By any measure, Randy Brecker is one of jazz’s greatest trumpeters.
Since hitting New York City in the late 1960s he’s been in the thick of the action, playing hard bop with Horace Silver, jazz/rock fusion with Dreams, and jazz/funk with the Brecker Brothers, the ferociously grooving band he co-led with his younger brother, the late tenor sax titan Michael Brecker (who died in 2007 at the age of 57).
A consummate player with seven Grammy Awards and 20 nominations, he’s a master of Brazilian jazz and a studio legend with hundreds of pop, rock, soul and funk albums to his credit. But even with his vast array of creative resources, Brecker is daunted by his brother’s music, which he’s tackling over the next two weeks with saxophonist Tod Dickow and Charged Particles, the Bay Area trio-cum-quartet led by drummer Jon Krosnick.
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“It was always a problem, even with the Brecker Brothers band,” said Brecker, 78. “Michael was great at writing saxophonistic tunes, which were so aligned with his instrument they don’t translate easily to the trumpet. It helps that the band is very good, and Tod is a wonderful saxophonist. It’s been a lot of fun to get to know Mike’s tunes, though there are a few I just can’t play, that they handle by themselves.”
Trumpeters aren’t the only players who quake at the suggestion of interpreting a Michael Brecker piece, which is one reason why he’s tended to be overlooked as a composer despite his vaunted status as the most influential tenor saxophonist of his generation. Krosnick, who’s kept his day job as a Stanford University political science and communications professor while flourishing as a drummer and bandleader, describes a teenage encounter with the Breckers music as an epiphany.
It was the mid-1970s, the heyday of blazing, turbo-charged fusion, but the Brecker Brothers “weren’t playing a million notes a minute,” he recalled. “The stuff they were doing was so groove oriented and precise, with every note articulated. The way the two brothers played together was so organized, and then you add David Sanborn and the ensemble was so powerful.”
A late bloomer as a solo bandleader, Michael Brecker didn’t release his first album under his own name until his eponymous 1987 debut on MCA, returning to his early love of acoustic jazz with a classic quintet session featuring guitarist Pat Metheny and drummer Jack DeJohnette. He spent the next two decades refining his work as a composer on a series of acclaimed albums.
It was an evolution that his older brother watched closely and encouraged as Michael Brecker “changed slowly but surely as he started feeling more confident as a writer,” Randy said. “We talked about the craft of it, how you have to sit and put in time every day. He gradually gained confidence and left us all in the dust.”
With Aaron Germain on acoustic and electric bass and Murray Low on piano and keyboards, Charged Particles spent years honing a trio sound before delving into Michael Brecker’s music. It was a path that opened up for Krosnick after he connected with journeyman San Francisco tenor saxophonist Tod Dickow, a devotee of Brecker’s diamond-hard tone and high-velocity attack.
Honing compositions from across his discography, with a particular focus on Brecker’s extraordinary final recording, 2007’s “Pilgrimage” featuring Metheny, DeJohnette, John Patitucci and Herbie Hancock, the quartet workshopped the tunes at Seven Mile House in Brisbane. The quartet recorded the music at the Baked Potato, the Studio City club that’s served as Southern California’s premiere jazz fusion venue for five decades, but might not have released it without a nudge from Randy.
When Krosnick noticed a Facebook post by the trumpeter lamenting that the company had locked him out of his page for allegedly impersonating himself, the drummer made a call to an old friend who works for the oft-uncontactable company. Reaching out to Brecker to let him know his problem may have been solved (it was), Krosick ended up sharing a track from the Baked Potato recording.
“I was still feeling uncertain about whether to release it, but Randy wrote this incredible note, saying ‘send me the rest of the record’ and that he was playing along with ‘African Skies’ right now,” Krosnick said.
He wrote a blurb for the back of the CD, and when Charged Particles played a sold-out album release show at Birdland in New York, Brecker came with his wife, Italian tenor saxophonist Ada Rovatti (who has toured with Randy in the Brecker Brothers Reunion Band).
The fact that the album came out at virtually the same time as veteran jazz journalist Bill Milkowski’s biography “Ode to a Tenor Titan: The Life and Times and Music of Michael Brecker” served as a one-two punch in drawing attention to his compositions.
Contact Andrew Gilbert at jazzscribe@aol.com.
RANDY BRECKER
With Tod Dickow and Charged Particles
When & where: 7 p.m. Oct. 14 at Kuumbwa Jazz Center, Santa Cruz; $21-$42; www.kuumbwajazz.org; 7 and 8:30 p.m. Oct. 17-18 at SFJAZZ Center, San Francisco; $35; www.sfjazz.org; 7:30 p.m. Oct. 19 at SJZ Break Room, San Jose; $37.40; sanjosejazz.org; 6:30 and 8:30 p.m. Oct. 20, Meyhouse, Palo Alto; $80; www.meyhouserestaurant.com