Jazz great Sam Rivers will perform with the Barbary Coast, the College's jazz ensemble, as well as with his own trio Saturday night at 8 p.m. in Spaulding Auditorium.
Rivers, who brings a diverse range of musical experience to the stage, has done it all -- from playing with pianist Bill Evans to filling the tenor chair in Miles Davis' quintet in 1963.
Even at 73 years of age, Rivers continues to break new ground in jazz and has indeed established himself as a unique voice in contemporary music. In an interview with The Dartmouth, Rivers discussed his development as a musician as well as his thoughts on the direction jazz is moving in today.
The Dartmouth: How would you describe the character of your music -- as improvisational music with or without structure?
Sam Rivers: Well, we [the trio] try to cover the whole spectrum, so we do a lot of stuff that is just completely creative and then we'll do music with changes, chords -- something with harmonic variation. And then we'll do purely improvisational music -- and improvisation is a strange word for me because it means that you improvise with some kind of structure, and that's something we do. But we also create with no structure, so you really can't call it improvising. It's just sort of a creative process. And I guess that's my main contribution to American music -- jazz music.
The Dartmouth: So your model for "free jazz" or creative improvising -- is that in the same vein as Ornette Coleman's or Don Cherry's or Pharaoh Sanders'?
SR: I think it's a little further advanced than that because, like I said, they were improvising on structures. I did some stuff, like "Streams," which is just the trio and we just played together. But you do have to be a musician of some years of training in order to do this. I mean it's not just an overnight kind of thing because it's a combination of classical music and jazz and blues.
The Dartmouth: Tell us a bit about your background: how you started playing, your musical education and, basically, your development as a jazz musician.
SR: Well, my mother and father were musicians and they were coming up in Chicago, so I pretty much spent my younger years in Chicago. And while I was in school, I used to play the organ for mass. And I played in high school -- in a band where the senior students used to teach all the younger students. And we had a big bandroom full of instruments, so if anyone wanted to play a instrument, they could just choose. So I picked up the trombone first and I didn't like that so much so I went back and got the soprano saxophone, and then went back to trombone. Then, when I got out of high school, my college band didn't have a saxophone player. And they wanted someone who could solo and I could solo but the tenor saxophonist couldn't solo. So I started on tenor that way. So in the navy, I didn't play because the band wasn't too good. I was playing the whole time but I just didn't play in the band.
The Dartmouth: So did you start studying at the conservatory after the navy?
SR: Well I went up to the Boston conservatory and I was already a musician -- I already knew I wanted to do music. I was playing clubs at night and in Boston at the time, there were a lot of musicians who were studying, like Jaki Byard and Gigi Gryce, Quincy Jones, Alan Dawson.
The Dartmouth: So just place this in a time context -- was this in the '40s?
SR: Yeah, this was late '40s -- that's when I heard about Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. And I enjoyed that music very much and I was playing things that were similar to bebop but we hadn't really heard of bebop at the time. I heard them in the navy when the record companies distributed their 12-inch discs to the services. And while Dizzy and Charlie Parker were around in New York, Boston was a very, very creative and fertile scene.
The Dartmouth: What was the direction your music was going in at that time?
SR: Bebop, definitely. But I was also in school studying Stravinsky and Mozart and Bartok. I studied during the day and played jazz at night. And a lot of what I was hearing at the time was far out. And that's an acquired taste -- you just don't jump up and say, 'Oh, that music is great!' -- if you like it, that's great. But if it is serious music, where you are trying to communicate something, it's not that easy for your ears to get used to it.
