MAY 2004 Volume 71 – Number 5 Players - Fred Hess: Late Bloomer "Roscoe Mitchell once said, 'Longevity is the key in this kind of music'," Fred Hess recalls. "After awhile, you get good at it." He's Exhibit A. The Colorado tenor saxophonist has been making good records for 15 years, but only hit his stride in the '00s, with a trio of smashing CDs for pianoless quartet: the new The Long and Short of It (Tapestry), with longtime ally Ron Miles on trumpet and New York's Ken Filiano and Matt Wilson on bass and drums, and two with Paul Smoker, Filiano and Damon Short, including 2002'sterrific Extended Family (Tapestry). Hess has a tough and sinewy tenor style, but the intricate ensemble interaction and shapely themes really distinguish these discs. He crams lots of good stuff in: improvised counterpoint, flexible forms, push-pull pulsing rhythms. The complexities recall Jimmy Giuffre's overlooked 1955 pianoless four (more than, say, Ornette's), but this music charges harder, adhering to Hess's "four Fs," which include "fast, furious, and frantic." Ensemble vectors are partly inspired by Hess's interest in physics, specifically the motion of subatomic particles.  He's hit paydirt. Yet six years ago Hess had considered hanging up his neckstrap, after playing alongside James Carter on Ginger Baker's CD Coward of the County. "I thought, 'This guy can do things I don't even know about.' I realized I was a little behind the times. All my life, I had been counting on the inspired moment." Not that he'd been running on raw intuition. Hess has had an extraordinarily complete music education. Born in 1944 and raised in New Jersey, he'd spent two periods studying with Phil Woods (saxophone in the '60s, composing in the '70s). He played in jazz bands, a Puerto Rican band, a Princeton physicists' rehearsal band, and a showband where he tripled on tenor, flute and trombone. In the late '70s he attended Woodstock's Creative Music Studio and got hipped to Leo Smith's advanced concepts, and Anthony Braxton's thorny composing, an audible model for pieces Hess's Boulder Creative Music Ensemble would play later (alongside Jelly Roll Morton's "Dead Man Blues," laced with pedal steel guitar). Fred moved west in 1981 to study composition at the University of Colorado at Boulder--these days he lives 14 miles east, in Erie--eventually earning his doctorate. Somewhere in there he also studied briefly with west-meets-east composer Lou Harrison, who inspired the gamelan-derived timing of the BCME's stately "Lou-Bop" (from 1999's Faith, on Cadence). In '89 and '90 Hess went to Gunther Schuller's Festival at Sand Point in Idaho, and got bit by the jazz repertory bug. In the '90s he and Miles would play classic charts with their Creative Music Works Orchestra, an offshoot of the BCME. Nowadays Hess coordinates Jazz Studies at Denver's Metropolitan State College (Miles teaches there too) and he's published several books of transcribed solos by Pres, Hawkins, Don Byas and various '50s tenors--see his site www.indra.com/~fhmusic. But his style never sounds like a pastiche or homage, maybe because he transcribes on piano: "I've never played those solos." Still, after encountering James Carter, Fred began studying contemporary tenors, to further develop his instrumental language. "I started writing compositions with chords, based on that language. Then I realized, I'll never be as facile as Joe Lovano chasing chords around. The last step was to drop them." And the piano they rode in on. The two horn/two rhythm concept was born. Hess's compositional training comes in handy. "I'll create a melody for trumpet, then a second part for tenor--in unison, harmony, or counterpoint--and maybe derive the bassline from the melody as well: elongated, or in retrograde. Or maybe there'll be two melody parts and a separate bassline, with drums mediating between. I'll also write interludes and backgrounds based on the same material--the tag Ron and I play at the end of 'Happened Yesterday' is the melody, backwards--and then we'll improvise off of that. It makes for good listenable material--and it sounds like jazz." --Kevin Whitehead