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Written by Dan England
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Thursday, 17 April 2008 |
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Stefon Harris was the kid banging on his parents’ pots and pans when he was 3 or 4. You probably were, too. It’s just that Harris was better at it.
And, no doubt, he banged away a lot more.
He taught himself how to play piano soon after that, and then he learned how to read music. Then he entered elementary school, and since he already knew how to clap a quarter note, his teachers gave him instruments that he could learn to keep him occupied. By the time he was through, he knew how to play 20 of them.
“Sometimes, when you look back on your life, you realize the music chose you,” Harris said. “It’s not like I sat down and decided that maybe I’ll be a musician. My deep rooted passion’s always been for music. I was always the kid trying to make music, even when I was very young.”
Now he’s considered one of the leading young composers in the jazz world today, as well as one of its most heralded vibraphonists. Harris and his group, Blackout, will perform as Saturday’s headliner for the University of Northern Colorado/Greeley Jazz Festival.
It turns out learning so many instruments was good for his career. In fact, even today, he considers himself a musician, not a vibraphonist. He chose that instrument just because he was better at percussion than many of the others, and a teacher forced him to choose one to study when he was in a youth orchestra.
“Instruments are secondary for me,” Harris said in a phone interview. “The vibraphone just happens to be the one I was more technically fluent on, so it was easier for me to connect with it.”
Harris many times writes in suites, not four-minute bursts, and so, for his latest album, “African Tarantella: Dances with Duke,” Harris turned to another composer who wrote several famous suites — Duke Ellington. Ellington isn’t as known for those as he is for, say, “Take the A Train” or many of his other standards, but Harris was drawn to the suites because he thought he could interpret them and yet remain true to their intention. Ellington’s suites, he said, sounded like they were recorded last week.
“There’s a lot of music out there, including Ellington’s standards, that sound very time-specific,” Harris said. “But his suites dug so deep. I was looking for another composer that had the same elegance and grace, and Duke Ellington is the epitome of elegance and grace.”
Harris raised some eyebrows at his choice of instruments for redoing Ellington’s suites, of course. He arranged the music for a chamber-jazz ensemble, with a flute, viola, cello, trombone and his vibraphones. He left out the saxophones or trumpets and added a clarinet. But that’s another example of Harris’ philosophy of not worrying about specific instruments for a specific part. He didn’t think his choices were unusual at all.
“When I write, once I have the melody, I ask what the melodies want,” Harris said. “I do what they are asking for. I needed a clarinet because Ellington’s melodies were graceful and elegant, and a saxophone has a bite to it. A trumpet can be brassy, and that’s not what the melodies were asking for.
“Ellington wrote about love and fear and compassion, and that has nothing to do with the instruments.”
Harris, in fact, does not think about his vibraphone when he’s writing. He spends a good portion of his writing time at the piano, although he also stays away from the piano at times, too.
“Ultimately, writing comes from within,” he said. “The vibraphone does not come from within. It’s totally separate. If you listen to a lot of my melodies, they’re not specifically for the vibraphone. I want my melodies to be close to a voice. I want people to sing my melodies.”
Despite all that, Harris is a jammer, too. He loves playing.
“Playing is where it’s at,” he said. “It’s being in the moment. One of the things I love is the interaction with the other musicians, the fact that I don’t have control and you never know what’s going to happen. We’re all on this journey discovering this for the first time. That’s a great experience.”
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