Jeremy Pelt, Musician & Author

Plus: Gary Bartz's Thoughts On Sheet Music! (Not Positive!)

I’ve been a fan of trumpeter Jeremy Pelt for a long time now. I first interviewed him in 2011, and I’ve subsequently had him on the BA podcast (which will return someday). I’ve only ever seen him live once, as a sideman with the late organist Dr. Lonnie Smith, but he puts out an album a year, and I may like some more than others, but they’re always a rewarding listen.

His latest album is The Art of Intimacy, Vol. 2: His Muse. It came out last week, and it features pianist Victor Gould, guitarist Chico Pinheiro, bassist Buster Williams, and drummer Billy Hart, plus a string section. (The Art of Intimacy, Vol. 1 came out in 2020 and featured pianist George Cables and bassist Peter Washington.) It’s a collection of romantic ballads, two of which are Pelt originals; the rest are outside compositions, but I wouldn’t call them “standards” because I can’t think of too many other people who’ve recorded them. Pelt is a guy who knows his history, and knows a lot of songs.

This album, in its approach to the jazz tradition and in its actual sound, reminds me of Wynton Marsalis’s Standard Time, Vol. 5: The Midnight Blues, which came out 25 years ago next month (April 1998). I reviewed the entire Standard Time series in 2019, and called Vol. 5 “the best album in the series after the first, perfectly capturing the sophistication of late 1950s jazz.” The Art of Intimacy, Vol. 2 is similar, but not identical, in its approach. Pelt is a very different player from Marsalis, to begin with. I read a quote once from Archie Shepp (can’t locate the source, sorry) where he said of his own Ben Webster-ish approach to ballads, “I’m not a romantic; I’m a sentimentalist.” Marsalis has a sentimental side that pops up not only in his New Orleans-isms but also his affection for swing-era styles and arrangements. Pelt, meanwhile, is a hard-edged New York player, and even when he’s playing ballads, as he does here, there’s steel at the core.

Pelt is more than just a musician. He’s also an author, and the three books he’s published over the last couple of years are, no joke, some of the most vital contributions to jazz history I’ve come across in a long time. Inspired by drummer Art Taylor’s legendary book Notes & Tones, Pelt has been interviewing fellow musicians and gathering the results in a series of books called Griot. They’re for sale on his website, and all three volumes are essential.

He’s talked to legends, and people who should be much better known than they are; to players of his own generation, and to those who’ve been around for decades. The first volume included conversations with Wynton Marsalis, Terri-Lyne Carrington, JD Allen, Robert Glasper, Ambrose Akinmusire, Eddie Henderson and many more; the sequel offers insights and stories from Harold Mabern, Louis Hayes, Kenny Barron, Ralph Peterson, Orrin Evans, Christian Scott, Brandee Younger, Esperanza Spalding, Lakecia Benjamin, and others; and the third volume, which just came out, includes interviews with Wayne Shorter, George Cables, Gary Bartz, Regina Carter, Jason Moran, Christian McBride, and others. These interviews are unlike anything published in a jazz magazine; Pelt asks questions that journalists wouldn’t think to, and puts each player into the broader context of their family, their upbringing, and their peer group, getting them to talk about what they do and why, and specifically how they see their art as Black Americans — what they feel they are contributing to their cultural lineage.

Here’s a short excerpt from his interview with saxophonist Gary Bartz:

What is Black music?

Black music is music cultured by our ancestors from Africa. You see, because what we play — what they wanna call jazz — is African-based and Eastern-based. We don’t read music, it’s aural. We teach you by playing it, you listen to it. You don’t read it. That’s the European concept. I just saw a thing on YouTube with Miles. They asked him, “Why don’t you like the word jazz?” And Miles said, “Jazz is a word created by white men who couldn’t play that music.”

I mean, this is the greatest music ever, and now they’re trying to teach it in school with a European concept. The music is stagnating because if kids come out, all they’re doing is memorizing chords. So what started out as theme and variations is now theme and chords. You hear no melodies. You hear no themes. You hear no thematic material. All you hear is running chords, arpeggio on the outsides of the chord. They don’t know how to play on the insides of the chords because they haven’t been taught that. This is an African-based music. It comes from us. We don’t read. I mean, can you see John Coltrane and the band pulling up saying, “Who’s got the music stands?” You know, give me a break. We don’t do that, man.

When I see music on stage, that means two things to me. One, they don’t know the music well, and the other thing is, it’s a rehearsal. I don’t want to go to the theater and watch the actors reading from the script. I don’t want to go to a show and watch the musicians reading from the music stands. You know, I’m disappointed when I see that. That means they didn’t know it. They didn’t learn it. Max Roach used to say, “There’s no magic with music on stage.” I mean, there are times when you might have to do that. Okay. There’s always exception. I remember we went out with McCoy [Tyner], with the Latin Jazz All Stars and we had all these charts, and that just doesn’t look good to me. I don’t like that. I never saw any of my heroes ever doing that, so I learned the music and I challenged all the horn players, Steve Turre, Claudio Roditi and I forget who else, but they finally learned it. Then we could go finish the tour without the music. You know, we don’t need that. You learn it. If it means anything to you, you learn it.

…

Is there something significant being a Black musician playing this particular music?

I would say it’s the music from our ancestors because it’s African-based because we are an aural tradition. We pass it on by word of mouth and by listening, we don’t write it down…I understand how it happened. They want to teach it to people, and so that’s a way to teach it, but then it became the way to do it and that’s the European concept of how to do it. Memorizing these chords. This music started by following the melody, the theme. Now they’re following the chords, which are following the melody, which you should be following. You shouldn’t be following the chords.

My analogy is, it’s like a policeman following a murderer, but he’s following the man that is following the murderer, thinking that that’s the murderer. That’s not the murderer; the guy he’s following is the murderer. That’s what we’re doing. We’re following the chords, which are following the melody, but we should be following the melody. Follow the melody, you’re going to be playing melodic. Every melody has enough information in it that you don’t even have to bring any ideas to the song to your solo, because the melody has got all the ideas. The melody is the ideas. The minute you start playing those chords man, that’s what they do, they trick you. There’s no more melody. You know what I mean? And Trane had something to do with that. But if you notice as many chords as Trane played on “Giant Steps,” you can sing “Giant Steps.” You can sing that song. You come out of some of these shows with these younger musicians, you can’t hum nothing they play. You come out thinking, “Oh, my God.” When I would come out from listening to Trane, I wasn’t thinking about Trane, I was thinking about this beautiful music and beautiful melodies he played, and what he was doing, and I could hum some things. I can’t hum nothing from most of this music I hear today.

Buy all three Griot collections from Jeremy Pelt. You’ll be glad you did.

That’s it for now. Note: There might not be a newsletter next week. I’m pretty busy with something pretty big. But with a little luck, I’ll see you next Wednesday!