Nick Finzer Spotlights J.J. Johnson’s Centennial

News, From the Magazine, Nick Finzer, J.J. Johnson, Rufus Reid, Renee Rosnes, Lewis Nash

By Yoshi Kato I Jul. 31, 2024

Finzer, second from left, with drummer Lewis Nash, left, bassist Rufus Reid, second from right, and pianist Renee Rosnes.
(Photo: Adrien Tillman)

J.J. Johnson (1924–2001) earned his rightful place in jazz history. But fellow trombonist Nick Finzer thinks that Johnson merits more consideration.

The 36-year-old Rochester, New York, native’s latest album, Legacy, pays tribute to Johnson, Finzer’s personal hero on the instrument and an inspiration for his own composing and arranging. The deeply felt eight-track album released on Finzer’s own Outside in Music label in April, features a combination of Johnson pieces and a standards sourced from throughout his fertile career plus three originals.

“I always thought this wasn’t something I was going to do,” Finzer says of the Johnson tribute. “My first five or six projects have been mostly focused on original music.” He did the math two years ago and realized that Johnson’s centenary was coming up in 2024. “I talked to some of my teachers and mentors and asked if they were doing anything for J.J.’s 100th or knew of anyone else doing something.

“And everyone I talked to said, ‘Oh, not that I know of.’ Some didn’t even realize it was coming up. So I decided that we can’t let this go by and not acknowledge J.J.,” he continues, by phone from his part-time home in Denton, Texas. “I wanted to make sure he had his moment in the spotlight, and that we shared his music again. Then if somebody else comes along and does it, too, that’s great. The more the merrier.”

Finzer had played with Lewis Nash in Ryan Truesdell’s Gil Evans Centennial Project and peppered the drummer with questions about his time mostly gigging, but also recording with Johnson during the early to mid-’90s. “Nick always jokes and says he was like the pesky young musician asking a thousand questions about J.J.,” Nash reports, in a phone interview from his home in Arizona. “And Lewis was gracious enough to put up with it,” Finzer confirms.

Those conversations inspired Finzer to ask Nash to record on Tribute. He agreed and, when queried by Finzer, suggested pianist Renee Rosnes and bassist Rufus Reid to fill out the quartet, as the three had been Johnson’s rhythm section in the early to mid-’90s. The album was captured at the same Rudy Van Gelder studio where Johnson himself had made many classic albums, and it was Finzer’s first time recording at the historic jazz landmark in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, to boot.

“There’s one piece by Renee, ‘Malaga Moon,’ which she wrote when he was playing with him,” Finzer explains, when asked about the album’s three originals. “And I wrote a couple of things (“That Thing” and “CC”) trying to assimilate J.J.’s influence on me.”

“I was really impressed with not only his knowledge of J.J., but also his commitment to this album and J.J.’s legacy,” Nash reflects. “It’s been a really quality project and not just some knock-off thing that someone was trying to do in a timely manner because it was J.J.’s centennial.

“He was very organized and very open,” he recalls. “Even at the session, Nick was willing to alter things if we made suggestions.”

“J.J.’s got so many records and so many different parts of his repertoire — small group, big band, brass orchestra — that it’s really impossible to really do it all,” Finzer replies, when queried about selecting material for Legacy. “I just tried to cover a lot of ground in a short amount of time.”

Johnson’s reputation as both a bebop pioneer and a triple-threat instrumentalist/composer/arranger has remained strong. But Finzer points out that the diverse nature of Johnson’s career may have meant he was deserving of wider recognition during his lifetime, even as he was already acknowledged as a legend.

“A friend of mine, a saxophone player and a colleague, asked me, ‘Does anybody check out J.J. Johnson for real?’ And it got me thinking: It’s probably mostly just trombone educators like myself and Michael Dease and Steve Davis,” Finzer says. “I don’t know how many people inside of the industry sphere or other players who aren’t trombonists are talking about what Jay was doing.

“J.J. was really respected by Miles and Sonny Rollins,” he points out. “But he was out of the scene for a while. He moved to L.A. to become a film and TV composer and took something like 10 years off from leading his own bands.”

Finzer started on trombone in fourth grade, and Johnson’s recorded legacy was his gateway into the jazz world. “I grew up in the mid-’90s, and there were two records that were re-released on one CD (Johnson and Kai Winding’s Jay & Kai + 6 and Johnson’s J.J. In Person). I can just still remember being a kid on the bus trying to hold my Discman so it wouldn’t skip,” he says. “That first CD took on a world of its own; I fell in love with the sound of the trombone during that time.”

Finzer joined his high school’s jazz band in 10th grade and was able to participate in Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Essentially Ellington big band competition, which became another life-altering event. Wynton Marsalis was collaborating with Rochester-based choreographer Garth Fagan back then, so when the band was in town Finzer received his first private jazz-based lessons with Wycliffe Gordon, the Marsalis Septet’s trombonist.

After staying East to study at Eastman School of Music and then at The Juilliard School, Finzer has led his own sextet and plays in clarinetist/occasional saxophonist Anat Cohen’s Tentet. And as an assistant professor of jazz trombone at University of North Texas College of Music, he carries forth Johnson’s de facto artistic motto.

“Why go through all the hardship of learning to play your instrument so well and trying to express yourself if you’re not going to think about how you present yourself and your musical identity and your musical point of view to the world?” he says. “And I don’t think you have to do anything crazy. You just have to be a little bit thoughtful.” DB