Charette keeps expanding his horizons
Jazz organist has a ‘Groovin’ ’ new album and gigs in S.F. and San Jose
A young jazz musician looking for a career game plan could learn a lot by closely observing Brian Charette.
One of the top Hammond B-3 organists in New York City, he’s enjoyed his fair share of luck, especially in his formative years as a teenager growing up in Connecticut, when he found opportunities to play with bona fide jazz legends. A precociously talented pianist, he started working regularly at Hartford jazz spots like the 88 Club and The Blue Star, performing with heavyweights like alto saxophonist and NEA Jazz Master Lou Donaldson, tenor saxophonist Houston Person and altoist Charles McPherson.
“I had to get sharper earlier, and that started me studying music seriously,” says Charette, 46. “I was in the right place at the right time.”
What’s most illuminating about Charette isn’t his impressive credentials so much as the way he’s building a sturdy career edifice brick by brick and relationship by relationship. He’s become a regular presence on the Bay Area scene over the past five years, anchored by appearances at San Jose Jazz’s Summer Fest, performing both under his own name and with an ensemble showcasing musicians associated with the label Posi-Tone.
Charette returns for a two-night run at San Francisco’s Black Cat on Wednesday and Jan. 17 with guitarist Jeff Burr and drummer Eric Garland and plays Cafe Stritch on Jan. 19 as part of Pete Fallico’s Jazz Organ Fellowship with guitarist Hristo Vitchev and drummer Mike Shannon.
“Jeff Burr was my original guitarist in New York before he moved back to the Bay Area, and Eric is an incredible drummer,” Charette says. “Oakland drummers have this specific feel that I love, and he’s got it. The Pete Fallico show is my first time playing with Hristo, whom I’ve heard great things about from organist Pat Bianchi.”
For Charette, the Bay Area beachhead is his latest campaign where he starts “working with people and getting involved with their scene,” he says. His expanding circuit brings him to the same regions every year, like his annual trips to Los Angeles for the huge National Association of Music Merchants trade show. “That’s turned into Northern California trips, too,” he says. “So every year now, I go to places like the Czech Republic, L.A. and Madrid. I try to add a new destination every year and make relationships.”
While spreading his wings geographically, he also continues to grow creatively. His latest album, “Groovin’ With Big G” (SteepleChase), exemplifies the kind of connections that have made Charette a leading B-3 voice. The blazing trio session features veteran guitarist Vic Juris and NEA Jazz Master George Coleman on saxophone, who sounds as inventive as ever at 83.
Though he’s been a dominant tenor saxophonist for more than half a century, including a prolific run with Miles Davis in the early 1960s, Coleman hasn’t recorded much in recent decades. Charette’s album is a precious valedictory addition to the saxophonist’s unaccountably thin discography.
“Groovin’ With Big G” also marks Charette’s return to swinging post-bop after 2017’s electronicsladen “Kürrent” (Dim Mak), a “bent trio” project with Ben Monder on guitar and effects and Jordan Young on drums and beats. Marked by buzzy textures, creeping melodies and mysterious, unsettling harmonic feints, the sound is partly inspired by two ensembles with coincidentally oppositional monikers, New York keyboardist Jason Linder’s Now vs. Now and the Berkeley duo Amendola vs. Blades.
Adding a note of wonder and nostalgia, he also draws on childhood memories of listening to random shipto-shore transmissions on a transistor radio. Describing the “Kürrent” music as “Hammond B-3 meets early Weather Report,” Charette creates the bent sound by manipulating the transistor circuits of electronic effects “so that the electronics misfire. I hear these misfires as harmonies and build music around it. It’s very difficult. There’s an element of randomness. I don’t like to use it in a jarring way. I’m trying to make it sound pretty.”
He’s started including a bent piece or two in straight ahead organ combo settings, too, adding an unpredictable element to familiar situations. It’s not surprising he’s found a champion in Pete Fallico, the KCSM disc jockey, producer and tireless B-3 promoter. Charette “belongs to the newest generation of jazz organists who distinguish themselves through myriad Hammond organ applications,” Fallico says, offering the kind of praise that should serve as a beacon for aspiring musicians following in Charette’s wake.