Mark Masters Celebrates Sam Rivers & Billy Harper

By Yoshi Kato I Sep. 3, 2025

Mark Masters, right, with Billy Harper.
(Photo: Susan Miyamoto )

The Rising Star Category of this publication’s annual Critics Poll was once called Talent Deserving Wider Recognition (TDWR). Composer/arranger Mark Masters is decidedly a TDWR who, in turn, highlights other talents deserving wider recognition.

After arranging and recording albums celebrating the likes of Dewey Redman, Alec Wilder and Grachan Moncur III, Masters released two big band albums this year via longtime label partner Capri Records. Sam Rivers 100 celebrates the songbook of the pioneering free-jazz composer and saxophonist. Dance, Eternal Spirits, Dance! draws from the songbook of Billy Harper, another titanic saxophonist/composer, with Harper himself the major throughline between the two releases. And both deserve our ears in Masters’ thoughtful estimation.

“I was listening to the Sam’s Blue Note box set that Mosaic released (Sam Rivers: The Complete Blue Note Sam Rivers Sessions) and noticed that he was born in 1923, which spurred me to start this project,” Masters said. Then, Masters found a simpatico collaborator in the Angel City Jazz Festival, which presented his ensemble at the Los Angeles County Museum of Modern Art in October 2023.

“I thought they’d be good partners to produce this. Some of the music isn’t for the faint of heart,” he shared by phone from his home in Temecula, a Southern California wine country city. All the musicians from the concert, including Harper, plus a few additional players convened in a recording studio three days later.

“There’s so much great music on those ’60s Blue Note Records that I just used those as reference points,” Masters explained. “I listened to the recordings, made my choices and then stopped listening.

“About half the record is orchestral settings of tracks that were free, like ‘Helix’ and ‘Point Of Many Returns.’ Other than that, everything was new material based on his harmonic structures,” he continued. “So I had lead sheets with Sam’s melody and chord changes for half the tunes, and the other half were free.”

As for Harper, the master saxophonist is both the featured soloist and sole composer on Dance, Eternal Spirits, Dance! “The record with Billy’s music was totally different than the one with Sam’s,” Masters pointed out. “Billy’s music is so orchestral in nature to begin with.

“He also writes in a way that’s harmonically so extremely interesting,” he added. “On ‘The One Who Makes The Rain Stop,’ the bass line is so profound that I didn’t change it at all but rather just orchestrated it to add bass clarinet and bass trombone. The bottom line is that Billy’s music is much more structured than Sam’s.”

When discussing Harper’s contribution to the album as an instrumentalist, Masters refers to another of the session’s special guests, Tim Hagans. The trumpeter first recorded with the Mark Masters Ensemble on 2003’s The Clifford Brown Project and has since contributed to nine other Masters albums.

“Tim has created his own vocabulary as an improviser. He’s so unique and so spontaneous. And Billy is the same thing,” Masters observed. “These are compositions that Billy’s played with his quintet for a number of years. But I felt like his playing was so inspired and so profound that we were getting the best Billy Harper that was possible on that day” in the studio last July.

Masters has been a Harper fan and later evangelist since the mid-’80s after first hearing the Houston native’s playing on Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra recordings. That led to discoveries of playing on recordings by the Gil Evans Orchestra and also ones by Max Roach, Elvin Jones and Art Blakey. “He’s played with all the great drummers,” he said. “And I just love his sound.

“There’s a quote from the liner notes of Billy’s debut album for Steeplechase [Destiny Is Yours, 1989] that Chinyére Nealé wrote: ‘I find that people have either never heard Billy’s music, or they are totally devoted to it. There is no in between,’” he recalled. ”And I’m totally devoted to his playing.” Harper first recorded with Masters on 1991’s Priestess, and they’ve gone on to collaborate in the studio seven more times.

In an alternate universe, Masters might have joined Harper and Hagans on the brass-and-woodwinds side of the big bandstand. But the 67-year-old Gary, Indiana, native learned over time where his strengths lie: “I played trumpet in elementary school through college and then realized that it wasn’t my calling,” he said. “I played in the big bands but was never an improviser. I was meant to do something else; that something else turned out to be putting notes on paper for other people.”

He was also meant to be a beloved educator, including a guest lecturing run from 1999 to 2006 at Claremont McKenna College; an after-school volunteer stint at Eagle Rock High School in Los Angeles with its big band; and serving as the president of the non-profit American Jazz Institute since 1998. “Now I also volunteer for my wife’s music non-profit,” he said. “So I teach beginning and intermediate band at a school here in Temecula.”

A recent “Find Your Own Voice” American Jazz Institute mentoring clinic brought Masters back to his alma mater, California State University, Los Angeles. (Other Cal State L.A. alumni include the late tenor saxophonist/ arranger Jack Montrose and the late alto saxophonist/composer Lennie Niehaus.) One hundred students from four schools attended, and he noted that “the kids were very receptive and played well. It’s always good for them to hear it from somebody else, other than who they hear it from all the time.”

Asked whether there was a woodshedding equivalent for arranger/composers, Masters pondered for a moment. “I don’t know what other people do, but I listen to a lot of classical music and jazz just to be inspired by music,” he replied. “And then just writing something every day, hopefully — but not necessarily — with some end product in sight. As you do this, you learn things and develop a vocabulary. And then things reveal themselves to you before you know it.” DB