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“The history of the music is very important to us,” says Escoffery, noting that it is equally important to push the music forward.
(Photo: Jimmy and Deana Katz)Wayne Escoffery sits comfortably in a soft chair in a hotel room in Denver. He is traveling once again with the Mingus Big Band, having played tenor saxophone with that ensemble for the past 23 years. “Just like everyone else, we’ve gotten through COVID,” he muses, speaking to DownBeat via video about his bandmates and other musician friends. “So, we all feel revitalized, and I think there is an urgency in the air. … We’re kind of riding that wave, enjoying an abundance of work and performance opportunities.” It is a return, of sorts, to life as they once knew it, but perhaps we can never truly be as we once were.
Escoffery is missing some key figures in his life. Sue Mingus, the wife of Charles Mingus and founder of the Mingus Big Band, passed away in 2022, a year after Escoffery’s longtime friend and mentor, Ralph Peterson Jr., also departed this world. Those losses, during the extended time of isolation during the lockdown, prompted him to think about the things that mean the most: the other members of his band with whom he shares a kinship of thought and spirit, along with other friends who have guided the saxophonist through his formative years as an artist. Embracing those people is at the heart of his latest album, Like Minds (Smoke Sessions).
It was during the second wave of COVID in 2021 when Escoffery received an unusual and generous proposition: The author and Fulbright scholar Michael Sampson, whose daughter was taking saxophone lessons from Escoffery, offered his home while Sampson was studying abroad. Escoffery soon found himself away from the sequestered hives of New York and in a spacious, sunlit abode on a road called Treasure Lane on the Gulf coast of Florida.
The change in scenery lent some new perspective. “Generally, I’m a very emotional person,” he states, rather stoically, “and I definitely write when I’m inspired emotionally by events that are happening in my life, or [when] something impactful has happened to someone else that’s affecting me. … Being in Florida, being in that beautiful space, made me reevaluate what was important to me.”
Peterson was important to Escoffery. They met shortly after the saxophonist moved to New York in 2001, and the elder statesman was always game to play whenever Escoffery called. “Even if it wasn’t a high-paying [gig],” he remembers, “[Ralph] was happy to do it because he was nurtured and mentored by Art Blakey … you almost feel obligated to pass on the music in that same way in that same tradition. That’s an important part of this music, and Ralph embraced that as I do.” Peterson’s tune “Song Of Serenity” appears on Like Minds in tribute to the late drummer.
Seven months after her death, just days before this interview, Sue Mingus became an NEA Jazz Masters fellow, one of the highest honors any jazz artist can receive. “Sue was the matriarch of the Mingus tribe and in many ways like a second mother to myself and many of the Mingus Big Band members,” Escoffery states. “She made sure that all the musicians that she chose [were] accountable for representing Mingus’ music with authenticity and the highest level of artistic integrity.”
2022 would have also been the year Charles Mingus turned 100. “The Mingus Big Band organization has been such an integral part of my life and my career that I couldn’t make an album in the centennial year of Charles Mingus without including this composition,” Escoffery adds. He is referring to “Nostalgia In Times Square,” one of Mingus’ best-known works, reharmonized and reimagined with a hip-hop beat, including a playful cameo from another old friend, trumpeter Tom Harrell. “The two main bands that I always wanted to be in were the Mingus Big Band and Tom Harrell’s quintet, so I definitely feel blessed that I was able to do both of those things,” he says.
Harrell also appears on the original composition “My Truth,” a soliloquy into the duality of man — love/pain, life/death, war/peace, desire/sacrifice, even murder/justice. Those reflections came out of the images of the tortuous police killing of George Floyd, then a newly raw event Escoffery pondered in his gilded isolation on Treasure Lane. It brought to his mind another song, “Rivers Of Babylon,” a Rastafari folk song he heard as a boy growing up in Jamaica. “The song kind of metaphorically tells the story of Black people living in an oppressive society,” explains Escoffery. “You know, Jamaicans refer to police as ‘Babylon.’”
“My Truth” and “Rivers” have lyrics sung powerfully into aurality by Gregory Porter, whom Escoffery knew well before the singer’s ascent into jazz stardom, having met at the saxophonist’s jam session at St. Nick’s Pub in Harlem in the mid-2000s. Escoffery says, “I’ve always wanted to record with Gregory … He has always been one of my favorites since the first time I heard him.” Another artist Escoffery has known for a long time yet is recording with for the first time is guitarist Mike Moreno, whom he first met as a student and then in trumpeter Jeremy Pelt’s band. Escoffery says of Moreno, “He’s very like-minded in that he’s studied the history of the music — [he] understands everything from swing music to bebop to what you might want to call the modern avant-garde.”
Escoffery realizes that he has found such a thing as “like-mindedness” in his bandmates, pianist Dave Kikoski and bassist Ugonna Okegwo. They have known each other for 20 years, and played in Escoffery’s band since they first came together with Peterson for a gig at Smalls seven years ago.
“The history of the music is very important to us, and making sure that we represent that history authentically is important to us, but it’s also equally important that we push the envelope and try to explore new things and keep the music alive and moving forward,” Escoffery says of his friends.
He also sees that quality in his new drummer, Mark Whitfield Jr., son of the well-known guitarist, and someone whom Peterson considered to be his best student. “Mark really took and ingested a lot of Ralph’s teachings,” he says. “When Ralph passed, it seemed quite fitting to have Mark Whitfield Jr. take the drum seat. … It was a passing of the baton.” DB
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