Al Jarreau gig to raise money for HSPVA scholarship
More than 20 years ago, Chris Walker and his girlfriend watched Al Jarreau sing at the Arena Theatre.
Walker — a 1986 graduate of Houston’s High School for the Performing and Visual Arts — had already enjoyed some success as a recording artist, including a Top 40 pop hit, “Take Time.” And as a bassist, he’d played and recorded with the late jazz legend Ornette Coleman.
Watching Jarreau, Walker saw yet another possible future.
“I told her — she’s my wife now — that if I could play with anybody in the world, it would be that man,” he says. Soon afterward, Gil Goldstein, Walker’s old teacher and mentor at the New School in New York, got him an audition with Jarreau, who was looking for a bassist.
“Al put the music on the stand, counted it off, and 20 years later here I am,” Walker says.
His long tenure with Jarreau has been more than a dream job realized. It also has been advantageous for fans of the jazz and pop singer here in Houston: Walker has brought his boss to his hometown a few times for master classes, tree lightings and performances.
This weekend, Jarreau will perform at the High School for Performing and Visual Arts’ Denney Theatre. He’ll also hold a master class at HSPVA at noon Thursday. Later in the day, he’ll be inducted into the KTSU Jazz Hall of Fame, where the Wisconsin native will join Houston jazz greats
including Joe Sample, Conrad Johnson, Hubert Laws, Wayne Henderson and Robert “Doc” Morgan, who for years helmed the jazz program at HSPVA.
Morgan retired in 1999 but has remained close with the school, due in no small part to former students such as Walker, who have gone on to successful music careers. Walker started an annual concert, DocFest, to honor Morgan and raise money for the Helen and Bob Morgan Jazz Scholarship at the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music. (A number of Morgan’s former students, including Robert Glasper, Reggie Quinerly and Jamire Williams, went on to study at the New School.) Alan Hampton, a distinguished singer and bassist, was the first recipient of the scholarship in 2000.
Morgan and Walker have the easy conversational way of a father and son. When Walker describes a recording session with Daniel Jobim, son of the legendary Antônio Carlos Jobim, Morgan slips into a story about playing a wedding in the 1960s. Morgan showed up for the gig not knowing that his ensemble was the warmup act for Count Basie, who’d been hired to play the event. The bride, like many others at the time, loved Jobim’s standard “The Girl From Ipanema,” which Morgan dutifully played repeatedly at her request.
When Basie’s turn to play came, she requested it of him, too.
“I don’t know how much you know about Count Basie,” Morgan says, “but he was a very taciturn man.”
Basie eventually tried to play the song, though he struggled with the bridge.
“I went to his manager and offered to show him the one chord he needed,” Morgan says. “He said, ‘Oh, no no no no. Don’t do that, please.’”
Unlike Basie, Jarreau is very much not a taciturn man. At 76, he’s sung all sorts of music, though his roots were in jazz. He steered toward pop and R&B and enjoyed enormous success in the process. But Jarreau has always kept jazz close, as evidenced by his brilliant 2004 album “Accentuate the Positive.”
For the show here, he’ll be backed by a trio — Walker, fellow HSPVA alum and drummer Mark Simmons and pianist Joe Turano.
“He loves Doc,” Walker says, “so this is a gig he agreed to do without hesitation.”