Reunion for Burton as the vibraphone master jams with ex-Berklee star pupil Smith

Published on Tuesday 8 September 2009 19:10

BACK in 1985, at Boston's Berklee School of Music, the newly appointed dean of curriculum, Gary Burton – who was already established as a ground-breaking jazz vibraphone player and fusion pioneer – had a promising 18-year-old saxophonist pointed out to him by the pianist Chick Corea.

"Chick turned to me and said, 'This young sax player, you should have him in your band'," Burton recalls from his home in Florida. "And the more I heard Tommy, the more I agreed."

For the student in question was indeed Edinburgh's Tommy Smith, now a leading player, composer and educator – and, in a nice irony, the recently appointed head of Scotland's first full-time conservatoire-level jazz course at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. Back then he was a powerful emerging talent, and Burton invited him to join his group. Smith never looked back, and later this week returns the compliment as Burton joins the powerhouse that is the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra, under Smith's direction, to play the music of another contemporary jazz figurehead, Wayne Shorter.

Burton's virtuoso four-mallet vibes style isn't normally to be heard within the ranks of a big band, nor has he previously approached the music of Shorter, a seminal figure whose reed work and compositions were an integral element within Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, Miles Davis's powerful 1960s quintet, and the fusion band Weather Report.

"I feel like I know a lot of Wayne's songs," says Burton, now 66, "but I've never actually played them myself. He is a very different kind of composer, and I've been saying for years that one of these days I've got to sit down with a lot of Wayne's tunes and really get into them.

"So when Tommy said to me, 'How would you feel about playing Wayne Shorter's music?' I jumped at the chance."

As an internationally renowned soloist as well as collaborator with such luminaries as Corea, Larry Coryell, Pat Metheny and Dave Holland, Burton tends to be associated with minimal musical forces, such as his creative duetting Corea or his long-time pianist Makoto Ozone. "I play in small groups 99 per cent of the time. A year ago I did a guest project with the WDR Big Band in Germany, but it's not something I do frequently, and it's always a new experience for me.

"The vibraphone is one of those instruments that has no counterpart in the rest of the orchestra, so you end up being a sort of solo instrument out front."

So does Burton – who has been reviving his quartet with guitarist Pat Metheny and recently returned from a tango safari in Argentina – find the SNJO tour a daunting prospect? "Not so much that, as the fact that, once I arrive, I have just one day to rehearse before the first concert," he replies. "I've been looking over the music, though, and only one of them looks… how should I describe it, extra challenging."

Many of the tunes he and the SNJO will be tackling are from Shorter's Miles Davis period, such as Speak No Evil, Nefertiti and ESP, with Smith commissioning an arrangement for each from a different jazz composer, including Mike Gibbs, Fred Sturm, and another vibes ace, Joe Locke, who guested on last year's Exploration album by the SNJO's feeder band, the Tommy Smith Youth Jazz Orchestra.

As the mercurial shimmer of Burton's vibes meets the muscular but limber forces of the big band in such distinctive repertoire, "extra-challenging" it may be, but also, one suspects, extra-rewarding listening as a matter of course.

&149 The SNJO with Gary Burton appear at the Byre Theatre, St Andrews, tomorrow; Queen's Hall, Edinburgh, on Friday; RSAMD, Glasgow, on Saturday; and MacRobert centre, Stirling, on Sunday. For more details, log on to: www.snjo.co.uk