Steve Turre: Playing in the Moment
Cover Story
Steve Turre: Playing in the Moment
Steve Turre plays in one of the most famous and powerful horn sections around: the one in the Saturday Night Live Band. Playing short, punchy charts after commercial breaks and lead-ins before the guest's opening monologue, the band has to make an impact right away--they have only a few moments to be seen and heard.
Outside of the SNL Band, though, Turre is a force in the jazz world, playing trombone with large groups, leading his own, and arranging music for countless ensembles. He's so involved he often has to do his warm-ups while in transit, on planes and in cabs. Still, in the world outside the Rockefeller Center studio where Saturday Night Live is broadcast, the smallest increments of time are the most precious to him. In jazz, he says, no matter the setting, "Our music is about the moment."
From West to East
Turre says he likes to find a place "for all the music of the world"--including salsa, Afro-Cuban, and Brazilian styles. But he says he owes his roots in music to a musician who played quintessentially American jazz, infused with blues and gospel: the late Ray Charles, formerly of Local 47 (Los Angeles).
Though he first joined the AFM as a member of Local 6 (San Francisco, CA), Turre transferred his membership to Local 802 (New York City) after a year touring with Charles' band. His relocation to New York, and the gigs he was able to land there, put him on the fast track to being one of the most active and successful trombonists around.
Turre has been a member of the Saturday Night Live Band for 24 years and is one of its longest tenured members, though he points out that keyboardist Leon Pendarvis of Local 802 has been there longer. Turre's AFM membership has been critical in working with the show's television agreement.
"It's especially helped me because of SNL," he says. "In that case, it's necessary."
The SNL Band generally does all of its rehearsing before show time on Saturday, starting in the mid-afternoon and playing until after 1 a.m. Turre says it makes for a long night, but the chemistry of the band and the thrill of live music makes it worthwhile. "I'm very glad to be there," he says. "Every week, it's a different show, with a different guest, and different music. And because it's live, it's about the moment."
Passing It Along
Turre has been on the faculty at the Manhattan School of Music since 1989. He currently has four students in his jazz instruction studio--a small number, but it's remarkable that he can fit them in among his playing and touring engagements. He's a dedicated teacher, and devoted to doing away with what he perceives as a "double standard" between instruction for playing jazz and playing classical. "Sound should carry through the room to touch the people, just like with someone standing in front of an orchestra playing," he says. "That's the hurdle for all of us to play."
To help his students achieve that far-reaching sound, Turre emphasizes articulation and attack. "One of the biggest challenges is to play clean," he says, "and to play clean without playing pianissimo. It's hard; it takes years." He adds, "I like to teach, that's how you keep the music alive--you pass it along."
In addition to his formal training at Sacramento State University, Turre also points to the education he received early on as a touring member of many bands, including Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Big Band, and the Carnegie Hall Jazz Band. He also singled out the influence that the experience of playing with trombonist Slide Hampton of Local 802 had on his musicianship. "That's when I grew and found my own voice," he says.
Physical Force
With a busy schedule of gigs as a guest soloist around the world, projects with his own band, and performances with the Saturday Night Live Band, Turre frequently finds himself in transit with a need to practice. While returning from a recent performance with a big band in Serbia, he brought a mouthpiece for buzzing exercises on the airplane "to keep my corners in shape." Not his regular trombone mouthpiece, but a plastic one--"so I don't set off security," he says. "I'll just do a warm-up, and I'll save most of my energy for the gig."
He carefully measures his playing to ward off fatigue. "If you play a lot the day of a gig, you won't be as ready--you'll end up playing pianissimo, eating the microphone," he says. He also notes the parallel between sound production for brass playing and for singing and, like many jazz musicians, he has an easy command of singing syllables, even breaking into scat to lay out a favorite chart.
"Brass is a lot like vocal music, because living tissue is vibrating to produce the sound," he says. He knows well the kind of hard work that goes into a live performance. "I sweat, and I work hard," he adds. "My physical energy is what makes the sound go."
Turre will put his own endurance and the skills of his band to the test with an upcoming recording project. He has set this demanding goal as he prepared to record a new album with his quintet: "We will do the whole record in a day, with one or two takes on each chart." He points to the achievements of earlier jazz groups, who took a similar approach in making landmarks recordings in the 1950s and 1960s.
Imagining Sound
In addition to a drive for hard work, Turre also shares another characteristic with jazz's pioneers: an ear for unique sound. Turre's musical imagination has led to some interesting collaboration between jazz horns and strings, including his wife, cellist Akua Dixon, also of Local 802. Turre and Dixon have recorded a sextet with strings, with violinist Regina Carter of Local 5 (Detroit, MI), in which the standard jazz lineup of a trumpet, tenor saxophone, and trombone becomes violin, cello, and trombone. "I write for it the same way I would any other jazz group. It's a different timbre if I want to blow out, or play softer and let the strings have the lead," explains Turre. "It's just different colors, a different sound palette."
Turre hopes to cross the line between jazz and classical trombone with his upcoming album with New York Philharmonic principal trombonist Joe Alessi of Local 802. Of Alessi, Turre says, "He's a master of orchestral music, but he's not stiff!" Turre plans to title the album Common Ground, and both trombonists will get to show off their skills.
Another product of Turre's imagination is Sanctified Shells, a band in which brass and woodwind players also play on seashells. Playing a shell as a lead instrument might seem strange, but according to Turre, it goes back to an even older tradition. "The shell and the animal horn--they're the roots of brass instruments, before written history and before we had a written language."
Turre points to the range of sounds he can achieve with the shell as a source of its appeal. "When it's open, it can be brassy, or you can play soft and get that other sound," he says. In performance, Turre often wields two shells at once, using his hands to mute and shape the sound, the way a French horn player would control his own sound.
This approach in bringing new sounds to traditional forms and balancing the familiar with the foreign has made Turre into an influential model for the next generation of professional musicians. "When you're really growing, it's always uncomfortable," he says. "You're doing something you haven't done before, and you're breaking new ground. Don't shy away from that: welcome it. Cherish the moment."
