» Music with Jeff Hemmings
Courtney Pine on defining jazz, reinventing the sax and playing his first professional gig as a schoolkid in Brighton
The son of Jamaican immigrants, this country’s most celebrated contemporary jazz musician is now in possession of a CBE for services to jazz music.
“It wasn’t something I considered at all,” says Courtney Pine from his home base in London. I was even more shocked to be considered for a CBE [one up from theOBE which was bestowed on him in 2000]. I got in touch with my teachers, Sonny Rollins and Branford Marsalis, and thanked them! It’s amazing that someone from my generation should be recognised for playing improvised music…”
It all started with his dad’s collection of 7” ska records. “I used to turn over the records and listen to the instrumental version of the A-side,” says Pine. “I didn’t know it at the time but people like [ska originators] Ernest Ranglin and Don Drummond were originally jazz musicians.”
So what is his definition of jazz? “It’s a music of freedom… the only boundaries are the limits of your imagination.” It’s this kind of thinking that has led Pine to explore all sorts of music from around the world and to fuse it with jazz in its myriad forms. Even his main instrument, the saxophone, is something he continually explores. “I use a company that makes me specialised saxes. I sometimes hear and want to do things that I can’t so I ask the company if they can!”
From ska and blues to modern music such as drum’n’bass, Pine is constantly making connections between music and between cultures. More recently, he has immersed himself in the music of Sidney Bechet, perhaps the first great jazz saxophonist, and a New Orleanian who spent much of his life in Paris. “His music is vibrant, it just doesn’t sound like anything of the period. I saw the connections betwen him and Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and Wayne Shorter, and it made sense to me.”
Pine’s last album, Transition In Tradition, is a homage to Bechet, and it’s this he’ll be performing on his UK tour. “I don’t try and play like him, but I pay homage and respect him,” he says. Pine’s management is based in Brighton and it also happens to be where he played his first professional gig. “It was at the Top Rank [now Oceana]. I didn’t get paid and I had to go to school the next day… I was told not to be a jazz musician,” says Courtney Pine OBE CBE.
Thursday 18 February, Corn Exchange, Brighton Dome
