Steven Bernstein is a known wildcard in the modern jazz game. He's a wily slide trumpeter, and the whip-smart bandleader behind both Millennial Territory Orchestra, a pugnacious little big band, and Sexmob, a go-anywhere four-piece band. So in some respects, Bernstein's latest is striking for its directness. ResoNation Trio finds him strictly on valve trumpet and flugelhorn, with a lean-and-limber rhythm team of Scott Colley on bass and Nasheet Waits on drums. True to form, Bernstein added a further twist — inviting maverick producer Scotty Hard to reconstitute the trio's recordings for the companion album Ultra Resonance, a kaleidoscopic refraction evoking both dub and electronic collage. Bernstein dropped by our studio before a recent show to talk about the jazz tradition, his drive for connection, and why this project had to happen now.
Watch the full conversation with Steven Bernstein inside WRTI studios:
Interview Higlights
On finally feeling ready to make a trumpet-trio record
I'm in my 60s now. I've been doing this a really long time. I feel like I have something to say that's my own. I've always felt like the reason I favored the slide trumpet over the trumpet, as a bandleader, was that everything I played on it was mine — I've never really felt the desire to play other people's phrases. But with trumpet, it's a little difficult — it's daunting, because you hear Miles in your head, and you hear Louis Armstrong, and Roy Eldridge, and Dizzy — you hear all this stuff in your head, and you need to block that out and find, well, where are my notes? I'll tell you an interesting story — Lew Soloff told me this on the road years ago. He said, “Steven, you know when you listen to a recording of yourself and you hear something that makes you uncomfortable? That's what you play like.” 'Cause I was quite young at the time. What he meant was, if you hear yourself playing a really slick Clifford Brown phrase, or an awesome Lee Morgan phrase, you go, oh, that's slick. But that's not your phrase. That's Clifford Brown's phrase. That's Lee Morgan's phrase. And the jazz musicians I was around growing up — it was expected that you'd find your own sound. It was really considered improper to imitate someone like Freddie Hubbard, 'cause Freddie Hubbard was alive — that's kind of rude, you're playing somebody else's notes.
On sending your sound into the room instead of into a microphone
I've always done long tones — I was taught really by older trumpet players. I was also one of the last guys taught by big-band players, lead trumpet players. So now people teach something called efficiency — I never heard that word in my life. For like two decades, whenever I'd tell this story, I'd be like, what's that word everyone uses now? 'Cause I'd never heard the word efficiency. They used to say two things: either play to the back of the wall, or it takes a lot of sound to get past the floodlights. 'Cause the idea is your job is to send your sound into the world. They don't teach that anymore, because you don't need to do that — that's not the job anymore. The job now is to play into a microphone.
On hating the term “spiritual jazz”
You used the word vibration — which is a word people associate with, like, Coltrane, and spirit. And I hate the term spiritual jazz. I'll say it right now — I hate the term spiritual jazz. You know what spiritual jazz is? Louis Armstrong. Name jazz more spiritual than that. So the idea that just because something doesn't have rhythm, and is in a pentatonic mode, gets called spiritual jazz — that's an insult to me. I appreciate that the jazz world embraces me. I was reading this Sonny Rollins book last night, and at one point he says, can we just retire the word jazz and call it music? And I feel like I'm a musician. I love Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, and I play the trumpet, so in a sense I'm a jazz musician. But in a sense, I'm a musician who loves jazz.
On rhythm as the root of everything
Rhythm is always what speaks to people, and rhythm is also what evolved jazz music. 'Cause until you get to people like Dizzy Gillespie, basically everyone's using the same notes — the only thing that changed it is the drums. And because jazz is collective music, if you're playing with Baby Dodds, you play a certain way. Then you get the kind of drummers that led to people like Osie Johnson and Gus Johnson — you're gonna play differently. Then you get into Kenny Clarke, and Max Roach, and then you're getting into Tony Williams, and Jack DeJohnette. The music keeps evolving because you gotta keep up with the drummers — they're the root of this music. So I always tell people, rhythm is number one. I mean, sound is number one, but when it comes to people, rhythm is the key — absolutely the key. Your band's only as good as your drummer, end of story. I don't care what kind of band you have — it's your drummer that tells you how good the band is. And it's so funny — going right outside of jazz — everyone loved The Beatles. And people would always make fun of Ringo, and of course people realized later — no, this guy was amazing. The Beatles would not have sounded that good if they didn't have Ringo.
On the false hierarchy of “difficult” music
What I call a false hierarchy of music, as someone who plays a lot of music — people tend to hear music that's difficult to play and difficult to listen to as being, that's high up, that's very hard to play. But let me tell you something — I've heard people come and play at Sitting In With Levon who could play all that kind of difficult music, and they could not play Levon's music. So I'll tell you, as a professional musician: all music is difficult until you learn to play it. It's a false hierarchy to think that just because something has large intervals, and time changes, and is kind of grating to listen to, that it's automatically, oh, that's really difficult. All music is difficult — music is not easy, that's why we practice. And that's why only a few people get to achieve being really able to play well.
