[JPL] Bruce Hornsby - Question and Answer

[Jazz Promo Services]

Hornsby calls jazz "Meeting" with McBride, DeJohnette

By Dan Ouellette

NEW YORK (Billboard) - Bruce Hornsby refuses to be counted among the pop
stars trying on jazz for size.

"I can see why someone may want to make an album that goes down easy and
why a record company would want to put it out because it's a quick way
to make a sale," said Hornsby, who makes his all-instrumental jazz debut
with "Camp Meeting," due August 7 via Legacy.

"But my record is just the opposite. I have two of the most in-demand
jazz artists, Christian McBride on bass and Jack DeJohnette on drums,
playing with me, and we go into plenty of dissonant, stark, angular
sonic places," he said. "This is not casual jazz playing; it's been
something I've been wanting to do for years."

The genesis of "Camp Meeting" stretches back to Hornsby's jazz studies
at the Berklee College of Music in Boston and the University of Miami.
But after graduation he gravitated to the songwriter camp as a
pianist/vocalist, even though his earliest pop hits, among them "The Way
It Is" and "The Valley Road," featured jazz-informed piano breaks. He
has also worked through the years with such top-tier jazz artists as Pat
Metheny, Branford Marsalis and Wayne Shorter.

After encounters in recent years with Metheny and DeJohnette, who each
encouraged him to take the jazz plunge, Hornsby embraced the harmonic
jazz language that he "hadn't spoken for years," he said. "I was no
longer fluent. I knew I had to go into the woodshed."

The refresher course paid off. Hornsby not only demonstrates his jazz
prowess on "Camp Meeting," but also conjures up that rare alchemy with
his rhythm team as they contemporize tunes by Miles Davis, Keith
Jarrett, Thelonious Monk (a reharmonized, rumba-flavored "Straight, No
Chaser") and Bud Powell (including a hip-hop-spiced take on "Celia").
There's also a never-released Ornette Coleman track, "Questions and
Answers," that the iconoclastic saxophonist played for Hornsby years
ago.

The CD was recorded in April 2006. Given their hectic schedules, the
threesome's next meeting was May 26 at the B.B. King club in New York,
to perform a benefit show for the jazz-in-schools organization Jazz
Reach.

Backstage at the show, DeJohnette said, "Bruce doesn't lose himself. He
approaches jazz with his own sensibility." McBride was likewise
impressed and joked, "But I worry about him. I hope he doesn't get too
good and make jazz his thing."

Hornsby laughed when told of these remarks. "Rest assured," he said, "I
love writing songs and it's great fun to sing."