Photo By Fabrizio Ferri

By Paul Freeman [August 2012 Interview]

Trumpeter Chris Botti can coax the most romantic sounds imaginable from his horn. Fans tell him he’s filling a void by conjuring up lush soundscapes.

Botti’s latest album, “Impressions,” features material from diverse sources, from Gershwin and Chopin to Harold Arlen to R. Kelly. Among the guests are Vince Gill, Herbie Hancock Andrea Bocelli, David Foster and Mark Knopfler.

Dreaminess is a key to Botti’s recording success. He’s earned several Grammy nominations and reached the jazz album chart’s number one spot three times. But live, the trumpeter goes for excitement.

Botti, whose mother was a pianist, knew from early childhood in Oregon that it takes discipline to reach virtuosity.

At age nine, Botti saw Doc Severinsen on “The Tonight Show” and wanted to try the trumpet. But it was at 13, listening to Miles Davis, that Botti had the epiphany. It’s not an easy path. It takes time to find one’s voice on the trumpet. Botti left college in his senior year and moved to New York.

Botti’s breakthrough came after he had already recorded a few solo albums. Sting invited him to be a featured player in his band, then to serve as his opening act. Later, Sting agreed to appear on Botti’s own PBS concert.

The trumpeter’s ability to pour sensitive, emotional sounds through his instrument have made him immensely popular. Now Botti and his band spend 300 days a year on the road, performing well over 200 concerts.

Pop Culture Classics talked with Botti prior to his August 23rd date at Saratoga, California’s intimate Montalvo Arts Center (www.montalvoarts.org). For more tour dates, visit chrisbotti.com.

POP CULTURE CLASSICS:
For the ‘Impressions’ album, did you have the music fully imagined beforehand or did it take shape in the studio?

CHRIS BOTTI:
I think because of the way we make records, you surround yourself with the best, but you don’t really know what it’s going to sound like until you get in there, which is different from pop music, where you write the songs and have things laid out in demo-land. We never do that. So you’re just sitting there in the days leading up to it, going like, ‘Well, I hope the arrangement’s good.’ You never know if it’s going to have the arc or the kind of sensitivity that you want it to have. And that really is the key to the success or lack of success of a particular song, is how the arrangement is treated.

PCC:
What is that process of finding your own take on even the most familiar tunes?

BOTTI:
You have maybe the seed of an idea, like you want something to maybe feature the guitar or you want it to be piano or you want it to be a certain key or a certain mood. And then you’ve got to verbalize it as much as you can - ‘I want not a lot of movement here, some more movement there...’ And then let these fantastic kind of people work their sensibilities.

For the 13 songs that are on the album, we missed on seven or eight of them. We recorded 20 songs and only so many make it to the record. So there are some misses. They’re not always on it.

PCC:
There’s such a diversity of guests and material. Do you enjoy placing yourself in different musical contexts?

BOTTI:
Well, if you look at, say, ‘Kind of Blue,’ Miles Davis, and you add up all the time that he actually plays the trumpet on that album, he’s probably playing trumpet 25 percent of the time. The rest, you’re hearing Bill Evans or John Coltrane or whomever. And, if I did that on my record, if I’d set another saxophone solo or piano solo on every song, it would be much more traditional jazz format. And so we put singers in there, orchestral pieces,to sort of break up hearing the trumpet all the time, basically. And that is the reason that I love working with singers, because you do get a break from that, and also, it’s something that’s very relatable. And, if the singer’s fantastic, like a Mark Knopfler or Andrea Bocelli, I mean, forget about Vince Gill, who’s got one of the greatest voices I’ve ever heard, then it just makes it much, much easier to draw the listener in.

PCC:
Do you hear from listeners that they feel you’re filling a void, in terms of romantic music, that it’s harder to find these days?

BOTTI:
I hope they feel that way. I definitely think that, to make music with a certain kind of sweep in it, a cinematic approach, costs a lot of money. And there are not a lot of record companies that are willing to let a first-time act come out and do that. The music industry is just so handicapped right now, that there isn’t these big kind of arc records being made. They don’t really have the eyes to do that. They want a little YouTube hit or a hit here and there and they move on. I’ve been lucky enough to build up a rapport with my record company, to the point where they just trust me and let me do whatever I want to do. And it’s a really, really, unusual spot to be in.

But I think that’s why you don’t hear that much music like that, Bocelli or myself or whomever, because, quite frankly, it’s hard to do.

PCC:
Do you feel a challenge to try to grow musically with each album, while still pleasing the core of fans?

BOTTI:
I never really try to please, oddly enough. This probably sounds kind of harsh, but I’ve never really tried to please my fans, just try to make the records I would want to listen to, and then, I just jump to the conclusion that it would be something that the fans would like. In other words, my tastes. I’m not one of these artists that’s into like super-esoteric music, but, for my fans, make romantic music. For me, it’s the same. If it’s going to be good for me, then I fell like it’s going to be good for the people that like my music. So I don’t really try to adapt at all. I just kind of try to please myself.

And is it hard to grow? I really feel like sitting there and writing with Herbie Hancock and, a lot of those songs, going into the studio, and a lot of those songs, we did live, in one take, I just feel like I’m a much, much better player now than I was 15 years ago or 10 years ago or five years ago. So I feel like the growth, we’re still on an upward trend. And when that downward trend starts happening, the trumpet will be the first one to let me know [Laughs].

PCC:
As far as your musical background, how much effect did it have, the fact that your mother was a trained musician?

BOTTI:
A little bit. I don’t really know, because it’s the only life I really knew. I will say that, what she did, maybe even more than teach me about music, is she taught me how to structure a practice session. A lot of kids, especially these days, they’re scattered so easily and they don’t really find joy in repetition of monotonous things. And whether it’s golf or trumpet, sports or whatever you’re doing at life, if you’re going to be great at it, you have to love the monotony and the repetition and you have to find joy in that and really spread your wings somehow, in amongst that style of practice, or you will make it in music, period. Unless you want to be a rock star. You can do that rather quickly, if you can come up with a catchy hit and you have a good look, that’s cool. But if you’re going to play a real musical instrument, piano or trumpet or whatever, you’d better get in a practice room and knock it out for many, many years. So my mom got me in that mindset.

PCC:
What was it that drew you to the trumpet at age nine?

BOTTI:
The power of television. There was Doc Severinsen and he was heading the ‘Tonight Show’ band at the time. And I thought, ‘Wow! That’ guy’s cool.’ So I went out and got a trumpet. And then, when I was 12 or 13, I heard Miles Davis. And they played trumpet so radically different from one another. Miles played different from everyone. But, you know, Doc or Maynard or those kind of trumpet players had that very brilliant upper register and lots of joy and flash in their playing. And then Miles had this brooding, melancholy, haunting thing that makes you cry. And that really struck me, in hearing Miles Davis for the first time, I thought, ‘I want to be a trumpet player for the rest of my life.’

PCC:
You mentioned how you have to be committed to the practice. With trumpet, it can be a long time before you can get what you hear in your head out through the horn.

BOTTI:
Oh, my God, yeah, like 40 years. That’s why there aren’t a lot of trumpet players out there, quite frankly. There’s many more guitar players and saxophone players than there are trumpet players, because the instrument is so physical and demanding and frustrating. But I always loved playing the trumpet and I was still practicing when you called, in the bathroom of my hotel. I’m sure the neighbor aren’t too happy about that. But that’s just what I do. I just really find meditation in it and joy in trying to make the trumpet sound smooth or trying to iron out the rough edges that a lot of players have.

PCC:
Having some classical background, was that important to the development?

Photo By Fabrizio Ferri

BOTTI:
Yeah. If you’re going to really play trumpet, even if you’re a great jazz musician, it gives you the fundamentals of the instrument. Playing an instrument like the trumpet is a railroad track. You’ve got a track on the right and a track on the left and the things in between that hold everything, right? And if one of those tracks goes off course, then the train derails. So those two tracks are basically assimilated to, or you can link them to one being the physical part of the trumpet and the other track is the music, playing music.

So there are a lot of great technical trumpet players who sound fantastic playing the scale, but they have nothing to say musically. They can’t improvise. They only play what’s on the page and they’re just not very musical. So the track doesn’t work. But you can’t be super-musical and not have the fundamentals, the classical fundamentals of the trumpet. You just can’t, because there’s just too many things that are exactly the same. You have to play all the scales, you have to play all the chromatic scales, you have to know all the arpeggios of the instrument or you won’t be able to make music. It would be like speaking without any knowledge of how to form your mouth or tongue. You learned that from your mom and dad, when you were a kid. So you’ve got to have both to work.

PCC:
Once you had the foundation in place, was the classical too confining for your musical personality?

BOTTI:
Yeah, definitely. The people that are expressing themselves in classical music are named Brahms and Beethoven and Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky. The people that sit in an orchestra do not really have a personal expression. Their orchestra has a sound. When you’re playing with a great orchestra like Philadelphia or something, it has a great sound. But the individual musicians don’t enjoy a personal identity. It’s more like being on a team. And I recognized, when I was a kid, I didn’t want to be on a team. I wanted to be a complete narcissist [Laughs]. But you know what I’m saying. I wanted to stand out in front and be a solo artist.

PCC:
And developing your own style, is that something that just comes naturally or do you have to think consciously about that?

BOTTI:
That comes from just a daily notion that you want to be a solo artist and then you have to figure it out. I don’t know really how that happens, how someone’s individual sound becomes identifiable. That’s kind of luck. Maybe the way I play into the horn... people always come up and say, ‘Oh, I recognize your sound right away.’ And it’s the trumpet. It’s not like an MTV video and you’re singing a song. I get that, but the fact that people can recognize an instrumental sound is amazing to me. And I think there’s a big, fat dose of luck, because without that, I don’t really have a real solo career. If you don’t have the identifiable thing, then you don’t have a solo career. But you don’t know if you have it, until much later in life. You don’t just wake up and have an identifiable sound. It’s kind of weird that way.

PCC:
Do you remember a point in time when your trumpet seemed like your true voice to you, yourself, even if other people might not have recognized it?

BOTTI:
I thought maybe, when I first started making records, that there was something pleasing about the way my trumpet would sound on a record. Like when I played a solo piece. And at the time, I was doing so much studio work and sitting, playing the themes to every TV show, sports show and blah blah blah. So I was around all sorts of other really well known, fantastic trumpet players. And I’d hear them warm up and I’d hear the way that their horn goes down on the microphone and into the studio and onto the tape. And then when I went home and I had my own studio and I started making my own stuff to try to get a record deal, I kind of thought, ‘Wow, this sounds a little bit different.’ I could kind of recognize that. But I didn’t know it would have an effect on the outside world. You can’t really ever dream that that’s going to happen. You can dream it, but you can’t really be assured, even with practice, that that’s going to happen. Because that’s pure, insane luck.

PCC:
So before the recording success, did you envision a career in music being a difficult road?

BOTTI:
One thing I can say that is a real big blessing, and I’d say this to any young person, you have to have a huge appetite for being naive. In other words, when I moved to New York, broke, I did terrible gigs in the Bronx that started at three in the morning and they tried to pay you in illegal drugs. I mean, it was crazy. And they would like hijack your car. It was insane. The band members were getting mugged on the way to the gigs. But when I scraped up enough money that first month to pay my rent, I thought I’d won the Academy Award.

And now, if somebody said, ‘Hey Chris, you’ve got to go do a gig that starts at three in the morning,’ I would be like in complete depression. But what happened was, I just felt a real connection with the instrument and I was real positive, even if I look back at it and say, ‘Well, I had nothing going on,’ I didn’t feel that way then. It was just an amazing thing to be able to give the landlord my rent money and stand on my own two feet, even thought I was doing crappy gigs in New York.

And then later, as I was able to like join Paul Simon’s band and get back on the road and then weed out the crappy gigs and stay in the studio and actually make a living, it was an incredible feeling. And you don’t ever really think that you’re going to walk out in front of thousands of people a night and have a real career, because you can’t jump that far ahead. You just can’t fathom that. A career in music is so self-driven. It’s not like the NBA, when you get out of college, and there’s a structure, there’s a draft day and, if you don’t make it, you’re toast. There is no structure to the music industry. I didn’t even start making records until I was 35. Really late. My real success happened to me when I was 43. Now, where does that happen in pop music? It doesn’t. The odds are stacked up so hard against you, if you actually tried to look at them, you’d just hide under your covers all day.

PCC:
Was it while you were in college that you did some dates with Sinatra and Buddy Rich?

BOTTI:
I left college in the middle of my fourth year. So I never graduated. It was November of my fourth year of college. So I dropped out and flew the next morning, because I’d gotten an offer to do this Sinatra-Buddy Rich gig.

PCC:
Was that like surreal to be performing with them at that point?

BOTTI:
It was absolutely surreal, because I got there at sound check, I was 21. I’m fairly youthful now, and I’ll be 50 in a couple of months. When I was 21, I looked like Opie. There I was in Hollywood, staying at this unbelievably Gothic hotel, filled with crack addicts. And you get off a plane from Indiana and you’re going, ‘Okay, I’m going to go to sound check now with Frank Sinatra’ and I’m walking through this seedy hotel. It was just a bizarre start to my career.

You get to sound check and the first person to check was Sinatra. And it was fantastic. And I went up and tried to talk to him, again, being naive. And then, the second person to check was Buddy Rich. So I went from this haze of beautiful music and then to like the anger and grittiness of Buddy Rich. And that was not a very nice scene. He was not a very nice person. But just to see all this stuff come down on you, your first day out of college, and you dropped out. So you’re sitting there going like, ‘Oh, God! How is this going to work?’ But it was a great experience.

PCC:
And I guess Sting had a huge, positive impact on you?

BOTTI:
Well, I’d released about three albums under my own name, at that time. And he had performed on one of them. We were sort of kind of friendly. And I was in London at the time, doing a soundtrack with John Barry, who was a great film composer, and I ran into Sting and he invited me to have a drink with him at his hotel and he said, ‘Listen, I had success in the ‘80s, with Branford Marsalis, and he kind of weaved commentary throughout my music and played solo saxophone in my band for a few years. And I’d like to do that same thing with you. And I think, if I break the sound of your trumpet to the whole world, you’ll have fans that don’t really know anything about jazz and come to my show and they’ll be your fans forever.’

I was on Verve Records at the time and I said, ‘Absolutely. I’d love to do that. That’d be great.’ And the minute my record company heard that I was going on the road with Sting, they dropped me. So bizarre. They thought I wasn’t committed to my own career. And so they dropped me. I was like four or five months into the tour, thinking this is such a great break for me, and I get a call saying, ‘We’re releasing you from Verve.’ And I was like devastated. And I didn’t know what to do.

And through my now manager, my friend at the time, Bobby Colomby, who has a long history with Blood, Sweat & Tears, etc., he called up Columbia and got me a deal on Columbia and everything Sting said to this day has rung true.

Subsequently, after I was in his band, he then asked me to be his opening act, and then someone in the audience, when I was the opening act, playing in New York, said, ‘Oh, my God, my friend Oprah would love this guy.’ And the next thing you know, the week later, we’re on ‘Oprah.’ Every road that I’ve gone on, it all threads back, in some way, to Sting believing in me. My DVDs, the PBS, none of that happens, without Sting saying ‘I’ll be there,’ first. So when you have the Boston Pops and Sting who are going to perform with you, all of a sudden, Yo Yo Ma, Steven Tyler, John Mayer, everyone else goes, ‘Yeah, I’ll be there, too, no problem.’ But you have to have that first big vote of approval from someone else. That’s just the reality of it.

PCC:
Bobby Colomby, having had such longevity to his career, what sort of advice has he been able to give you?

BOTTI:
He’s like a brother to me. So we give each other advice. My whole career is kind of wrapped up in the two of us doing it together. How do you envision a real touring career? How are you going to surround yourself with the best arrangers, the best musicians? I would never in a million years have had the audacity to approach Herbie Hancock to ask him to do something on my record. I mean, I would just never do that. It’s not my style. But Bobby would [Laughs]. And he and Bobby go way back, so he had no problem asking him and Herbie was gracious enough to say yes. So the things I do really well, like picking songs or picking collaborations, like saying I’d love to do something with Vince Gill, that sort of thing, I think I know what my strengths are, and I think there are some things that Bobby does that I certainly couldn’t do. And it’s a great, great relationship that we have. And I would never have thought, five years ago, when we started working together really hardcore, with him as my manager, that it would succeed to this level, concerts all over the world, selling out the Sydney opera house two nights. You just don’t think that it’s going to come down that way. But it did.

PCC:
And all the discussions of whether something is pop, jazz or smooth jazz, do you find labels to be irrelevant?

BOTTI:
Now I do. Maybe 12 years ago or 15 years ago, it would have gotten under my skin. The reality really comes down to this, everybody in pop music can basically agree that Sade is cool. Bob Dylan is cool in rock. In R&B and love-making music, Sade is cool. Everyone thinks that. If you removed Sade’s voice off of her record and replaced it with an instrument, it’s all of a sudden, smooth jazz. And everyone hates it, right?

The basic reality is, if you play any kind of music that’s instrumental, that you have to plug into a wall, in others words there’s maybe an electric guitar, some sort of synthesizer, it’s smooth jazz. So you’re either going to be completely traditional, like Wynton Marsalis, or you’re going to be absolutely labeled smooth jazz. So, anything that’s sort of modern, is often called smooth jazz - Diana Krall, Sade, Sting, myself, Pat Metheny, whomever it is. But all I really care about is that the stuff reaches an audience, and what that audience is like.

When I first started out, it was as more of a straight-ahead smooth jazz artist, because those were the kind of gigs I was doing. Then like seven years ago, we sort of just stepped away from all that and made these big kind of conceptual, romantic, orchestral music records. And all of a sudden, everything changed for me. No one was calling me a smooth jazz act anymore and suddenly I’m doing all this different stuff. So it doesn’t affect me. I don’t care what people call it, as long as people come to the show and have a real open mind about what they’re about to hear or review.

And that’s where it gets real interesting, because, most of the time, we have these hardcore jazz critics and they’re walking away saying, ‘We thought we’d be seeing some light, fluffy, bullshit smooth jazz show. Oh, my God! It was classical music. It was jazz on the highest level. It was entertaining. We had no idea it was going to be like this.’ That’s the best you can hear. Even the most hardcore jazz critics are at least sort of complimentary.

PCC:
When you’re performing live, are you conscious of wanting to take the listeners on a journey?

BOTTI:
The live concerts couldn’t be more opposite from the records. We played New York last week and Nate Chen, the great jazz reviewer there said, ‘If Chris Botti’s records are candlelight, then his gigs are fireworks.’ You don’t want to have a real, direct representation of my records live, because what’s the point? You can just go and listen to the record. When you go see Josh Bell in concert, people stand up, at the end, when he plays Paganini and just torches down on the violin. And everyone goes, ‘Oh, my God! That’s great!’ And they love it. But when they go home, they listen to Chopin nocturnes. They don’t want to necessarily sit there in their house and listen to like just visceral technique. And when you sit closer, you want to make sure that you walk away from there going, ‘My God, that guy was badass!’ So I try to pace my show so it flows all over the place and that’s probably, more than anything what’s defined my sound, live shows, and that’s why people coming back to the shows so many years.

PCC:
Are you still playing the same vintage instrument?

BOTTI:
Yeah, my same one that I’ve had for about 12 or 13 years. It’s from 1939.

PCC:
And that one particular instrument just connects with you in a unique way?

BOTTI:
Yeah, one. Not even one particular make. You can’t even find that many of them, but if you did... I mean, I’ve been trying to find one other one, but it’s just this relationship with this one particular instrument [Chuckles] And God, I’ve tried to find another all over the world, to try to have a backup, but I don’t have any backup or anything, just this one.

PCC:
Does it seem like an extension of you?

BOTTI:
Oh, yeah. It’s an amazing fit. It’s got a lot of quirks to it and that’s what gives it its sound and I love the thing. My relationship with it is kind of the only relationship I know [Laughs], so I’m into it.

PCC:
Do you still have an unfulfilled goals?

BOTTI:
Maybe 13 years ago, I did a tour with Paul Simon and we did a double-bill with Bob Dylan. And I’m not a big Bob Dylan fan, musically. But I learned something from watching him that summer. Here’s a guy who’s got everything he wants. He’s got money, he’s got fame, he’s got critical acclaim. He’s got everything. And he gets off his bus - he looks like hell - but he gets off his bus every night and walks out and plays the show and gets back in his bus and leaves.

And as I become more and more well known and successful, I always go back to that and think there’s something very noble about that life, as opposed to those people who, all of a sudden get big and want to have a perfume line, be an entrepreneur, like a record company, a mogul. That’s not me. I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to be in my sixties or seventies, trying to be all that. But I do want to be in my sixties or seventies, walking on stage and doing a show and hopefully entertaining people. And it’s very, very simple. But it takes a lot of practice and a lot of care. And that’s really what I want to do. That’s my little goal.

And along the way, I’d like to keep working with people that I admire. But life’s goal, that’s probably the one thing I want to keep doing.

PCC:
You mentioned the landmark birthday coming up in the fall. Do you feel that more years give you more to draw from, as an artist?

BOTTI:
[Laughs] Yeah... I don’t know. I don’t really look at it that whimsically. I’m probably scared or feel tired... I feel very grateful for everything in 50 years. Probably, when that night hits, I’ll be thinking more about life than my art [Laughs], I suppose.