JAZZ : The Next Miles? : That could be Wallace Roney. He’s played with the trumpet master, he sounds like him and he’s replacing him in an all-star reunion tour of Davis’ classic ‘60s group.
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The setting is a sound stage in Burbank. Tony Williams is at his trademark yellow drum set. Nearby, Herbie Hancock plays a Steinway grand piano, while Ron Carter plucks his bass. Wayne Shorter is there too, playing tenor saxophone, his glasses perched on the bridge of his nose as he concentrates on an arrangement of his tune “Orbits.”
And then there’s the trumpet player. In the ‘60s, it would have been Miles Davis, with whom these four other now-giants of jazz created a musical explosion with such classic albums as “E.S.P.,” “Miles Smiles” and “Filles de Kilimanjaro.”
But Davis died in September.
So now the man with the horn is a little-known 32-year-old named Wallace Roney. Until last year, his main claims to fame were a couple of stints with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers and, since 1986, membership in Williams’ ace quintet.
This guy is a dynamo, a steaming, knowledgeable musician who speaks persuasively in the angular-mixed-with-melodic language of the post-be-bop tradition. And while the man’s style is not completely mature, he is an artist with a potential for greatness, for being one of the top artists in jazz.
“I knew when I met this guy many years ago that he was going to be a helluva jazz musician,” says saxophonist Branford Marsalis, the new bandleader on “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno.”
“Roney’s unquestionably one of the top young trumpeters to emerge in the last decade,” says New York Daily News jazz critic Hugh Wyatt.
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Wallace Roney may not turn out to be the next Miles Davis, but if there has ever been a trumpeter who sat at the feet of the master and religiously absorbed his lessons, he’s the one. Davis had been his idol since childhood, and Roney has patterned his style on Davis’, playing Davis-like lines--he has memorized scores of the master’s recorded solos--with a Davis-like sound on a Martin Committee trumpet, a factory-built copy of a horn that Davis gave to him.
Roney was selected by Hancock, et al., to take Davis’ chair in the quintet that is currently on tour playing a musical tribute to Davis. The group--which is offering a broad repertoire that includes such tunes as “So What,” “Two Bass Hit,” “Paraphernalia” and “Orbits”--has already played Europe this summer and just returned from the Far East.
The musicians appear next Sunday at Hollywood Bowl, Aug. 24 on “The Tonight Show” and in two shows Aug. 26 at the Strand in Redondo Beach.
Roney’s name will forever be linked with Davis’ if only for one reason: Davis invited him to share the bandstand with him a year ago at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland.
There, at what became the most talked-about jazz event of the decade, Davis did what he said he would never do--once again play tunes he had recorded decades ago on such timeless Columbia albums as “Sketches of Spain” and “Porgy and Bess.” And Roney was right at his side throughout the entire concert, which would prove to be one of Davis’ last.
And there was another key project that reinforced Roney’s association with Davis. In February, he played what were originally Davis’ parts on the Gerry Mulligan recording “Re-Birth of the Cool.” That GRP Records album found Mulligan also looking back and investigating arrangements that he, Davis, Gil Evans and others had concocted in 1949 and 1950 for the famed “Birth of the Cool” recordings.
Those appearances, coupled with an awareness of Roney’s complete musicianship, were sufficient for Hancock, Williams and their partners to assign Roney the role of trumpeter on the Davis tribute tour. Williams--the “creative spark” of the ‘60s quintet, as Davis described him in his autobiography--believes that Roney possesses many of Davis’ qualities of excellence.
“Wallace is the best person to be doing this for a lot of reasons,” Williams said after the rehearsal.
“For one thing, Miles loved him. But mainly it’s the way he plays. Like the sound he gets. It’s very warm, but it doesn’t stay the same. It changes, likes Miles’ did, going from warm to dangerous. And like Miles, Wallace is always on the edge of making a mistake. He’s not perfect. I hate trumpet players that play perfectly. They play more trumpet than they play music. Wallace plays more music than trumpet.”
“And Miles chose him to play at Montreux. That says something right there,” Hancock added.
Still, it was the last thought on the minds of the four ex-Davis whizzes to have their new arrival play exactly like the boss.
“We talked to Wallace, told him to go for it, go where Miles was going , don’t start where Miles was,” Williams said. “Not that Wallace needs that advice.
“And we want Wallace to play Wallace , not echo anybody else. That’s what Miles would want. Not having Wallace trying to be the next Miles Davis. He would hate that for Wallace.”
And Roney wouldn’t dig it, either. His improvisations--as heard at the rehearsal, on his albums with Williams and Blakey and in his work as a leader--show his keen affinity for the man who was nicknamed the “Prince of Darkness.” But Roney remains his own man.
As Williams pointed out, there is that sound, round and ringing, though a tad fatter than Davis’. Too, the edgy, modern improvisatory approach is similar to some of Davis’ work, but it ultimately comes off sounding, well, different.
“I think if people listen, they’ll hear some lines that I play that Miles didn’t play,” the affable Roney said in his West Hollywood hotel room, temporarily home for the New York resident, a few days after the rehearsal.
“I want to take Miles’ style and make it a personal thing, put my own little thing on it,” he said.
“I know I have my own sound because when I hear it, I wish it sounded more like Miles. If I can hear the difference, if it was good enough for Miles, then I know I’m on the right track.”
Roney says he wants to do what Wayne Shorter did with John Coltrane’s style: “I want to digest all the guys that have come before me and use their vocabulary my way. I don’t want to imitate anybody; I want to make it personal.”
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Roney’s relationship with Davis began in his childhood in Philadelphia.
“My dad played trumpet and was always playing records by Miles, Clifford Brown, Lee Morgan,” Roney said.
He started on trumpet at age 6 and began copying Davis’ solos in his early teens. But he would not meet his hero until 1983, when he was invited by CBS/Sony producer George Butler to take part in a tribute to Davis at the Bottom Line in Manhattan.
Roney played with a borrowed horn, and when Davis discovered that fact, he gave the upstart, then 23, one of his spares. “Just play it,” Miles told him.
The turning point in Roney’s career--playing with his idol at Montreux--was another serendipitous event. He was touring Europe with George Gruntz’s big band, which, with the orchestra of the late Evans--Davis’ collaborator on “Sketches of Spain,” “Porgy and Bess” and other time-defying projects--was set to play the Davis concert. But there were too many trumpeters.
“So guess who they chose to sit out? Me !” Roney recalled, his face turning into a grimace. “And that hurt my feelings, because it could have been one of my biggest moments, and now I wasn’t going to be part of it.”
Fate had something else in mind. Davis didn’t show up for rehearsals, so Roney was called upon to play his parts on such tunes as “Boplicity,” “Solea” and “Summertime.” When the star finally arrived, he joined Roney on the bandstand.
“I was soloing on ‘Springsville,’ and after I finished, he tapped me on the arm and said, ‘Play this tomorrow on the gig,’ ” Roney said, shifting into Davis’ hoarse voice.
“He went on to give me a lot of solos, so that by the time we did the gig, it was almost 50-50,” Roney said. “There I was trading (four-bar phrases) with my hero . I couldn’t believe I was doing this with Miles. Then we played duets on ‘Solea.’ He would play something, and he’d hit me; I would have to echo him.
“That felt so great !” said Roney, falling backward from his seat on his bed, in a sort of reverse swan dive. Then sitting erect, with a huge smile on his face, he added, “That was one of the greatest moments of my life.”
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And it would seem certain, with the response that the tribute quintet has already received in its first shows and the degree of comfort that Roney is thus far experiencing with his compatriots, that more of those moments are in store for him.
In the rehearsals in Burbank with the fivesome, the trumpeter was mostly quiet, writing little notes on his score sheets, then, when called upon, playing his parts with bravura.
Typical was a first look at a new Williams tune, “Elegie,” which has one of those bossa-rock beats that sounds like “chuck-a-chuck-a” when you say it aloud and that the drummer has employed on other compositions, such as “Sister Cheryl.” The line, a sequence of notes that filled the stage like a bank of fog, was alternately hit hard and then soft by Shorter and Roney, who bent over slightly, pointing his green-anodized horn at the floor.
The tune was played through without solos, and at its conclusion, Williams stood up and said, “OK, next.” Then he smiled--he’d obviously been joking, for he wanted to work out some rough spots.
“Try to go outside the melody,” he said to the hornmen. “I don’t want it to sound static. OK, let’s try it again.”
Thirty minutes later, after several passes, the band went on to another tune. Here Roney soloed for a bit, sounding sure of himself, playing hard-driving lines.
“Wallace doesn’t say a lot,” Hancock offered after the rehearsal. “All of the rest of us are talking, shaping the stuff, but I never got the feeling he feels uncomfortable. He just steps right up and plays his tail off.”
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A week later, Roney, Williams and the bunch spent a couple of days in a Hollywood recording studio, making an album to be released this fall on Qwest Records.
“They played their tails off. I played OK,” Roney said in his hotel room. “But I have to feel like that. If I get comfortable, I’ll get lazy, and I want to keep stepping.”
A month after the West Hollywood conversation, Roney spoke again from France, where the tribute band was performing at Antibes.
“With this band, we could play nursery rhymes and make something very creative,” Roney said. “Every night has been different, very spontaneous. We all have a voice, which is cool. The music is still the main leader.”
How about the audience response? “The people love it--at least that’s what they tell us,” he said. “We go up there and do what they expect us to do, which is be creative. In that sense, we’ve been having a lot of fun.”
Roney said his philosophy of being an individual was holding steady as she goes.
“I’m trying to make a personal statement when we play this music, be creative and spontaneous,” he said.
So he’s not trying to be Miles Davis? “Nah, I can’t do that,” he said. “I’m just trying to get in there and make a contribution.”