Jan 21, 2025 7:54 PM
Southern California Fires Hit the Jazz Community
Roy McCurdy and his wife had just finished eating dinner and were relaxing over coffee in their Altadena home, when he…
“You’ve got to trust that inner child, keep exploring, even though people think it’s wrong,” says Fortner.
(Photo: Antoine Jaussaud)Every week at the Village Vanguard fosters its own sound. No one really knows how the music might evolve by Sunday, but after a solid opening night on Tuesday, nerves can settle and concepts can begin to materialize. After his second trio set at the historic New York club in July 2023, Sullivan Fortner remembers thinking, “This feels good.” He left feeling excited and a bit relieved. “I was nervous because Marcus [Gilmore] and Peter [Washington] had never even met before that week,” he says.
Earlier that year, the pianist and composer began taking similar chances. “I’d been mixing and matching people,” he says. “During the Jazz Cruise, I had Joe Sanders and Jeff Ballard, and I felt the same way — nervous. We set up the instruments, and I counted off the first song. And just like that night [at the Vanguard], immediately I could feel it: ‘This is going to be fun.’”
Even though they’d never played together and hadn’t really rehearsed, the New York-based pianist and composer trusted his trio to create something beautiful. He also trusted himself. But having the kind of confidence that overrides anxiety takes work. And frequently for artists across disciplines, building confidence requires a level of resilience no one should have to prove they’ve got.
Several years ago, Fortner heard feedback from a couple of labels: “One said, and I’m paraphrasing, ‘This is the most unlistenable, unmusical thing I’ve ever heard in my life.’ Another said, ‘If this album was made by somebody else, we’d put it out.’” The words stung. The dismissals left him questioning his worth as a working musician.
Nearly five years later, the Grammy Award-winning artist sits at a small conference table in Steinway Hall, his winter coat slung over the back of an office chair, recounting his 12-month trek back to self-trust. “You’ve got to trust that inner child,” he says. “Keep exploring, even though people think it’s wrong.”
With daily encouragement from his partner and frequent collaborator Cécile McLorin Salvant, and support from his mentors Jason Moran and Fred Hersch (the latter whom Fortner still owes a few steak dinners), the late Jean Philippe Allard (whom he credits for “allowing musicians to be themselves”) and his own inner voice, Fortner finished recording what would become his 2023 Grammy-nominated release Solo Game. That experience changed him. Trusting his own concept, his own intuition — his own craft — revitalized him. “I realized, ‘OK. That is the answer,’ to follow your instincts and to tap into that place of discovery.”
Even as artists succeed in gaining and regaining confidence and self-possession — while working each day to serve their artistry — self-trust can feel elusive. Despite being energized after his second set at the Vanguard with Gilmore and Washington, he remained undecided on whether to record the music. But encouragement is transformative. “Cécile told me I needed to try to record [the music],” says Fortner, who hadn’t booked a live engineer for the week. “I said, ‘But it’s too late.’ She said, ‘Just try.’”
The encouragement he received on the bandstand opening night — along with his hard-earned self-reliance — strengthened his confidence as well. “I looked at Peter and he was smiling. Peter barely ever smiles [laughs] unless it’s really happening. I always judge it by the bass player: If the bass player is happy, it’s going to be a great night.”
Fortner booked that Saturday at Sear Sound, with Todd Whitelock engineering. The trio recorded about 13 songs and he extracted nine for Southern Nights, the album he would release in November via Artwork Records, his fourth as a solo leader. The music includes compositions from Allen Toussaint, Cole Porter, Osvaldo Farrés, Donald Brown, Bill Lee, Consuela Lee, Clifford Brown and Woody Shaw, plus “9 Bar Tune,” one of three Fortner originals the trio had played through the week. “For a cohesive album, I wanted to keep the nine-bar tune because it was swinging,” says Fortner.
Inside the studio, he knew exactly what he wanted and how he wanted to achieve it. He describes their setup as the “traditional Oscar Peterson setup”: piano on the right, bass in the middle, drums on the left. Fortner wanted the record to sound and feel as close to the live shows as possible. “Nobody used cans,” he says. “We had to completely rely on the room to record.” It was the first time he’d recorded that way. “I said, ‘I don’t want any edits. If we screw it up that bad, we’ll just do another take.’” Some tunes got more than one take, but none got more than two. He directed the mixing to be as minimal as possible. When the time came to master the album, he asked, “‘Does it need to be mastered?’ They said, ‘Yeah.’”
On Southern Nights, the trio moves together through deep syncopation, reflexive interplay and stirring melodies, stretching from New York to New Orleans, Fortner’s hometown. They lean into what he describes as a wholly supportive space to experiment texturally, which listeners can hear from the first gesture. “Because of Peter’s type of experience, there’s a certain groundedness that I felt,” he says. “So, I had a lot of earth to depend on in case I wanted to jump.
“And Marcus, while does have that, he sits kind of in a land where I sit. There’s some groundedness, there’s some awareness. You hear Marcus and in all the craziness, you still hear his grandfather’s ride cymbal. You still get that information. So, from a textural standpoint, it kind of allowed me to investigate even further because I knew I was going to have an anchor and I knew I was going to have somebody else to feed, and somebody to feed me.”
The instincts Fortner has developed over time, and learned to trust, began in observation. Admittedly, he didn’t really know what was happening musically the first time he heard the Bill Charlap Trio perform when he was still in high school. “The only thing I could do was judge if it was good by how [the audience] reacted to it,” he says. “When Peter took a solo, everybody [in the audience] was leaning in. That was the first thing I noticed. There’s a certain kind of command that [Peter] has — the language and his note choices. He’s a bass player.
“And with Marcus,” whom Fortner met when they were both still in high school, “the more he developed and the more I developed in the music, I started to realize how complex everything he was doing was, but how easy it felt. I think that’s the sign of a true master. Even with Peter, the complexity is there, but it doesn’t look hard. You see it with all the great artists. They can do some of the craziest impossible things, but they do it with a sort of ease that just makes you feel like you can do it.”
When Fortner was still a student at Manhattan School of Music, Roy Hargrove recruited him to join his quintet, and later his big band. During his seven-year tenure with the trumpeter, Fortner fostered a relationship with bassist Ameen Saleem, whom he also observed intently from behind the piano. “I could look at his body language and tell if he was feeling good,” he says. “And it always depended on who was in the drum chair. His body language would change, for example, if Jimmy Cobb sat at the drums or if Gregory Hutchinson sat at the drums, Steve Williams or Willie [Jones III]. All of a sudden everything became lighter.”
Through the years, he’s also learned what happens when the bass player is uneasy. “The rest of the rhythm section is uneasy and the horn player or the singer is in trouble,” he notes. From that, Fortner learned what he can do to assist.
“There are certain things that you can do, as a piano player, to elevate the rhythm section,” says Fortner. “I’ve noticed you can help settle a rhythm section. Playing upbeats generally propels the rhythm forward, as opposed to playing downbeats, which settles it and almost grounds it a little bit more.”
Trusting instincts and earned knowledge requires confidence, which rises and dips. When he’s not feeling as confident in the moment, Fortner returns to a piece of advice he received years ago taking lessons with Hersch, who later would produce Solo Game: “Play a note. Then that note leads to another note. Pretty soon you have a phrase. After that phrase, you have a chorus. And then you’ve played the tune. You just take it bite by bite by bite. If you look at it like, ‘Oh, god, I gotta devour this entire elephant in an hour,’ you’re screwed.”
Fortner’s ability to heed that advice, to slow down and let the music happen, followed a meaningful shift in his point of view. For years, he couldn’t bring together the sounds and styles he’d grown up compartmentalizing. “I always felt like gospel and jazz and classical and R&B couldn’t work together. I was told that they could … but I didn’t think it could work in me. My upbringing in the church couldn’t justify it — sacred versus secular.” Asked if he could pinpoint what happened to change that perspective, Fortner pauses before responding. “Roy happened,” he says.
“Roy Hargrove happened. Barry Harris happened. Cécile McLorin Salvant happened. Dianne Reeves happened. John Scofield, Stefon Harris — all these people I started playing with happened, and I started to see, ‘Wait a minute, you’re going to do a baroque song on your gig?’ … ‘Yeah, why not?’ … ‘But this is a jazz gig!’ … ‘So what? Who cares? Nobody cares — music is music.’ … and not only to see them play it but to see them play it with the same looseness as they would play jazz … and then going and finding recordings of James Booker playing Chopin’s ‘Minute Waltz’ as a New Orleans boogie-woogie. Jonathan Batiste is sort of trying to do that now with the blues meets Beethoven. People are becoming aware that these mergers can come together and [find] some middle ground, looking at everything as an equal opportunity to create something. Everything is valid. Let’s incorporate it all.”
Fortner’s list of collaborators expands beyond those he mentions. His growing resume includes brief and extended associations with Wynton Marsalis, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Paul Simon, Etienne Charles, Ambrose Akinmusire, Peter Bernstein, Nicholas Payton, Jazzmeia Horn and The Baylor Project, among many others. Now in the latter half of his 30s, as he begins working more and more with younger musicians, Fortner champions that inclusive perspective as a collaborator and a mentor. He recently assembled his most active working trio to date with bassist Tyrone Allen and drummer Kayvon Gordon. Their work together earned them the number-one spot for Rising Star Jazz Group in the 2024 DownBeat Critics Poll — and in 2023, he brought them on a West Coast tour. “It’s definitely been humbling,” says Fortner, “because they’re younger than I am, and I’m used to being the youngest person in the band.” But his years as a leader have given him insight into his own playing and a sense of what he needs from his fellow artists. “I think of myself as a little more of a subtle player,” he says.
“So the people that play with me have to be aware of the subtleties and be able to orchestrate in a way that doesn’t get in the way of all the layers that I deal with when I play. A drummer like Kayvon, his dynamic range is just right, and he also knows how to dress a piano player — kind of like Marcus. They know how to dress them in a way that makes it feel like [the piano player is] doing more than they actually are. [laughs] They play in a helpful way, in a supportive way. Same thing with Tyrone. He’s a solid bass player, with a personality that comes through. I have a lot of fun with him. I think the more we play, the more the sound will come together.”
Another insight he’s gained over the course of his career comes directly from Belle Rose, Louisiana, a small town outside Baton Rouge — not far from New Orleans — where many of his family members live. “They had their own rhythm in how they spoke and how they dealt with [things],” says Fortner. “The more you sat and talked [with them], the more words would start making sense, but at first it sounded like mumbling. And there’s something about that, in a musical sense, that I relate strangely to bebop, certainly in the way that they phrase — the way the rhythms fall. It makes me realize that music reflects speaking. The music reflects the way that people spoke to one another. That’s the hidden code — trying to capture that essence.”
Knowing that philosophy, the phrasing, accents and cared-for looseness across the title track for Southern Nights — a Toussaint composition — sound that much more intentional. “That tune is [very New Orleans],” says Fortner, “but the rest of the record is very New York. I think I picked that tune because that was the thread [through the week]. It was a tune that we played every night for every set. And it was the tune that we went back to that kind of held us together.”
With each creative risk and each career milestone, Fortner can still find his relationship with self-trust shaky at times. He views himself not as an artist but as a person “on the path to artistry,” and understands maintaining self-trust while on that path requires patience. His respect for the music, for those who created it and those who have evolved it, informs his own development and how he perceives his work. “One of the biggest misconceptions is, because you do art then you’re an artist,” he says. “It’s a life dedication. It’s a focus. It’s a calling to be better and better every time, even when it doesn’t seem like there’s going to be a reward at the end.”
“Cécile and I were watching the documentary Jiro [Dreams of Sushi]. Just the amount of craftsmanship and art — how important all the ingredients are, the prep work, massaging the octopus for 50 minutes before you cut it up. That’s artistry. That’s what I mean. That type of integrity, fortitude, tenacity. ‘I’m going to work at it until it’s better than the last time I did it.’ The people I look up to the most, it’s a life’s dedication, a constant reach toward perfection.”
Asked what the world can do for artists, aspiring and realized, Fortner responds without hesitation: “To allow opportunity and space, to welcome it, to help create it — and to not shut it down. The best thing we can do, especially for our kids, is to provide the space and opportunity to create without judgment. And to provide an environment of encouragement. That’s going to change the status quo. It’s going to make the world a lot more colorful and a lot less dull.” DB
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