Black Note Cuts Its Teeth With Old Pros

While the jazz world has been looking to New Orleans--hometown of the Marsalis brothers--and the East Coast for young lions to feed the music’s current youth movement, a pride of West Coast initiates has been preparing to roar.

Black Note, arguably the busiest band in Los Angeles, will go into the studio later this month to record for Columbia. The six-piece combo will play Sunday at the Orange County Register Jazz & Blues Festival at UC Irvine.

Black Note certainly fits the “young band” category: All its members are under age 30, most of them under 25. But their emphasis on group performance, rather than on individual and technical flash, sets them apart.

That’s largely the result, according to bassist/founding member Mark Shelby, of guidance the group has been given by older musicians. When he first moved to Los Angeles from Northern California in 1990, Shelby sought out drummer and longtime Ornette Coleman associate Billy Higgins at the World Stage, Higgins’ performance space in the Crenshaw district.

“He immediately took me in, almost as if I was his son,” recalls Shelby, who at 27 is the second oldest member of the group. “Pretty soon he gave me a key to the place, and I was there playing day and night.”

It was there that Shelby met trumpeter Richard Grant and alto saxophonist James Mahone. “We became the Three Musketeers,” Shelby said this week, “hanging out at every jam session in town.”

Soon pianist Ark Sano, tenor saxophonist Phil Vieux and drummer Willie Jones III got involved, and Black Note was formed. (Grant has since taken off to New York and has been replaced on by Gilbert Costellanos.)

“We wanted to develop some type of group sound,” Shelby continued, “so we began rehearsing almost every day at the Stage, sometimes till 4 in the morning. Cedar Walton (who plays at the festival today) started coming down to work with us one day a week, and we got to play with people like (bassist) Ron Carter, (drummer) Elvin Jones and (pianist) Barry Harris. People like (saxophonist) Harold Land and (trumpeter) Oscar Brashear spent a lot of time with us.

“They all pounded it into our heads to stay together as a group and to keep writing music. We wouldn’t be where we are today without their influence and leadership.”

Higgins also released the group’s first album, “43rd & Degnan” (the address of the World Stage), on his own World Stage label. And then things began to take off.

Soon, the band was appearing frequently in Los Angeles at such venues as the Atlas Bar and Grill, the Overland Cafe and the Jazz Bakery and traveling to San Francisco for dates. Delfeayo Marsalis heard Black Note one night and encouraged producer George Butler of Columbia to have a listen. Suddenly the band found itself with a major-label deal.

The soon-to-be-recorded disc will feature the band’s neo-bop originals, tunes that reflect the group’s West Coast roots.

“We’re not from New Orleans or the East Coast,” Shelby said, “and there’s a great deal of music we can pull from here in L.A.--jazz, R&B;, hip-hop, Latin music. We want to embrace all those styles. Our group reflects how things are socially here on the West Coast. We have a Japanese pianist, a Mexican trumpet player, three blacks and a Creole. That hodgepodge of ethnicity gives us a multicultural connection that broadens our musical scope.”