Berklee today is the official alumni publication of Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts. It is a forum for contemporary music and musicians.
Issue link: http://berkleetoday.epubxp.com/i/827757
Summer 2017 29 me to the local jazz musicians. While playing with a rehearsal band, I met [saxophonist and bandleader] John Dankworth who needed a trombonist to back his wife, [singer] Cleo Laine. We became friends and I started writing for John. After that, the BBC heard my music, I formed a band in 1968, and things never stopped. What prompted your return to teach at Berklee in 1974? Gary [Burton] was a faculty member at the time and arranged to bring me over to be an artist in residence for one year. I ended up staying nine years. I created arranging and composition classes that were built around what I was doing professionally. One arranging class was done in the studio where students learned to book musicians, work with an engineer, and record and over- dub parts. I had an analysis class where we would analyze any kind of music. So there was the analysis class, three arranging classes, and a composition class. I taught what I felt the students needed to know. You wrote orchestrations for so many artists. What made you a fit for that type of writing? I arrived at Berklee to teach just after I did the orchestrations for John McLaughlin's Apocalypse album in 1973. It was very popular and attracted students to my classes. After hearing that album, Peter Gabriel called me for a project. After I arrived in Boston, I went right to Electric Lady Studios in New York to work with Stanley Clarke based on what he had heard of the McLaughlin album. But jazz fusion all began with Gary Burton's early albums with Larry Coryell. By Gary asking me to write for them, I became part of that music. I'm labeled as a fusion musician, but that was never my intention, it just came out that way. Has your approach to writing music changed over the years? I've always applied the same process. My goal was always to search to the end of my own envelope and do my best regard- less of what the music was. The degree to which I could push the envelope was different from movies to pop music to my own jazz. On the projects I did with [producer] Narada Michael Walden, I knew not to go too far out of bounds. I have listened to Debussy for years, and at the end of La Mer, he wrote the highest A-flat I had ever heard in classical music. It's an octave above the A-flat on the fourth ledger line above the treble staff. Narada asked me to work on a piece in A-flat and I couldn't resist putting that note in the strings two times. After we listened back, Narada looked at me as if to say, "What are you doing?" I told him I'd never recorded a double A-flat in any of my reper- toire. He took one out and left the other in for me. I thought that was a sweet gesture. On October 19, Berklee will host a concert that will hearken back to your concerts at Berklee in the 1970s. Will it represent music from different periods in your life? It will. I have a list of pieces I am drawing from. One or two of them will be from that original Only Chrome-Waterfall Orchestra concert from May 1975. Susan and Lee Berk [former Berklee president] attended that concert as their first date, and Susan has commissioned me to write a fanfare for the concert. Ti Muntarbhorn ['80] is organizing logistics for the con- cert in Boston. Greg Hopkins will rehearse a band made up of Berklee students and faculty members. Bill Frisell ['77], Gary Burton, and Jim Odgren ['75] will be guest soloists. I plan to spend two weeks in Boston so I can go to the rehearsals. I also want to see people from my days in Boston. Music unites us. And your Berklee Fund gift helps our students thrive. Make your gift at berklee.edu/make-gift or by calling 617-747-2439.