Sax legend Charles McPherson ready to wow San Jose Jazz Winter Fest.
He’ll take the stage at Cafe Stritch during San Jose Jazz Winter Fest
Conversations with alto saxophone master Charles McPherson often turn to the nature of time. The way that jazz musicians feel the music’s pulse can be as much a signature of their sound as their tone, but given McPherson’s philosophical bent he’s interested in more than the metrics of music.
Best known for his intermittent 12-year run with bass legend Charles Mingus, McPherson is one of jazz’s most commanding altoists. Given his undiminished improvisational prowess and his wide-ranging intellect it’s not surprising that younger musicians often seek him out for mentorship.
Pianist Ethan Iverson, late of the Bad Plus, makes a point of looking up the San Diego-based saxophonist for a lesson when he’s in the Southland. A few years ago he posted a fascinating discussion about time with McPherson on his popular blog Do the Math, a topic that came up in a recent phone conversation.
“When it comes to music I think of time as a point of reference, but it’s something you can play with,” said McPherson, 79, who performs at Cafe Stritch Feb. 27 as part of San Jose Jazz Winter Fest. “You can ride with it, or play against it and use it as a counterpoint. What are you thinking when you’re committing to the beat? What are you thinking between the beats when you’re not committing? What is the emotion in that space? Are you just waiting? I think that space influences the next beat.”
It’s easy to see why fellow musicians are drawn to McPherson’s heady approach to, well, life. San Diego-raised pianist Rob Schneiderman, who spent two decades as a top New York accompanist for jazz giants like Chet Baker, J.J. Johnson and James Moody, credits his early conversations with McPherson about Einstein’s theory of relativity with setting him on a path that eventually resulted in a Ph.D. in mathematics from UC Berkeley (he’s now an associate professor of mathematics at City University of New York’s Lehman College).
But the saxophonist’s ideas wouldn’t carry nearly as much currency if he didn’t deliver on the bandstand. Pianist Jeb Patton, who performs with McPherson at Cafe Stritch and March 3 at Bach Dancing and Dynamite Society in Half Moon Bay, was a member of drummer Winard Harper’s hard-charging band about a dozen years ago when he first got the call to work with the saxophonist.
He’d played with some veteran masters, but nothing quite prepared Patton for McPherson’s searing velocity and unbridled emotional intensity. “He’s got such incredible force, and you really feel it on the bandstand,” Patton said. “He’s an amazing improviser. Charles has this never-ending reservoir of ideas. He can overwhelm you as a musician. A couple of times I was working with him and Tom Harrell and there was just an incredible meeting of the minds.”
While often pigeonholed as a bebop acolyte, McPherson is an artist who has never stopped evolving and responding to the musicians around him. “It starts with bebop and it’s kind of limitless,” Patton said. “I remember him asking me about finding a drummer, and he wasn’t looking for someone who played in the bebop style. Charles is not in a box or a time period.”
For the Stritch and Bach dates, McPherson is working with Los Angeles bassist Jeff Littleton and New York drummer Billy Drummond, a first-call New York cat who’s played on more than 300 albums. Dividing his time between a professorship at Juilliard and touring with NEA Jazz Masters like Carla Bley and Sheila Jordan, Drummond is making his first appearances with McPherson outside New York.
Based in San Diego since 1978, McPherson hasn’t languished living outside jazz’s major markets. One of his primary creative outlets in recent years has been composing scores for the San Diego Ballet, where his daughter Camille is a principal ballerina.
He’s reveled in the opportunity to write for dance, where he’s “very aware of having an emotional narrative, a story that’s giving birth to some of the notes. Sometimes the choreographer says you write and I’ll do movements, but I still start with the idea of an emotional tone.”
With his 80th birthday approaching on July 24, McPherson can’t avoid the topic of time, with Jazz at Lincoln Center celebrating him at a concert in early April. Still, 80 doesn’t mean what it used to, not with players like Roy Haynes, 93, Jimmy Heath, 92, and recently minted nonagenarians Benny Golson and Sheila Jordan still running around and performing.
“They were heroes of mine growing up, and I was the young boy on the scene,” McPherson said. “I’m feeling like I’m still the kid.”