Tia Fuller: The Brilliance of a Diamond

Interview, News, From the Magazine, Tia Fuller, Terri Lyne Carrington, Dave Holland, Jack DeJohnette

By Ted Panken I Sep. 28, 2018

Tia Fuller’s most recent album is *Diamond Cut* (Mack Avenue).
(Photo: Jimmy & Dena Katz)

Savage said that Fuller has established a new cultural stream at Berklee, both musically and institutionally. “She’s done some things no one has done before,” he said. “To me, what’s unique is that innovations at Berklee usually have come from former students or longtime faculty—established community members. Tia came with a vision and a strategy, a work ethic, and the patience to work through the institutional issues to become one of Berklee’s shining lights in a relatively short period of time.”

Fuller applied the same qualities Savage described to establishing herself on the New York scene after earning her master’s degree. “At jam sessions, I’d be waiting my turn, and someone would walk in front of me and start playing,” she recalled. “That happened a couple of times before I was like, ‘OK, I see what this is.’ When I started talking to club owners about booking gigs, often they wouldn’t take me seriously—or they would hit on me. Things like that helped mold me into maintaining my personality, while also being direct in how I exude my energy, setting up barriers of business versus pleasure.

“I don’t experience sexism in an environment where people know who I am or what I do. But I still have to ward off sexist comments. Every day I’m traveling, if I’m carrying my horn, someone says, ‘Oh, what’s that?’ ‘It’s a saxophone.’ ‘Do you actually play it?’ Whereas maybe I’d laugh it off 10 years ago, now I address it and call them out. I take it as an opportunity to educate.”

In this regard, she mentioned her father, Fred Fuller, who played bass in a family combo called Fuller Sound with her mother, Elthopia, a singer. They remained in the Denver area after having their children, and pursued careers as educators.

As a youngster, Fuller was a classical piano and flute student before becoming “infatuated” with the saxophone. She wore saxophone earrings and a saxophone necklace, and finally switched instruments at age 11. After high school, when Fuller was gigging with her parents, her father trained her in the mindset of “go in and be fearless, even when you are afraid,” Fuller said. “He would yell at me on the bandstand, ‘Play! Don’t be scared.’ Recently he told me, ‘I didn’t want you to grow up being afraid to play, so I pushed you, because I knew what you’d have to endure as a woman.’”

Fuller drew on those lessons after matriculating to Spelman College—a historically black women’s college in Atlanta—for undergraduate work on inspiration taken from the TV sitcom A Different World, whose plot revolved around a stand-in institution called Hillman. “I’d see the camaraderie and sisterhood of all these African-American women,” Fuller said. “I felt exploring the liberal arts college experience in that environment was more important than attending a conservatory.”

At Spelman, Fuller encountered alto saxophonist Joe Jennings, the founder of Spelman’s jazz studies program and director of the Spelman College Jazz Ensemble. “I walked into Mr. Jennings’ office on my first visit, and he had on his John Coltrane hat, which I took as an omen,” Fuller said. “I played Charlie Parker’s ‘Donna Lee,’ just the melody—I pretty much only knew my major scales. All he said was, ‘OK, you have potential.’ After talking to him, I knew he’d take me under his wing. Because of him, I started practicing six to eight hours a day. He would never say, ‘Tia, you sound good,’ but always, ‘You’re coming along’—even up to this day. He kept me grounded, and he wanted me to keep working.”

Jennings is one of the “Joes” who Fuller references on Diamond Cut’s “Joe’N Around.” The open-ended piece begins with the leader in a duo with DeJohnette. She postulates variations across the alto’s range on an abstract line transcribed from a Joe Lovano solo, before bringing on Holland for a transition to a “more sassy” section that refracts Joe Henderson’s phrasing and intervallic sensibility. She concludes with a pattern learned from Jennings.

Fuller credited the involvement of Carrington—a two-time Grammy winner whose work as a producer includes acclaimed recordings by Spalding, Dianne Reeves, Nona Hendryx and Teena Marie—as crucial to her propensity to stretch and explore throughout the recording sessions. “To me, this album is the first time I had a producer I could trust, where I just had to show up,” she said. “When we were in the studio—or talking about who was going to be on what—I leaned on Terri’s perspective.”

Fuller might be understating how proactive she was in guiding the flow. Guitarist Rogers recalled the leader mentioning that a “slightly distorted, bluesy sound” she’d heard him deploy on an earlier album might work on one tune. “It was a good idea,” he said. Still, Rogers added, Fuller comported herself “in the great tradition of calling musicians whose playing she loves to bring their personalities to bear, and gave them music that made sense—so things didn’t need to be dissected and explained.”

“I wrote out the bass lines, heads and melodies,” Fuller said, adding that she knew her all-star collaborators “would fill in the gaps once they learned the germ of the structure.”

Carrington’s painstaking preparations established an immaculate playing field on which to operate. “Before you get to the studio, you make sure there aren’t surprises or problems,” she said. “Then, when you’re there, you’re the ears. After a take, you tell them to try it once more, or step away from the microphone, or play a little softer or stronger—they don’t have to go into the control room to hear it, which stops the momentum.

“Tia is steeped in the blues tradition,” Carrington continued. “She has a great understanding of jazz and her instrument’s lineage. She didn’t skip anything—she took the Point A to Point B approach, as opposed to Point A to Point F. Her technique is strong. Her energy is strong. Her material sounds familiar, but feels like her own thing. She has all the qualities of someone who is the truth in the music—the real deal.”

Throughout the program, Fuller responds in kind, presenting a master class in alto saxophone expression. She projects an array of attacks—husky and muscular, legato and sprightly, soaring, keening, songlike—that proceed over percolating rhythms drawn from the canons of West Africa and New Orleans, from swing and rock. M-Base-esque odd meters underpin and propel both “Fury Of Da’Mond” and the opening track, “In The Trenches,” on which she articulates her float-like-a-butterfly-sting-like-a-bee variations with crystalline brilliance atop Genus’ kinetic B-flat-minor bass vamp.

“I was literally in the basement of my house, trying to write, and it wasn’t coming,” Fuller said of “In The Trenches.” “Personal things were interfering with trying to clear my mind and sink into it, as I did on my other albums. I felt spiritually in the trenches, trying to dig myself out, to create something and rise through the pressure to the top—which is how a diamond surfaces. That’s what the vamp represents, and it’s one meaning of the title. The other was to celebrate diamonds in the jazz community: legends like Jack and Dave and Terri.

“Now, once the diamond gets to the surface, the cut doesn’t relate to size or shape, but to the balance and proportion of light that it reflects. That’s the brilliance of the diamond. All the people who have poured into me—my mentors, my peers, all my experiences—serve as the light, and now I’m able to reflect that light back out onto students.”