Moving fluently between gigs with Horace Silver, Frank Zappa, Paul Simon and Claus Ogerman, Michael and Randy Brecker have been very much musicians of their generation. Starting out as admirers of Coltrane, Rollins, Miles, Freddie Hubbard and the like, by the early seventies they were well on the way to developing the virtually peerless command of contemporary jazz technique which has made them powerful influences in their own right. But their jazz chops did not blind them to the developments in the popular music of the time, and their equal ease with Browns James and Clifford soon led to the potent mix of r’n’b energy and modern jazz harmony that was the Brecker Brothers.
That band ran out of steam in 1981, but after a decade of diversions, including their own responses, on Denon and Impulse, to the hard-bop revival, the brothers are once again pursuing their extra-curricular ambitions in a regrouped Brecker Brothers. The new band has played several isolated concerts in Britain in recent years, but the following conversation with Mark Gilbert took place during a week in November last year when the brothers challenged the Red Arrows’ supremacy of the stratosphere at Ronnie Scott’s London club.
The brothers sat in the lounge of the Grafton Hotel in Gower Street, Randy grizzled, sunglassed, constantly working a trumpet exercise machine, Mike studious, watchful, composed. This is Mike’s first appearance at Ronnie’s but Randy is a veteran, now on his fourth visit to the club. His second visit was with a Denon promotional band, The CD Players, in the mid-eighties, with ‘my ex, Eliane Elias on piano, and Bennie … what’s his name … Wallace … squawking away on tenor’. Then there was an appearance as guest soloist with the Guildhall School orchestra. But his debut happened in the old days, when jazz-rock was barely a glimmer in Miles Davis’s eye: Around 1968, Randy came to Ronnie’s with Horace Silver, Billy Cobham, Bennie Maupin and John Williams. Horace was actually a significant influence, along with Wayne Shorter (‘the way he voiced those three horns’) and others – on Randy’s mid-seventies writing for the Brecker Brothers.
Randy on the Horace Silver gig: ‘I quit Blood, Sweat & Tears to do it, but right after I left they recorded Spinning Wheel and sold nine million copies’
Both brothers played and recorded with Horace on and off around the turn of the sixties, and have fond memories of their apprenticeships with him. However, for Randy, the move to Horace had a sting in its tail: ‘I quit Blood, Sweat & Tears to do it, but right after I left they recorded Spinning Wheel and sold nine million copies. I might have had some second thoughts as they met me in various cities around the US in their limos. They’d pull right up to the little clubs we were playing.’
Mike is quietly reverential about Horace, speaking in a characteristically clipped, conspirational monotone: ‘For me it was my first and probably only bona fide jazz gig, and I loved pretty much everything about it. You know, Horace is a great bandleader, I loved playing the tunes, he was very kind to me and supportive and it was like going to jazz university. I had a chance to practise all day, and Horace was a good guy, kinda showed me how to build a solo, how to say more in a short time – probably something I could incorporate now! It was a very good experience. I had a lot of fun in many ways. I was with him I guess for a year in ’73. I was on just one record.’
The brothers’ strong commitment to bebop and its progeny no doubt helped make the Brecker Brothers the most jazz-oriented of seventies jazz-rock bands. While Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return To Forever, Herbie Hancock and Weather Report explored more esoteric, poetic and sometimes plain funky areas, the harmonic sophistication and bop-like velocity of Randy’s seventies writing, captured at its best in the still stunning 1978 live album Heavy Metal Bebop, sounded like bebop to a different beat. Except in the solos, much of that bebop density is largely missing from the brothers’ two comeback albums for GRP, both of which, reflecting the tenor of the times, make use of hip-hop drum loops, samples and much more space. I think I hear eighties Miles, or at least Marcus Miller writing for Miles, in such tracks as Slang from Out Of The Loop. But no, says Michael:
‘I wasn’t thinking Miles when that was written, though I’m a tremendous fan. I think perhaps you’re hearing Randy’s Harmon mute. But there is more space, the music is more open. It also makes it easier for us to play horns, otherwise you’re constantly fighting the rhythm section and that can get very tiring.’
The brothers’ new conception depends heavily on the input of sequencing specialists Robbie Kilgore and his wife Maz. Michael describes how it works: ‘Randy’ll come in with a sketch, really clever kind of rhythmic sketches and they take it and programme it in only ways that they can. Then we come in and play on top of it. Then they take what we’ve done and sort of shuffle it around to arrive at the final arrangement.’
Backbeats have always featured strongly in the brothers’ music, not without attracting criticism. But they find the approach satisfies their appetite for the directness of r’n’b while allowing them the freedom of jazz. Randy: ‘Most of it is improvised. It’s like a jazz band; once you play the head, you make the rest up in between, apart from little cues and repeat sections.’
Michael: ‘Frankly, we like to play that way. But it’s basically improvised. The rhythm section takes great leaps every night, so we never know how it’s going to end up. Anyway, a lot of hip-hop rhythms have built-in swing and fall real naturally. The whole texture of hip-hop feels great to play on. We haven’t been able to translate it live though, and maybe what stops us from using loops live is that we can’t really improvise with the band or rhythm section.’
Although the brothers’ new records draw strongly on contemporary dance music, there’s nothing in them to match the candied compromises of certain of their records from the seventies. Then, their accommodations with disco music got them into serious critical trouble. It’s not, says Michael, an episode they care to dwell on:
‘We try to forget that stuff. That was a learning experience. There was some pressure from the record company at the time to make something that would sell, which we really didn’t know how to do. We tried it on two or three tunes but it just was not our best effort.’ Randy: ‘We had a producer that didn’t quite work out. He was more interested in getting his friends on the record and his tunes than he should have been. So we kinda backed off and just left it up to him … a big mistake.’
The brothers’ readiness to entertain popular influences is one side of the rich duality in their music. The other is signalled by Michael’s fervent admiration for the post-bop tenor giants.
Mike on Coltrane: ‘Probably my favourite album is Crescent. I like them all, but that one, I like the writing and I love the texture of the whole thing. The album hangs together as a complete thought’
‘There’s a tremendously strong Coltrane influence in my playing. I listened to ’Trane for years, transcribed solos, and he’s still my favourite saxophonist. And there’s the influence of other people also – Sonny Rollins, Joe Henderson, Wayne Shorter – and on and on. I’ve drawn from everyone. Probably 90 per cent of what I play comes from sources before me.
‘The other 10 per cent? … Brain damage. It’s in the subconscious. I’ve drawn and listened, studied people I consider the great masters and then hopefully it comes out sounding different, but you can certainly hear the influences. When a young saxophone player comes up to me and says how can I learn to play like you, I immediately say go out and get some Coltrane records, some Joe Henderson records, Charlie Parker albums, Sonny Rollins… I’m also influenced by my contemporaries. Dave Sanborn is incredible, and a very big influence, even though we kind of came up together. And players such as Dave Liebman, Bob Berg, Steve Grossman, Jerry Bergonzi…’
Michael’s pre-eminence among the New York crowd, and his divine status among many young tenor players in the eighties has led, inevitably, to the suggestion that he has taken up where Coltrane left off. The response is swift, earnest, quietly vehement:
‘I haven’t. No, no. He was light years ahead. Trust me. He was a true musical intellectual. He was way beyond. I make my attempts, but he was on a whole other level, in whatever terms you want. I could reproduce his solo on Giant Steps, but they were his notes. He was truly unique. He was a creative force on every level, spiritual, emotional, mental, intellectual. He had a unique ability to translate it through his horn. And his writing – he spent hours and hours developing it. It’s very interesting – I was listening recently to a recording he did with three other saxophone players, about 1957, and the difference was striking, even then.
‘The thing that’s amazing to me is that the music still sounds fresh, particularly the stuff done in ’60-’67. It’s timeless music. Probably my favourite album is Crescent. I like them all, but that one, I like the writing and I love the texture of the whole thing. The album hangs together as a complete thought, and the group plays so beautifully together.’
Despite their immersion in the jazz tradition, the brothers are careful now not to fall foul of the traditional jazz lifestyle. As they came up, in the late sixties, jazz and chemical indulgence still went hand-in-hand, and the brothers enjoyed their share of high-living. But advancing seniority has made them more circumspect. Both are now matching their instrumental athleticism with daily visits to the gym. As Randy explains in his chewy, nasal drawl, that’s one reason he has been worrying his trumpet exerciser for the last hour or so:
‘It’s one little method just to get around the more tedious, clinical aspects of the trumpet which is real effective. The other side of the coin is that I go to the gym and lift weights using gloves and my fingers tighten up, so this kind of gets ’em back in shape. The gym thing is mostly to build up my diaphragm. It was getting harder to keep up, so I started to do abdominal exercises, maybe in the mid-eighties. It helps endurance, and I’m a stronger player now than I was then, I think. I also do lip flexibility exercises, get ’em unswollen from the night before, ’cause we really go at it, as you’ve heard.’
Mike too is taking care of himself, carefully avoiding fat and drinking only plain water as we lunch later at the Kanishka in Whitfield Street. Even the late nights at Ronnie’s aren’t the thrill they might have been 20 years ago. But then Mike has left behind a lot of things since then, including artificial stimulants: ‘It’ll be 13 years on December 9th. I had a big problem with all of it, but I haven’t had anything, even alcohol, since then.’
Oddly enough, despite this particular contravention of the jazz mythology, both brothers are playing as well as ever.
