Artist Interview by: Gerard W. O'Brien
August 2005 - I recently spoke with vocalist Tierney Sutton, who has just released her seventh CD and her first live recording. This album consists of twelve standards, beautifully interpreted by Tierney and her group, which includes Christian Jacob on piano, Trey Henry on bass, Kevin Axt on bass and Ray Brinker on drums.
The CD is entitled “I’M WITH THE BAND,” exemplifies just how well a live recording can capture a band’s unique sound, if it’s made correctly.
Tierney was enthusiastic in sharing her philosophy about being in a band, which she says, “Is the Best in the World,” playing classic jazz and making her own music.
Jazz Review: Yesterday I received your new album “I’M WITH THE BAND” and that is certainly not a dead spot. It’s a really nice album. Really good music.
Tierney Sutton: Well, thank you.
Jazz Review: I like the choice of composers that you used.
Tierney Sutton: Yeah, well a good song is the start of all of it.
Jazz Review: And I was just wondering, this was recorded at Birdland?
Tierney Sutton: Right. It was recorded live.
JazzReview: And I saw you at Founder’s Hall in Costa Mesa.
Tierney Sutton: Oh, yeah.
JazzReview: That crowd seemed much more lively, were they told at Birdland to…
Tierney Sutton: They certainly were.
JazzReview: They were. Okay
Tierney Sutton: Because, in terms… There were a couple of reasons for that. Everything on this album is something that isn’t on any other record. So one thing is we requested that people not clap for solos and wait just a little bit before applause after performances. That way when we were editing the record we could choose whether we wanted applause or not.
JazzReview: Okay.
Tierney Sutton: There were a couple of reasons for that, but one reason was, I think when you want to listen to an album over and over again, if there is loud applause after every song, it’s kind of cumbersome. In terms of some of the songs if they were really barn burner songs, you have to have the applause afterwards because there is sort of an energy payback that happens. But our arrangements are really complex and we listen to each other so hard in the transitions when one of us …say if I stop singing and Christian is going into a solo or vice versa, those transitions are really important to us. We wanted that to be not covered up in any way on the record.
JazzReview: Having only begun going to jazz concerts in the last five or six years and having been predominantly a rock and roll listener before that, I noticed in rock concerts that people sort of scream from the time they get out of the car until they go home. With jazz concerts in small venues, I wonder why people start clapping right over the bass solo.
Tierney Sutton: Well, Christian comes from a Classical background originally and all of the other guys have played every kind of music known to man. We’ve talked about this and we’re not huge fans of people clapping after solos. When we’re listening to music, we want to hear how the musicians are interacting and the interacting is the main thing for us. The main goal is to interact in an artistic noble creative way and if people are clapping we can’t hear each other the same way. Those transitions are important to us, so we did say something to the audience. They were actually a very enthusiastic audience but we had to put a little bit of a lid on them, so that the recording would stand.
JazzReview: Okay. Yes. That’s one of the weak points of a lot of recordings, live recorded albums, is that you miss so much of the music by listening to the people whistling and doing crazy stuff.
Tierney Sutton: Right. I kind of … apparently there is a certain amount of prejudice in the media about reviewing and taking seriously live records, and so we didn’t want to have “live” on the cover of this record because we wanted it to be heard by as many people as possible. And so, we made a conscious decision to have no applause on the first few songs on this CD, so that by the time that they know for sure that it’s live they’ve already heard a bunch of what we do and they can’t dismiss it. That was kind of my thinking on that issue. I think that the rhythm, I haven’t listened to the final record very many times; I think I listened to it once through. You know when you make a record, you listen to it so many times for the purpose of choosing takes and all that stuff, that I just put it down for the last month and a half. So I listened to it once and I thought it sounded good. I haven’t really listened to the pacing of it. We tried to basically pace it just like our shows. You know, in terms of tempos and all of that.
JazzReview: You have quite a band; actually I just interviewed a percussionist named Brad Dutz.
Tierney Sutton: Oh yeah, sure.
JazzReview: Brad was telling me he played with Ray and Trey. I was looking at some of Brad’s albums and I saw both of them listed in the credits. How did you put together this remarkable band?
Tierney Sutton: That’s a great question and it makes me like you right away, because there is a reason I wanted to call a record “I’M WITH THE BAND.” Being the singer and being this sort of front person, for lack of a better word, people often think because it usually is this way, that it’s the singer’s thing. And she tells the instrumentalist what to do or maybe there is one musical director who writes the arrangements and everyone else plays them. Our process is entirely different from that. We have a real band. It’s a consultative process that we’ve developed over twelve years working together. This is our sixth, seventh CD together because Christian did a CD that I did a few guest vocals on, too. We have been playing together for so long and everything we play is all of us. There isn’t one arrangement that we do that one guy doesn’t like or had a part in creating.
What people are hearing is our group process. They’re not hearing my arrangement that the guys are playing or Christian’s arrangement that the rest of us are playing, or Trey’s arrangement. Everyone has a role and a sort of veto power, so that they can say “That isn’t working for me, the bridge on that song doesn’t feel right to me, so let’s talk about that.”
Everything on the CD went through this rigorous, sometimes several years long process, about playing things, seeing how they work, analyzing at breakfast the day after the gig, rehearsing, choosing material, thinking of things that have been done eighteen million times that we didn’t want to do the same way. Say the Nat Cole Trio did a song well. We didn’t want to recreate that, so our goal is really to be a collaborative group and to create something that is original.
JazzReview: Now you are primarily a West Coast Band?
Tierney Sutton: Well, we work a lot more on the East Coast than we work on the West Coast, although we do work a lot on the West Coast. We work in San Francisco and Seattle and then we spend a lot of time in New York and Boston, and Washington DC and Florida. The irony is that we are based on the West Coast, but our touring is mostly out of town.
JazzReview: Have you done any European tours?
Tierney Sutton: We’ve done some touring in Europe. We did a pretty extensive tour in Europe a couple of years ago. We did Germany, Switzerland and Austria and we also played in France and Spain last year. We haven’t done as much touring in Europe as we would like to and we are working on a tour of Japan right now.
JazzReview: Well that sounds like fun. Jazz is doing very well in Japan.
Tierney Sutton: You know it is and I have a lot of friends who have toured extensively in Japan and who feel that the band would be very well received. We are working hard to get there.
JazzReview: I first heard you when I had the opportunity to see you at Founder’s Hall. Then you played at the Cerritos Center. I thought that this was a brand new band.
Tierney Sutton: That would be incorrect.
JazzReview: Yes it’s a very funny thing, by the time you become publicly recognized and are thought of as a new band you have seven albums and twelve years of collaboration:
Tierney Sutton: Right. Right.
JazzReview: What did you do before you had this band?
Tierney Sutton: Well, I got really serious about singing, about twelve years ago when I moved from Boston to Los Angeles. I had dabbled and done a few gigs, went briefly to school and studied with a great saxophone player named Jerry Bergonzi, privately for several years. I knew I had to either move to New York or LA. I was planning to move to New York, but I came to LA to become part of a vocal group that was being put together, just sort of testing it to see what the situation was.
While I was in town, I went to hear Jack Sheldon’s Big Band and the trio I have been with for twelve years was playing with Jack’s band. I knew of Christian because he had just moved from Boston. I had never worked with him, but he was pretty much the most respected pianist in Boston when we were both there. Ray and Trey were just unbelievable. We immediately had a rapport, musically, and started working together back then. We have been working together ever since.
JazzReview: When you were back in Boston, did you have any connection with Berklee or NEC?
Tierney Sutton: I went to Berklee for about a semester and a half and then dropped out and studied privately with Jerry Bergonzi, who teaches at the Conservatory, but I didn’t go to the Conservatory. I was a private student of his.
JazzReview: You’ve been out here twelve years, you've recorded seven CDs and on this album, you recorded all standards. Are you writing a lot of your own stuff?
Tierney Sutton: We are working on that. Christian has been composing for many years. On his last CD he wrote a couple of originals, but they didn’t have lyrics so I didn’t sing those. I sang some Jule Styne songs, because his CD was part his originals and part the work of Jule Styne. I really want to write and we are working hard on that. It’s very hard when you have been singing and playing great American Songbook stuff for all these years to for me to feel that what we have is going to stand up next to Irving Berlin, Rogers and Hammerstein or Roger’s and Hart. It’s really a tough task and I think we all have the sense that it has to be able to stand there. We’ve dabbled in writing and I think the next CD will have some originals on it. One way or the other we’re going to make it happen.
JazzReview: With the bar set so high, when you write things, how do you make the determination that this one is going to stand?
Tierney Sutton: Well it hasn’t happened yet, so I think we will know when we have it. I think it will go through the same process that our arrangements go through in that we will perform it, we’ll rehearse it, we’ll play it, we’ll craft it, we’ll take it out for a spin, we’ll see how it feels in the set...and if it lives it lives and if it dies it dies. We have dozens of arrangements that we’ve done over the years. We have over one hundred things that are on CDs that we commonly play and that we have done together. But there are probably fifty others that we have put together at one time or another and played for a little while and that faded away. They just didn’t stand the test of time for us. I would imagine it will be the same with our originals, only more of them will die. We’ve already had a few that we’ve tried and they came along. The other thing is we have to get into a mind set of respecting our own stuff as much as we respect the standards, and probably we have to be more patient with them.
JazzReview: I would think, because I see second or third CDs come out by new artists and it is entirely original compositions. I assume they are serious musicians and feel very comfortable with that. Looking at your band, each of these guys have been playing for what, twenty five years?
Tierney Sutton: Yeah. I say on the liner notes that they are the best in the world and I find it very easy to stand by that statement. Everywhere we go, a chunk of our audience are instrumentalists that play those instruments and want to study what they’re doing. They come up to the guys after the set. I can tell by where they sit in the room and who they’re staring at, what they play. Our records have been used in jazz study programs and the students come to our shows and take notes. I see them camped out in front of Ray, taking in everything he does and making notes.
JazzReview: He is a dynamic drummer. Where I was sitting at Founder’s Hall I was probably ten feet away slightly behind him, so I was watching from behind. He gets a good work out.
Tierney Sutton: He does and yes he is such a musician. I am sure from where you were sitting you heard everything that was going on.
JazzReview: That’s true.
Tierney Sutton: Ninety-nine per cent of the drummers in the world, if you sat that close to them, the rest of us would have been some kind of distant sonic event. All of us have this aesthetic that we are there to serve the whole. I think that is a subtlety that is hard to create if you don’t have people who are very experienced. There are a lot of incredibly dynamic, great virtuosic young players, but it is hard for them not to play everything they can play in every song. Ray has that restraint that is something to watch. It’s a more intense workout to be restrained than it is to play all the way out.
JazzReview: He knows what tools he is going to use instead of just using everything that he’s got.
Tierney Sutton: Yeah, he is incredibly disciplined. And you can tell by watching how his body is and when he’s playing, it’s really incredible. It’s been really great for me to see how, after any given concert, people get so hooked into all of them. In most vocal shows, the singer is so much the focus. Every once in a while there is a nice solo that somebody kind of half notices. Our aesthetic is a little different than that. We really want people to experience the interaction.
JazzReview: What are the immediate/future plans?
Tierney Sutton: We’re getting ready for a pretty extensive tour on behalf of the record. That will start at the end of August. We're going to New York and will be at Birdland for four nights. Then we will be off for a little while. Then we have an extensive tour all over the east coast and also we’re doing the San Francisco Jazz Festival at the Great American Music Hall.
JazzReview: And when is that?
Tierney Sutton: I think that’s in October, but I don’t know the exact dates. And we will be at Catalina’s [Los Angeles] also in October before the San Francisco Date. So we will be doing quite a bit in touring the record.
JazzReview: After that are you beginning to think about another studio CD?
Tierney Sutton: Yeah, we’ve already been thinking about it. I mean I already have copious notes on songs I want to work on and original ideas. We’ve already started that process. It will be a minute. We really want it to be at the level that we want it to be.
JazzReview: At this point in the band’s history are you thinking that albums are going to start coming out a little slower or…
Tierney Sutton: I don’t know, I think that the pace we have been at is a pretty good pace because my psyche is such that if I don’t have a dead line, I might not get anything done. That’s one of the main reasons that I have been so delighted to have a record deal during these years, to say, “Well this is when we’re going in the studio.” I think it has been good for all of us to know we have to get this together, this is the deadline, this is when we’re going to do it.
One of the exciting things about this record is it’s the first time that we planned to make a record after we had a month of playing together every day. We had a month at the Oak Room, the month of March in the Oak Room in New York. We played there and then we had two days off. Then we went into Birdland and made the record. A couple of times we’ve had to go into the studio. For one of the records I took the guys to Seattle and we did this obscure little gig over the weekend ,so that we could rehearse all day and do two nights. That was kind of “alright we’re going into the studio next week so we have to hole up here and get this stuff together,” because we don’t arrange in the studio. We try not to do that. We want to have our ducks in a row.
JazzReview: Here is a rather trivial question; on the new CD you are pictured with the band sitting in a restaurant. Since I have worked in the restaurant business for a very long time, where is that?
Tierney Sutton: That was actually a booth at Catalina’s [Los Angeles].
JazzReview: Oh. So that is a West Coast Venue? That’s nice.
Tierney Sutton: But since we spent a huge part of the last year on the road, that picture is a pretty honest picture.
JazzReview: Well everybody is smiling, so that’s a good thing.
For more information: http://www.tierneysutton.com
Photo by: © Morrice Blackwell
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