Jeff Coffin: Cause and Effect (INTERVIEW)

At some point in the middle of a Bela Fleck and The Flecktones set it happens. Jaws drop, eyes pop open and crowds roar as Jeff Coffin blasts two saxophones at once. It’s a sight and sound that leaves most audiences stunned, but those more familiar with his fiery approach to the instrument know anything is possible when Coffin hits the horn. With an extensive career that stretches far and wide beyond his Flecktones fame, including two award winning solo albums, appearances with everyone from Bruce Springsteen to Van Morrison, and his own touring band, The Mu’tet, Coffin has solidified himself as a respected songwriter, eclectic musician and contemporary pioneer of the saxophone.

Jazz has always identified itself from within its personal, self-disclosing compositions. Soulful melodies and powerful solos dictate the collective emotions of a room, only strengthened by those musicians who play with, as Coffin defines it, sincerity. Cyclical themes run throughout his work, reaching further than that of the music, but encompassing the connectedness of all actions past and future. It may sound a bit heavy, but it’s jazz, and if it’s sincere, the music will tell the truth.

Fresh off of a club tour with The Mu’tet, and on the road again with Bela Fleck in support of their new triple-disc release, we spoke with Jeff to learn a little bit more about the man behind the two saxophones.

Jazz is typically a genre someone acquires a taste for after years of music appreciation. How did you discover it at such a young age?

When I was living up in Maine, that’s where I started playing in the school band system. I was living in Dexter, Maine, which is kind of a town in the middle of nowhere, and I had a director that got me playing. I originally wanted to play drums, and he was like ‘well, you know, start off on saxophone, see if you like it.’ I was like ‘whatever.’ (laughs). Yeah, it’s funny man. When I got the instrument home, I opened up the case, and it’s in pieces. The mouth piece, the neck and ligature and reeds and all that stuff, and I was like, ‘this is too many pieces’ and I just put it away (laughing). But, then I started playing in his trio in seventh and eighth grade, and I listened to a little bit of jazz, some improvised stuff, so I was learning some things by ear. When I got to New Hampshire, when we moved down there, it was the first time I had ever heard Charlie Parker, or Coltrane, or any of those guys, and that’s when I started getting into stuff. And I actually had a student that was in sixth or seventh grade that started studying with me when I was a junior in High School, and rather than paying me each week, he’d bring me in [a record]. His dad was converting all his LPs into Reel to Reel or tape or something, so he was getting rid of all his albums. Like original copies of Coltrane and Sonny Stit and all this stuff. So I was listening to all these original sides. But it wasn’t until I got to college though that I had any [life changing] experience listening to jazz. It was Miles’ record, ‘Round About Midnight, and it was Coltrane’s solo on “Bye-Bye Blackbird.” It was the first time a particular jazz solo had really hit me in this deep, emotional place. I always sort of gravitated towards listening to real soulful vocalists, and when I would hear like Motown, Aretha, and things like that, it would just make me squirm (laughs). It was so incredible man. All along I wanted the horn to sound like a vocalist…

So are the tones of your sax your singing voice coming out?

I think so man, I really do. And it’s not just that, but that’s part of it…definitely part of it.

In college, as you got more serious about playing, what were your aspirations at that time? You can’t really be thinking Madison Square Garden as a sax player.

I wasn’t really thinking to far down the road. I was just, ‘I really want to get better…I want to be in the shed all day.’ I was practicing between eight and twelve hours a day. And that on top of like twenty-one credit hours on top of a job on top of…so I was literally sleeping like five hours a night. And this went on for probably three years, or longer. But I was dedicated to doing it. I just wanted to get better. I knew I had a lot of work to catch up on, and I was willing to spend the time. I had no social life, no girlfriend, I wasn’t getting laid at all (laughs). And I’d have cats coming in like, ‘come on man, lets go hang, and party.’ And this is when ecstasy first came out, so I’d have guys coming over my room and they were just fucked up (laughs)! And they’d say, ‘come on, lets go hang!’ And I’d be like, ‘man, I gotta practice, I can’t. I just have so much stuff to catch up on, so much work to do.’ And it would have been fun to hang with them, but that certainly wasn’t something I wanted to get into, and music was a good excuse not to get into it. And my dedication, just trying to take myself to the next level, whatever that was, was definitely away from that. Which was definitely a direction I wanted to be moving.

Moving into your solo career, the two albums you’ve released, Commonality in 1999, and Go-Round in 2001, are both based on ideas of a cyclical nature, the ripple effect of actions. Aside from the obvious cyclical base of music, how does that theme relate to your own playing and philosophies?

Well to me it really relates to how it parallels life, and even gets into some aspects of spirituality forming. With Commonality, I truly believe everything is connected. That every action is connected to every other action. And the ripple effect is a great analogy. Throwing the rock into the pond, the ripples look like they disperse, but they actually end up going on even if they move one little piece of earth. You in then turn affect something else, and it keeps moving on, sometimes a minuscule amount, and other times it’s a great amount. I think that everything we do is connected to everything we’ve done. And therefore everything we do is connected to everything that we will do. And that’s how we connect as a community on the earth as well. The things that are going on for example, over in Iraq right now, or over in Afghanistan, they affect us. It may not be something that hits home right now, it may be something fifty years from now, but we’re all affected by that. And so these things are all connected, and trying to be conscious of what our actions are, it’s important. And I’m not saying I always do that, but that’s someplace that I’m striving to get to. With Go-Round, the whole idea with that is, again, this continuous cyclical nature of things. How things are patterns and how we repeat certain patterns in our lives and our relationships, and even musically, until we’re ready to move past a particular pattern and incorporate it as something that brings us to the next place.

And within that, while Go-Round is a continuation of sorts of the first album, was there a conscious direction change? Stylistically, Commonality sounds to me more grounded in traditional jazz, and Go-Round is more free form.

Well, you’re absolutely right with that. There’s definitely a conscious decision to move from the trio setting of Commonality, and sometimes quartets, into a little bit more of an exploration of free form. And I didn’t want it to be too far out. I wanted it to still be accessible and for people to be able to take a ride with it, and I think that it achieved that. When I was giving it to people, initially I said, ‘check it out, but listen to it all the way through the first time, just do that for me.’ And I think that people are willing to take the journey. On that recording, there’s some really in stuff, and some pretty adventurous. I wouldn’t say avant-garde, but certainly more freer than not. And I think people are willing to go there. I’m in the process of doing another one which is very different, and it’s not really a jazz record, it’s a groove record, with some New Orleans stuff, some stuff that’s very heavily influenced by African stuff that I’ve been checkin’ out. Some Arabic and Indian music…all sorts of different stuff. So it’s definitely a very different record than that.

And that will be released next year?

Yeah, it will be done sometime this year, and coming out in the Spring of next year. I’ve just been working on it little bit by little bit. But everything is tracked, and what we’re doing now is finishing up overdubs and cleaning things up.

Did you write mostly everything on piano?

It varies. I’ll do some stuff on piano. A lot of times things will come off of the horn. And there are times when I’ll be driving or walking down to my studio or just sitting around that a tune will just pop into my head, and I’ll write it down on a napkin or sheet of paper out of my bag or something. Or sometimes I’ll call my cell phone, and sing it to myself (laughs).

Playing in your own band as opposed to The Flecktones. They’re both structured in their own senses, but how do you make the transition and go from lead role to non?

It’s pretty simple, ‘cause I know in both situations, what the situation is. With Bela’s thing, I realized that we do all have a say in what goes on, but that ultimately he has the final voice. And there’s no problem with that, ever. And it is different, in every way imaginable, but it’s kind of like apples and oranges. For me, the leadership role, in my group, I try to recognize all the things that, and I’m sure Bela recognizes also, is that the guys that you’re there with are the guys that you hand picked, and you have to trust them. You have to trust the musicians to do what they do best, which is to play music. By doing that, I think that you allow the creativity of that musician to really shine through. So that’s what I try to do. I try to recognize the individuality, and creative nature of whoever I’m playing with. I never try to change their playing, all I try to do is bring out parts of their playing that sometimes they aren’t aware of, and parts of their playing that will really enhance the music that I’m writing.

In your live shows with Mu’tet, many of your lines sound like Flecktones’ lines. In a what came first, the chicken or the egg sense, when you first started playing with Bela, did he notice your sound would fit The Flecktones, or have you adopted those lines and tones since joining his band?

Well, I think a little bit of both. I think he recognized that where I was coming from would be a fit. I think that he has a way of putting things together that are really, really unique. But I think it’s been both, because I know that the way The Flecktones play and the way that everybody writes have certainly influenced what I’ve done, and I think in a very positive way. Once you play with people, just like when you hang around with somebody, and you find that certain phrases or things you say are exactly like your buddy. And so I think those things all come into play and we influence each other. One thing that Bela has talked about that I really agree with, is that when we do our own projects, all it does is make The Flecktones a better band. ‘Cause we have a different vocabulary and different experiences that we can all bring together into what we already have, so it just enhances it.

What’s the story behind your Vibration Arts Ensemble project? Did that more or less become Mu’tet, just on a smaller scale?

Well, it still kind of exists. It exists outside of the Mu’tet. The Mu’tet is more of a touring group. In the Vibration Arts Ensemble, I’ll do a couple of gigs a year with that, and that is just, throw a bunch of people together, and see what happens…upwards or twelve or fifteen people. So there’s elements of that in the Mu’tet, but it kind of came out of my belief that everything is vibrational. Even in physics, at a subquantum level, they’ve got the Superstring Theory, which is everything at a very base level is a vibrating or oscillating string, for lack of a better term. And so therefore, everything is sound, everything is vibration, everything is music. So that’s kind a philosophy that I still hold true, and that gets back into the whole connectedness of things as well. So that’s where the name of that came from and I kind of decided that it could be a group where I could do whatever I wanted to do, no matter what style of music. And if it was coming from a sincere place, then that’s all that really matters.

You have quite a cache of instruments that you play. Aside from soprano, alto and tenor sax, you also bring on stage a flute, clarinet…even a singing bowl (laughs).

Oh right, yeah, there’s a lot of different stuff. I’m kind of a sound junkie (laughs). I love to try new things and see what’s out there. And I’ve got a ton of stuff at home that I screw around with, and check out. But even on the saxophone, I love to see what different sounds I can get, whether it’s splitting a tone, or making it sound like it’s crying, or seagull sounds, whale sounds, humming threw the horn, any different configuration. And I’ve got flutes and whistles…I’m a bell freak also, like jingles…like this kind of shit (rattles an instrument). I’ve got it all over my room (laughs). And cymbals also, I love cymbals. I’ve got a whole set of Bosphorus cymbals from my drum kit, and I’ll have people come over, and I’ll be like ‘oh man, you gotta check out these cymbals’ (laughing). I just love the way they sound, there’s just something about it.

If you listen to a song like “Tall and Lanky” off Go-Round, it’s not classic jazz, it’s not avante-garde, it’s not funk, but it’s somewhere in between. That seems to be where your style falls into…somewhere in between. So using that song as an example, are you trying to perfect that “middle of the road”?

Kind of. It hits a lot of different areas, because on one it’s just a blues form, and on the other hand it’s got a New Orleans street groove to it…like a second line (sings the beat). And then on guitar, Pat has done something with the intro, and it puts it in a whole different kind of place. But it’s also got a weird little twist, (sings guitar line) and those two bars are in seven. And so that form stays the same all the way through, and that’s kind of the distinguishing feature of that tune. And one of the things I like to do, is I like to have certain distinguishing features above the tune, something that it’s kind of built around. And with “Tall and Lanky,” it does that I think. It’s kind of the anchor that ties that tune together. You can go wherever you want on it, ‘cause really, it’s a blues, but ultimately you’re gonna hear the (sings guitar line again). And so even the melody is coming out of the New Orleans thing, which is coming out of the Afrocuban clave, and that’s coming out of Brazilian music also. And all that shit came up from South America and from Africa to America, when white people first settled into America and they went to those countries and they brought back the natives from those countries and made them slaves and they brought them to New Orleans. And sometimes, if they couldn’t fight, or they wouldn’t fight, they would give them instruments, because they wanted these regiments to march. So they’d say, ‘I don’t give a shit what you play, but play something.’ So you’d have these indigenous rhythms coming out of Africa and South America that people were moving to. And the song that they brought with them also. So you would have these fife and drum bands, with those particular rhythms going, and they would make these tunes up. And that in turn, turned into this New Orleans stuff, which is of course the birthplace of jazz. So it all comes from underneath.

While your sound ends up somewhere in between pop and jazz, you delve into both sides of the fence. Some lines are really catchy, pop rhythms and others are true jazz. How do you distinct yourself from becoming either or, and maintain that center?

That’s an interesting question. I really agree with you, that the lines are coming from both, but I think that part of it is that I’m not trying to do either one. All I’m trying to do is play what’s in my head and what’s in my belly, what I’m feeling emotionally. And trying to make a statement, a statement that is true. I want people to have an experience when they listen to my music. Whether it’s good or bad is almost irrelevant. Obviously I prefer it to be a good feeling, but as long as it invokes some kind of mystery or emotion, then it’s done it’s job. At the end of the night, we play “Ibrahim,” and we had an experience in Cleveland that ranks up there as one of my favorite musical moments ever. At the end of that tune, we had done like two 1 and a 1/2 hour sets or something, and at the end of the second set, we played that. And there was literally like a forty-second silence after we were done with that tune. And it was like this amazing couple of collective breaths that everybody took together. It was unbelievable man. And people were roaring after that, but it was very moving…very moving.

When someone mentions Jeff Coffin, most people immediately refer to the “two horns at once” solo. Now that its become synonymous with your name, do you tend to throw it out there as a crowd pleaser?

No, because when I first started doing it…Bill Fanning was living in Nashville for a number of years, and he and I had a couple of bands together including this acid-jazz group, and we just wanted a place to play, just experiment around. And when I first started doing the double horn stuff, it wasn’t meant to be any kind of crowd pleaser, ‘cause there was no crowd…there was like five people there (laughing). I remember the night I first did it. I had seen pictures of Roland Kirk doing it, so it was a definite nod to him and the inventiveness and the creativity that he displayed. And the first time I did it, Billy was playing, and I think it was on “Commonality,” we would do that tune with that group, and so I start doing this double horn thing, and I just see him jump! Because I was behind him, he had no idea I was gonna do it (laughs). And he stops and he looks around slowly at me like ‘what the hell was that?’ And I started laughing, and I was like ‘just keep playin’ man’ (laughs). And that’s when I started doing it, and I’ve just been trying to move the technique forward for myself. I’ll never come close to what Roland Kirk did, but it’s a sound I hear in my head. It’s not something I’m trying to jive anybody with. I’m not doing it just to go ‘I can play two horns at once.’ It’s really a sound that I love. It feels good to do it. It sets up a really heavy vibration in the body…and I think it’s a great sound.

Some years back I wrote a review of a Bela show, and when I mentioned your double horn solo, I wrote that you couldn’t possibly be a two-pack-a-day guy. I assume that’s true, but how do you keep your lungs in check? Is it just constant practice, or are there exercises involved?

It’s a little bit of both I guess. And you’re right, I don’t smoke. But I know how to breathe, and that’s a big part of it. When I breathe, my belly expands, more like someone who does yoga. When I breathe, my belly gets really soft and it expands. And when I exhale, especially when I’m playing, then I firm up. And it probably looks harder than it really is. I mean, it’s not easy, but it’s not like curing cancer or anything. But you gotta be in shape for it. I can’t imagine going out on tour having not really played. After tours, I always take a few days off, just to kind of clear my head. I’ll just blow on the mouth piece to keep the muscles prepared. But I’ll always be conscious that I’ve gotta keep things moving forward, and I’m always working on something, I’m always playing, always practicing. And all that stuff makes a difference.

Little Worlds, The new Bela triple-disc coming out this month has so many collaborations on it. Even Bobby McFerrin is on there.

Yeah, Bobby is on there, Branford [Marsalis], The Chieftains, Nickel Creek…a Chinese opera singer, a cello, some Indian musicians…just a ton of people. And man, I really think it sounds beautiful. Bela’s done a hell of a job with it, and really taken it to a different level than where we started for sure. I’m really proud of it.

The Flecktones are such a diverse group, with a banjo player, saxophone and essentially no drummer. Is it difficult at times playing with such a non-traditional instrumentation?

Not really, because all the stuff I listen to is eclectic. And I would definitely say FutureMan is a drummer. He does play the drums. He’s got stuff out there, and he’s a better drummer than probably anybody I’ve ever played with. Most people don’t see him sit down behind the kit, but he’s gone beyond the kit. He’s gone to a point where he’s finding the melody in his fingers and through the rhythm of the drums. It’s unbelievable the stuff that he’s doing. He’s one of those cats that I really think that in forty of fifty years people will be studying his shit going ‘oh my god!’ He’s just looking at it a different way, from the other side of the looking glass.

As you build your own legacy, what are you hoping audiences will take from your unique artistry?

Hopefully a sincerity. That what I’m trying to put out there is as true as I can be. Ideally, I hope that people are inspired by the music. And that it make a difference. I suppose that every artist wishes that what they do makes a difference, but I just want to try and make the best music I can possibly make…and not be a dick (laughs).

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