Buy Organic

Chris Potter loves his freedom.

by Shaun Brady

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Published: Jan 23, 2008

jazz

WIND IN THE REEDS: Chris Potter's two dramatically diverse 2007 CDs cemented his position as the leading saxophonist of his generation. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

"You sort of make it up as you go along, I guess," Chris Potter says, expressing the fact that improvisation has had as much to do with his long-term planning as it has with his own playing. Both his career and his sound are at impressive high points at the moment.

Potter released two stellar and dramatically diverse CDs in 2007, cementing — if he hadn't already — his position as the leading saxophonist of his generation, with a seemingly inexhaustible ability to find new and surprising turns of phrase on his instrument.

This weekend, Potter comes to Philly with his electric group Underground, with whom he released the CD Follow the Red Line — Live at the Village Vanguard (Sunnyside) last year. The bassless quartet, with Craig Taborn on Fender Rhodes, Adam Rogers on guitar and Nate Smith on drums, has in a little more than three years cohered to the point of telepathy, able to conjure an energy that packs a gut-punch of a wallop in live settings.

Underground is a different approach to funk fusion (using that word with clenched teeth, hoping it can overcome its more damning connotations), one that refuses to flirt with the slick grooves that the term usually implies, instead bearing Miles' 1970s experiments and the deep-pocket soul of that era's R&B heroes in its genes, while inheriting aspects of edge and vitality from two longtime employers: the electronic experimentation of trumpeter Dave Douglas and the compositional imagination of bassist Dave Holland's quintet.

(CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

"I was born in 1971," Potter points out, "so I naturally grew up with a comfort with those kinds of rhythms and that kind of sound. I needed to see if I could make music that sounded similar to the way that I'm living. We're surrounded by all this new technology and we're hearing all these things in the air, and as much as I'm still interested in playing and exploring the music of Duke and Charlie Parker, it felt a bit anachronistic to pretend that all this other music hadn't happened."

With the phenomenally adept group that he's assembled and the way in which it's evolved into a tight-knit unit, Potter prefers composing loosely and allowing the band to mold his material into its final form. "When you write music, that doesn't mean that you necessarily understand all of its implications," he explains. "I bring in a blueprint, but one of the great joys is to see where it wants to go. For me, that's the best way to get an organic group sound."

Potter's other 2007 release, the Chris Potter 10's Song For Anyone (Sunnyside), took the exact opposite approach, being a large ensemble vehicle for composition. Finding new settings in which to work, he says, is essential.

"It's hard for me to imagine not challenging myself in some way," he says. "Music's always a challenge, whenever you go up and play, but trying to find some new approach, some new way of thinking about music, is very important in trying to keep alive the spirit that originally made me interested in music."

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

Chris Potter's Underground plays Sat., Jan. 26, 7:30 and 9:30 p.m., $30, Harold Prince Theatre, Annenberg Center, 3680 Walnut St., 215-898-3900, pennpresents.org.

 

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