The following is an interview between jazz journalist Morgan Enos and alto saxophonist, composer, and author Jim Snidero. His new album, Bird Feathers, a tribute to Charlie Parker, features bassist Peter Washington and drummer Joe Farnsworth, and was released 21 February via Savant Records.
Links to purchase the album, and to Snidero’s website, can be found at the end of this article.
Jim Snidero is more than a veteran alto player of great esteem; last month, he played a subtle role in the history of the instrument.
Specifically, Snidero donated Cannonball Adderley’s mouthpiece – the very one he played on Kind of Blue, which he’d owned for a quarter-century – to the Smithsonian Institute, who reunited it with the legend’s horn of the same period. “It brought me to tears. It was quite moving,” Snidero tells UK Jazz News. “It was one of the highlights of my life, to be honest to you.”
The alto saxophone has loved him back. Two years ago, Snidero walked into a Chicago woodwind shop and took home a horn that beat even the model he’d played for three decades: “The same model and make as mine, but just a really, really, really good one,” he says. “Mine was really good, but this is on another level.”
Right after, he recorded For All We Know, his first-ever chordless trio album, with bassist Washington and drummer Farnsworth. Now, with the same personnel, he’s followed it up with Bird Feathers, Snidero’s first-ever album-length tribute to the player he calls “the greatest ever.”
He’s been building to this for four decades. “You know, that was something that I really lived,” he reflects. “In the ‘80s, I spent several years exclusively listening to Charlie Parker, night and day, trying to figure out as much as I could. So, it’s a deep part of my DNA, and it just takes a lot of balls, as an alto player, to make a Charlie Parker tribute record.”
Read the full interview below; Snidero hits the midwestern United States on tour with Washington and drummer Jason Tiemann this week.
UKJN: Recording an album-length tribute to Bird isn’t a task one should take lightly. And I don’t figure you did.
JS: No; the heat’s on, baby. I finally, honestly felt like I had the confidence to do it. And that, given the success of the last trio recording, if I did that again, it would give the music a different feeling without chords – more openness.
The challenge beyond that kind of soundscape is to somehow make it personal. Of course, it’s going to be my playing, but we wanted to make at least some of the songs fresh.
I did that by having Peter play the melody with me on a couple of tunes, including ‘Charlie’s Wig’, which hasn’t been recorded very much, and ‘Scrapple from the Apple’. So, that switches things up a little bit; I could thread things together between my different influences, and not have to really worry about the pianist finding his way through that.
That’s one of the advantages, right? That you don’t have to have a pianist guessing, especially if you haven’t played together that often, which is often the case with me on a recording. I mean, most of the people that I’ve played with on recordings, I’ve done other gigs with, but it’s not like we’ve been out on the road for a month, or we’ve played 100 gigs together over the course of years.
So, there has to be a certain common language that they can somehow lock into. That was very apparent on [2021’s] Live at the Deer Head Inn, because we were playing those standards, and it just was very natural. [Pianist] Orrin [Evans’] comping is beautiful on that.
UKJN: Say more.
JS: It’s not that they can anticipate what you’re going to do, but they have confidence that it’s going to be somehow appropriate stylistically. Whereas if you’re playing in a trio, then you can go off into corners and not have the sound become confused, with a pianist who is not exactly sure what they’re going to do.
On the other hand, it’s a challenge, because you don’t have that beautiful backdrop of an incredible-sounding acoustic piano. I mean, that’s one of the great instruments of the world – and to have that behind you, that is definitely going to make the sound more beautiful.
Also, there’s the rhythmic aspect; the pianist is often feeding the rhythm section, the bassist and drummer. He’s the one giving the rhythm section impetus and drive, which they pick up on a lot of times.
If you listen to a Miles record on Prestige, and you ignore Miles, and just listen to what the rhythm section is doing behind him, you’ll notice that often, it’s an independent sound. You could take Miles out, and it would make total sense.
UKJN: In the absence of the piano, I imagine it’s pure intuition between yourself and P-Wash. There’s no hashing anything out beforehand; the music relies on trust, a mutual balancing act.
JS: Absolutely. In some trios that I’ve heard, the temptation is to fill the space up all the time, because there’s so much empty space compared to a quartet.
But when you allow space, you can let things kind of blossom, let the sound open up by not playing something. Let someone else play something, or just react from each other’s lack of density. That gives it a more floating effect.
Like I said, the temptation is to fill in the spaces, and that can sound pretty overbearing for me, anyway. I’m not going to have that kind of problem with Peter or Joe. They know exactly what to do.
UKJN: Beyond the chordless aspect, how does Bird Feathers give Parker’s music a “little bit different feel,” as you’ve described?
JS: I think it has to do with the way I’m hearing my sound, because it’s so clear in the recording. When recording with this trio, I’m so much higher than Peter, and there’s no piano in my range, so it’s almost like a showcase for tone. I think that’s what changes for me a little bit with the trio.
For example, my favourite track on the thing, honestly, is ‘Ornithology’, because I feel like I’m so inside my sound on that. It sounds strong and convincing. There’s nothing that distracts from the flow of sound, and that’s a key element for me in the trio.
UKJN: I know pure sound was a huge component for you when you did [2023’s] Far Far Away with [guitarist] Kurt Rosenwinkel. It sounds like you’re still on that path.
JS: That’s interesting, because Kurt, of course, put me into a whole different space; I was trying to think about how our sounds would blend.
UKJN: You mentioned that ‘Charlie’s Wig’ is a lesser-known tune. Can you talk about the sequence of Bird material you chose? I mean, you could have gone in so many directions…
JS: Well, first off, I realised that Charlie Parker wrote hardly any songs in a minor key. As a matter of fact, as far as I could tell, there was only one, called ‘Segment’. Every other Charlie Parker song had a major, or dominant sound.
In other words, he was joyous. A minor key is a more serious kind of sound. And that’s limiting, in a way; if you’re going to pick Charlie Parker tunes, they’re going to be in major. So, that was a little bit of a challenge.
I wanted to play a couple of the real classics, like ‘Confirmation’. The title track, ‘Bird Feathers’, is not very well known; a lot of musicians don’t even know that blues. It’s not widely played, and it’s a really tricky one, and I love it. I think that one has a kind of off-kilter rhythm that lends itself to a more modern concept, at least in my mind.
Then, like I said, I wanted to do a couple where the bass was playing the line with me, and I thought ‘Scrapple’ would be a good one for that. ‘Ornithology’ is one of my all-time favourite burning tunes of Bird’s. It’s a challenge in its own way. It’s been recorded a lot, but I just did it straight up, because that’s the way I wanted to do it.
‘These Foolish Things’ – that’s a challenge, because after Bird played it like that, what are you going to do? But in the trio, I feel like we were able to give it a different sound, and go in some different directions.
‘Lover Man’, I wanted to do a capella, even though I recorded that one other time a long time ago; it was in a different key, and I did it with an organ. ‘The Nearness of You’: as far as I know, he only recorded that once, and that was with a live big band too. It’s called Bird With the Herd…
UKJN: I’ve got to check that out.
JS: It’s a late radio broadcast with Woody Herman’s group in Kansas City, and people are going freaking wild, man. You can hear people screaming, and Bird just going off. It’s a great one too. So, about half the record is like that; I was looking for ones that hadn’t been recorded that often.
UKJN: Where was the session? How was it?
JS: The last two have been out in Pennsylvania, with Ken Heckman, the same engineer that did Live at the Deer Head Inn. He also did Keith Jarrett’s Live at the Deer Head Inn, which is a real famous record. The studio is called Red Rock, and that’s where [saxophonists] Phil Woods and Dave Liebman recorded all the time.
Beyond Ken, who’s great, the thing I like about the room is that it’s acoustically live. It’s got a high ceiling. It’s not too small. There’s plenty of stone around. There are no parallel lines with the roof. It’s a very, very good room, and the horn sounds freaking great in there as well. He’s got a great microphone that I love, and the bass and drums sound so natural and real. Part of this is because it’s a trio – but this guy really knows how to record.
