“The reason we didn’t go to New York is that we liked having a front yard,” Hooper jokes. New York was the hub for jazz in the late 1950s and 1960s, but these crusaders had familial connections out west and found a city that was eager for jazz, but not necessarily for their jazz. In retrospect the move seemed counterintuitive. They could play jazz as the Modern Jazz Sextet and R&B as the Night Hawks. After high school, these players continued working together at Texas Southern, where they took on other members like trombonist Wayne Henderson and flutist Hubert Laws. Like all great Houston jazz artists, the Swingsters could toggle between jazz and R&B, depending on the gig and the crowd. At Wheatley, Hooper met pianist Joe Sample and saxophonist Wilton Felder, and they created the Swingsters nearly 60 years ago. Such was not the case in Fifth Ward, where Wheatley students had first-class educators who pushed the high schoolers toward greatness. The stories of great jazz ensembles almost always involve players from varied places coming together through good fortune, luck or kismet. That said, he was raised in this city and found kindred spirits at Wheatley High School. Hooper has been in Los Angeles far longer than he was ever in Houston. And also gave my music a different dress to wear, so to speak.” Go west I felt my compositions allowed these musicians a platform to express themselves. I wanted a new framework to express myself. “This time, I’d met these great musicians from around the world. “My image is primarily as a guy playing a groove, getting funky and laying down a pocket,” he says. Hooper says the album didn’t feel like a stretch. He made and makes music without regard to prescribed genre. The record is a loving and lovely culmination of what the Houston native started as a kid decades ago. With “Orchestrally Speaking,” Hooper transformed into Stick, a musician who transferred decades of work as drummer and composer and arranger into a gloriously lush set of orchestral jazz with Hooper yielding a baton rather than drumsticks. Stix served as a branch on all manner of musical trees. He’s also played scores of sessions for other artists in jazz, pop, rock and R&B. Stix Hooper has played on all manner of sessions: He was part of the Modern Jazz Sextet that morphed into the Jazz Crusaders and morphed again into the Crusaders.
Since his childhood in the 1940s, Nesbert Hooper sat behind a drum kit with a pair of wooden implements that lent him his nickname. Stix Hooper, drummer in the Crusaders, also a composer, producer and bandleader.
0 kommentar(er)
