Jazz Connection Magazine

Vibraphonist Stefon Harris, center in red shirt, with his band, Blackout. Members include left to right, Casey Benjamin, alto sax:

Terreon Gully, drums; Darryl Hall, bass; and Marc Cary, keyboards. The band has recorded the CD, Evolution, last year on Blue Note.

It's been said that curiosity killed the cat. In Stefon Harris' case, however, curiosity usually brings out a personal best.

Two years ago, the vibraphonist extraordinaire and three-time Grammy Award nominee launched his current five-piece band, Blackout, originally intended to be an experiment, if you will, in electronic music. The results since then have been more than "electrifying." Fans around the world have taken to Harris' new sound and current album, Evolution, like AC takes to DC.

"The audiences at our performances have really been great," said the 32-year-old Harris via telephone from his home in Central New Jersey. "They love the music. We recently played the Cape May (NJ) Jazz Festival and the audience was very enthusiastic. We've also had very good reviews."

(Harris called the band Blackout because "we're about blacking out the narrow views surrounding and constricting the definition of jazz," said Harris in a previous interview. "This is an art form like no other in that it embodies a great deal of musical subtlety, individual expression and unpredictability. Its evolution is inevitable.")

What makes the band so sound so hot, say Harris' fan base, is the chemistry that goes on between the musicians.

"That's a big part of it," Harris said. "It's about the interaction between all the musicians. It's different."

Members of Blackout who contribute to this dynamic musical elixir are Casey Benjamin, alto saxophone/flute; Darryl Hall, acoustic bass; Marc Cary, Fender Rhodes/keyboards; and Terreon Gully, drums, a long-time member of Harris' acoustic quartet.

But Blackout is not your run-of-the-mill-high-voltage-super-sonic electronic band. In fact, it's really not an electric band at all, according to Harris.

"The band has definitely continued to develop," Harris explained. "It actually has more of an acoustic sound that's enhanced by the sound of the keyboard. It's not really an electric band at this point."

While Blackout rates high on Harris' artistic scale, the band itself is a reflection of the title of its album, Evolution, Harris said (See Stefon Harris and Blackout CD)

"It's really a culmination of all the things I've done before, at this point in history," Harris said. "It's been a very great, challenging experience for me. All the musicians really contribute to the overall concept. It's not just me dictating how everything is going to be."

One may presuppose, if not having heard Blackout perform live previously, that their CD, Evolution, recorded on the Blue Note label in November 2003, would be a "radical" take off on music. It isn't. The reality is the music is a mixed bag of musical forms blended nicely together that presents "the aural distillation of the sights, sounds, people, places, events, and culture..." that are happening at the moment.

In short, the sound can be called what Blue Note Records likes to refer to as "soulful ensemble jazz on a melodic R&B tip laced with a grooved down hip hop backbeat sprinkled with Jamaican, Latin and African seasonings."

"My aspirations are never to be different," Harris confessed. "That's not a goal of mine. My goal is to seek beauty. I'm in search of beauty. I'm always looking for the truth, essentially, if I could use such a bold term. Whatever resonates with me as being a beautiful melody and truth for me, I'll document that. If we fall into a category of super innovative or conservative, none of that matters to me, really. The intention behind the record is certainly not to be different, but to be true to everyone's contribution to the band. It's really an ensemble that articulates the voices of its members."

Harris has found that Blackout is very appropriate playing for festival settings, but not necessarily appropriate for playing in acoustic halls, he said.

"I think there may be situations that come up where I'll say Blackout is definitely what we should take into this environment, depending on the audience and the venue," Harris said.

Northern Californians will have the opportunity to once again check out the sounds of Blackout for themselves when Harris and crew will spend five days performing in the very intimate, 300-seat Studio Theater at the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts on the campus of the University of California, Davis, Sept. 27 through Oct 1. Show times are at 8 p.m.

While Blackout made some Northern California stopovers last year in San Francisco and at Yoshi's in Oakland, this will be Harris' second time to the UC, Davis campus, having previously played there with his quartet in February 2002.

"I'm sure we'll be playing a lot of music from the CD," Harris said about what listeners can expect to hear at the performances. "But, again, like all of the groups that I've had in the past, the only thing I can say to be expected is spontaneity. We don't really know what's going to happen."

Harris and his band are also scheduled to conduct Master's classes during the afternoons on campus focusing on the art of improvisation and the art of listening, Harris said.

While Blackout, as a unit, may be in for the long-haul, never count on Harris to stay the course for very long. His adventuresome spirit and forward thinking are the catalyst for adding new chapters to his illustrious career.

"I can never predict the future," Harris said. "When you get a group of people with that type of chemistry as we have in Blackout, I think it's the type of thing you can always re-visit even if there are other things going on."

Harris is one of jazz's brightest stars. In 1999, the New York Jazz Awards, Jazz Times and Jazziz Magazine readers' polls named him Best New Talent. The following year, he was voted by Jazziz Magazine as and Best Vibraphonist and he was Down Beat's Critics' Poll Winner for Talent Deserving Wider Recognition. Newsweek celebrated him as "jazz's reigning 'It' man."

After working as a sideman with such luminaries as Max Roach, Joe Henderson, Wynton Marsalis and Charlie Hunter, Harris exploded on to the jazz scene in 1998 making a critically impressive showing as a leader on his debut album, A Cloud Of Red Dust (Blue Note Records). It won Recording Debut Album Of The Year at the 2nd Annual Jazz Awards and was voted Best Jazz CD by Newsweek.

The following year, Harris recorded his second CD for Blue Note as a leader, Black Action Figure. He earned his first Grammy nod for Best Instrumental Solo from that album on the Isham Jones and Marty Symes standard, There Is No Greater Love.

In 2001, Harris and pianist Jackie Terrasson teamed up to record Kindred (Blue Note), which was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Album.

In March of that same year, Harris recorded his soaring 12-piece concert-length jazz suite, The Grand Unification Theory (Blue Note), giving the vibes titian in 2003, his third Grammy nomination (Best Jazz Instrumental Album).

Harris was recently honored twice in Down Beat's 2004 Critics' Poll. He won Best Vibraphonist and his current release, Evolution, was voted one of the year's Top 50 Albums. Evolution was also named to the Village Voice's 2004 Jazz and Pop Critics' Poll for Album of the Year.

Born in Albany, NY, Harris began playing piano at the age of six. By the eighth grade, he had expanded his proficiency to nearly twenty instruments. While still in high school he earned the principal percussionist chair in the famed Empire State Youth Orchestra. A double-degree graduate of the Manhattan School of Music (BA in classical music, MA in jazz performance), Harris also is a recipient of the prestigious Martin E. Segal Award from New York's Lincoln Center, and the 2003 Jazz Journalists Association Jazz Award for Mallets Player of the Year. Since 2002, he's been an Artist in Residence with San Francisco Performances.

Harris also collaborated with stellar artists such as Mark Shim, Regina Carter, Cassandra Wilson, Kenny Barron and Steve Coleman, among others.

Much of Harris' inspired works in recent years have come as a direct result of receiving commissions from various organizations and agencies. In 2001, he received his first such commission from the Troy (NY) Fine Arts Council. The result was his Grand Unification Theory suite.

In January 2002, Harris was commissioned by the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, spending a month's residency there where he wrote the framework for what he calls The Gardner Meditations, he said.

This past April, Harris completed a commission at Michigan State University. When he goes into the recording studio in August, some of the music that resulted from that commission will be on his new CD, Harris said.

"It's another suite, much like The Grand Unification Theory," Harris said about his up-coming recording project. "I plan to record with a larger ensemble, with cellos, trombones, clarinets, flutes. This suite is a lot more colorful. It's also a lighter sounding suite. Grand Unification Theory is dense and heavy. This is much more graceful, I think."

Also making its way on to the album will be portions of Duke Ellington's New Orleans Suite and Queen Suite, Harris said.

"I'm rearranging Ellington's music for the instrumentation that I'm using for my suite," Harris explained. "The entire record is going to be snapshots of these two suites with my stuff there in the middle."

The only guest artist slated to be on the recording to Harris' knowledge, is trombonist and shells player Steve Turre. Turre also appeared on Harris' Grand Unification Theory CD.

"I'm really excited about this project," Harris said. "It really strikes a balance, I think, between the emotion and the melody and the intellect. It's really not a hyper-intellectualized suite and it's not just completely emotional. It's right in the middle, which is where I think art should be."

Jazz Connection Magazine . August - September 2005 . www.jazzconnectionmag.com

*** Stefon Harris and Blackout are scheduled to perform in the Studio Theater at the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts on the campus of the University of California, Davis, September 27 through October 1, 2005. Show times are at 8 p.m. For ticket information call (530) 752-1915 or visit the Mondavi Center website at www.MondaviArts.org ***