INTERVIEW: Donald Harrison celebrates Nouveau Swing, along with some friends
Photo: Donald Harrison will play New York City’s Town Hall Thursday, Jan. 11. Photo courtesy of Osmany Torres / Provided by Cindy Byram PR with permission.
Donald Harrison, the famed saxophonist and musician from New Orleans, is ready to have some sonic fun at New York City’s Town Hall. At a special concert, scheduled for Thursday, Jan. 11, Harrison will invite a number of his well-respected friends on stage for a celebration called Donald Harrison’s Music Omniverse. Audience members can expect to hear the creative talents of Dave Holland, Fred Wesley, Vernon Reid, DJ Logic, Arturo O’Farrill, Charles Tolliver, The Headhunters (Bill Summers & Mike Clark) and Joe Dyson.
One of the themes for the evening is Harrison’s unique style of music, which he first developed in the 1980s, according to press notes. More than three decades ago, he started to combine various musical styles, fearlessly respecting all types of music by breaking down the barriers amongst the genre silos. This style is called Nouveau Swing, and it incorporates elements of swing jazz, hip-hop, funk, soul and rock ‘n’ roll. Harrison, a “Big Chief,” is a welcomer of everyone and every type of sonic sound.
Here’s how Harrison previewed the special NYC concert: “I’ll start with my working band, with young guys, Brian Richburg on drums, Dan Kaufman on piano and Noriatsu on bass, and we’re going to play some of the Nouveau Swing music. That is something I started in the late-’80s where I was mixing modern dance music with swinging jazz, so we started merging ideas from hip-hop, soul music, R&B, funk and New Orleans music, and rock ‘n’ roll and a little bit of classical all together into one style of music. And a Frenchman named it Nouveau Swing because it was a new way to swing music because I kept its swing element in it, but I also added the dance factor to the music because I came from New Orleans.”
Harrison said that one of the prerequisites of creating the Nouveau Swing sound is understanding the full history of jazz, and that’s why Harrison is both a teacher and student. When he was becoming an internationally renowned saxophonist, he learned every era of jazz and even had the chance to play with some of the greats, an honorific that can be applied to his own name. He was born at a time when he could play jazz with musicians who were improvising back in the 1920s, only a few decades after the art form was first created.
“I was able to merge all those experiences and what I like from dance music into one little ball, so you’re going to hear some of that and the history of music,” he said in a recent phone interview. “Then we’re going to add some quantum elements, culled from quantum theory. I’ve been working on quantum improvisation with a published quantum theorist by the name of Stephon Alexander. We worked out something called quantum improvisation. … We’re going to go to working with the older masters of the music and mixing up generations together, new generations with people like Dave Holland and Charles Tolliver … the rock element with Vernon Reid and the hip-hop element with DJ Logic into a new shiny ball I’m calling ‘Omniverse’ music, which is where I tie up a lot of aspects of my life into one sound. It’s multi-genre music. It’s where you take one song, and you play it in many genres and then mix them all together into the Nouveau Swing genre again.”
This concert will be a preview of Harrison’s upcoming recording efforts. One of them is called The Magic Touch and features nine different versions / genres of the same song. Then, there’s The Art of Passion, which takes one song and puts it in three different styles of music that mirror one another. The tune may start in the genre of swing jazz, and then it’ll morph into trap music, a subgenre of hip-hop.
“It really developed when I was in high school,” Harrison said of these collaborations and connections in his musical oeuvre. “Two things happened. One was I read the Charlie Parker statement that if you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn, and that’s the reason I went on a quest to play with every era of jazz musician. … And the other thing that happened was I heard a mixture of New Orleans traditional sounds that were developed in the 1890s with modern jazz, and so in New York, I wrote a song when I was 19 called ‘New York Second Line.’ That was an aha moment, but it just continued to evolve … in deeper ways the older I get and the more experiences I get. So I’m very fortunate that I was in the right place at the right time with the right inquisitiveness from my mentor Charlie Parker’s statement.”
Harrison added: “I think the template that has proved to be successful … is that [the legends] first mentored with a great artist before them and collaborated with many other artists, and you can see that in the work of John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Sidney Bechet and all these great artists who played with the previous generation’s greats and then found their voice from that. I appreciate the ideas of others because there’s no way I can know everything. There’s no way anyone can know everything, but I think that the more you learn from other people, the more depth you’ll have in your music. … The most obvious thing is that we bring humanity together, and we respect each other’s ideas. We acknowledge each other’s ideas and talk about them and spread the gospel of humanity.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Donald Harrison’s Music Omniverse will play Thursday, Jan. 11, at New York City’s Town Hall. Click here for more information and tickets.
