Christian Scott
@ the Royal Albert Hall
28 June 2012
Click an image to enlarge.
Biography
When trumpeter Christian Scott was growing up in New Orleans in
the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, his grandfather gave him
and his brother Kiel extra reading assignments each week as a supplement
to their assigned schoolwork. If the young students failed to finish
their books within the week, their grandfather would say, “Yesterday
you said tomorrow…” It was the older man’s way
of emphasising the importance of recognising the work at hand, and
making the most of the available time to complete it.
In the end, the two brothers graduated at the top of their high
school class at the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts. Armed
with a full scholarship, Scott headed north to Berklee College of
Music, where he earned two degrees in two years and eventually launched
a music career that has positioned him as one of the great innovators
of his generation. But along the way, Scott has learned that there’s
still much work to be done – not just within the jazz idiom,
but also in the larger world in which jazz exists. “Yesterday
You Said Tomorrow,” his March 30, 2010, release on Concord
Jazz, reflects the legacy of some of his musical heroes of the ‘60s,
and at the same time wields the music as a tool to address some
of the very important issues of contemporary culture.
“I’ve never worked on an album as hard as I’ve
worked on this one,” says Scott, who did the session
work in April 2009 at Van Gelder Recording Studios in Englewood
Cliffs, New Jersey. Scott co-produced with Chris Dunn, and veteran
jazz engineer Rudy Van Gelder engineered the album. “I
wanted to create a musical backdrop that referenced everything I
liked about the music from the ‘60s – Miles Davis’
second quintet, Coltrane’s quartet, Mingus’ band –
coupled with music made by people like Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix.
The music from that era just had more depth, whether it was jazz
or rock or folk or whatever. The political and social climate at
the time was much heavier, and there were a few musicians who weren’t
afraid to reference that climate in their work. The ones who did
that – and at the same time captivated people in a way that
referenced their own humanity – were the ones who ended up
lasting the longest.”
That perspective may sound unusual for someone born in 1983, but
Scott has always been acutely aware of the legacy of jazz and its
role within the broader context of 20th century history. He learned
much of it first hand from his uncle, saxophonist Donald Harrison,
an alum of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. “Some people
start with bebop, some people start with post-bop, some people start
with fusion,” says Scott, who first picked up the trumpet
when he was 12. “My uncle took me back to the very beginning
of the music. He taught me stuff that Buddy Bolden was playing in
the early 1900s.”
Scott was already proficient enough to join his uncle’s band
when he was 13, and he played on Harrison’s 2000 recording,
“Paradise Found,” when he was 16 – all of which
gave him a considerable head start in relation to his peers in high
school and at Berklee. In 2002 he made his solo debut with his self-released
and self-titled album, “Christian Scott.” In 2006, after
earning significant attention and landing a record deal with Concord
Jazz, Scott released “Rewind That,” an album whose mixture
of modern jazz, rock and R&B garnered both criticism and praise
– but ultimately a Grammy nomination. “Anthem,”
released the following year, was in large part a statement about
the political and social dynamics that enabled many people to ignore
the ravages of Hurricane Katrina. Live at Newport, released at the
end of 2008, captures Scott and his four-piece ensemble performing
at the JVC Jazz Festival in Rhode Island earlier that year.
“Yesterday You Said Tomorrow,” like “Anthem,”
takes aim at certain injustices persistent in society. The difference
this time is in scope. “With Anthem, you had this microcosmic
experience – the hurricane and the resulting devastation to
a specific region,” says Scott. “With this album, it’s
a more macrocosmic view of all the broader issues and dilemmas that
challenge us today.”
Aided by guitarist Matthew Stevens, pianist Milton Fletcher, Jr.,
bassist Kristopher Keith Funn and drummer Jamire Williams, Scott
addresses the issues head on, regardless of how uncomfortable the
subject matter may be. He opens the set with “K.K.P.D.,”
a track full of dark harmonies and tense, competing polyrhythms.
The title stands for “Ku Klux Police Department,” a
reference to what Scott calls the “phenomenally dark and evil”
attitude by the local police toward African American citizens of
New Orleans when he was growing up – and the similar dynamic
that persists there and in other cities to this day. “If
you’re black, and you get caught in the wrong place on the
wrong night, they may do some Klan stuff to you,” he
says. “That’s always the thought in the back of
your mind.”
Scott wipes away some of the darker shades in “Eraser,”
the melodic follow up track penned by singer-songwriter Thom Yorke,
co-founder and frontman of Radiohead (the song is the title track
to Yorke’s solo debut, released in 2006). The aptly titled
piece resets the tone of the overall recording, says Scott. “With
that song, we’re erasing the issue that was raised in the
previous song, and then the album starts,” he says. “Those
first two songs are very much a part of the album, but they’re
there to establish an environment where you’re willing to
listen to whatever else we have to say, because you’ve been
opened up to the validity of the original argument.”
Further in, “Angola, LA & The 13th Amendment” is
fuelled by Scott’s alternately melancholy and soaring trumpet
lines and Williams’ crashing drums, and punctuated by Stevens’
plaintive guitar. The song equates certain aspects of the prison
system with slavery. “You go to places like Angola, and
you see these convicts doing very daunting manual labour,”
says Scott. “Of course, if you’ve been convicted
of a crime and you’re guilty, then you should be punished.
And you should be rehabilitated. But I know personally that there
are people there who are not guilty, and for that to be their plight
shames me as an American.”
The introspective “The Last Broken Heart” was inspired
by the debate over gay marriage. “It’s a very challenging
song to play, but the small dissonances within the song make it
very captivating,” says Scott. “What could
be more beautiful than two people deciding to love each other? It’s
better than two people deciding to hate each other, but somehow
that’s more acceptable.”
Pitting a melodic trumpet line against a tense rhythmic undercurrent,
“The American’t” is a reflection on the negativity
that persists in the aftermath of the history-making presidential
election of 2008. “There was so much hope and positivity,
but at the same time, there were people who insisted on taking a
really dark view of the events,” says Scott. “The
song is about how people can harbour some very negative aspirations
for our country, all under the guise of patriotism.”
The closer, “The Roe Effect,” employs a bit of musical
sleight-of-hand to pose a hypothesis about abortion. “I
had written this melody that was really captivating,”
says Scott. “Then we decided to play it backwards. It
turned out to be equally as beautiful – if not more beautiful
– than the original melody.” The song is constructed
around a thought-provoking question: what happens over the next
few generations as parents who oppose abortion raise their children
with similar values, and then those children grow up and vote, while
adults who choose the abortion option raise no voters at all? “By
playing the song backwards in the second half,” says
Scott, “we illuminate how the erasing of the process is
more beautiful than the creation of it.”
Scott freely admits that the subject matter within Yesterday You
Said Tomorrow is anything but light-hearted. But like his grandfather,
he has little patience for falling behind on the important work
at hand that can’t wait. “There’s no better
time than right now to fix all of the problems and issues that we
face as individuals and as a society,” he says. “The
problems that some of the musicians of the ‘60s addressed
still exist. They may look a little different, but they’re
still around. The intent of the album was to make a document that
illuminated that fact, and illuminated the means to change the dynamics
and solve the problems.”
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