Live & Local: Brian Lynch Returns to Colorado

This portion of the interview above has been edited for length and clarity:

Carlos: You're currently up in Aspen doing some teaching.

Brian: Yeah, I've been part of the faculty of Jazz Aspen Snowmass Academy for, actually this is my seventh year or seventh summer being here. And the school that I teach at the Frost School of Music is partners with JAS in this enterprise. And we bring out some of the top young musicians coming out of the college scene and put them together in impromptu formations. And also then they're part of a big band that's convened for the great Christian McBride, who's the artistic director of Jazz Aspen Snowmass. And so we'll be doing some performances in Snowmass this week and then next week in Aspen as part of Jazz Aspen Snowmass June Jazz activity with Christian McBride's big band and the Combos with myself as special guests. That's happening on Friday and Saturday of next week in Aspen. (April 27 & 28)

Steve: I wanted to ask you about kids these days. As an educator, it's always about these kids and they're into their phones and the short attention span and you're trying to bring them along in this discipline, this creative enterprise called jazz. Do you think you have some advantage because these are musicians, they're so focused. What's your view, man? You've seen a lot of students come through your classroom.

Brian: Well, it is really interesting that you bring this up. I've been teaching in higher education for, gosh, I guess about a quarter of a century now. I was being at NYU before I came to Miami in 2011. And I think the technology has been really an incredible boon. And that's part of the reason why I think you hear so many young musicians, and I mean young musicians that are so naturally talented because they have access to the whole history of the music at their fingertips and also the way they learn is really kind of infused by technology. And I'm not saying it's a bad thing. I don't know if I'm saying it's a good thing either necessarily all the time too. It's just different and it is what it is. Talk about dropping down a rabbit hole! I think one of the things that I see is that it's harder for students with so much at their fingertips to appreciate the cultural content of the music and the cultural background of the music, and also to realize how much of the effort that it took, all the masters and all the people who made this music to get this music out into society in the category of what Eddie Palmieri calls "the conditions that existed." So we could get all this music, but we don't know who played on it. We don't even know what the record was that it originally came out on because it's all kind of served up to you and the sort of very disconnected and disassociated sort of form. 

Carlos: One of the differences I would imagine, between now and 40 years ago - 45 years ago, when you were a young fledging, up-and-coming trumpet player, just looking for that next gig, whether it was on the Latin scene there in New York with Ángel Canales. And the first time I ever saw you play actually was a gig with Pete "El Conde" Rodríguez.

Brian: Oh really?

Carlos: Yes! You were in the Broadway Club down there and you were up there in the horn section.

Brian: Yeah, Pete's of course, El Conde's son. And Pete Rodriguez is a very good friend of mine and kind of a bit of a little brother to me. And he studied with me for a little period of time around the time he was getting into Rutgers University and he's doing fantastic, and his music is really something. But yeah, I played with all the groups and of course, being on the bandstand for about five years straight with Héctor Lavoe certainly infused my musical sensibility for the rest of my life in a very, very profound way. 

Carlos: What kind of relationship does a horn player have to have? I know you say, well, it's written there. It's written right? But you still, at some point, you got to feel it. You got to know that groove. And I'm speaking specifically of the clave and how important it is for musicians to understand how that works if you're going to be an effective musician in a Latin band.

Brian: When I first started playing in salsa bands and Latin jazz bands, I was still in my hometown of Milwaukee. And there was actually a very good musician, a gentleman named Toty Ramos who passed away recently who had put a band together and he wrote his own Latin jazz music for salsa band or instrumentation, so with the full Latin percussion section. But he also had transcribed a lot of tunes from the likes of Ray Barreto and (Tito) Puente and Machito, you name it. Even Típica 73 and Tito Allen, he had some of their charts in the book. So I got that experience, which when I came to New York and I started playing with Mr. Ángel Canales, it really got me in good stead, but I still wasn't really aware of the clave. I think that I had pretty good reflexes in a way, and I could kind of fit in, certainly reading the parts, but also in soloing. But when I got into Héctor Lavoe's band, when the music was, let's say more uncompromising of anything that wasn't completely Duro that, I mean Pablo "El Indio" Rosario took me aside himself and said, "Bro, that bebop," I won't say the word, the qualifier is okay, "but you got to play some drums on the horn!" So I saw that was my come to Jesus moment, and I started studying it more seriously. And to me, a lot of it was studying the background of the music and the older recordings and going back and getting some of the fundamentals of learning the patterns, The Cascara and The Tombao and all that kind of stuff. I was able to work well in that context with that band. So when I joined Palmieri's band, then I am kind of in a good position to really learn even more because of course, he's not only a master of playing it, he's a master of the theory of it and also his relationship to all the older music and the music that he would bring on the cassette tapes when we're on the bus on the road and play and things like that. So my learning went to another level, just kind of the same way that I learned jazz music from starting with the things that were around contemporariness to me, and then going back from Woody Shaw and Freddie Hubbard to Clifford Brown and Fats Navarro, and of course Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker and so on, and learning about the whole history of the music. It's really amazing, I think learning jazz gave me the tools to learn in other idioms. I call myself sort of a purist but a "pluralist" because I think it's very important to respect the parameters and you could say "the rules" of the genre, both musically and culturally, but then at the same time, be flexible to play different things and different styles and different types of music.