Chris Potter

Chris Potter - Follow the Red Line [Live at the Village Vanguard] - 2007 - Sunnyside

Here's a quote from All About Jazz, and it says a lot about this stunning album - "It's an exercise in futility to find a name for the music of Follow the Red Line. But as Potter blurs the lines between jazz, rock, funk and even a little afro-beat in ways that are finally being accepted again two decades after The New York Times declared the "pestilence known as fusion is dead," the best word to describe this recording is, quite simply, great."
© John Kelman, AllAboutJazz

Born in Chicago in 1971, Potter grew up in Columbia, South Carolina. By the time he was fourteen, he was a professional and when he was eighteen, he moved to New York, enrolled at the Manhattan School of Music, and joined bop trumpeter Red Rodney's quintet until 1994. He has worked with some of the world's finest jazz musicians,. and some of his finest session gigs include work with the legendary Marian McPartland on her 1993 CD, In My Life, and with Renee Rosnes, Paul Motian, Dave Holland, John Patitucci, Dave Douglas, Steve Swallow, and Kenny Werner. He has toured with Steely Dan and played on their briliant "Two Against Nature" album. He was the youngest ever winner of Denmark's prestigious Jazzpar Prize in 2000. There have been many great recordings made from artists appearing at the legendary Village Vanguard venue in Manhattan, and this recording is up there with the best of them. An incredible mix of jazz funk, fusion, blues, and even a few great rock beats, this album should be heard by anybody remotely interested in good music. Even if you are not a jazz lover, it would be impossible not to like this album. A wonderful recording and VHR by A.O.O.F.C.. Check out his excellent 2006 album, "Underground," and for a great lesson in musical education, try and listen to Chris Potter's sax solo on the track, "West of Hollywood" from Steely Dan's "Two Against Nature" album, where he plays a seemingly impossible series of changes for over four minutes. It's breathtaking stuff from a living jazz legend.


TRACKS

Train - 15:59
Arjuna - 14:41
Pop Tune #1 - 11:56
Viva Las Vilnius - 12:59
Zea - 6:52
Togo - 12:55
Morning Bell - 9:19

All tracks composed by Chris Potter, except Togo, which is an Ed Blackwell tune.

MUSICIANS

Adam Rogers (guitar)
Chris Potter (tenor saxophone)
Craig Taborn (Fender Rhodes piano)
Nate Smith (drums)

REVIEWS

Saxophonist Chris Potter has been pushing the limits of the saxophone since his entrance to the jazz scene. Potter created the Underground band as a vehicle for his explorations in improvisation and composition. Though the band has only been around for a short time, it has proven to be one of the most engaging and far-reaching ensembles around. The new recording, Follow the Red Line, documents the band in its element, a live performance at the famed Village Vanguard, and expands upon their previous release, Underground (Sunnyside 2006). The band consists of young stalwarts Craig Taborn (keyboards), Adam Rogers (guitar) and Nate Smith (drums). This recording serves as a perfect expose of Potter’s prowess as composer and performer. © 2003-2007 Radical Moodswinger Music - All Rights Reserved

For the last half century, the tenor saxophone has been the top dog in jazz, the instrument that carries the most heft in the community. It’s the heavyweight voice that typically isn’t cute or clever. Not many tenor saxophonists will settle for being coy.
Chris Potter, album-by-album and show-by-show over the last ten years, has made a bid for the tenor title. He has been playing with the best bandleaders (from Dave Holland to Steely Dan), and he has been leading his own potent groups. Though Potter does not possess a larger-than-life persona, he builds gargantuan solos with the personality of a freight train: slow at first, then surging and bold, and finally explosive and spectacular. Potter’s band Underground is his most hard-hitting outfit, and this document of the band’s tenure in the legendary Greenwich Village basement club bristles with daring and funk energy. What a great record!
Follow the Red Line features not only Potter’s tenor but also a fully integrated rhythm section: Craig Taborn’s Fender Rhodes electric piano, Adam Rogers on electric guitar, and Nate Smith’s drums. This is a band that could court cliché—an electric “fusion” band that integrates funk rhythms with jazz—and that would seem to be lacking an important tool: a bass player. But, in fact, the opposite is true. Underground is a band that pulses with invention. With Potter out front, the band is precisely the opposite of generic. Each player is pressed into varied service: Taborn plays bass lines as well as ripping chords, Rogers is both distorted and clean, choppy and legato, and Smith is polyrhythmic fallout—a dizzying clatter of arms and legs in flowing groove.
Even compared to the band’s first studio outing from early 2006, this is a progression. While the tunes still begin with intelligently composed, carefully voiced arrangements, there is a boiling beneath the surface that rises quickly enough to the surface. On “Arjuna”, for example, the ensemble section bristles with Smith’s nasty stickwork, then Taborn’s solo starts at a simmer and starts to flare up as the punches of left-hand Rhodesplay is complicated by Rogers stuttering guitar. When Potter enters, it is predictably with his own stuttering ‘plosions of breath, adding another pointellistic layer to the polyrhythm. The solo climaxes in a series of serpentine rips that alternate with architectural steps through the harmony.
Equally impressive are the more consonant moments, such as the statement of melody on “Pop Song #1”, where a pleasant and inevitable tune is set amidst a flow of surprising chords. Rogers plays with a pungent simplicity, and Taborn patiently waits for each downbeat before playing his gospel-infused chords. On Potter’s solo, however, the band gets into an improbably hot funk groove that seems to build off the basic guitar line. “Viva las Vinius” is first built off a single rhythm lick, and the band seems ready to ride the thing through the whole performance. It’s even more of the treat, then, when Potter’s solo begins in a slowed-down free time that very gradually builds from slow and quiet back to the full strength of the original groove.
It’s an extra treat that Follow the Red Line allows Potter a long stretch for his outstanding sound on bass clarinet. Bass clarinet is a doublers specialty, of course, and inevitably gets jazz fans thinking about Eric Dolphy. So it’s wonderful to hear Underground place the oddball horn in a Rhodes-and-guitar pop ballad on “Zea” and then allow it to begin “Togo” in a Bennie Maupin vibe, muttering from its lower register as the rhythm section slowly picks up on the percussive groove. This last tune eventually gives way to a one-chord jam groove (and a burning tenor solo) that suggests how Potter’s electric band ultimately converges with the likes of Medeski, Martin, and Wood on the one hand and class Sonny Rollins on the other.
The magic in Red Line is ultimately in the drama that each player brings to his solos, each of which builds like a scene from a Hitchcock film. Top honors, as so often, go to Taborn’s versatile Rhodes playing. But they are Potter’s fiendish tunes and his group conception. In a year that saw the passing of Michael Brecker, Potter seems to have emerged as a steely-toned tenor player who blends harmonic adventure with groove. It’s not a question of talking about Potter as a Brecker successor—they’re totally different players and, frankly, I think that Potter’s range and imagination is wider. But it’s a joy to hear this young master put a hard-edged, Breckeresque foot forward. Chris Potter, one of finest saxophone players in jazz today, has made a great record. © Will Layman, © 1999-2008 PopMatters.com. All rights reserved

Nobody can replace the late Michael Brecker, but sax master Chris Potter has Brecker's sweeping technical command, and the ability not only to express just about any fleeting thought on the instrument, in flat-out real time and without repetition, but to hook the thoughts together as a shapely and dramatic spontaneous narrative. This live set from New York's Village Vanguard features Potter's best-ever group, with visionary keyboardist Craig Taborn, guitarist Adam Rogers and drummer Nate Smith. There's plenty of jolting Breckerish melodic edginess, but more avant-funk explorations, and abstract textural journeys through the sonic resourcefulness of Taborn and Rogers. The opening Train becomes a chunky funk strut, the fast Arjuna is like crisper, cleaner Bitches Brew music, and Pop Tune is a swelling ballad for sax and guitar that eventually becomes loping, Crusaders-like funk. Taborn's sumptuous ripples and lustrous chords usher in Potter's startlingly pure bass clarinet on the rapturously reflective Zea, and Togo is a long, slow-build finale that milks its riff to the utmost. © John Fordham, Friday November 2, 2007, The Guardian , guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008

BIO IWikipedia)

Chris Potter (born January 1, 1971) is an American jazz saxophonist, composer, and multi-instrumentalist. Born in Chicago, Illinois, Potter spent most of his childhood in Columbia, South Carolina where his mother taught psychology at the University of South Carolina. He exhibited an early interest in all kinds of music and quickly became a prodigy, mastering several instruments including guitar and piano, and finally gravitating toward the alto and tenor saxophone. Potter played his first professional jazz gig at age 13 and quickly developed a devoted local following. He attended college in New York City, first at the New School, and later at Manhattan School of Music. He currently resides in New York. Potter has released a number of albums as leader and has performed and recorded with many leading musicians including Kenny Werner, Red Rodney, Marian McPartland, the Mingus Big Band, Paul Motian, Ray Brown, Jim Hall, James Moody, Dave Douglas, Joe Lovano, Wayne Krantz, Mike Mainieri, Steve Swallow, Steely Dan, Dave Holland, Joanne Brackeen, and many more. His 1998 CD Vertigo was named one of the year's top ten jazz CDs by both Jazziz magazine and The New York Times. He was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Solo for his work on the Joanne Brackeen recording Pink Elephant Magic. His 2004 CD Lift: Live At The Village Vanguard was named one of the year's ten best new jazz recordings by Fred Kaplan of Slate.