Oct 28, 2025 10:47 AM
In Memoriam: Jack DeJohnette, 1942–2025
Jack DeJohnette, a bold and resourceful drummer and NEA Jazz Master who forged a unique vocabulary on the kit over his…
In 1997, a Japanese promoter asked Vincent Herring (right) to bring “a young guy who nobody knows” on a tour with a four-saxophone band that also included Bob Berg and Donald Harrison. Herring invited Eric Alexander (left).
(Photo: Kevin Scanlon)Midway through their The Battle 2025 Japan Tour — one that began in Yokohama on July 10 and ended in Oyama on Aug. 3 — Vincent Herring, 60, and Eric Alexander, 57, were on Zoom with DownBeat from their respective hotel rooms after a two-set, three-hour, alto-tenor saxophone joust at Fukuoka’s Backstage Club.
The tour hit 23 gigs in 25 days, and the Backstage Club served as a repeat stop from their 25-dates-in-27-days sojourn the previous August.
“We’ve done a version of this tour at least seven times since the 2012 London Olympics,” Alexander said. Herring has co-produced each one with drummer Yoichi Kobayashi, a skilled hard-bop practitioner who contracted the strong rhythm section of bassist Takumi Awatani and pianist Yoshiko Kitajima (preceded earlier in the tour by Tadataka Unno and Mayuko Katrakura).
Kobayashi, 72, was living on Manhattan’s then-gritty Lower East Side when Herring, then 19, moved to New York after a year in the United States Military Academy Band at West Point. For the next several years, he complemented Herring’s enormous sound, abundant soulfulness and cogent refraction of the vocabularies of Cannonball Adderley, Charlie Parker and John Coltrane while busking on the streets of Manhattan, a mode that soon brought Herring to the attention of New York’s elite hardcore jazz practitioners.
He rose through the ranks, serving brief stints with Horace Silver, Art Blakey and Freddie Hubbard. In 1989 he joined the Nat Adderley Quintet for a nine-year run that generated nine albums. Among them was The Old Country, produced by Herring — who formed Big Apple Productions with drummer Carl Allen in 1988 — for Japan’s Alfa label, which also issued several Allen-produced albums under the banner of Manhattan Projects on which Herring played alto alongside then-rising stars Roy Hargrove, Nicholas Payton and Mark Turner.
Early in 1994, Herring recalled, Alexander — who’d just recorded Full Range (Criss Cross), his third leader album, which featured Kenny Barron, Peter Washington and Allen — came to Allen’s apartment while Herring and Allen were playing cards.
“I said, ‘How old is this kid? Can he play?’ Carl said, ‘A little bit.’ Then I heard exactly where Eric was coming from, and it fit my ideal of what I love to hear.”
In 1997, Japanese promoter Yoshiki Nishikage asked Herring to bring “a young guy who nobody knows” on a tour with a four-saxophone band that also included Bob Berg and Donald Harrison. Herring invited Alexander for his professional debut in Japan.
“Jackie McLean once said, ‘If I’m going to play at the Village Vanguard, I have to do my long tones and go into training, because I might run into Vincent Herring,’” Alexander recalled. “I’d always looked up to him and there was a bit of a fear factor. Vincent muscled me up. He told me, ‘Write at least three charts and bring them, and Bob Berg is going to be there, so get ready.’ Bob Berg was bombastic and loud, so I thought I’d out-finesse him, play so hip that he can’t deal with it. The first tune, Vincent called a concert B-flat minor blues I’d spent a lot of time arranging. Bob learned the arrangement, and he took the first solo. They had an Electro-Voice RE20 microphone, which ideally is for talking on radio, not for saxophones. He had it all the way down [inside] his bell, and he ended every phrase with a low blaster note — bu-de-buda-bo, YONK, YONG — as hard as possible. The speakers were almost blowing the room out. I thought, the Japanese audience must be sophisticated; they’re not going to like this. Wrong! They were all screaming. So he finishes his solo and looks at me. I went up and tried to go scooty daba deedop … crickets.”
In 2004, Alexander signed with High Note, for which Herring had led three albums and side-manned on another three playing tenor with Cedar Walton. Soon thereafter, High Note proprietor Joe Fields, a keen student of his market, asked the newly minted label-mates to pair off before an audience. “Joe told me, ‘That’s a gold mine,’” Alexander recalled. “‘You’ve got to battle it out. The people want a bloodbath.’” Alexander and Herring fulfilled that mandate on the first two days of April 2005 at Smoke Jazz Club, generating The Battle, with pianist Mike LeDonne, bassist John Webber and Allen on drums. They followed up six years later at the Upper West Side boite with the equivalently fierce Friendly Fire.
“The tape was rolling at Smoke for four days, and we got stronger and stronger,” Alexander recalled of the Battle sessions. “Our friends in the audience were egging us on. One said: ‘Why are you being such a pussy? You gotta try to take him out. Bring the heavy artillery.’ I said, ‘This is a recording session; I don’t want to overextend myself.’ He said, ‘That’s why you’ll get knocked out. Get your ass in gear.’ So, we were fired up.
“On this tour the club owners have been torturing us by piping The Battle over the sound system after the gig or on breaks. We’re looking at each other, saying, ‘What happened to us? We used to be tough.’ It’s like Thomas Hearns and Ray Leonard fighting at 60. ‘We’ve got to pick up the pace.’”
In truth, both protagonists are full-steam-ahead on their third live-at-Smoke release, Split Decision (SmokeSessions), an LP-length recital culled from a week of gigs in July 2024 on which Lewis Nash propels the flow with expert i-dotting and t-crossing. “They’re like two peas in a pod: explosive and uptempo, hard-hitting,” Webber said. “Each has a huge sound; we can play gigs without using mics or amps. Vincent always knows exactly what he’s doing. He knows the changes inside-out, and sometimes he’ll throw down alternate changes. Eric is more apt to throw caution to the wind. It’s interesting to play behind them, because sometimes I don’t know where the soloist is going to go harmonically. But the real goal is to swing as hard as humanly possible.”
“They love each other as friends, but that competitive thing is their trademark,” LeDonne said. “They know they have to get to their best stuff, and they play at a consistently high level. They’re blues-based, bebop-based modern musicians — advanced harmonically, with burning time and great sounds — who’ve continually changed and grown. The energy is undiminished, but it sounds more mature. Twenty years ago, it was almost like a sporting event. This time the guys were relaxed and there was nothing left to prove. The fire was lit from beat one when we recorded the new album — so honest, so much energy — and it didn’t let up all week. It was old-school stuff.”
As if to cosign LeDonne’s “old school” remark, neither Herring nor Alexander would acknowledge any downside to their two-nights-off-in-four-weeks itinerary. “I enjoy doing long tours,” Herring said. “I enjoy playing music. I enjoy listening to Eric play a ballad every night, then battling it out with him on other tunes, practicing and trying to do better the next night. It helps me continue to develop my musicianship. Some people will see us as keepers of a flame, paying homage to sax battle duets from earlier times. It’s fine with us if that’s what you see. Sonny Stitt playing great notes with great voice-leading in the chords doesn’t leave me, no matter how abstract I get or how advanced the music gets. But we’re two contemporary saxophone players, playing music we love with people we love. The music is constantly reinventing itself and moving forward. I’m upholding its values and traditions, but moving on with my own personality and interpretation.”
Alexander referenced a YouTube clip he’d viewed of 1950s heavyweight champ Rocky Marciano explaining his preternatural stamina. “He said, ‘I never get out of shape. I’m in a 12-week training cycle every day of my life until I retire.’ To be in playing shape, you have to hit the heavy bag and sparring partners every single day. That’s what we’re doing. Sometimes Vincent beats me; occasionally I get the better of him. It doesn’t matter. We embrace and say, ‘Next. That’s one in the books.’”
However much mutual love and respect infuses the protagonists’ take-no-prisoners approach, the value system that underpins their aesthetic sharply contrasts with the attitude they encounter when Alexander teaches at SUNY-Purchase and Herring at William Paterson, and for nine years at Manhattan School of Music. “When I grew up, you had to prove yourself worthy of being mentored by someone,” said Herring, who “put everything” about his approach to modern jazz harmony in the recently published Logic and Critical Thinking in Jazz Improvisation (Sher Music). “The idea of learning tunes, being able to play with a certain level of musicians, is gone. People are trying to become instant leaders. Very proficient on a technical level, but there’s a lack of experience, so the musicality has suffered. I try to give them realistic expectations and get them to listen to other people than the ones with 20,000 Instagram followers who they think are great.
“I tell them, ‘After you’re finished with school, you’re out there, competing with all the people you admire. You barely practice. You don’t know these core tunes, and you can’t do this or that. The way you play, you’re going to stake your life and well-being and quality of life on competing against Eric Alexander for gigs? Whatever you do in life, you want to do it with excellence. If you decide to be a player, you have to put in serious time.”
Alexander used another pugilistic analogy when recalling the tough love ministrations of certain early mentors. “I got busted up hard in sparring practice by musicians who did it not out of personal animosity toward me, but because they saw that I had a grain of talent and a potential to be good,” Alexander said. “As a teacher, though, I see the best in people, and I encourage them rather than breaking them down. I should know better.” He recalled an admonition to that effect from an eminent generational contemporary as they warmed up backstage at Birdland for a two-tenor Coltrane tribute. “I told him that I try to feel out my students. He said: ‘You should have their ass on a platter right away. They don’t know anything that you know. It’s your obligation, your rite of passage. You learned from the best, and the best are disappearing at an alarming rate. Who else is going to tell these young kids what is up?’
“I like people who reflect a stability, a permanence — a personality — so I know who they are musically and spiritually. I like to know what I’m dealing with. Music is a representation of our humanity, and I don’t like chameleons in life or in music. In jazz, I never have to apologize for missing a note in my solo. Time moves forward. There’s a boat going through the Caribbean Sea. My history is the wake behind the boat. My history is what I do right now. If we could all live our lives and not beat ourselves up for things we did, but try to be better with every second that comes our way, we would have a better world. That’s why jazz music kicks ass.”
It was time to call it a night. Ahead was a late morning train for Kumamoto for the next evening’s battle at Smile before they entered The Battle 2025 Japan Tour’s 10-concerts-in-11-days homestretch. After that, both were anticipating their mid-August record release week at Smoke with LeDonne, Webber and Nash.
“Tonight I told Vincent, ‘We’re going to be ready for their inspiring asses, because we’re warmed up,’” Alexander said. “Vincent said, ‘Yeah, but Lewis will be warmed up, too. He’ll be right there.’ We’ll be on fire, and the rhythm section will be on fire. It’s going to be so burning.” DB
Jack DeJohnette boasted a musical resume that was as long as it was fearsome.
Oct 28, 2025 10:47 AM
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