The following is an interview with arranger and bandleader Mark Masters. His ensemble’s new albums, Sam Rivers 100 and Dance, Eternal Spirits, Dance!, pay homage to two singular tenor saxophonists and composers: Sam Rivers and Billy Harper. Links to Masters’ website and to purchase the albums, both released June 6 via Capri Records, can be found at the end of this article.
Sam Rivers and Billy Harper were born nearly two decades apart, and embodied markedly different temperaments in both music and life. Yet both stand, in the eyes of many discerning listeners, as towering figures in the lineage of modern jazz – and Mark Masters, a meticulous Southern California–based arranger with a decades-long track record of reimagining composers’ work, is as discerning as they come.
In the early 2000s, Masters brought Rivers, then in his early eighties, and his working trio to Claremont McKenna College for a performance presented by the American Jazz Institute, which Masters co-founded. Nearly twenty years later, in late 2023, he staged a series of concerts to mark what would have been Rivers’ 100th birthday (Rivers died in 2011 at age 88).
For that tribute, Masters turned to a kindred spirit: Billy Harper. In an interview at the time, Harper – a spiritual force in his own right – hailed Rivers as “the building blocks of jazz music”, and “the stepping stone to go to the next place.”
Harper, however, was no mere guest; he would emerge as the subject of a tribute in his own right. The result wasn’t just one album, but two: Sam Rivers 100 and Dance, Eternal Spirits, Dance!, twin tributes that showcase Masters’ flexibility as an arranger. One album builds orchestral structure around Harper’s sweeping, intricately composed works; the other reimagines Rivers’ early open-form compositions, rooted in melody and loose changes, with a freer, more elastic approach to ensemble interplay.
“In each of his compositions, there’s a distinct personality,” Masters says of Harper. “He doesn’t write from a formula. Billy is a very melodic composer.”
Read on for an interview about how Sam Rivers 100 and Dance, Eternal Spirits, Dance! came to be, and how these two legends connect in Masters’ estimation.
Morgan Enos: How do you connect Sam Rivers and Billy Harper in your mind?
Mark Masters: They’re definitely post-Coltrane influenced tenor saxophonists. I see them coming out of that part of the jazz world, whatever you want to call it. I guess avant-garde, but that actually means what’s happening now, I think. That moniker is attached to somebody regardless of when and where.
I love them both. Sam was more of a pure, outside-the-chord-changes improviser – although he played the blues and played chord changes. I mean, like Dewey Redman. These guys could play the instrument. They didn’t rely on the free jazz thing of the late ‘50s into the ‘60s as a crutch to be in the business. They could really, really play.
Interestingly enough, Billy – while he does it and can do it significantly – is not really an outside guy like Sam was, or Dewey. He just has such a remarkable sound on his instrument. They both did.
ME: Take me through your past with Rivers and Harper, in any regard.
MM: I first became aware of Billy listening to Gil Evans records, and Thad Jones and Mel Lewis. I was immediately smitten and searched out everything that he was on. He played with all the great drummers – Elvin Jones, Art Blakey, Max Roach – and spent a lot of time with Gil, Thad Jones and Mel Lewis in New York.
Interesting little bit of trivia: Billy is probably the only person to play drums in Max Roach’s quartet.
ME: I would have never guessed!
MM: He told me a number of years ago that they were working someplace, and Max was sick and couldn’t do it. So they went on as a trio. Cecil Bridgewater would have been the trumpet player. A good friend of mine who’s a very famous bassist said, “Why is it that when you start talking about a group, nobody can remember who played bass?” I don’t remember who played bass in Max’s group, but Billy is an accomplished drummer as well.
Sam, I was aware of for a long time through recordings, and then I was running a concert series at the Claremont Colleges in Southern California. Fortunately, I was able to do musically whatever I wanted, and it was a remarkable nine years.
There was a gentleman, Ron Teeples, who was in the economics department. He had a love of this music, and he approached me at a concert, and said, “Would you like to do some concerts at Claremont McKenna College?” I said, “Well, yeah, let’s talk about it.”
So, a friendship and relationship blossomed, and we were there for nine years. I presented Andrew Cyrille, Lee Konitz, Mark Turner, Ted Brown, Gary Foster, Grachan Moncur, Dewey Redman… it was like a dream come true, and I treated every year like it was the last year this was going to happen. And, eventually, it did end. The administration got tired of us, I think, because we weren’t feathering their nest in any way.
Sam Rivers, and a lot of these guys that we presented, never came to the West Coast because the free jazz thing can be rough on people. Also, Los Angeles is a notoriously poor jazz town, how it’s so spread out.
I invited Sam to play with his working trio, which they did. It was a spectacular night, and his music has always intrigued me. So, I got to thinking that 2023 would have been Sam’s 100th birthday. We played one job with that, and then made the recording. And there you have it.
ME: Can you get into the sessions themselves?
MM: For the Sam Rivers [project], we did a rehearsal. We don’t have the luxury that they do in Europe with the state radio orchestras, where people can go over there and rehearse for a week and then play a series of concerts. We’ve got essentially three hours to make it all happen.
So we rehearsed, played a job at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on a Friday night, and went in to record the following Monday. I have this feeling it came out more like a New York record than a Los Angeles one.
ME: How did you navigate the two albums’ feels and approaches?
On Sam’s record, there are two free tracks: ensemble and small group. Then, I think there are nine of Sam’s compositions. For those, there was a melody that was taken off his Blue Note records, but no chord changes.
So, my goal was to take those melodies that Sam had improvised freely on those records from the early ‘60s, and find a way to put them in an orchestral setting while still retaining the spontaneity of what Sam did on those records. Sam’s album is loose and free orchestrally – which, as you know, we call freebop. It’s still swinging, and it’s got all the tenets of bebop, but there are no changes.
Generally, Billy’s record is totally orchestral in nature, because he’s such a brilliant composer. Even for his quintet, there are rhythmic figures that the rhythm section will play underneath the soloist. There are bass lines that are so much a part of the composition that you wouldn’t touch those in any way. They’re so brilliant, you just orchestrate them and determine how best to serve that part of the music.
So, in a nutshell, I guess Billy’s record is more orchestral in nature, and Sam’s record freer in nature.
ME: Can you get into the choice of material on both?
MM: With Billy, he’s been around so long, and his compositions are so profound, it’s really overwhelming. I just listened to everything that I had, thinking about whether I liked the tune or loved it, and crafted a record out of that.
I definitely knew which tune would be first, and where to go after that, and just moved things around so there would be a good cross section of what he does as a composer.
If there’s such a thing as a hit in the jazz world, for Billy it would be ‘Priestess’ and ‘Croquet Ballet’. I had recorded ‘Priestess’ years ago with Billy on a record, so I wasn’t necessarily going to do that again, but [I included] ‘Croquet Ballet’. For Sam, it’s ‘Beatrice’, which he wrote for his wife, and ‘Fuchsia Swing Song’.
With Sam, it was just songs that I liked – keeping in the back of my mind, How is this going to work for 50 minutes’ worth of music? There has to be some pacing to a record. They’re definitely not concept records, other than the fact it’s Billy’s music on one and Sam’s on another.
But the whole concept of shaping a record really started with Sinatra in the early ‘50s at Capitol. So, it’s not just a hodgepodge of tunes thrown together. There was some thought that went into how these tunes would work with each other and as a whole.
ME: What can younger cats learn from these two men?
MM: Adhering to their craft with longevity and honesty. There’s an enormous amount of musical dishonesty in the jazz world.
I’ve got to be careful here, because I’m trying to keep my glass half full and not half empty. But there are people in the business part of it to make a living, to have a career, to play jazz festivals. And that’s fine, but there’s not always total musical honesty.
I have a very good friend. He doesn’t play anymore. He’s in his late ‘80s. He retired; he had a fabulous career in film and television in Los Angeles, but that didn’t affect his improvising and he was a remarkable improviser.
We have lunch together, and we’ll talk about somebody, and there’s a clarinettist who’s, you know, winning DownBeat polls. I try to stay informed about what’s going on, so I listened to a couple of the records from this person. I mean, they were playing all the right scales over the chord changes and all that stuff, but there was no emotional content to what they did. I mentioned this to my friend, and he kind of looked at me over his glasses, and he said, “Oh yeah, I tried that out, but I only lasted a couple of tracks. There was nothing there.”
Do the right thing. Let’s be able to go to sleep at night with a clear conscience.
