INTERVIEW: Shuggie Otis brings new freedom to classic compositions

Shuggie Otis, the R&B musician responsible for such legendary albums as Inspiration Information and Freedom Flight, recently embarked on a nationwide tour, bringing his original compositions to fans both young and old. The multi-city route comes at a time in the musician’s life when a new album is on the horizon and memories of his father, Johnny Otis, and the wild 1960s and 1970s are still fresh and filled with nostalgia.

Concertgoers who experience Otis’s tour, which includes upcoming stops in Pennsylvania, Washington, D.C., North Carolina and Georgia, will notice a difference between his 2015 sound and the music he was playing a couple of years ago. His band has been reduced to five members, offering a more streamlined quintet of drums, bass, guitar, keyboards and tenor sax.

“The arrangements are a little bit looser because we only have one of each instrument,” Otis said recently during a phone interview. “Before I had a bigger band, a horn section, so we were doing like more of a show type of set. … I’m giving freedom to this band as far as arrangements are concerned.”

When Otis put this band together, he told the musicians to make each song their own. “That’s the only way a band can make a single statement really — everybody’s pulling together,” he said. “But you’ve got to learn the stuff first, and then you own it. And then once you own it, you go on stage … with all that authority and the love for your own composition. So it’s starting to happen, and it’s kind of like a miracle. Because this band is really great in more respect than one. They’re great musicians, and they’re great people as well. We all fortunately enjoy each other’s company.”

Otis has his brother on drums, plus Albert Quon Wing on saxophone, Ed Roth on keyboards and Paul Lamb on bass. “I couldn’t be happier with this band,” he said. “It has more freedom. It has the concept of kind of a jazz quartet, the concept not the sound.”

Out in the crowd for this round of shows are fans who remember the days of Otis’s important album releases in the 1970s, plus newcomers. “It’s actually a mixture of both,” he said of the audience. “I’m probably the luckiest person in the world to have an audience. … We’ve got the range of audiences from 20s to the 80s. That’s what I mean by the most fortunate person that I know to have all these different age groups come up and just giving the same reaction, too. It’s really overwhelming.”

With the new tour, plans for a new album and the recent release of a live recording, Otis is very much of the moment. However, there were several years when he was out of the recording spotlight. However, he didn’t call the years off a “break from music.”

“I never took a break purposely on my own,” he said. “I was forced to take a break from the recording industry.”

Otis went into detail about the good memories from his younger days: the time he was signed to a record label in his teenage years, working with his father on an album called Cold Shot, even meeting Frank Zappa.

Here are his memories of Cold Shot: “Obviously we had a lot of freedom to do it because the title song, ‘Cold Shot,’ is very old, what was termed a prison song. It came out of the prison. It’s a very funny song. … There’s some profanity, but it’s all in humor. It’s just a very funny song, and the rest of the album was straight-hit blues, traditional, nothing racy, nothing funny about it, just good times, real easy-going blues. … After it came out, we were lucky enough to get a great write-up, so good to where we were able to get a recording contract offer from other major record companies.”

Another early memory involves playing with his father at the Monterey Jazz Festival. “We were on stage three hours,” he said. “That was the longest I had ever been on stage, I think. Three hours straight, and the audience was just in heaven. And especially when we did the song ‘Since I Met My Baby’ by Joe Liggins. That was like the highlight of the whole three hours, I believe. It seemed like the whole audience just swooned to that song, including the band. It was just a beautiful day.”

Today’s band is actually closer to the vision Otis had for his music as a teenager. “I remember that I wanted to have a flute in the band,” he said. “And I do. I have a tenor saxophonist [Wing] who also plays flute because reed players can play all the reed instruments — not necessarily well. I happen to have an amazing saxophonist in the band who is very well known in his own right. … And he can also play the blues as funky as anybody I’ve ever heard, and he can play it all. He can play psychedelic style. He’s the perfect guy for me because I love all styles of music, and I want to incorporate those different styles into my band. I’ve always wanted to do that, and finally I’m being able to do it.”

He added: “We’re playing the same songs, but they sound completely different. I like it. I’m really enjoying that freedom. It gives me the chance to be able too to stretch out on the guitar.”

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

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