Lovano's Caruso
Joe Lovano sits alone in his dressing room at Teatro Mancinelli, an intimate 1886 opera house in Orvieto, his fleshy face flushed, his big brow beaded with sweat. He stares between the mirror and the floor, somewhere between exhaustion and exhilaration, perhaps meditation. Figures lurk near the open door, but Lovano doesn’t look up. Today’s most celebrated saxophonist is spent, a far cry from the loquacious finger-snappin’ Joe with the cool Van Dyke and upbrimmed fedora that jazz fans know and love.
It is the first day of 2002 – three days after his 49th birthday – and the conclusion of a triumphant five-day run with his 52nd Street Themes nonet at the winter edition of the Umbria Jazz Festival. Time to reflect on another year of honors – critics and listeners polls, a Grammy Award for Themes (after six previous nominations), the first Gary Burton Chair at Berklee School of Music. Time to start talking about the latest in his string of fascinating projects, Viva Caruso, a tribute to the first great tenor and global superstar, whose early 20th century discs gave recorded music a universal voice.
“I’m not a big opera aficionado, but I’ve heard Caruso’s sound my whole life, not only through singers like Mario Lanza and Pavarotti, but in other musicians,” says Lovano. “Listening to Caruso taught me so much about how to create a tune, not just repeat a melody within a given structure. I feel like I’m a different player, trying to incorporate those deep qualities of Caruso that I hear in Lester Young and Miles and Coltrane. If cats that are hip to it listen to him today, they’ll hear a lot of things he taught us.”
Although Lovano has as much facility ordering breakfast in Italian as the average American tourist (“I’m intimidated,” he says sheepishly), his connections to the country still run deep. His grandparents came to America from Sicily in 1906 (the year Caruso witnessed the San Francisco earthquake firsthand). The Milan label Soul Note gave him his first opportunity to record as a leader (Tones, Shapes and Colors, 1984). The fourth-generation Borgani family, from the medieval town of Macerata and 130 this year, handcrafted his tenor sax.
Then along came Caruso. Two years ago Lovano’s longtime friend and nonet bassist Dennis Irwin gave him a copy of a 1945 biography by Caruso’s last wife Dorothy (who married him over the objections of her rich industrialist father). Lovano was smitten. “Caruso gave the world the imagination to hear different personalities coming out of the same person. Hollywood picked up on that, and it’s what jazz is about too. Charlie Parker had an identifiable sound and conception, but he took on different roles depending on the tune. Sonny Rollins, one of my main teachers about being yourself, shows there’s a lot of ways to be expressive. Caruso was a total natural who did it with the deepest passion and beauty. His expression – dynamics, sound, tone, presence – was phenomenal. He really drew you in.”
Lovano avidly studied Caruso In Song, a Nimbus Records collection of his favorite Neapolitan songs. Caruso was often backed by a woodwind ensemble, with the same sort of sound Lovano developed with Gunther Schuller on Rush Hour (1994) and Manny Albam on Lovano’s 1996 celebration of the century’s other great Italian popular singer, Frank Sinatra. “I realized a lot of these old songs Caruso sang had some of the same structures we’d been playing all along. In approaching them in a free organic way, making them our own, we could focus on Caruso’s personal connection to the famous songs he grew up with in Naples and loved to sing even after he became a famous opera star.”
Naples basks in chaos and Bel Canto. Cars careen the wrong direction on one-way streets while polizia lazily chat up ladies, and wrinkled women sell incense made of manure to ward off evil spirits. Dilapidated vehicles serve as storefronts for dozens of neatly arranged hubcaps: steal by night, sell by day. Balconies bear laundry of moldering stucco-crumbled apartment buildings crowned by satellite dishes. Naples’ streets ooze the theatricality of superstition: Lucky charms, figurines and Pulcinellas are sold in every nook and cranny of the wide-open port’s old section, a real-life “street museum” known as La Vie Del Arte. Viva Caruso’s penultimate tune, the three-part Lovano original “Il Carnivale del Puccinella,” captures this “festive jam-session atmosphere. Naples reminds me of New York City in many ways.”
Caruso, the eighteenth of 21 children and the first to live past infancy, earned $2 a day (and the nickname “the little divo”) singing Neapolitan ballads at the city’s gilded waterfront cafés in 1891. But after silence greeted his 1901 debut at the storied San Carlo opera house, he kept his vow never to play Naples again. Yet he was inescapably drawn to die there, in the throes of advanced pleurisy, after opening every Metropolitan Opera House season from 1903 to 1920. Fittingly, Viva Caruso begins with a mournful rendering of its only aria, “Vesti La Giubba” (from I Pag’iacci), the song Caruso was singing on December 8, 1920, when his voice suddenly broke on a high A and he staggered backstage and fell unconscious. Three days later he suffered a throat hemorrhage; his last performance, on Christmas Eve, 1920, saw him go through one blood-soaked towel after another.
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A musician’s musician, Lovano never forgets a face – or a sound. “I’m trying to draw from my personal history of experiencing different musics and playing with a lot of different players, in a multi-generational, multi-cultural sense.” He can pick up a dialogue with a musician he hasn’t played with in ages as if he was continuing a long bar conversation from the day before. It’s a quality that’s made him jazz’s most genial ambassador, serving him well on Viva Caruso.
“When we recorded ‘Santa Lucia,’ the song everyone plays at weddings, I wondered, ‘Now how am I gonna do this tune and not have it sound like a commercial throw-away?’ So I put together an arrangement for the two basses and drums – creating a very rhythmic dance-like mood – in the same way we got into different atmospheres on [last year’s] Flights of Fancy, Trio Fascination Edition Two.” Those delicious abstractions, utilizing four trios in 11 different permutations, also made it easier to turn “O Sole Mio” into a two-part piece – a re-harmonized free ballad and a walking-bass jazz jaunt – “that I could play for a half hour if I wanted to.”
Viva Caruso was recorded in two sessions with a “Street Band” and an “Opera House Ensemble.” Founded on shifting rhythms and a rat-a-tat-tat percussive bustle reflecting the spirit of Naples, both groups reveal Lovano’s affinity to drums (at home he rarely goes a day without bashing them). They also recall a period at the turn of the 1990s when Lovano gigged extensively with four stylistically different drummers (Mel Lewis, Paul Motian, Elvin Jones and Ed Blackwell). The glue on Viva Caruso is provided by the colorations of Joey Baron, the John Zorn collaborator who delivers a table-setting tour de force.
The ensemble was arranged by Byron Olson, who featured Lovano on his 1994 album Sketches of Coltrane. “We discussed the instrumentation and conception, but he was free to be himself,” says Lovano. “In fact, I didn’t hear any of his music until we got into the studio.” It’s a modus operandi Lovano employed on his first Blue Note ensemble disc, Universal Language (1993), pairing bassists Charlie Haden and Steve Swallow, “who knew each other for 30 years but had never played together. There was a lot of magic in the room, so I wrote music that could unfold in the studio, that were organic and free enough for everyone to be creative.”
Recording Viva Caruso gave Lovano the “thrill” of playing with veteran bass clarinetist Charlie Russo (who served in the Army with Tony Bennett and played with both The Met and Mingus). He renewed an affiliation with drummer Carmen Castaldi, with whom he played in high school in Cleveland, and clarinetist Billy Drewes, “my brother who I grew up with musically at Berklee.” (Drewes frequently works with postmodern guitarist Bill Frisell, who’s often played with Lovano in free-form trios with Motian.)
Then there’s the crucial contribution of classically-trained vocalist – and Joe’s wife – Judi Silvano: “I’ve taken him to a number of operas over the years, and he’s learned to appreciate the voice in a somewhat deeper way. The operatic voice is not necessarily natural; it’s an extension that must be cultivated, to reach that high C or whatever. In the jazz world, there’s been a lot of fluctuations between instrumentalists and vocalists trying to emulate each other. The classic example was Lester Young and Billie Holiday digging each other. Some people consider [vocals without words] to be avant-garde; I just consider it beautiful music. Audiences are used to hearing singers in the Billie mold, so it may take them a while to catch on. When I step up the microphone in the ensemble, I lose my ego: I’m only thinking about how my sound can serve the music.”
Indeed, her elegiac vocalese provides a wistful perspective on Caruso’s larger-than-life personality. He relished food (a macaroni brand was named after him), conversation, and practical jokes. To wit: during La Boheme he passed a hot sausage to a singer playing the waif Mimi – at the very moment he sang, “Your tiny hand is frozen.” And there were scandals: accused of improper behavior toward a lady in the notorious 1906 “monkey-house case” while viewing the animals in Central Park, and the messy 1912 courtroom resolution of fathering two sons in a liaison with Ada Giachetti.
Lovano shares the passion, though not the stormy weather. Perhaps it’s inevitable that some so-called jazz fans, with a penchant for internecine controversy, will glance at Lovano’s astonishing variety of releases and conclude that nobody can be that polyvalent, that he’s spreading himself thin. Lovano coolly responds: “I think new music comes from the personality of the players and the different combinations of ideas everybody brings to the table. Miles’ groups taught us that. Every Miles record was what you could call ‘concept album,’ and the players’ contributions made it new music. It wasn’t just a ‘record date.’ That kind of helped guide me.”
Lovano sighs, and continues quietly and carefully. “A lot of musicians can only play one way. Stuck in a style, playing in someone else’s shoes, they’re not creative improvisers to me. They don’t know how to explore. A lot of listeners are like that too.” He cites his experience last year playing for the first time, at Carnegie Hall, with Hank Jones – the elegant pianist who accompanied Bird on early 50s flights of fancy (“One of the highlights of my life, it taught me so much”) – and then joining the modernists Joey Baron and Billy Drewes at the Knitting Factory the next night. “Some people who heard me play ‘Three Little Words’ in a certain way with Hank, they might hear it the next night and say, ‘What was that? Wow, that was terrible!’ Then again, others might think my playing with Hank was ‘old-fashioned’ or something. Touring with the Celebrating Sinatra ensemble opened my eyes up to this. About half the audience never heard beautiful standard songs, and expected to hear me play in a so-called ‘progressive’ way. The other half hadn’t heard my freer playing and were scratching their heads when we played originals. But by the end everyone was really drawn into it. That taught me a lot about playing diverse.”
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Call this a soliloquy or an aria cantabile (or “songful yearning”): Joe on his father Tony “Big T” Lovano, barber by day and jazzman by night, who played with many musicians passing through Cleveland, and placed his tenor sax in three-month-old Joe’s lap for a photograph.
“I grew up with the music around me. My dad was no big wizard on his horn but he loved to play and he played beautiful. He took me to gigs and jam-sessions when I was a teenager, and the communication between him and the fellow musicians inspired me. I remember Gene Ammons, whose records I grew up on and who jammed with my dad, when he came to Cleveland around 1970. ‘Jug’ had just come out of jail, he hadn’t been on the scene for a while. Now he was back, and when I saw him and my dad embrace, that flipped me out, man. Here’s this legendary figure whose sound I knew from records, and now I’m listening to him in the room – not even realizing that he knew my dad from before – well, that made everything real for me.” He whispers the word “real” with sacred religiosity. “All of a sudden, these are real people. My dad spoke about playing in a Sunday matinee jam with John Coltrane in the early 50s, when Trane came through with a blues band playing alto. My dad always told me these stories, and it made things really real. So Coltrane wasn’t just this legendary cat on a record who’s a god – I mean, he was a god! – but it was the real stuff. I felt all this as a young guy, and it put a lot of stuff in perspective for me.”
Exploring the personality of the man they called The Great Caruso, Lovano plumbed his musician’s soul for some of his deepest playing. Lovano suddenly rises in that opera house dressing room, his post-concert catharsis complete. Eyes twinkling, the big man walks out on the balls of his feet – like he does on stage, swept away by transcendent sounds – to greet friends, fans and glad-handers alike. All week long on Orvieto’s stages and streets, the bucolic smiles on his bandmates’ faces gave him “such a joyous feeling that how could I not help but be swept up in it? For me, jazz music is a joyous communication between musicians.” Joe Lovano is now ready to take Enrico Caruso on the road.