John Murph's LINER NOTES to SWING LOW

I’m pleased to share the story of my debut baritone saxophone recording through the masterful lens of journalist and writer John Murph- see below.

Swing Low is the result of the act of reclamation. After nearly two decades of being a top-ranking trombonist, composer, arranger, and bandleader, Michael Dease returns to an instrument that played a crucial role in his artistic trajectory – the baritone saxophone.

On the new album, the award-winning musician – who won again the No. 1 position in Down Beat magazine’s Critics Poll for “Best Trombonist” – leaves the trombone duties on three songs to Altin Sencalar, while solely focusing on the baritone saxophone. Dease leads a splendid ensemble that also includes frequent collaborators – drummer Rudy Royston, trumpeter Ingrid Jensen, pianist Art Hirahara, and bassist Boris Kozlov.

Dease describes Swing Low as “a love letter” to himself. Before focusing on the trombone, Dease began his musical journey in Augusta, Georgia by playing the recorder when he was nine years old. Two years later, he switched to alto saxophone, while playing in the concert and symphonic bands. When jazz became his calling, he gravitated toward the tenor saxophone and trumpet in his mid-teens, before settling on the trombone at age 17.

So, how does the baritone saxophone fit into his formative years?

A Once Disenchanted Baritone Saxophonist

When Dease was an 8th-grade student at the John S. Davidson Fine Arts Magnet School entering the 9th grade, he auditioned on alto saxophone for one of the school’s top bands Even though the band contained many members in their senior years, Dease was already demonstrating the musical prowess of a prized competitor. “Even at [age] 13, I’d decided that I loved music more than anything,” Dease recalls.

Dease took the “chair test” for the magnet school’s top band and “whooped ass.” The test consisted of playing all the major scales and arpeggios, music sightreading, and playing an étude.  “I worked my butt off because I was scared of being placed in the lower band,” he says.

Dease’s hard work didn’t exactly pay off. After the auditions, the band director told Dease that he would be placed in the concert band – the lowest high school band. He confronted the band director, who confessed that Dease delivered the best audition. “He told me that I had beaten all the seniors,” he remembers, “But it was their last year in high school. And he couldn’t kick out any of the seniors for a freshman.”

The band director’s confession crushed Dease to the point of making him want to give up music. “Music was the place where the playing field could be leveled,” “he argues. “It didn’t matter how expensive your instrument was or how many private lessons your parents could pay for. My parents couldn’t pay for an expensive instrument or private lessons. For me, music was the place where you could work hard and be a part of something greater than yourself. So, when the band director told me that I couldn’t be in the top band even though I had the best audition, it was like a door being slammed in my face.”

The band director, nevertheless, relented after Dease’s confrontation. But he told Dease that he would have to play baritone saxophone in the top band. A teenaged Dease still felt slighted by the band director’s reconsideration, which led to his long-held disdain for the baritone saxophone. Dease quit band in the 9th grade but he stayed at the magnet fine arts school by taking creative writing.

“For me, the baritone saxophone represented something in life in which you were not being rewarded for your hard work,” Dease explains. “So, it’s crazy for me that almost 30 years later, playing the baritone saxophone feels so right.”

Reclamation

When Dease turned 40 in August 2022, he began reassessing his career as a professional musician and educator. “I felt like I hadn’t said ‘yes’ to myself in this musical area of my life,” Dease explains about the baritone saxophone fitting into artistry. “[Playing the baritone saxophone] has always been like an undiscovered place in my musical life. And I didn’t want it to become a regret. I’m not a fan of regrets, especially when you can do something about them.”

Dease returned to tenor saxophone on a few projects. Then he sat in with an octet on baritone saxophone during his first week on faculty at Michigan State University College of Music, where he serves as a full-time professor of jazz trombone.

Dease recalls feeling “really good,” when he revisited the baritone saxophone, “even though it’s a weird instrument in my musical history.”

And while Dease acknowledges the technical differences between playing the trombone – a brass instrument with a slide and metal mouthpiece – and the saxophones – which have keys and reed mouthpieces – he says that at this point in his artistry, playing those instruments just “feels like singing.”

“I teach all my students to sing multiple things like scales, solos, melodies, and tunes,” he says. “It teaches them proper phrasing and the mechanics of using your diaphragm, having proper posture, relaxation, dynamics, control, and nuance. So, from those perspectives, the baritone saxophone and trombone have more in common than differences.”

Swinging Low on the Bari Sax

Even though, Swing Low marks Dease’s first album as a leader, playing the baritone saxophone, it documents him continuing his herald status as a torchbearer for modern post-bop as he delivers a tantalizing program of cherry-picked jazz standards, riveting originals, and a few outstanding compositions from up-and-coming jazz stars.

The album exudes one of Dease’s core beliefs – that many of his jazz contemporaries are not honoring the greats that came after the likes of Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, and Wayne Shorter. “There is this wide body of work that started being composed in the mid-1970s and continued through the ’80s, ’90s, and early 21st century that is being ignored,” Dease says. “[The jazz scene] now has become sort of a ‘dog eat dog’ world, in which the only advocates that we have for our compositions are ourselves.”

“I always try to include music on my albums by people who influenced not just me, but the scene as a whole,” he continues. “I look at some of those people’s work and try to find something that I see in myself.”

To Dease’s point, Swing Low includes “Julian’s Tune,” a snazzy mid-tempo burner, composed by one of his lodestars – trombonist Julian Priester. After Sencalar delivers a sterling trombone solo, Dease follows with a shining improvisation that demonstrates his mellifluous tone and fluid phrasing.

“Julian Preister is somebody who has an amazing body of work and has made historical contributions that have moved the course of jazz with so many important groups,” Dease says, “He’s also an esteemed educator. But for some reason, he’s been overlooked.”

On the spry “Melancholia” which features Jensen’s muted trumpet lines swing majestically in unison with Dease’s velvet-toned baritone saxophone, the leader pays homage to another favorite under-celebrated composer and arranger –Bill Cunliffe, who wrote the tune, specifically for Swing Low.

Cunliffe is better known for his work on the West Coast’s Hollywood music scene. When Dease was studying jazz trombone, he noticed that a lot of the popular Los Angeles-based large ensembles were mostly white. And if he saw any Black musicians in the bands, it was mostly because the bandleader was also Black. With Dease being biracial to white and Black parents, he’s very sensitive to racial segregation.

“Bill believes very deeply in Black music; he was a protégé of Mary Lou Williams,” Dease says. “He lives in Los Angeles and whenever he puts bands together, there’s always people of different backgrounds and races.”

Drummer, composer, and educator, Terri Lyne Carrington’s 2022 book, New Standards: 101 Lead Sheets By Women Composers also influenced Dease. That guidance on Swing Low resulted in the inclusion of Melba Liston’s transfixing ballad “Just Waiting,” on which Dease’s robust baritone saxophone renders the comely melody alongside Jensen’s gorgeous trumpet lines, atop the rhythm section’s swooning accompaniment.

Dease admits that he first thought “Just Waiting” was a Quincy Jones composition, partly because Liston was a ghostwriter and arranger for Jones’ big bands. Dease later became entranced by the Liston composition after recognizing shades of Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn.

Another important female composer included in Carrington’s New Standards book is pianist, composer, and bandleader Renee Rosnes. Dease tips his hat to Rosnes with his hypnotic rendition of her composition, “Galapagos.”  Dease says that this is the fourth Rosnes composition that he’s recorded; he’s also featured Rosnes on several of his previous albums such as Coming Home (2013), Never More Here (2019), Best New Thing (2022),

“Renee is an amazing pianist, who’s written all of these great tunes, but if people don’t record her compositions, hardly anyone would know her body of work unless they’re directly hipped to her,” Dease asserts, “and we will continue having few new jazz standards by ignoring people like her. If it were up to me, everyone would be recording herher compositions like our community does for Wayne, Monk, and Ellington.”

On Swing Low, Dease also uses his platform to showcase the compositional brilliance of two emerging jazz talents – guitarist Ben Turner and clarinetist Virginia MacDonald. Dease delivers a sublime reading of Turner’s mid-tempo “Appreciation,” which prances to a pneumatic strut, thanks to Royston’s delicate drumming and Kozlov’s gentle bounce.

Dease met Turner after the young hopeful had transferred from Temple University to Michigan State University College of Music, where he got a chance to work with him. “Ben stood out for me because he likes to cultivate musical relationships outside of the classroom,” Dease says. “So, I’ve worked with him in some of my ensembles. He had this really nice tune, ‘Appreciation’ and I asked him to send me a chart of it.”

With regards to MacDonald, Dease includes her suspenseful ballad, “Up High, Up Low,” which becomes another showcase for the leader to pair his hearty baritone saxophone with Jensen’s expressive melodicsm.

“When I first heard Viriginia play the clarinet, it gave me chills,” enthuses Dease, who first encountered her playing in a video on Facebook. “It was the same chills I get when I listen to Lester Young or Charlie Parker. So, I reached out to her. Her sound and style convinced me to add clarinet to some of my bands. Virginia is still quite young. But I believe that her music should be known to a wider audience.”

Swing Low also showcases Dease, the composer on three compelling compositions – “Don’t Look Back,” a wistful romantic ballad, addressing the dilemma of unrequited love; “Phibes' Revenge,” a thrilling up-tempo excursion, dedicated to actor Vincent Price’s portrayal of Dr. Anton Phibes in the 1971 horror-comedy flick, The Abominable Dr. Phibes; and “New Blues,” an experimental burner with a turbulent rhythmic undertow that he wrote about 20 years ago when he was exploring polytonality, pedal points, and graduated dissonance.

Dease frames Swing Low with two endearing staples. The album kicks off with an elegant take on Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz’s early-1930s composition, “Dancing In the Dark,” a piece Dease first heard on Charlie Parker’s 1950 LP, Charlie Parker with Strings. On Dease’s version, the leader references Rosnes’ conversational duet performance with pianist Bill Charlap from their 2010 album, Double Portrait.

The album concludes with a flickering rendering of George and Ira Gershwin’s “Embraceable You” on which Dease’s baritone saxophone croons the alluring melody, accompanied only by Kozlov’s sturdy bass counterpoint. Dease’s rendition of this timeless standard is in honor of the 125th anniversary of George Gershwin's birthday.

Moving Forward With Forgiveness

As Dease embarks on his next chapter as a crowned trombonist, composer, bandleader, educator, and now a recovering baritone saxophonist, he says that all of those interconnected musical personalities are starting to feel like one multifaceted thing. He also recognizes how returning to the saxophone refines his trombone voice and vice versa.

“To play the baritone saxophone – this big horn with dexterity and trying to deepen my sound and to not play in a contrite way – is a fun challenge every day,” Dease says before recalling playing saxophone, trumpet, and trombone more recently in one of legendary alto saxophonist David Sanborn’s bands.

“David played every note on the saxophone like it could be his last,” Dease says. “For me, that put a whole new spin on me holding the baritone saxophone. It made me take having this different side of my artistic voice more seriously.”

Spiritually, Dease now compares playing the baritone saxophone to someone praying instead of merely reading the Bible. “Playing the baritone saxophone at this point is more like mediation,” he says. “And it’s like forgiving myself for ignoring that side of me for so long.”

                — John Murph

John Murph is an award-winning journalist who has written for Down Beat, TIDAL Music, NPR Music, Smithsonian Magazine, Grammy.com, and The Washington Post.