Fred Hess

Over time, veteran tenor saxophonist Fred Hess shows himself to be always a versatile, broad-minded, highly flexible musician/composer who is able to handle a multitude of jazz settings. Like fellow saxophone explorer Joe Lovano — who he offers often been in comparison to — the Colorado citizen is content and influenced in avant-garde circumstances, but can be quite with the capacity of playing in what jazz music artists explain as “the custom,” which identifies straight-ahead jazz (hard bop, bebop, great jazz, golf swing, post-bop, etc.) instead of avant-garde jazz, fusion, crossover jazz or electrical jazz-funk. And like Lovano, Hess provides an inside/outdoors perspective; he isn’t somebody who is convinced that jazz performers are obligated to confine themselves to “the custom” morning hours, noon and evening, but at exactly the same time, he isn’t as radical or as considerably left musically as somebody like free of charge jazz firebrand Charles Gayle (who’s known when planning on taking outside improvisation towards the extreme, and it has been significantly inspired by John Coltrane’s post-1965 result). Hess brings an extended and diverse set of affects to his function. In the avant-garde aspect, his affects have got ranged from Ornette Coleman and Steve Lacy towards the Chicago-based AACM, Roscoe Mitchell, and Anthony Braxton (although Hess isn’t as regularly outside as Braxton continues to be). Eric Dolphy provides influenced Hess; therefore have different intervals of Coltrane’s profession. So when he attracts on “the custom,” Hess can include components of Sonny Rollins along with the seminal Lester “The Pres” Small. Stating that Hess continues to be affected by “The Pres” isn’t stating that he’s a golf swing revival designer — Hess is definitely definately not that — or that he’s trying to audio exactly like Youthful sounded within the ’30s, ’40s or ’50s. Rather, Hess demonstrates an improviser may bring elements of Youthful or hard bopper Rollins to his firmness, despite the fact that he doesn’t improvise the direction they improvised; when somebody compares Hess to Youthful or Stan Getz, it is due to intonation as opposed to the records that he chooses. Nobody would mistake among Hess’ abstract, AACM-influenced inside/outside solos for just one from the solos that Youthful provided for vocalist Billie Vacation at Columbia Information back the Franklin Delano Roosevelt period. Hess is not a indigenous of Colorado; he was created in Abington, PA (a Philadelphia suburb) in 1944 and was raised in NJ (where he went to Trenton State University as a adult). The saxman was 37 when, in 1981, he transferred to Boulder, CO, where he founded the Boulder Innovative Music Ensemble the next year. Hess continued to keep his education in Colorado, and in 1991, he graduated in the School of Colorado, Boulder using a doctorate in music structure. Hess began saving as a head in the first ’90s, when he documented Special Thunder for the tiny, Colorado-based Capri Information; his next Capri launch, YOU UNDERSTAND I Care, arrived in 1994. The first 2000s discovered Hess, who flipped 60 in 2004, offering many albums for Tapestry (another Colorado-based indie).