Bennie Maupin article

ghost of miles · August 28, 2006

Mark wrote the excellent article on Jackie McLean which was posted here back in April. If you follow the link that I'm posting at the bottom of this piece, you can hear audio clips from the interview:

Bennie Maupin's winding road
A great yet unheralded saxophonist, Maupin took an unconventional -- and sometimes unappreciated -- path. He returns to his hometown as part of next weekend's jazz fest.

August 27, 2006

BY MARK STRYKER

FREE PRESS MUSIC WRITER

ALTADENA, Calif. -- "One day I was lying in bed reading a story in the Los Angeles Times about depression," says Detroit-born tenor saxophonist Bennie Maupin, recalling a 1979 epiphany. "It was a profile of a depressed person, and I suddenly realized, 'Wow, that's me!' "

It's about noon on a recent Sunday, and Maupin is recounting the twists and turns of his career while navigating his Isuzu Rodeo though Los Angeles. He's on his way to an African festival at the Buddhist community center where he leads a volunteer big band. A practicing Buddhist, Maupin was introduced to the salutary effects of meditative chanting by band mates in Herbie Hancock's influential sextet in the early '70s.

Maupin, an unsung hero in jazz, makes a rare visit to his hometown to perform Saturday night at the Detroit International Jazz Festival. He's appearing with pianist Kirk Lightsey's Detroit Four + One, a reunion of former Detroiters who have had international careers, including trombonist George Bohanon and bassist Cecil McBee. Local drummer Bert Myrick completes the group.

Of all the major figures who emerged during the golden age of Detroit jazz in the 1950s, Maupin, who turns 66 on Tuesday, may be the least celebrated. He is best known for his darkly mysterious saxophone, bass clarinet and alto flute playing with Hancock in the '70s and the sinewy bass clarinet solos he contributed to "Bitches Brew," Miles Davis' iconic jazz-rock recording.

But given the depth of his experience, his hard-won individuality and the progressive sweep of his aesthetic vision, Maupin ought to be much better known. He's got an A-list resume, including work and recordings with key figures like Hancock, Davis, Horace Silver, McCoy Tyner, Lee Morgan and Jack DeJohnette. Maupin's own music paints a uniquely sorcerous soundscape distilled from post-bop, free jazz, funk and world music.

"People just don't know how to listen to him," says astute saxophonist, arranger and producer Bob Belden.

"He's got all the elements of all the saxophonists people like -- John Coltrane, Joe Henderson, Sonny Rollins -- but he's not a cliche player. He doesn't just play blues licks or symmetrical patterns. He plays in the moment."

A matter of priorities

There's a truism in jazz that the best players don't always get the best gigs. Part of Maupin's low profile in America -- he works far more in Europe -- can be traced to his decision to leave New York, the hub of the jazz industry, for southern California in 1972. He's made just five albums as a leader and only the newly released "Penumbra" is in print. Maupin's 1974 masterpiece, "The Jewel in the Lotus," a wash of lush avant-gardism, has never even made it to CD.

Of greater consequence, however, is that since leaving Hancock in 1979, Maupin has placed greater stock in his personal and artistic growth than careerism, turning down performing and recording opportunities that didn't align with his priorities. The turning point was that fateful day he recognized a description of his malaise in the Los Angeles Times.

"I had worked steadily from 1968 until 1979, and I was burned out," he says, picking up the tale. He glances at his rearview mirror, takes a bite of the sandwich resting in his lap and a swig of his Starbucks elixir. "I was going through a separation and a divorce, and I just needed to refresh myself."

On the brink of his 40th birthday, Maupin began studying with the late Lyle (Spud) Murphy, a renowned composition teacher. He enrolled in a degree program at Pasadena City College, digging deeper into not only music but also political science, English and other subjects.

He played clarinet in a chamber orchestra, took no jazz gigs and worked the graveyard shift at an electronic surveillance company, where he could practice the clarinet while keeping an eye on the video monitors and computers.

Most of his peers were baffled. In 1982, trumpeter Freddie Hubbard offered him $6,000 for a two-week European tour, but Maupin said no because he had only a few weeks left in an English class that he needed to graduate. "People thought I was nuts," he says.

Hancock saw the wisdom in his path. "Studying and going back to school -- what a wonderful choice for him to make," he says. "A lot of musicians wouldn't have had the courage to make that choice. That's a sign of a secure human being."

Community service

Maupin's Ikeda Kings Orchestra performs in a ballroom for about 150 people, many in colorful African clothing. The players are mostly part-time musicians. Maupin plays only on Horace Silver's hit "Song for My Father," which Maupin played nightly during the 1 1/2 years he spent with the pianist in 1968-69.

He roars through several choruses on tenor sax, playing zigzag phrases with an oracular tone whose edgy shell surrounds a core that radiates warmth. The band often sounds like a second-tier college group, but Maupin is thrilled, noting that some players could barely read music not long ago.

He started the band as a way to give back to his community, and it's really an outgrowth of his involvement with Buddhism, which he says helped him connect more profoundly to the world around him.

"Being able to help others is a joy," he says. "People never forget how you made them feel."

Later in the afternoon, Maupin sits on a sofa in the cozy Altadena home he shares with his wife, Barbara Dumetz-Maupin, a commercial photographer, and their 15-year-old son. (Maupin has two older children and two stepchildren from earlier marriages.) Altadena is an ethnically diverse suburb northeast of downtown in the shadow of the gorgeous San Gabriel Mountains. Maupin fell in love with the natural beauty of the landscape on his first trip to the West Coast in 1968.

He is a barrel-chested man, and looks 15 years younger than his age. Three days a week, he works out at a gym, and three days a week, he walks 5 miles. He has a long face, a closely cropped salt-and-pepper beard and a pronounced gap in his top teeth that seems to add wattage to an already bright smile.

Like many of his Detroit contemporaries, Maupin was practically born into jazz. He grew up on the east side by Paradise Valley, ground zero for African-American culture in the city. Music seeped out of clubs, under doors and through windows, coating the neighborhood in a thick haze of swing. Maupin's earliest memories are of the gleaming reflection of lights bouncing off shiny instruments at the Paradise Theatre, where his mother took him as a toddler when she went to hear stars like Count Basie.

Maupin taught himself to play piano by ear when he was 8, started on clarinet the summer before high school and switched to alto saxophone in the fall. His band director at Northeastern High insisted he study privately, so he signed up at the Teal School of Music, founded by Larry Teal, a pioneering classical saxophonist.

Sage mentors helped ignite Detroit's postwar jazz explosion. Two of the most important were saxophonist Yusef Lateef and pianist Barry Harris, the latter still in his mid-20s but already earning a national reputation as a bebop guru. Maupin couldn't afford lessons with either, but his buddy, saxophonist Sam Sanders, was studying with both and always shared the secrets he learned from Lateef. Harris let Maupin sit in a corner and eavesdrop while he worked with his friend.

Later, Maupin would switch from alto to tenor sax because gigs were more plentiful on tenor. He assembled his style primarily from four tenor titans: Lateef, Henderson and the leading postwar heroes, John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins. All offered friendship and encouragement. Rollins even gave Maupin mouthpieces when he came to town.

In the late '50s, he often practiced with Henderson, a Teal student enrolled at Wayne State who would later became a major influence in jazz. Henderson's skittering rhythmic phrasing and centered tone (a Teal trademark) left a clear mark on Maupin.

"You'd go to his apartment, and he had nothing but a mattress, ironing board and a few chairs," says Maupin. "It was like he had a secret and never shared it."

When he moved to New York in 1962, Maupin supported himself for three years by working at a hospital and taking care of lab animals. Along the way, he took up the bass clarinet, a cumbersome instrument that Eric Dolphy had introduced into modern jazz. Maupin's brooding expression proposed a compelling alternative to Dolphy's frenetic style.

From tonal music to screams

The late '60s were an experimental age, and like a lot of young musicians, Maupin pursued an inside-outside approach, playing by the rules of swing and harmony or turning on a dime to favor pure energy, sound and abstraction. By 1968, he was in demand, working with Silver, pianist McCoy Tyner, trumpeter Lee Morgan and, from 1970, Hancock's sextet. The group was nicknamed the Mwandishi band for the Swahili names the players adopted in a nod to Afrocentrism.

The music straddled an electric-acoustic fault line, evolving into a stunning collectivism rooted in amorphous forms and harmony, ominous bass lines, beguiling textures and spaced-out sonics. Still, the music eventually wandered into opaque abstraction that left most audiences behind. Hancock reorganized in 1973, retaining only Maupin for his Headhunters band, one of the breakout groups of the decade. Its funky populism was epitomized by the hit "Chameleon."

"The great thing about Bennie is that conceptually he was able to cover territory from tonal music all the way into screams and nonstandard sounds and cover it all with taste and integrity," says Hancock.

Much of Maupin's current music recalls the Mwandishi band in its rejection of traditional melody-solos-melody structures for a more expansive canvas rooted in jazz but open to a smorgasbord of eclectic influences and cultures.

His acoustic quartet's new CD, "Penumbra," released on a small, arty California label, Cryptogramophone, has gotten excellent reviews, including a recent rave in the New York Times. Maupin hopes to parlay its success into higher-profile concert and festival work.

Europe remains his bread and butter. He toured overseas five times in the last year, and his audience is growing, especially in Poland, where he's gotten extensive TV, radio and print exposure. Maupin would welcome wider recognition at home, but he is nothing if not comfortable in his own skin.

"It would bother me if I allowed it to," he says. "Most people who have jazz recordings have me in their record collections. I would like it to change, but I want it to change on my terms."