The opening
trumpet fanfare of John Bailey's debut album In Real Time heralds the arrival
of a major, fully formed talent. Yet Bailey is no newcomer to jazz: this is his
first album as a leader after more than 30 years as one of the busiest sidemen
in the business. The album will be
released on June 8, 2018 via Summit Records.
Why at age
52 is he now making his debut as a leader? His answer is simple yet profound:
"It was just time."
Known as one
of the most eclectic trumpet players in New York City, Bailey is an in-demand
musician and teaching artist on call for everything from traditional jazz, to
R&B and pop, to classical. He became a member of The Buddy Rich Band while
still in college, and his career has included long-running gigs with Ray
Charles, master conguero and bandleader Ray Barretto, Max Weinberg and Frank
Sinatra, Jr. His work with Latin Jazz innovator Arturo O'Farrill won two Grammy
awards for the albums The Offense of the Drum and Cuba - The Conversation
Continues. He has played on more than 70 albums and, as a jazz educator, has
taught at the University of Miami and Florida International University.
That
immersive career informed and shaped Bailey's creative approach to his first
recording. For In Real Time, he dug deep and came up with a variety of riches
as a composer.
"My
natural inclination has always been to draw from as many different sources as
possible," he explains. As a child of the 1960s, he learned from Dizzy,
Miles and Bird, and was mentored by the legendary multi-instrumentalist Ira
Sullivan who wrote the liner notes for this album. He was also influenced by
artists as diverse as Jethro Tull, The Beach Boys, classical trumpeter Maurice
Andre, and the Chicago Symphony brass section. "Duke Ellington said it best,"
says Bailey. "There are only two kinds of music: good music and the other
kind."
Bailey
acknowledges deliberately ignoring the boundaries between genres. "As a
composer and improviser, I make no lines in the sand, though I try to keep the
music coherent." For In Real Time, Bailey enlisted a group of fellow
seekers and jazz veterans including saxophonist Stacey Dillard, guitarist John
Hart, bassist Cameron Brown, and drummer Victor Lewis. Through seven originals
and two Brazilian covers (by Milton Nascimento and Gilberto Gil), the album
shows unusual range. From the straight-ahead and boppish, to elegiac ballads
and cerebral post-bop flights, his goal is to make the music deep and
wide-ranging. In each tune, regardless of where the music takes him, Bailey's
ebullient personality shines through.
A trumpet
prodigy, Bailey's spectacular gifts began to be noticed as a high school
musician in 1984 when DownBeat Magazine cited him in its annual Student Music
Awards for outstanding performances in both the classical and jazz trumpet
categories, noting "Shades of Wynton!" The same year, he was a
finalist in the National Foundation for Advancements in the Arts (NFAA) Arts
Recognition and Talent Search, along with Donny McCaslin and Bill Charlap. He
also won the National Association of Jazz Educators' Youth Talent Contest.
Later, as a senior at the Eastman School of Music, he won DownBeat's Best
Instrumental Soloist award.
Looking
back, he says, "It all started for me when I discovered Clifford Brown.
Clifford was the centerpiece of the golden era of jazz trumpet, and a great
place to begin my lifelong study of the instrument. He was influenced by
everyone before him, and became an influence on everyone after."
Bailey, who
continues to teach privately, believes that educating the next generation of
musicians is essential for any artist. "In American culture, where the
arts are often ignored or deemphasized in both schools and the mainstream
media, it is up to us, the artists, to inspire an appreciation for great art,"
he says. "By keeping performance standards as high as possible and sharing
our devotion with others, especially children, we enrich countless lives."
With the
success of his debut recording as a leader, John Bailey has indeed set the
standard very high and enriched our lives.
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