Facing death, saxophonist provides moving coda to jazz career

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Facing death, saxophonist provides moving coda to jazz career with CD of final recording sessions

By CHARLES J. GANS The Associated Press

AS THE NEW year began, Michael Brecker’s life was coming to an end.

But the tenor saxophonist, suffering from acute leukemia, was still thinking about his music. He went downstairs to his home studio to perform the last notes on an electronic wind instrument for what would be his final album. The 57-year-old died in a Manhattan hospital on Jan. 13, just four days after telling his manager that the record was ready for mixing.

That album, Pilgrimage, has been released this week — an inspiring coda to the career of a quiet, gentle musician widely regarded as the most influential tenor saxophonist since John Coltrane, whether playing straight-ahead acoustic jazz or electronic jazz-rock in seminal fusion bands like The Brecker Brothers.

It’s the first of the 800-plus albums the 13-time Grammy winner recorded as a leader and a sideman — with such pop icons as Paul Simon, James Taylor and Aerosmith — consisting solely of his original compositions.

Brecker’s wife, Susan, considers it "a miracle" that her husband managed to record Pilgrimage — the title of the last track he ever recorded, a 10-minute musical journey with a deeply spiritual prelude that evokes memories of his main inspiration Coltrane.

"I believe it was his spirit, his wanting to complete the record . . . that kept him alive a lot longer than really was humanly possible given his physical condition," she said, interviewed with his manager Darryl Pitt in a midtown Manhattan restaurant.

For nearly two-and-a-half years Brecker had battled myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS), a cancer in which the bone marrow stops producing enough healthy blood cells, which eventually progressed into acute leukemia. He had to stop publicly performing in March 2005 and could not practice his saxophone more than five minutes at a time. But he used the time remaining to him to write the album’s tunes at his home in Hastings-on-Hudson, north of New York City, in between lengthy hospitalizations.

"What I would like people to take from this record is that it is one man’s testament to the human spirit," said Susan Brecker, her voice choking with emotion. "This music is just one man’s response to hearing he is going to die . . . and there can be nothing more honest or more vibrant than that, nothing."

Just two weeks after Brecker died, his wife and children, manager and jazz musician friends gathered in a midtown Manhattan recording studio for the mixing of Pilgrimage."

"Hearing Mike playing so vibrantly in the studio it was literally as if he were conjured back to life," said the album’s executive producer Pitt, Brecker’s close friend and manager for 20-plus years. "It was deeply moving and profoundly touching and sometimes deeply upsetting."

The 78-minute CD respects Brecker’s wishes by including all nine original tunes he recorded with a jazz all-star lineup of guitarist Pat Metheny, pianists Herbie Hancock and Brad Mehldau, bassist John Patitucci and drummer Jack DeJohnette.

"The compositions are among the best Mike had ever written," said Metheny, who appeared on Brecker’s first solo album in 1987, in an e-mail response. "I have always contended that he was one of the best modern jazz composers of our time. He had a strong individual voice."

Pitt says the album would not have been possible were it not for Brecker’s 18-year-old daughter Jessica. Brecker was close to dying in November 2005 when she volunteered as the half-match donor in an experimental clinical trial at a University of Minnesota hospital involving a new stem cell transplant procedure. The operation alleviated the pain by killing off large growths of leukemia cells but the transplant failed to engraft, leaving the disease free to spread again.

Last June, Hancock, at Pitt’s suggestion, coaxed a reluctant Brecker into making a surprise appearance at a JVC Jazz Festival concert at Carnegie Hall honouring the pianist. He received a standing ovation after performing the tune One Finger Snap, his last public performance. The experience encouraged Brecker to go ahead with the recording session that had already been postponed twice.

"When he asked me to be on the record, I was really thrilled because I just didn’t expect it to happen," said Hancock. "And when we actually started working on the record . . . I said, ‘Wait a minute Michael, are you sure you’re still sick?’ . . . What was exuding from him was so much power, conviction and enthusiasm to do this record, and it was just a joy to experience that."

During the August recording session at the Manhattan studio, Pitt and Brecker intentionally masked from the other musicians just how poorly Brecker felt in order to keep the focus on the music.

But none of that frailty is reflected in Brecker’s performances, whether it’s his rapid-fire arpeggio runs on Anagram with its shifting tempos or his deeply emotional, soulful playing on the poignant ballad When Can I Kiss You Again? — a question asked by his son Sam during a hospital visit when physical contact was prohibited to avoid infection.

"No one would ever think when they listen to this recording that this guy’s fighting for his life. . . . You get the feeling of somebody who’s at the top of their game," said Patitucci.

After the session, Brecker was optimistically planning for future albums. He took a family vacation in Florida and attended his son’s Bar Mitzvah. He was diagnosed with acute leukemia in October, but kept working on the record.

It was bittersweet for those closest to Brecker when just days after the mixing session ended in early February, he won two Grammys for the CD Some Skunk Funk, recorded in 2003 with older brother Randy on trumpet.

On Feb. 20, Brecker’s family, fellow musicians and fans filled Manhattan’s Town Hall for a memorial celebration. Hancock and Paul Simon performed Still Crazy After All These Years, one of the many classic pop tunes with a memorable Brecker solo.

"His efforts to get this final message out to all of us (on Pilgrimage) will go down as one of the great codas in modern music history," Metheny said in his eulogy.

Brecker’s legacy also includes his efforts to encourage people to enrol in the national marrow donor registry. The introverted saxophonist went public about his illness after realizing how many thousands of people die every year waiting to find a genetically matched blood stem cell donor.

More than 30,000 people have been added to the registry since 2005 as the result of Brecker-sponsored events at jazz festivals, concerts and synagogues, said Pitt, who with Brecker’s wife founded the Time Is of the Essence Fund, named after a Brecker album, to pay for blood tests for potential donors.

"Mike was a hero through the whole thing," said Hancock. "He used the challenge of a life-threatening disease to express his compassion for human beings and was able to express it with his music."

© 2007 The Halifax Herald Limited

[Shawn]

Thanks for posting that.

[7/4]

June 2, 2007

A Jazzman’s Farewell Album, All Heart and Soul

By COREY KILGANNON, NYTimes

It was a frail Michael Brecker who walked slowly into a Manhattan recording studio last August, clutching a cane and a folder of sheet music.

He did not look capable of holding, much less playing, his tenor saxophone during a weeklong recording session scheduled for him. One of jazz’s most influential tenor saxophonists over the last quarter-century and an 11-time Grammy winner, he had been battling myelodysplastic syndrome, a bone marrow disease commonly known as MDS, for more than a year and would pass away about four months later, at 57.

But he did hold his saxophone, and played it extremely well, for the grueling weeklong session that would result in his final recording, “Pilgrimage” (Heads Up), a collection of nine originals, released last week. Among the selections is “When Can I Kiss You Again?,” a ballad whose title comes from a question that Mr. Brecker’s son, Sam, asked him during a hospital visit when physical contact with his father was prohibited to prevent infection. And the CD’s final track is the 10-minute “Pilgrimage,” a song that alternates between serene ensemble playing and tumultuous soloing from Mr. Brecker.

“In its balance of ambition and abandon, serious-mindedness and ebullience,” Nate Chinen wrote of the new album in The New York Times, “there’s a crystallization of what jazz, at its best, is all about.”

Mr. Brecker’s favorite collaborators — the guitarist Pat Metheny, the bassist John Patitucci, the drummer Jack DeJohnette and the pianists Herbie Hancock and Brad Mehldau — all agreed to attend the session on short notice. Mr. Brecker had played on more than 900 albums, including familiar pop solos on Paul Simon and James Taylor tunes, but now it was apparent that his days were numbered. A reporter was invited to document a day of recording.

Not that there was anything morbid about Mr. Brecker. He became energized immediately upon reuniting with his longtime sidemen. He cast off his cane and began zipping around the studio taking care of logistics.

“Even the first day in the studio, we didn’t know if the whole thing was going to happen,” said Mr. Brecker’s manager, Darryl Pitt. “But Mike just kept getting stronger and stronger in spirit, and it carried through him physically.”

The band clicked immediately. During preparations, Mr. Metheny began running quick arpeggios, which Mr. Patitucci mimicked on bass. Mr. Brecker followed suit on saxophone, and Mr. DeJohnette began singing along. Mr. Hancock, meanwhile, set up a Fender Rhodes electric keyboard next to a grand piano and began playing each with one hand.

“You’re doubling, Herbie,” Mr. Brecker said.

“Yeah,” Mr. Hancock replied jokingly. “I get double pay.”

Mr. Hancock winced as he struggled to finger some of the chord voicings Mr. Brecker had written for the piano part.

“That’s some serious stuff right there,” he declared, prompting the other musicians to cheer Mr. Brecker.

“Iron Mike,” Mr. Patitucci yelled, a good assessment of Mr. Brecker’s surprising strength and endurance that week. In a phone interview after the recording session, Mr. Brecker said, “I must have been running on adrenaline, because I collapsed after it was over.”

Mr. Brecker had stopped performing publicly in 2005 and was often too weak to practice his saxophone. Still, he displayed during the sessions the trademarks of his playing: distinct tone and daring harmonic forays. His performance seemed to reflect the urgency of his situation. His lines were probing but purposeful. He reared his body up and down with emotion as he played, and often grunted midphrase.

“His whole life — all the life he had left — was pouring out of his horn,” Mr. Pitt said. “There was nothing left in him after the session.”

“Michael was extremely self-critical and hardly ever felt that he played well,” he added. “This was the first time I’ve heard him — in his career — say he was satisfied with what he’d done.”

Mr. Brecker was so ill that he often composed music in bed, using a portable keyboard, his electronic saxophone and his laptop.

Yet Mr. Hancock, who has recorded and performed with him since the 1980s, said: “Michael has gone up yet another notch with his writing and playing. He’s taken something that’s destructive and turned it into something extremely constructive.”

Mr. Metheny, who appeared on Mr. Becker’s first solo album, in the late ’80s, said, “There’s no one else who would or could write anything like this.”

Mr. Brecker said that in a way, his illness helped his creative expression by giving him a sense of “extra purpose” and a new feeling of freedom as a composer.

Mr. Pitt said Mr. Brecker did not want the other musicians to know the pain and discomfort he was in during the session. During the months that followed it, Mr. Brecker became obsessed with adding tracks and remixing the album, he said.

“Making that album kept Michael alive,” Mr. Pitt said. Shortly after he pronounced the recording finished, Mr. Brecker died.