Downbeat Magazine
Players Feature
October, 2005
JAMES FINN - Precipice of Wonder
By Frank-John Hadley
James Finn, the bold, rousing and fiercely individual tenor saxophonist who has ignited a two-alarm fire of "where’d-this-guy-come-from?" raves with his 2004 debut album Opening the Gates (Cadence) - and keeps on blazing with new releases Faith in a Seed (CIMP) and Plaza de Toros (Clean Feed), has his own improvisatory language.
“What I’m doing now is really one step beyond any kind of bop,” the New Yorker said, lounging on a bench in Central Park while a thunder storm rolled overhead. “If you study Charlie Parker as a saxophonist and then you go to post-bop and then you stay open-minded to everything that’s in the world, you eventually will arrive at what I’m doing in your own way."
“It’s free music," Finn continues, "but it’s not free because there’s so much structure. It has a blues root. I was walking the bar in Texas 20 years ago. It’s an amalgam of everything I’ve ever done.”
The man's done a lot. He befriended and absorbed knowledge from JR Monterose, Benny Golson and Jimmy Heath. He’s shared bandstands with Sir Roland Hanna, Nick Brignola, Ben Harper and dozens more. He investigated harmolodics with Andrew Cyrille; travelled from Dallas saloons to London's Royal Albert Hall on to the Leningrad Center for Music.; and for more than a decade stuck to a grueling practice regimen.
Finn developed a system for learning improvisation based on a 12-tone approach. “I was playing ‘Giant Steps’ through the keys, working on it ferociously," he said, "If you can do that, you pretty much know all the buttons on the saxophone.”
Finn's woodshedding went hand in hand with spiritual enrichment, “I was getting into Egyptology more and more and I was also studying with a Lakota medicine man, doing vision-quests."
Using drawings, Finn assigned specific musical pitches to the sides of three famous pyramids. “You have all 12 tones and I found that by spinning these pyramids in different combinations with different notes that very exotic sounds come out that were filled with different kinds of energy.”
One day years back, Finn was practicing with typical abandon when he suddenly felt a supernatural force crashing through his head, “I heard a voice. It was telling me, ‘Go with this!’" Finn did as instructed, taking his vocabulary out of the private domain of self-seeking rehearsal into the light of public scrutiny.
In 2003, Finn made Opening the Gates and Plaza De Toros in his Upper West Side home studio, using his spontaneous compositional approach to spin melodies that interacted with the sonic urgencies of bassist bassist Dominic Duval and from drummers Whit Dickey and Warren Smith - the later whom he calls “the epitome of a jazz master.”
Finn took his tenor, soprano, and wood flute on local gigs with Smith and a second free-thinking drummer and recorded the performances for CDs that he releases on his own Gingko Leaf imprint.
Listening to Finn’s tenor reveals a special rapport with Charlie Parker - the ease of his phrasing, rhythmic variations, relaxed double-time and strength of his line. “I can’t stress enough how much of an influence Bird’s music had for me. JR told me back when I was first studying—Listen to Charlie Parker! But don’t copy his ideas!”
Finn is kin to late-period John Coltrane in terms of spirituality, virtuosity and harmonic complexity. But he's no servile follower. “There’s always a chordal or modal base to what Coltrane played,” he said. “His band created an orchestral sound on which he blew on top of. I basically build a story which comes from a foundation of interaction—free of preconceived modalities, chord structures and forms. I haven’t heard one Coltrane lick in what I do.”
Finn is secure about where his music originates,“It’s playing from the heart. Each time I pick up the horn, I’m on the precipice of the wonder of the universe." - Frank-John Hadley
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