Eric Alexander is ‘Always Adventurous’

By Dan Ouellette I Feb. 28, 2020

Saxophonist Eric Alexander regards his playing as “well-spoken, with melody at the center.”
(Photo: Steven Sussman)

At Armesto’s request, Alexander and his working quartet—pianist David Hazeltine, bassist John Webber and drummer Joe Farnsworth—set up shop at Systems Two Recording Studio in Brooklyn for several sessions from December 2011 through January 2012. Armesto sang vocals for a still-unreleased album, but she liked Alexander’s playing so much that she recorded instrumentals by the band, too.

During the course of that recording, Alexander made a passing comment. “I said that my dream was performing with strings someday,” he said.

Armesto, who’s involved in the New York real estate business, decided to finance a project to make Alexander’s dream a reality. She got Alexander’s quartet into a studio and had them focus on songs that were not classics. “They’re semi-unearthed gems that haven’t been very well-covered,” the saxophonist said.

After those dates were completed, Armesto contacted Dave Rivello, a professor at the Eastman School of Music, to begin arranging music with 13 strings, plus flute and French horn, based on what the band already had recorded.

Alexander was transfixed by the results. “Dave did a spectacular job, not only doing things with taste and correctness, but he was also really hearing where the quartet was moving with the harmonic framework of these tunes,” he said. “In jazz, the music is an amorphous, living creature. Rhythms change, harmonies change, but Dave adjusted to the surroundings. He heard everything that we were doing and encapsulated that in his arrangements.”

What Alexander and his crew did was, in his words, “reverse the role.”

“If I were playing live with an orchestra and listening to the harmony the arranger had created, I’m going to react to that,” he. “We’re just switching it. I’ve already created the harmony with the quartet, and Dave is reacting to us.”

Rivello, who recorded the strings not long after Alexander’s sessions, expressed excitement when Armesto recruited him to compose arrangements around the studio dates. “I responded to them and reacted to what Eric and the rhythm section were playing,” he said. “I was making a soft-pillow bed to lay all the music down on.”

The balladic album opens with a beauty, the Alexander original “Gently,” where the strings provide a lush ornamentation to the quartet’s Latin-tinged reading. The conductor and arranger noted that “Gently” was his favorite track to work on. “There’s such great harmonic language that creates a flow,” Rivello enthused.

The band also interprets two Henry Mancini compositions and makes gold out of Horace Silver’s “Lonely Woman” (which has the same title as Ornette Coleman’s standard). Also in the mix is the double-time vibe of “Some Other Time,” by Leonard Bernstein, from his 1944 show On The Town, with a quietly muscular tenor solo. Alexander’s favorite tune on the new album is the walking ballad “The Thrill Is Gone”—not the B.B. King classic, but a ’30s tune written by Lew Brown and Ray Henderson that was recorded by Rudy Vallée, Bing Crosby and Chet Baker. “That’s the best tune ever,” Alexander said. “No one ever plays it anymore. It has such a good feeling, like a combination of melancholy and ‘Lonnie’s Lament’ from John Coltrane’s Crescent album.”

“Eric’s approach to the slow tunes is no brainer,” said Farnsworth. “These tunes were slow-pitch lobs. He knows how to play pretty. You can tell he’s listened a lot to Frank Sinatra. He also learned from his mentor Harold Mabern how important it is to know the lyrics that go to the melody. I didn’t realize strings would be added. But I know Diane, and she has good taste. She’s clear about getting what she wants.”

“Eric plays with force and is highly skilled in many different aspects of the tenor saxophone,” said Hazeltine. “There wasn’t a grand plan in my mind. It was just playing a lot, often off the cuff. It was all about playing something pretty for Eric to play on. When it was decided to release some of these tunes, we realized that we were presenting the gentle side of Eric.”

Alexander said that he loves to play full-throated like his heroes Dexter Gordon and Gene Ammons. But there’s more in his style that he gleaned from jazz elders during his Chicago days. “When I was starting to develop my own style on tenor, I went to see Johnny Griffin at the Jazz Showcase, and I asked him how he was getting his sound that I could hear it in the back of the club,” he recalled. “Mr. Griffin paused and then answered, ‘Subtone all over the horn and Ben Webster.’ So, that became my end-all, biblical power phrase to guide my life in my tenor sound—‘subtone.’ You can play at a louder volume, but you can get just as compelling a sound at a low volume. Also, you can play it pretty at triple forte, unless you want it to be ugly. And I have learned to make it ugly. But I go for the beautiful sound. George Coleman once told me these words of wisdom: ‘brightness and mellowness,’ which I thought about for the next 10 years.”