Michael Brecker Dies at 57, the voice of the modern saxophone

If you've never checked out Brecker's early recordings, now would be a good time.

When I first heard Brecker in high school I was pretty much captivated. He had such a highly developed personal style and sound. Even though his playing was based in Trane, he had an ability to personalize everything that he borrowed. I got my hands on everything that I could find with him on it and listened with wonder at the complex lines he effortlessly wove. There's always a period when you first discover a great player when they can do no wrong and you see only genius in their playing, it's like the honeymoon period. For me it lasted several years until I got to Berklee where everyone was trying to sound like Brecker. Before then it was like he was my personal discovery, only I knew about the magic lines he played.

My roommate at school was a Swedish flutist named Anders Bostrom who sounded very Becker influenced, he had really studied Brecker's harmonic concept and could play many choruses on Brecker solos. Brecker came to school that year to do a clinic and play a concert. I sat with Anders in the balcony at the concert. Every single line Brecker played that evening Anders was able to tell me what record it was off of. These lines weren't just short licks, they were entire phrases of music. I heard it then for the first time. Brecker was more of a composer than an improviser! Everything he played was carefully worked out before hand, he wasn't just letting the creative flow take over, he was copping his own shit. I was crushed and very disillusioned, I felt like I had been duped. All those freaked out complex lines were pre-composed, not improvised!! What a sham, what a rip off!!! I had never even considered that anyone would have the gall to do something like that, except maybe a Japanese high schooler. I couldn't listen to any Brecker for a long time after that evening, it was just smoke and mirrors to me, not real living creative improvisation. I vowed not to ever take that approach with my playing. I started to see just how many players approached music like Brecker did, more as composers than improvisers.

It seemed like a cop out to me, a trick to fool the audience into thinking that you just invented something that you actually had worked out very carefully. Pure crowd pleasing. I wondered if Brecker took this approach because of all the time he spent as a studio musician, having to play perfectly on the first take. Maybe it was just the way is mind worked, was he just not a creative guy in the first place? He still sounded great on recordings though. Maybe he was more methodical than I liked, but he played some pretty cool shit. To me he represents a kind of extreme, the rational pole of Jazz improvisation. Every note has a function and reason, every line fits every chord change. Brecker is the anti-christ to the savior of Ornette. Both are needed
for evolution to take place. Both poles are part of the same scale of creativity. I know that my views won't be popular with those Brecker-heads out there that are now mourning the passing of their savior. I do appreciate what he gave to the modern saxophone, in a way he was the modern saxophonist of our time. I don't need to take his approach to appreciate him, I can even steal some of his lines and harmonic techniques without feeling guilty.

It's interesting to listen to some of Brecker's earliest Jazz recordings, they are some of my favorites and they are also some of the rawest. You can hear more of the direct influence of his peers like Berg, Grossman and Liebman. There is a more authentic emotional passion in his sound, not the calculated and controlled emotional affectation of his later years. My all-time favorite Brecker recording are the two records he did with Hal Galper's quintet in the late 70's- Speak with a Single Voice and Reach Out. If you like Brecker you owe it to yourself to hear these two CDs.

Again, I'm only writing about my experience of Brecker's music. It's all a matter of taste. I can't say that he didn't have an effect on my development as a saxophonist, he did. He was the voice of Post-bop tenor saxophone. His playing influenced just about every moden saxophonist and will continue to do so for a long time.


Michael Brecker Dies at 57; Prolific Jazz Saxophonist

By BEN RATLIFF

Published: January 14, 2007
New York Times

Michael Brecker, a saxophonist who won 11 Grammy Awards and was among the most influential musicians in jazz since the 1960s, died yesterday at a hospital in New York City. He was 57 and lived in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y.

The cause of death was leukemia, said Darryl Pitt, his manager.

Having taken a deep understanding of John Coltrane’s saxophone vocabulary and applied it to music that merged with mainstream culture — particularly jazz fusion and singer-songwriter pop of the 1970s and 80s — Mr. Brecker spread his sound all over the world.

For a time, Mr. Brecker seemed nearly ubiquitous. His discography — it contains more than 900 albums — started in 1969, playing on the record “Score,” with a band led by his brother, the trumpeter Randy Brecker. It continued in 1970 with an album by Dreams, the jazz-rock band he led with his brother and the drummer Billy Cobham.

His long list of sideman work from then on wended through hundreds more records, including those by Frank Zappa, Aerosmith, James Brown, Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell, Lou Reed, Funkadelic, Steely Dan, John Lennon, Elton John, and James Taylor, as well as (on the jazz side) Chick Corea, Pat Metheny, Gonzalo Rubalcaba, and Papo Vasquez. His 11 Grammys included two for “Wide Angles,” his ambitious last album, released in 2003 with a fifteen-piece band he called the Quindectet.

His highest achievements were his own albums, both under his own name (starting in 1986) and with the Brecker Brothers band, as well as his early 80s work with the group Steps Ahead. Mr. Brecker was scheduled to tour with a reunited version of Steps Ahead in the summer of 2005 when his condition was publicly announced — initially as myelodysplastic syndrome, a bone-marrow disorder, which finally progressed to leukemia — and much of his work had to stop.

Mr. Brecker grew up in a musical family in Philadelphia; his father was a lawyer who played jazz piano. He started playing the clarinet at the age 6, switched to alto saxophone in the eighth grade, and finally settled on tenor saxophone in the tenth. He started to attend Indiana University — as did his brother Randy. After initially pursuing a music degree and then briefly switching to pre-med, he quickly discovered he preferred to be playing music. He left for New York at 19.

For most of the 1970s and through the mid-80s he worked hard in studio sessions, becoming a fixture on albums by the Southern California pop singer-songwriter movement, including those by Jackson Browne and Joni Mitchell. But for hard-core jazz enthusiasts, it was his work of the early 80s — on Steps Ahead’s first two albums, when the band was simply called Steps — as well as Chick Corea’s “Three Quartets,” from 1981, and Pat Metheny’s “80/81,” from 1980, that cemented his reputation as a great player.

His tone was strong and focused, and some of his recognizable language echoed Coltrane’s sound. But having worked in pop, where a solo must be strong and to the point, Mr. Brecker was above all a condenser of exciting devices into short spaces. He could fold the full pitch range of the horn into a short solo, from altissimo to the lowest notes, and connect rarefied ideas to the rich, soulful phrasing of saxophonists like Junior Walker.

In the 1980s and 1990s he experimented with the electronic wind instrument called the EWI, which allowed him to blow through an electronic hornlike device, play a range of sampled sounds, and multitrack them in real time. He began experimenting with the instrument again in the last few years.

With the onset of his illness, he and his family called for bone-marrow donors at international jazz festivals, synagogues, and Jewish community centers around America; tens of thousands responded. Working sporadically over the last year, he managed to complete his final album two weeks ago, Mr. Pitt said.

He is survived by his wife, Susan, of Hastings-on-Hudson; his children, Jessica and Sam, of Hastings-on-Hudson; his brother, Randy, of Manhattan; and his sister, Emily Brecker Greenberg, of Philadelphia.