Yellowjackets

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For nearly 20 years, the Yellowjackets have flourished as one of America’s most loved and top-selling contemporary jazz groups. Initially formed in 1981 to back up guitarist Robben Ford, the band has since demonstrated its mastery of a wide range of musical styles, producing heartfelt ballads and songs inflected with R&B, bebop or fusion with equal aplomb. The present-day Yellowjackets continue with their sonic subtlety and sensitive interplay to remain as vital to jazz as they have ever been.

With 15 albums, a dozen Grammy® nominations and two Grammy Awards® to date, the group continues to blaze a trail into the 21st century with an energy and a signature sound that few will fail to recognize and all have come to love.

Music as exploration is a concept as old as jazz itself. Some of the best compositions and most prolific musical careers have started at point A by artists and bands with little or no conception of point B’s whereabouts.

Such is the story of the Yellowjackets, an outfit that began as the session band for guitarist Robben Ford in the late 70s and took on a life of its own in a matter of a few years. More than two decades after its genesis, the band continues to delve into every corner of the musical universe – simply because it’s there to be explored – and weave a multi-layered and innovative tapestry of sonic experience.

By the mid 1970s, Ford had assembled keyboardist Russell Ferrante, bassist Jimmy Haslip and drummer Ricky Lawson – a team of up and coming players who backed him on his mostly instrumental 1977 release, The Inside Story. Although Ford’s label wanted him to follow up with a more pop- and vocal-oriented album, the band – then known as the Robben Ford Group – preferred the instrumental approach. They renamed themselves the Yellowjackets, and while Ford made appearances on their first couple albums, the band and its former leader parted on amicable terms after the release of Mirage a Trois in 1984.

“That was a very exciting time for instrumental music,” Ferrante recalls. “It seemed like a lot of people were open to mixing and matching various musical styles. There wasn’t the strict compartmentalization that you see in radio now.”

With the success of innovative instrumental bands like Weather Report around the same time, crossing and merging genres had become a successful strategy, artistically as well as commercially. “There was no thought about whether this style should go with that one,” Ferrante adds. “Nothing was genre specific. It was just the music that we had all played – R&B music and electric music and acoustic music, blues, pop, the whole thing was just all music. We just did what came naturally.”

By 1987, Lawson had left the band and was replaced by William Kennedy, whose polyrhythmic sensibilities opened doors to an even greater sense of exploration – and a further departure from the familiar, Haslip recalls.

“During that time, I had been listening to a lot of African and Afro-Cuban music,” he says, “and I started writing in a lot of 6/8 patterns and experimenting with that kind of thing. I brought it over to Russ, and he was really interested in it. We started experimenting with a lot of polyrhythmic things.”

The result was Four Corners, an album with a distinctly world music sensibility, and one of the Yellowjackets’ most commercially and artistically successful albums to date.

Subsequent albums – Politics (1988) and The Spin (1989) – dispensed with some of the multi-layered intensity of Four Corners and took a more acoustic direction. Greenhouse, released in 1990, welcomed tenor saxophonist Bob Mintzer into the Yellowjackets lineup. Mintzer’s dedication to the jazz tradition, along with his highly developed skills as an arranger, have since taken the ‘Jackets to a new level of sophistication over the past 12 years.

“It was very interesting,” Mintzer says of his early days with the band. “I was challenged. There was a way of playing and writing that had been in place for a while. I basically tried to step into that, acknowledge what had already been going on and add to that in some way.”

Haslip’s high praise picks up where Mintzer’s modesty leaves off. “Bob is an amazing musician,” he says. “He has a very distinct voice. He’s the really serious traditionalist in the band. He also has a very wide, eclectic view of composing, so he lends himself to what we are trying to do. He’s very much into experimentation, and he has his own big band, so his skills as an arranger are also very good to have on board.”

Throughout the 90s, the ‘Jackets continued to explore a diverse cross section of sound and rhythm. The relaxed and mellow Dreamland, released in 1995, marked a brief reunion with Warner Brothers that also spawned Blue Hats in 1997 and Club Nocturne in 1998.

The Yellowjackets entered the new millennium with the release of Mint Jam on the Heads Up International label. Recorded live at the Mint in Los Angeles in July 2001, the two-disc set was scheduled for international release in March 2002. Backing up the regular lineup of Ferrante, Haslip and Mintzer on Mint Jam is drummer Marcus Baylor.

While the Yellowjackets are optimistic about the future, even the charter members aren’t about to limit their options by mapping that future too carefully.

“We never know, even when we start writing,” says Ferrante. “The music might take you in a completely unanticipated direction. I think you have to stay open to that. We just start playing and writing, and a thread starts to emerge, and we’ll follow that and see what happens.”

“No matter where the thread leads,” says Haslip, exploration will always be a primary objective. “That, to me, is the key element,” he says. “That’s what jazz means to me. It means exploration. That’s kind of a lost art.”

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