SNJO and Peter Erskine blow the house down

IT IS 1978, and in Tokyo, a press conference is convened by the mighty jazz-rock fusion entity known as Weather Report. The band has just gone through one of its frequent personnel changes, and its core of keyboard alchemist Joe Zawinul and saxophonist Wayne Shorter, by this time accompanied by the great if ill-starred electric bass guitarist Jaco Pastorius, has taken on a new, young drummer, Peter Erskine, who previously served in the rather different-sounding ranks of Stan Kenton’s and Maynard Ferguson’s big bands.

“There was quite a lot of scepticism at the time,” Erskine, now 57, recalls from his home in southern California, “with people wondering, ‘What’s this guy doing with them?’”

At that press conference, a journalist turned to Erskine, still in his early twenties, and demanded rather pointedly how his Kenton-Ferguson credentials qualified him to play in Weather Report. “I was thinking, ‘Well, thanks a lot,’ and started to give an answer, but Zawinul waves me off and grabs the microphone and says, ‘Weather Report is a big band. It’s also a small group. Next question.”’

Despite its cutting-edge synthesizer textures, extended improvisation, funk grooves and Zawinul’s electronic conjuring of “all the sounds the world makes”, the music of Weather Report is perfectly suited to a big band, Erskine continues, “Because Zawinul and Shorter were both real creatures of the music of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington.”

Weather Report may have been a small band that packed a big punch, but as the Zawinul’s later collaborations with the WDR Big Band demonstrated, such trademark Weather Report compositions as Night Passage and Boogie-Woogie Waltz do thunderously well when arranged for large-scale forces. Erskine is consequently enthusiastic at the prospect of the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra, now established as an outfit of international stature, getting to grips with such Weather Report classics as Elegant People and Birdland (originally written, says the drummer, as a tribute to the great jazz big bands).

He is also excited by the arrangements the SNJO’s director, saxophonist Tommy Smith, has commissioned from such established jazz composers as multiple Grammy-winners Bob Mintzer and Vince Mendoza for the orchestra’s four-gig tour with Erskine, starting in Dundee on 24 February. “Tommy’s commissioned a whole concert’s worth of new arrangements, with the exception of one – Mendoza’s Night Passage, which has been played before. Everything else is brand new and it’s fantastic. I can’t wait to get my hands on this stuff.”

To the ranks of the SNJO Smith has also enlisted the Hamburg-based Argentine percussionist Marcia Doctor, while the mercurial electric bass work pioneered by the late Pastorius will be taken up by the young electric bass guitarist Kevin Glasgow, who has guested with the SNJO before, as well as playing in Smith’s own Karma band.

Asked to what extent the orchestra will sound like Weather Report or simply capture the spirit of the group – which finally disbanded in 1986 – Erskine stresses: “We’re not trying to do a soundalike.

“When you get writers like Geoff Keezer or Bill Dobbins or Tim Hagans, Mintzer and Mendoza … they can’t help but put themselves into this creative mix. For example, the Jaco Pastorius song Teen Town has always been played … well, energetically, but Geoff’s written it to feature the drums playing brushes, which will open up all sorts of other interpretive possibilities. That takes a tune not only into the new, but into another dimension.”

Interdimensional tripping, one might say, was par for the course with Weather Report, with whom Erskine played for four years. Since then he has become a byword for cross-genre drum expertise, playing with Steely Dan, Joni Mitchell and Kate Bush as well as such jazz luminaries as John Abercrombie, the Brecker brothers and Gary Burton.

Quite apart from his name, Erskine is no stranger to Scotland, having collaborated with classical percussion stars Evelyn Glennie and Colin Currie and toured in the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s collaboration with guitarist John Schofield, Scorched, composed by Mark-Anthony Turnage.

Based in Santa Monica, he is a professor of music at the University of Southern California and continues to compose and play, among other things powering trios with pianist Alan Pasqua – whose wide-ranging CV rivals his own – and the rising young Armenian-born pianist and composer Vardan Ovsepian.

He remains happy, however, to recall his time with Weather Report. “Being invited to play with the band and be around such incredible personalities as Zawinul and Shorter and Pastorius made me one lucky young drummer. The lessons I learned back then still inform a great deal of the musical choices I make today.”

• The SNJO and Peter Erskine play the Caird Hall, Dundee, on 23 February, the Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh on 24 February, the Royal Conservatoire, Glasgow, on 25 February and the MacRobert Centre, Stirling, on 26 February. For further information, see www.snjo.co.uk