it’s entirely its own thing, and it’s particularly fascinating because you might not think of Kenny Garrett and Pharoah Sanders having that much in common, artistically speaking, but they really did. They also recorded a live album together that came out in 2008.
Garrett’s latest album is going to surprise a lot of people. It’s called Who Killed AI, and it’s a collaboration with Svoy, an electronic music producer. Garrett plays alto and soprano sax on it, and all the rest of the music is made with synths and programmed drums. Even the horns are multi-tracked and fed through effects at times. It’s structured as kind of a suite — the first track is called “Ascendence,” and there are also pieces called “Transcendence,” “Divergence” and “Convergence.” But there’s also a really beautiful version of “My Funny Valentine,” which lays the ballad melody over these kind of shimmering keyboard sounds and a hard drum ’n’ bass beat. It’s not at all what I was expecting when I was told that there was a new Kenny Garrett album on the way.
I’m really glad I had the chance to talk to Kenny Garrett. We discussed his history with Miles Davis and with Woody Shaw, his early musical upbringing, his work with Pharoah Sanders, his approach to synthesizing genres and musics from around the world, and much more. I think you’re going to enjoy this conversation. So click here to listen.
Here’s an excerpt from the interview, edited for clarity.
In 2006, you made the record Beyond the Wall, and then you did a live album with Pharoah Sanders, and even before that, you were kind of making records that could be at least partially associated with so-called spiritual jazz, you know, that bring in non-Western instruments and ideas. So, like, how did your vision of the music evolve in the late ’90s and early 2000s?
Well, you know, I was always interested in what they call now spiritual jazz. I mean, Pharoah Sanders was one of my heroes. So when I would go to hear Pharoah, he would say, Where’s your horn? I’m like, I just came to listen to you. Well, where’s your horn? I want you to play. So it was always — we had this thing where if I showed up, I had to bring my horn. And I remember the first time I had African Exchange Student [out]. I was playing at Kimball’s East, and I heard this voice behind the curtain. It sounded like Pharoah Sanders. And he said, I’m coming to hear Kenny Garrett. I was like, wow, Pharoah Sanders is coming to hear me. I was excited, and that’s when we kind of started that relationship. I would see him in New York some time, and he would just tell me, I’m going to be playing, or he would invite me by his house and we would kind of practice together and try different things. But I was always interested in that music, since the first time I heard Coltrane playing on, I always like to tell people when I heard Coltrane’s sound on “All the Things You Are,” on A Blowing Session, that messed me up because Johnny Griffin was playing, he was killing it…and Trane came in and he went, [imitates high-pitched note]. I’m like, oh man, that’s it. It’s that one note. And I was searching for that note. I was like, I just need one note, because it has so much power in it. So listening to Trane and hearing that music, what they’re calling spiritual music or spiritual jazz. I mean, I was always there. That was always my way of hearing music. That’s why, I mean, in a lot of ways, a lot of music that I was playing, if it was Chinese music, if it was Japanese music or Middle Eastern music, or if it was Greek music, whatever genre it was or whatever kind of music it was, I was always listening to that stream that had the spiritual part in it, like I was doing Japanese folk songs [on Happy People] because it had the spiritual link to it. So I would play these songs like “Akatonbo” and “Tsubasawo Kudasai.” And “Arirang,” which is a Korean song. And then I would — but not only that, when I played with Miles and we were in Israel, Miles would give me music from, you know, from Israel, or from the Middle East, he was giving me music. I would go to Greece and people were giving me music. I would go in Japan and they were giving me what they call enka. Enka music’s the first music I really tried to do that, but that’s the first music I heard when I went to Japan. So it was always I was connected to that. I was always looking for that stream, as I call it, of music. And so to me, that was always spiritual jazz. But it didn’t necessarily have to only be what we call — it was always related to the spirit. But other people, other genres, other styles of music.
That’s it for now. See you next week!