Jose James: Adaptations

“[…] The Negro
with the trumpet at his lips
whose jacket
Has a fine one-button roll,
does not know
upon what riff the music slips

It’s hypodermic needle
to his soul
but softly
as the tune comes from his throat
trouble
mellows to a golden note”

–Langston Hughes

Now, this voice comes to accompany this “golden note”. This voice it is José James. A young jazz singer of 28 years old, astonishing by his maturity and talent, discovered by Gilles Peterson two years ago. He released his first album “The Dreamer” [aA tribute to Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.] in January 2008. Some people from the Jazz community say he is too young, but people who really listen know he isn’t, “He has the voice, poise, charisma, and stage presence. All the ingredients… making him the most exciting singer I’ve heard in a long time” Junior Mance.”

Scheme: Can you tell me more about your debuts? How did you start playing Jazz?
Jose James: One day I was listening to the Radio, I was like fourteen, taking the A train, and I never really listened big band’s stuff. All the Jazz I knew was very confusing, I didn’t understand it. And I Heard this very powerful song, I got very excited. It was so much different from the hip-hop of the 90’s that I was use to. And I really liked this thing it made me very happy. And then I Heard Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, so I bought those 3 people. And I just listened to it over and over, for like a summer. And I said, “Whoa, I really like this music, it‘s interesting.” But I didn’t think I wanted to do Jazz. I just liked to listen to it. Then, I just bought more and more album of everything, but a lot of jazz stuff, like Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, and I just sort of work my way through Nate King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, And Wes Montgomery, till I got to John Coltrane, and when I heard that song « Equinox, I felt very passionate about it. And I was trying to find singers who are like sort of complementing the instrumentals too, like Lester Young and Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker. But when I heard John Coltrane, I couldn’t find any singer who could sing the same stuff. You have Betty Carter but she wasn’t as avant-garde. So I felt like there was something missing, and I couldn’t find any recording like central park west, so I started writing lyrics to it, because I started singing in high school a little bit. It was a just for fun, not professionally, but then I started showing that to the people and they were very impressed. So I started performing really at Seventeen and became very serious about jazz and John Coltrane, I would do “Equinox”, I would do “Mingus” just stuff like that. But also “Blackeyesusan”, “Summertime”. So that’s how I started it.

Scheme: Why did you choose to do a jazz album as a first musical project? Knowing that you told us two months ago that you were planning on doing a soul record? did you want to introduce yourself as a jazz singer?
Jose James: Well, I may definitely consider myself a jazz artist. I had originally planned to make kind of straight ahead projects with the John Coltrane‘s stuffs. And then we didn’t get the publishing right for it. So I had to write my own stuff, which is good. But I definitely like the people that started this whole soul stuff after jazz singers like al green, Marvin Gaye, etc, earlier stuff. I’ve always been more attracted to the jazz stuff, because it’s more complicated, and I don’t know, it’s just different. I can’t explain why, but when I do jazz, and hear jazz, it makes me feel like a different thing than soul and hip-hop or anything else.

And I wanted to give back. For my first album I wanted to do more of a classic project, classic thing, because I feel like so much, so many albums, like them for couples months and after you never listen to it again. Even the very good artists, and I feel like it’s sad, you know, because even the artists I really like, like Mos Def, Erykah Badu, or Andre 3000, I don’t really find myself listening to their albums so much a year later. And I think they are the best. So I wanted to make something universal, and classic. And for me jazz has that quality.

Scheme: What’s the story behind this album? Can you tell us about the people you’ve met such as Gilles Peterson, and the musicians that play with you and how long did it take you to put it together?
Jose James: It’s kind of a long story. At first I got to this jazz competition in 2006 in London and I wanted to make a CD to bring with me, for a demo. So I made it just two weeks before I left for London, I made a session Luke Damash on drums, Alexi David, bass, Nori Ochiai on piano, Omar Abdukarim, Trumpet. And it wasn’t really a band. I was trying to put a band together. But we came together to make the album, we did the Dreamer, Equinox, Central Park West, and two others songs. That’s how the first session happened. And then Gilles Peterson heard that album and contacted me about making a record. They used “Dreamer” for Brownswood Bubblers, One. So he was interested, and he said he wanted to make an album because he liked the John Coltrane stuff. So I recorded ‘Resolution’. I wrote some of my own stuff too but it was more about the Coltrane project in the beginning. Then when we didn’t get the publishing rights for that, after a month of trying to figure it out we decided that we couldn’t use it, so I had to go back in the studio, and record tones of more stuff, because we wanted to make a Coltrane EP vinyl that didn’t happen. So I needed to figure out the next step. And the more I wrote and then having Steve coming on drums changed the sound. It made it more, just different, very strict. It’s not swimming, but more contemporary. And we made the others stuff such as« Spirit Up above », « Park Bench People », that we planed to do anyway. But having Steve, just the all sound of the band changed. So I started writing news songs based on that sound, like “The Desire” or “Red”. It was just like a responsive, a new sound. And it just started to evolve to a new project, which helped me evolve as a songwriter. That’s how it happened, “The Winter”, “Desire”, “Red”, all the stuff later in the album was the later sessions. It just sort of became my own voice, it’s really good. We’ve been recording that for like a year and half. And then we pushed back the album, it was suppose to come in September, but we had the push it back.

Scheme: Is the dreamer a tribute to MLK, or is it something else? What is the meaning behind “the Dreamer” ? Who is “that Dreamer”, and what does he dream of?
Jose James: The original title was “The dreamer, For Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.”, but I think that maybe it was too political or whatever. So I just left it as “the Dreamer”. My birthday is January 20th and every year M.L.K.Jr. Celebration day is around that, like the 21st. So I always grew up thinking about him, because it’s like around my birthday, and his birthday. So it was always like special to me. And this song just came; I didn’t just sit down and said I want to write a tribute to him. It was just like very beautiful moment, like when you giving a song like a gift. And I writing down, and I was like whoa, this song it’s about Dr, King, the message. So he is the Dreamer and there is a beautiful picture of him at Washington DC, giving this I Have a Dream speech and he’s like waving his hand up in the air to people; that’s what I saw when I read the lyrics.

Scheme: You talk a lot about Barak Obama on your myspace blog, you seem to support him… is he a part of “the Dream”? Was he already a part of “the Dream”?
Jose James: I was in NYC in 9/11, and it was very scary, and people were very scared here. It was the first time that a lot of people had any consciousness of what’s happening in the world. So there were all this fear and it‘s still here. So George Bush was able to capitalize off that fear and do all this terrible things, because people very scare and said it was okay. And it since him there hasn’t been anybody who makes people feel hopeful. And I think that people in America are good, generally, I think the spirit of the artists are good, but it’s such a young country that it could be led any direction by the government, basically. If they say we’re gonna do this, and be positive, this is what I’m telling you and the people say cool. But if they say we gonna kill this people because it’s right then they do that, people don’t really know what’s right. So for me, Barack Obama, is the first candidate who speaks for the young people here, to black people. A lot of black people just have completely giving up on the politic, after Katrina, after the riots, after Rodney king, after a million things. And the bad police always shot people here, and in NYC etc. it’s terrible. So I think he is inspiring because he is taking on the white money system but in a different way, he is a part of it, a big part of it. But he saying that he wants to work with that, and bring it a different way. So I think the dream is equality. But it’s different for everybody. But I think most people here just want to send their kids to college, have health care and to have a house, a job. That’s basically what people really want, so I think he speaks of that dream. And for me like an artist and as artist of color, he represents the new face of America that hopefully we can show to the world.

Scheme: The track Nola is an extract from She’s Gotta Have It, a Spike Lee movie. Bill Lee, Spike Lee’s father, composed it. There’s also a track originally composed by Rahsan Roland Kirk that you re-interpreted with Junior Mance, “Spirits Up Above”, and you also sing on “Equinox” by Coltrane, why do you re-interpret those songs in particular?
Jose James: “Spirits Up Above” was a song that I just heard and I wanted to have Junior Mance to play on my album because he is a legend and he played with everybody, I was very excited. But also by the time he came to the project, he was not such a jazz album, it wasn’t really like a straight jazz album anymore. He is definitely a traditional player, so I needed to find a song he would comfortable playing, but that correspond with the vibe of the album. And I heard “Spirits Up Above”, and I just thought it was such a good song, because the spiritual vibe of it, it’s sort of a gospel song. And I looked at the Charles Mingus’s work, his writing, because he fuses a lot of gospel and modern jazz in an interesting way. So I thought to take it bluesy, because Mance is more blues player, to not make it like a gospel song but more of a blues and jazz song than Charles Mingus. And Alexi David he is really into Mingus. He is like a Mingus scholar, so I asked him to do a Mingus style arrangement, and I thought it worked really well.

Nola and Park Bench People too, Gilles Peterson specifically asked me to cover those songs. He really liked those, and thought it would be a good fit for the album, I wasn’t sure about Nola, at first. Because the original version is so different, it’s very happy it’s totally different. And my style is more dark and introspective. So I had to work very hard on changing it. So I put into 4/4 time, and I re-harmonized the bridge, to make it more intention, and I wanted to make it more contemporary. And I wanted to make it sadder, because I think the story of the actual song is not happy. I thought the original was like a summer park thing and I said no, the story about this woman who is trying to find independence, she doesn’t want to be with just with this one man, because she likes thing about the three of them, all together they satisfied her. And if there was all those qualities in one man she would be happy, but they weren’t. I thought it was interesting. So I wanted to tell more her story, more of her pain. So I made it sadder and darker. I thought it worked better. And then “Park Bench People”, was like the hardest song on the album to do for me. Because it was a hip-hop song.

Scheme: It’s jazzy hip-hop.
Jose James: Yeah, but I don’t think there’s ever really been a good combination between jazz and hip-hop. I can’t really think of any jazz vocalist that interprets a hip-hop song ever successfully. I’ve never heard it. It’s just a totally different way of looking at lyrics. And they weren’t any lyrics sheet for me, I couldn’t understand a lot of the word, so I spent two weeks just listening over and over with Ryan and trying to get it, he is really into Fellowship and 90’s Bay area, San Francisco hip hop scene, he really loves that And I didn’t know much about it, so he helped me a lot so I made some changes but The original song was from Red Clay, so I totally used Red Clay. It’s a song on the album that people really like, because they can refer to it.

Scheme: Have you ever thought of doing rap?
I did, when I was in high school, I totally idolized the dude From Digable Planets, Butterfly. He was like my idol when I was a kid, the way A Tribe Called Quest. Actually, I really wanted to be MC, but didn’t think I have like a singular speaking voice. Because it’s not about singing. And every rapper I really like, like Andre 3000, Snoop Biggie, 2 Pac, or Q-tip, all these people have this voice that you really love to hear. And I tried some stuff but I didn’t really like my voice. Before it was very about a singular voice. Now anybody raps you know. Now, it doesn’t really matter if you have a cool voice or not. So I just decided that well I can write but I don’t have this voice, I think I could rap but I don’t have the cool voice. So I said fuck it you know. But my voice change, I have this deeper voice, so I tried jazz in stead. But I did think about it.

Scheme: What are your biggest jazz inspirations/influences? Coltrane for sure.
Jose James: Yeah, I mean Coltrane is really the one artist I really looked to for inspiration. More than anything, what I like about him is that he was able to change so dramatically, in his carrier. He really made the change, even if he lost a lot of audience. HE did a lot of work that people weren’t ready for. I really admire that courage, especially in the 60’s, being a black artist at that time. He could’ve played “My Favorite Things” for the rest of his life, and be a millionaire, he was that’ popular. He had like the number one jazz group in the world, and he gave it up, to the change. I really like his writing too. I mean I listen to hip-hop, that’s what I came up on, and hip-hop is like one or two cords musically. It’s not really like a cordial movement, but you don’t miss it you know. And I think a lot of that comes from that kind of blues, like the all modo jazz period, where you just played on some cords and I wanted to combine that like on “Red” for example or “Desire”. It’s very simple; it’s just two cords. I really like simple song than have complex things on the top of it, so I really love his spiritual quest. There are singers like Billie Holiday, she is like my idol. I think she is the only jazz singer.

What about Nina Simone?
Jose James: Nina Simone, I don’t think she is a jazz singer. She is a world singer, because she sings anything. She was a true interpreter, she could sing jazz, she could sing blues, and she could sing anything pop.

Steve Lyman [drummer]: She sang more pop.
José: So, Billie Holiday to me, her phrasing, her style, I took so much from her, I learn so much from her. And if you took all the instrumental tracks away, and just listen to my voice alone, you will hear so much Billie Holiday. Like the way I phrase and I’m also always behind the beat. And also, most importantly, she is like an instrumentalist jazz singer. She was one of the most important jazz singers to really learn from the horn player like Lester Young, and I learn so much from John Coltrane. So for jazz those are my two major influences.

But I like Marvin Gaye; he is my favorite singer of all time. I just love what he does with his voice, he is such a passionate person, and I love his honesty, you feel that you believes what he is singing all the time. And he has a very sweet voice with a lot of pain in it. I’m really attracted to things that seem more real, a little rougher because I’m like that too.

Scheme: You did a song with Flying Lotus who is the nephew of Alice Coltrane, was the fact that he is her nephew important for you?
Jose James: Yeah, I mean I wish I could’ve seen Alice before she passed, I was so sad when she passed away, before I have the chance to see her. To me, I think Flying Lotus represents a very important future of music. And when I listen to him, I feel the same spirit of the Coltrane family, and I didn’t know he was the Alice Coltrane nephew at first. But it made sense, when I found out. Because I feel he approaches his composition at the same searching way that they do, because he is never contempt to just make beat. And I think it’s very important that he doesn’t have a tone of hip hop dudes on his albums, rapping or whatever. He makes music; it’s avant-garde, sophisticated, really complicated, spiritual, electronic music. I think like Alice and John, he transcends the gender of music that he’s in and leads you somewhere else? He is somebody that I look up to a lot for contemporary musicians who are taking the language of today to a new place. And the fact that he is the
Alice’s nephew, it’s huge, honored to work with somebody that’s royal blood.

Scheme: Is this track going to be on his album or yours?
Jose James: It’s not gonna be on his album, but it might me on my next album. We’re definitely talking about doing some collaboration.

Scheme: There’s only ten songs on the album… was it done purposely to fit the classical jazz form? Like Herbie Hancock or Coltrane, short albums with tracks that go beyond the 4 minutes limit?
Jose James: We made actually thirty tracks on that album or twenty-eight. We made a lot of different tracks. I definitely wanted to make a jazz album the way we approached it, we didn’t write a lot. I was just catching on the track. I wanted to do an album like Miles Davis, a kind of blues. We just get the good musicians together and just play. I gave to the musicians the cords, and the drums [talking to Steve] I kind of told you.

Steve Lyman: He gave me the words.
José James: Yeah the lyrics. I gave the people the lyrics to read. I had pretty much the idea in my mind first, how I wanted to sound and I knew the right people. But I didn’t really write like a melody, for any song. I wanted it to be really fresh. I wanted it to be really improvisational. I had the lyrics in the studio and we were just playing, I was just singing and improvising. So it was like real jazz. And pretty much for all the song. Except for « Spirit up above » etc. I mean, all of my songs, “Love” etc., I just let the lyrics sort of dictate what the melody where gonna go. It’s actually what, I didn’t know at the time, John Coltrane used a lot on his album, and Alabama was based on the speech that Dr. King gave. “Love Supreme”, he was just reciting his poem. So it was another Coltrane connection that I realized the last later, and in term of the length some of the tracks such as “velvet” and “Love” were actually longer so I had to do some editing so it could fit in the album. I didn’t really think about doing a pop record or a soul record and I wanted to give musician time to play.

Scheme: What do you think of contemporary jazz? Do you believe there’s still a place for Jazz nowadays? I mean, do you think there are enough young jazzmen, like you, talented enough to keep jazz alive? I’m talking about vocal jazz
Jose James: I think it’s very hard, I mean I can’t really tell you one main jazz singer of my age that I look up to. And I looked very hard. Men singing jazz it’s always a very small thing anyway. There hasn’t been that many jazz singers really. And I thing more and more the perception of jazz has crystallized into a sort of 1958, always b bop quintet for instrumentalists. And my style has a lot to do with that. And for vocalists, it’s very crystallized around to Ella Fitzgerald style. And I respect all that music a lot but I don’t feel like it’s necessarily moving forward. So it think that the challenge, because a lot of people ask me why do I sing jazz or where are the young people singing jazz and I think that the reason is money and it’s hard to sing jazz and to win respect from the jazz community. There are a lot of people who don’t like what I do in the jazz community right now. And it can be hard, because it’s a small community and you want people to respect your work. That’s the challenge. And most jazz vocalists are not considered serious if you are under thirty by jazz people. Most jazz vocalists, if you are like between thirty-five and fifty, that’s a jazz singer. I think the challenge is like, how do you sing jazz now? We all try to figure it out. I watched the two singers I really look up to when I was like in high school, Kurt, Cassandra Wilson, and I think they are 1990 singers who started to sing song that they grew up with, 70’s song and 60’s. And I thought it worked for them, but for me not at all. I think the problem is that how do you find the way to keep the spirit of jazz strong but using a contemporary language because a lot of older jazz artists don’t really think that hip hop or rap or electronic music is music actually. And they don’t respect it. But for people like me and Robert Glasper, younger people, maybe early thirty, maybe forty, you grew up with hip hop that what you listen to and that’s what we consider music, so it’s not so much of the issue. But I think that what is hard is depth of communication if you’re not using a band. If you are on a tracks. I think that Flying Lotus does electronic music in a way that has spirit of jazz, but I think that hip-hop music are cool but you don’t have the same interplay that you do with jazz. So it’s hard to make changes, it’s kind of very complicated. It’s just very hard t figure out, it’s kind of long answer but I think that every jazz singer that I know that is like my age, are struggling because nobody really wants to hear them sing standards but it’s kind of expected to sing standard, I’ve been singing standard my whole life.

But I knew that when I made the album I couldn’t make a standard album because Billie holiday sang the best standard album that we ever will I don’t care how good you are. So you just basically have to write new song. The challenge is that standards were such good songs, and that whole era of song writing [Billy Horn] was amazing, and it’s really hard to do anything that matches that but the thing that I understand was that, that is not necessarily my audience anymore.

I want to make jazz for hip-hop generation. Hip-hop people don’t have a problem to listen a song with two cords, if it’s interesting. And it thinks that for Jazz people, used to Be-bop, they are like well, there’s nothing going on? It’s not complex enough. I don’t think there is really a clear answer to that because they are a lot of jazz singers and jazz musicians but it’s hard to find a relationship to music now.

Scheme: Performing seems to be very important for you… each week you add an incoming show on your myspace page! You have performed a lot in Europe, thanks to your label I guess. What is the difference between performing in Europe and performing in the US?
Jose James: There are definitely a lot more respect of jazz in Europe. In New York nobody care about jazz basically. In the United State, NY is the last place where jazz is special. We have Chicago, we have New Orleans, San Francisco and LA and in Minneapolis where I’m from. There are jazz scenes in every major city in the US, but the festivals, and appreciation and criticisms and the radio play it’s not there than the same way it is in NY. It’s totally different. I mean jazz in NY is great, serious; there are tones of students and teachers, clubs, living master. But there aren’t that many jazz festival in United States. There might be a hundred or less per year. In Europe you’re talking about 800 easily. That’s a big difference and also there is very little funding from the states for us at all. When you go to Europe, people seem to really understand what you are trying to do, and the background of the music and it’s treated like an art form but here, they care more about the shoes that you have on.

Steve Lyman: There’s a healthy scene in Brooklyn of people my age and younger, people from all over the world. And New York is very interesting, because sits not really a city but a place where people come to. And the thing about jazz in the united states is that there’s not a lot of jazz appreciation but there is a lot of jazz education, because there is money to be made in jazz, so you have the finest student coming and it makes the music new, and it’s still the place where the music is being pushed. It’s there you just have to find it, it’s there and exist, it’s just not popular. It’s still healthy, fresh and brand new.

Jose James: We talking about instrumental jazz now, not vocal jazz it’s a big difference.
Steve Lyman: The good thing about José is that he is not the typical artist you play with, he encourages his band to really play, and he is open. And I’ve worked with so many singers that are so caught up with their own ego, that they don’t even know how to play their own music. José trusts and interacts with his players, he is a great vocalist but also improviser, so it’s just fun playing with him.