Ein längerer Auszug aus einem Interview, das Adam Mansbach mit Sonny Fortune geführt hat (die A&M-LPs heissen „Awakening“ und „Waves of Dreams“ – ich kenne sich nicht):
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… I know there have been a few times when you’ve had to deliberately redirect your career, so as to be true to yourself musically. Can you talk about some of those moments?
Well, the success of the music that Mongo was doing was something I was concerned about—I didn’t want to get locked up in that. Matter of fact, Creed Taylor [of CTI Records] was offering me—that may be stretching it, but he certainly paid for me to come a long distance to do the two recording dates I did with George Benson [Tell It Like It Is and The Other Side of Abbey Road]. We were in Las Vegas, and he paid for me to come to New York for the first date, paid for my hotel room and everything. The other date, we were in Boston, and he paid for me to come to New York.
So I was kind of like parallel to Grover Washington. I was moving in that direction, but that wasn’t the direction I wanted to go. Even Mongo and them used to get kind of pissed at me, because I used to take all my records and my record player on the road, and my records were not about them at all. It was about Eric [Dolphy] and Trane and Miles, and that’s what I wanted to do. That’s what I came to New York for.
By the time I worked with Miles, things were jumping for me pretty much. My first major label recording was on A&M Horizon (1975), and people even now are talking to me about that record. It got a lot of response, a lot of exposure for me. And then I did another record with A&M Horizon called (1976).
And then you jumped to Atlantic, a real powerhouse of a label, and did Serengeti Minstrel in ‘77, Infinity Is in ‘78, and With Sound Reason in ’79.
The last two albums were commercial albums and that was when I started getting very frustrated because the music business was changing and the jazz musician was being asked to delve into the fusion. Those records, especially the last record I did, With Sound Reason—which is where the name of my label, Sound Reason, comes from—it’s like a one-over-one smooth jazz recording. One of the problems with the business of music is that the artistry of music has to weave its way through that—that business—if it’s going to survive.
Especially as the commercial expectations for jazz began to really rise in the mid-to-late seventies.
Fusion was coming in. Jazz musicians were being forced to consider another point of view, and a point of view that was more appealing to the masses. All of us, with very few exceptions, those who weren’t established and those who were established. Miles was one of them, Cannonball was another one, I won’t say Ramsey Lewis because he was kind of established as a commercial artist already, but Herbie Hancock—everybody delved into this fusion, trying to find this common ground, so if you were trying to get known, such was the case with me, trying to branch out on your own, sooner or later it had to knock on your door.
That’s what happened with Atlantic. I was making great money. I had a whole lot of money in the bank, but man, it was the most wasteful time in my whole career. I was so frustrated. I couldn’t write a note. The last two dates, the last day I didn’t even write a composition. I felt like anything that I wrote wouldn’t contribute to where I was going and I started being concerned about money and then I found it to be a very, very, very weird kind of place. But it came from the fact that I was kind of elevating in the business. So I made a move.
How did that go down?
I just ran into [keyboardist] Larry Willis in Europe a couple of weeks ago and I reminded him of this story, because it all came to a head over a tune he wrote. He wasn’t on the record, but he was the guy I went to to help me with this concept of fusing jazz and commercial. He had worked with Blood, Sweat and Tears, so I wanted the jazz guy who’d played with the rock band to give me something I could grab ahold of. There’s a couple of tunes we did—I play them now, but I don’t play them the way we recorded them. The irony is that when I recorded these tunes, I omitted a lot of the tune because of the endeavor that we were pursuing—if I had played all of the tune it wouldn’t have worked as a commercial tune, so we took a section of the tune to make it more commercial.
So there was a great tune that Larry had written on With Sound Reason, but the guy at Atlantic—not the producer, but my boss, the guy who was overseer of me and the music—told me he heard vocals on the tune—he wanted to add vocals. I said “man I don’t hear no vocals.” And that was the end of me. I was so frustrated that I went there prepared to make that statement.
You were looking for a way out?
I wasn’t looking for a way out—but like I told some guys at the record company, I ultimately gotta live with what I’m doing. I’m trying to sell records just like you are trying to sell records, but I’ve got to feel comfortable about this whole endeavor here. I don’t want to go all the way over there to sell records. So that’s what changed my whole career.
[…]
Tell me a little bit about Miles’ band. What years were you there?
I was with the band in ‘74 , and I did about four albums with Miles. [Agartha, Pangea, Big Fun and Get Up With It.] I’d turned down an offer from Miles earlier, when I was with McCoy, but by 1974 I was ready to do something exciting and new.
Was fusion a pressure thing with him, or was it where his vision was taking him?
That’s a good question. I don’t know. My personal opinion—that I foresee is worth about a hill of beans, or a quarter of a hill—is as far as I’m concerned, when Coltrane died everybody said “whew!” As far as the jazz world, that’s what I believe. Because when Trane was alive, those who were in the front, at the vanguard, were busy pursuing music. When John stepped out it went in a lot of different directions, including Miles. I may get a lot of heat for even making that statement, but that’s how I feel about it.
Was Miles pressured? I don’t know. Miles said he wanted the crowds Hendrix and those cats had—twenty thousand people and whatnot. And probably somewhere in Miles’ psyche he was saying “How in the world can those cats be drawing those crowds when this music here is as bad as it is?” Because there was no doubt that jazz was stepping into some incredible frontiers. Whatever you could think of was being played. But like art in general, it got swallowed up in the business. But the business may be the result of the people. People get caught up in an easier way. Nobody wants to do geometry or trigonometry—maybe a little adding and subtracting. I don’t know if that’s a good analogy.
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http://www.adammansbach.com/other/fortune.html
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"Don't play what the public want. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you doin' -- even if it take them fifteen, twenty years." (Thelonious Monk) | Meine Sendungen auf Radio StoneFM: gypsy goes jazz, #164: Neuheiten aus dem Archiv, 10.6., 22:00 | Slow Drive to South Africa, #8: tba | No Problem Saloon, #30: tba