Ronnie Cuber is as laconic as one imagines the big horn he plays ought to be. But his languid exterior belies a vigorous approach to his instrument and to music in general. His first inspiration on the baritone, Pepper Adams, was noted for his agility and the young Cuber quickly picked up on that: ‘Yeah, his whole approach was so much more different than Mulligan’s. More of a Charlie Parker or hard bop sound, and that hard-edged baritone sound was very attractive to me.’ But he found he could only go so far in copying anyone, and Adams’s general approach was augmented in Cuber’s hands with snippets from other instrumentalists, including the tenor players who had influenced him before he switched to baritone, such as Hank Mobley, Sonny Rollins and Coltrane.
But why, if you want to be a soloist, switch from tenor to bari?
‘Well, I started on clarinet when I was a kid, and when I got to high school I switched to tenor. Then I auditioned for a band called the Newport Youth Band, a band of youth from around the Manhattan area, commissioned by the Newport Jazz Festival. That was around 1959. Well, Marshall Brown had had no baritone players audition, so he asked me if I would play baritone, so I stuck with it.’
Cuber came from a family that played. He was born in Brooklyn on Christmas Day 1941 to a Polish mother and father who played piano and accordion and he had an uncle and aunt who played drums, violin and keyboards. He began playing clarinet at about seven years old, and his father encouraged him by enrolling him at the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music.
The hard bop influences were part and parcel of the switch to tenor in high school, and as well as adapting much of the hard bop vocabulary to baritone, Ronnie was later able to reproduce something of the sound of the tenor, thanks to the customised altissimo fingerings he developed for the baritone.
However, it was a few years before Ronnie found room to express himself fully as a soloist. Unsurprisingly, his first gigs after Newport tended to be as a section man, notably with Maynard Ferguson. It wasn’t until he joined the George Benson Quartet in 1966 that he had both the room and the incentive to maximise the extempore potential of the baritone. A number of recordings of this group by Columbia, some recently reissued, brought him widespread recognition as a front-line player.
After more big band gigs with Lionel Hampton and Woody Herman in the late sixties, Cuber began the genre-hopping which has sustained his eclectic musical personality. Road work with King Curtis and Aretha Franklin in the early seventies brought him to the attention of the commercial studio world, and an inspirational stint with Eddie Palmieri perhaps provided the first insight into the wealth of Latin American puns inherent in the name Cuber. His first record as leader, Cuber Libre (1976, Xanadu), exploited just such a wordplay.
Cuber’s straightahead jazz involvements continued to tick over during the seventies and early eighties, and he recorded two more albums as leader, in 1978 and 1982, but he was best known during this period as a horn for hire. His baritone underpins recordings by Paul Simon, The Average White Band, Carly Simon, Steely Dan and others. In particular he remembers working with Donald Fagen, both as one half of the Steely Dan duo and as a solo artist:
‘I did Gaucho and then I did a few tracks on The Nightfly. Rob Mounsey did the horn arrangements for the Steely Dan and The Nightfly albums, but Donald Fagen did the arrangements for the latest album, Kamakiriad. He’s very meticulous, and he’ll spend hours on one phrase. But the writing is done so well, it’s very inspiring.’
As changes in musical styles and the advent of the synthesiser, sequencer and sampler reduced the demand for session men, Cuber found himself with time to renew his acquaintance with bandleading. Since the late eighties, several recording opportunities have come his way, including the excellent Cubism date (1991, Fresh Sound), which flowed quite fortuitously from a chance meeting in Barcelona:
‘I was with the Mingus Epitaph Orchestra, on tour in Europe, and we played Barcelona. The people from Fresh Sound were at the concert and they approached me to do an album. I assembled a band, we did a week at Birdland in New York and then went into the studio the following week.’
The spirited, fresh, somewhat ragged blend of Latin, funk, blues and bop which resulted leaves no doubt that Cuber makes a good bandleader. Certainly fortune seems to be on his side: A new issue on Milestone, The Scene Is Clean, is the first record in a new deal with the legendary Fantasy record company, and marking as it does Cuber’s third record as leader in as many years, it bodes well for his campaign for the liberation of the baritone.
Selected discography
As leader
Cuber Libre (Xanadu 135)
The Eleventh Day Of Aquarius (Xanadu 156)
Live At The Blue Note (Pro Jazz)
Cubism (Fresh Sound FSR-CD188)
The Scene Is Clean (Milestone MCD-9218-2)
With George Benson
It’s Uptown (Columbia)
The George Benson Cookbook (Columbia)
