Alan Palmer Demonstrates Staying Power : Jazz: The Fullerton-raised saxophonist, who plays in Huntington Beach tonight, has pretty much confined his career to Orange County.
If you haven’t heard saxophonist Alan Palmer playing somewhere in Orange County during the last 10 years, you probably haven’t been getting out much.
Palmer, who leads his own quartet tonight at El Matador in Huntington Beach, has been seen doing everything from vaudeville tunes with a saxophone quintet at Disneyland to irreverent rockabilly with local party band the Gyromatics. He’s worked jazz gigs ranging from stints with Tom Kubis’ big band and the Orange County Rhythm Machine to serious, Weather Report-inspired fusion with the group Axiom. He’s even been called on to back Orange County appearances of the Coasters and the Temptations.
“I’ve always been a side man,” he said in almost confessional tones by phone earlier this week from his home in Fullerton.
As you might expect from someone with this grab-bag of experience, Palmer’s own band will do things a bit differently. “My own stuff is more pop-oriented, more straight-ahead than the true jazz-fusion sound that Axiom has. It’s more melodic than the average jazz group, coming more from the David Sanborn and Kenny G school.”
Palmer has followed a long road, almost all of it winding through Orange County, to get to the point where he is leading his own band. Born in Long Beach, the 31-year-old musician began playing oboe in elementary school in Fullerton before he began “fiddling around” with saxophones in junior and senior high.
“Since you can’t really march in the band with an oboe, I started looking around.” He ended up with the baritone because, “when you play oboe, you get last dibs on the horns that are left.”
He didn’t get serious about jazz or playing sax until he enrolled at Fullerton College. “Very quickly, I realized that playing classical saxophone was something that I didn’t want to do,” he explained. “You learn the Bach transcriptions and the four or so pieces written for saxophone and that’s as far as it goes.”
He credits participation in the college’s jazz bands and the school’s music program for maintaining his interest in the instrument. “They had a real good program at the time. They tended to structure things so that you started from ground zero and worked your way up. The result was I was focused on getting somewhere and accomplishing something.”
Later, private lessons from Los Angeles session saxophonist Dan Higgins solidified his education. “He taught me everything I know about music,” Palmer said, “including how to play piano,” which, the saxophonist said, led him into composing.
His longest-running musical employment is his continuing gig with the Disneyland Saxophone Quintet, a group of reed players that strolls Main Street U.S.A. in firemen’s outfits playing the jazz and popular music of the ‘20s and ‘30s. Palmer plays baritone.
“We don’t really do that regional, Dixieland music, but more the Midwestern style of jazz, that Bix Beiderbecke kind of thing. Nobody (in the group) has changed since the early ‘80s, and that gives us a tightness that you can’t get any other way. We’ll play requests, and it’s amazing what we can put together, even if only one guy knows the tune. Before they even play something, you know what they’re going to do.”
His second-most visible job was during the mid ‘80s as saxophonist for the Gyromatics. “The Gyros were a rockabilly sort of band that moved toward that Oingo Boingo kind of thing after I joined,” Palmer says of the group that made a local splash with its EP “Attack of the Tikis From Outer Space” in 1986. “The Sunset Pub (in Sunset Beach) was pretty much the place to see the Gyromatics. We weren’t much of a dance band, even when we were covering tunes from the ‘50s and ‘60s. People would pretty much sit and listen. There was a lot that was satirical about the band, and it was a lot of fun.”
After the group disbanded in 1988, Palmer continued his work at Disneyland as well as taking calls to back visiting R & B acts. Once he even sat in with the L.A. punk band Fear, whose drummer, Spit Stix, also played for the Gyromatics under the name Tim Leitch. More recently, Palmer has appeared with Axiom, a group he describes as “a serious fusion band.”
His own quartet is a far cry from the Gyromatics, Axiom and the Disneyland Saxophone Quintet. “My band is more serious and plays a more sophisticated kind of jazz,” he explained. Though the group is only four musicians strong, Palmer states, “I need an eight-piece band and a lot of rehearsal time just to do my music live and maintain the sound.”
He overcomes that mathematical discrepancy by using prerecorded, sequenced material he triggers from the keyboard, and adds other tonal colors when he plays the EWI (Electronic Wind Instrument). Rounding out the group are drummer Ray Genovese, guitarist Peter Templer and wind player Jennifer Hall, who doubles on flute as well as tenor, soprano and alto saxophone.
Of the dual saxophones, he said, “I like blending tones, having two different instruments playing on top of one another, as opposed to having one play the melody and another playing off of that melody. The different saxes gives the music different timbres and more color.”
Learning the computer has bolstered his confidence as a composer. “I was afraid that people wouldn’t think I could write and wouldn’t want to play with me. But since I’ve gotten the computer and the synthesizer I can do the grungy work at home. When I go into rehearse, I can hand out the parts and I have the tape that I made at home so they know what it should sound like. Now I know my songs sound as good as everyone else’s.”
About half the quartet’s songs are his originals. “We do Cole Porter’s ‘Night and Day’--the only standard we do--in a minor-key arrangement that gives it a different slant, more of a ‘night’ feel.’ ”
He also borrows from his inspirations Sanborn and Grover Washington Jr. “But we’re not playing the tunes that everybody else plays. My first concern is that the quality is there.”
* The Alan Palmer Quartet plays tonight at 8:30 and 10:15 at El Matador, 16903 Algonquin St., Huntington Beach. No cover. (714) 846-5337.