Artist Interview by: Norm Breest
Communication is important to guitarist Jeff Golub. He says, sometimes the communication is just a glance or an unspoken acknowledgement on a subway train, while in line at a newsstand or as you brush past someone at a corner grocery. Before he got married, he says, my old life was great. I loved being a bachelor. I loved meeting my wife, falling in love and getting married and now having kids. It's just like a new experience in life and it's great. I like to keep things changing, if possible, and trying to get the most out of life while I'm here and so far it's been worth it.
One way to communicate with his fans is by Golub coming out after a concert to talk with them. He says, egos are in check fairly well. Everybody needs to have and ego and a little ego is good to get you motivated and out doing things and expressing yourself. Very few people seem to thing that they're above anybody else. We're all just trying to get along and have some fun. Everybody's very appreciative that there's an audience to listen to us play.
Through out his early career, Jeff Golub was a backup musician for various performers, just like other smooth jazz artists. He says, so many of us were sidemen to rock stars and pop stars before going off to being instrumentalists in the smooth jazz genre. I think sort of seeing just how silly that world can be, I don't really want to try to recreate that. Billy Squire I was with for years from '81 to '84 I toured with him and I played on all of his records. That continued on for a while after I left the touring end. From '88 to '95, I played with Rod Stewart, which was a great experience. We wrote a lot of songs together and definitely played a lot of shows and recorded a lot of records. That was fun.
Golub says it is different performing for himself than when he was performing with Squire and Stewart. He says, people sometimes ask me do I miss playing stadiums and coliseums. With Rod Stewart, it was like 30,000 people a night. I don't miss it at all. It means like nothing to me because I done it so many times that I don't have any aspirations for that. It was just a lot of people in a room that didn't sound very good.
Jeff Golub feels that he is now doing what he wants to do. He says, now I get to play to an audience that is really, really cares about the music and is really listening. I'm able to be myself and people are I think there in general for the music. I don't think it's as much hype involved in this kind of music. I think people who come to see these shows really, really want to feel what that's about. They're not going because somebody's a sex symbol or whatever. It's to feel the emotion that someone is making out of their instrument.
Golub is communicating New York in his latest CD Grand Central. He says, Part of being a New Yorker is that you're in a state of constant communication with people. 'Grand Central' is a word that people associate with New York, so it kind of made sense to name the record that. I embrace living in New York City and I think 'Grand Central' has got in real New York vibe to it.
Not only did Jeff Golub communicate New York through the songs on Grand Central, he wanted the people who performed on the CD to have that same New York feeling. He says, I wanted this album to capture the constant communication between musicians. I went into the studio with a lot of guys that I play around New York with some other New Yorkers. We do a lot of sort of commando-style playing in New York. Everybody does, everyone who lives here, which is what I love about it. The musicians kind of get together and do unadvertised gigs quite often. Busmen's holidays I guess they call that, where they just kind of go out and play for the fun of it without a whole lot of preparation and just kind of wing it. This is one of the groups of people that I think really excel at that and I wanted to capture it on tape.
Golub says doing a CD about New York is a natural. He say, New York is still the center for jazz in the world. It has been for the last hundred years and it still is. There's a lot going on in the clubs and there's a lot of people who come down to the clubs and come out and see people. You don't want people leaving and saying, 'Oh man, he's playing it safe.' Everybody's got to take risks and show who they are.
Jeff Golub says it's hard to define what jazz is. He says, to me, jazz has to be improvised. There has to be some level of improvisation in it to make it jazz. For me personally, what I enjoy about jazz is the interaction between the musicians and the improvised interaction. So I like to go in with a band and cut the tracks live, which aren't always the case in today's recording situation. Whenever I can, I do that to try and get the interaction of the guys, the sometimes overt dialogue as well as the subtile exchanges. You definitely hear that on this record because I would tell the band this isn't just about me, about you guys playing backing tracks and me soloing. This is about everybody taking a journey together and let's see where we end up.
One of the tracks on Golub's Grand Central came about in a very unusual way. He says, I wrote the song with trumpeter Rick Braun, who I have written a lot of stuff with. He's probably my best friend and whenever we can collaborate it's an enjoyable experience. There was a Dentyne commercial when I was a kid that showed two brothers sitting on the steps to an apartment. It looked like a street in Brooklyn. The older brother was about 16 or 17 and the younger brother around 10 or 11. The younger brother asked the older brother, 'Hey man, how do you chew that Dentyne gum? What's so important about fresh breath?' And he says, 'You'll find out about that in a couple of years' and right then a really foxy girl walks by and he throws a piece of Dentyne in his mouth and he says, 'Hello Betty!'
Jeff Golub says that Cadbury Adams, the company that makes Dentyne, will be profiting from Hello, Betty. He says, they're going to be getting free commercials out of me telling about that title. After that, amungst my friends and I, that became sort of an inside term for a good looking woman. I just thought it was a fun loving tune. That's the kind of the vibe of the song to me is a fun loving, good time kind of thing. I think that title fits it.
Jeff Golub communicates himself and New York on Grand Central. He will be continuing to communicate with his listeners this summer when he performs again on the Guitars and Saxes tour, which will also feature sax men Kurt Whalum and Gerald Albright and guitarist Tim Bowman. He shows his New York State of Mind in all he does.