Capital New York

When the tenor saxophonist Chris Potter isn’t on the road, he teaches at New York University. He doesn’t mind academia. He is also honest enough to admit that he enjoys the worshipful reception he gets on campus. “I’m only human,” Potter says with a self-effacing chuckle.

His students might takes issue with his claims of mortality.  Jazz studies programs are filled with young tenor saxophonist who are competing to be the most monstrous player on the scene. This is just another way of saying they all what to be Chris Potter. He is their god.

The Jazz Standard will be packed with Potterites on June 23 when their icon appears with an all-star quintet as part of the Care Fusion Festival. And they will hang on his very note. That’s how it is at a Chris Potter show. The New York Times wrote that when Potter appeared in January at the Village Vanguard, the room was full of “rapt young men.” Some even appeared to have bought along their dads.

It’s easy to see why Potter, who turned 40 this year, inspires such devotion. He has an enormous rugged sound. It is a thing of beauty all by itself. He seems to have discovered an extra octave on his instrument that isn’t available to his peers. Potter often zooms up into the stratosphere, making his listeners cheer with delight. Even at the most blinding tempos, he tosses out flurries of notes the way a ninja hurls a fist full of deadly throwing stars.

Quite simply, Potter is amazing. In fact, he is so amazing that sometimes you wish he’d be a little less so. Because that’s when you can hear what a truly great jazz musician he is.

Listen to him on the drummer Paul Motion’s “Lost in a Dream” released earlier this year on ECM. Here, Potter appears with Motion, a 79-year-old wonder, and pianist Jason Moran, two musician who have never been interested in showy technical displays. The saxophonist’s playing is sparse and ethereal. It is not what he is worshiped for, but perhaps it should be.

During an interview at a coffee shop near his Harlem apartment, Potter is hardly the brash, supremely self-confident guy that you might expect from listening to him play. He is soft-spoken and thoughtful, a little shy, even a tad on the schulbby side. (Just a tad, mind you.)

He acknowledges that he is the mostly widely imitated saxophonist on college campuses with some trepidation. He appreciates having a fan base. At the same time. he would like to play for more than just jazz studies majors. “Hopefully, it’s not all music students,” Potter says. “Hopefully, it’s a few of their girlfriends, too.”

He says he never set out to be a technical wonder. It just happened. “Yeah, it’s not something I aspired to,” Potter says. “Of course, you have to spend a lot of time practicing just to get the sound out of your head. But if I come out on stage and thin I should play something faster and difficult now, I can’t do it. Nothing comes to mind. The fingers don’t work.” He says he is just trying to relax on stage and get in touch with himself. The music just flows from there.

Potter has had something of a charmed career. He grew up in Columbia, S.C., and played in first gig at age 13. He came to New York to attend the New School of Social Research where he studied jazz along with future stars like the pianist Brad Mehldau and the guitarist Peter Bernstein. It was a revelation for him to meet young jazz musicians of his own vintage. “Nobody my age was interested in jazz in Columbia,” Potter says. “I was it.”

It wasn’t long before he went the road with his first big name: Red Rodney, the bebop trumpeter who played with Charlie Parker, one of Potter’s early idols. Rodney told his 18-year-old apprentice to dress better. The old-school brass man also warned him that a jazz musician’s income could be unpredictable and advised him to marry for money. “He said, ‘it’s just as easy to fall in love with a rich girl and a poor girl,’” Potter laughs. “He was a real operator.”

So was Potter in his own quiet way. He became a first-call sideman, playing trad jazz with the guitarist Jim Hall, adventurous conceptual jazz with the trumpeter jazz Dave Douglas, tmaze-like jazz with the bassist Dave Holland—and even jazz-infused rock with Steely Dan. Then around six years ago, Potter decided it was time to step out on his own. “I really felt hemmed in,” he confesses.

I wasn’t able to get into the full range of what I thought I could do.”
He gave us a glimpse of what we had been missing on “Lift: Live at the Village Vanguard,” his rollicking 2004 album. It showed that Potter had been listening not just to the usual influences—Bird, Trane and Michael Brecker—but to the jazz avant-garde of the 60s and 70s. He had seamlessly absorbed the best of it. Not only that, he played it with more precision and creativity than many of the era’s heroes like David Murray.
Potter is gratified to discover that somebody has noticed. “Thanks,” he says. “I don’t think that a lot of people have picked up on that. That’s another kind of music that I’ve listened to and l loved. More and more, I feel I want more freedom. More and more, I don’t want to impose a lot of structure on things.”

This irony is that is the avant-garde was largely rejected by Potter’s generation and the generation of younger saxophone players who hold him in such high esteem. But that is the whole point; a lot of his fans are dazzled by his technique, but they miss what he can do when he is at his best.

He has also drawn heavily on the deep grooves of Miles Davis’ electric period. In 2006, Potter released “Underground,” the first of three albums by his own plugged-in quartet of the same name featuring pianist Craig Taborn, guitarist Adam Rogers and drummer Nate Smith. It’s an intensively funky ensemble that would easily cross over to the jam band circuit. “I just need to talk to Phish’s manager,” Potter jokes. Still, it’s not beyond the pale.

It was with "Underground" that Potter truly became a phenomenon. Potter and his sidemen tend to take long ecstatic solos. The leader decision not to use a bass player allows the music to be freer and more unpredictable than it would otherwise.

And yet "Underground" was already starting to sound a bit stale by “Ultrahang,” its third album.  The same thing happened to the fathers of fusion—Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Tony Williams and Joe Zawinul. Their first electric albums felt extraordinarily fresh. Then after a while, they were playing swaggering, crowd-pleasing music that bore little resemble to the classic acoustic stuff that made them famous in the first place.

Potter isn’t there yet. “Ultrahang” was still one of the best albums of 2009. But there was something preening and self-congratulatory about some of the songs. Technically, they were amazing. But virtuosity only gets you so far in jazz.

Luckily for us, Potter is spending an increasing amount of time playing with Moran, who is inspired as much by movies and modern art as he is by the usual jazz influences. He and Potter are perfect foils for one another. Not long ago, Potter was talking to Moran and drummer Eric Harland about how much to play—or not to play.

The saxophonist says he told he his band mates that even if he stepped out on stage at a big concert where people had pay top dollar for their tickets, he hoped he would be brave enough play what he really heard inside of himself—whether it was a single note or a million. “If the only thing I hear is one note, I hope I have the courage to play one note,” Potter told me.

So do we. His students prefer cascades of them. But if they listen more closely, they will hear what their idol really has to say.

Devin Leonard

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