Interview by Shannon West
September 28, 2007

Over the course of ten albums and twenty years Najee has been one of the most influential and consistent musicians in the realm of smooth jazz. The sound he popularized on his hit debut album, Najee's Theme, with a saxophone playing infectious R&B flavored melodies while a vocal group sang the chorus in the background has been one of the most popular styles of music within the smooth jazz genre. Najee has continued to do some work from that foundation but he has also taken side trips into straightahead jazz, fusion-like energized improvisation, and highly original arrangements of cover songs. He has played with a who's who list of contemporary jazz musicians, mentored numerous rising stars, played on a score of R&B crossover hits and spent two years touring with Prince. Rising Sun, his tenth CD, captures the energy and diversity of his live shows and showcases some new musical territory. I caught up with him while he was in Washington D.C. rehearsing for
some upcoming tour dates. 


SV: Congratulations on debuting at #1.
Najee: Thank you. We are very happy and surprised, and grateful. I accept it with all humility.

SV: It's an excellent album and you're an established artist. But you were surprised?
Najee: I guess I am and am not at the same time. I've been there before pretty much throughout my career. I've enjoyed that position at different times. I think the longest I held that chart might be for13 weeks with my first album but since that time I' haven't had that kind of hold but fortunately I'm always grateful when we can make it the first week. To start at #1 is really nice. The only problem is after that you have nowhere to go except down  (laughs).

SV: Well you just have to hang in and go for some longevity staying on the chart, which is definitely doable when there are a lot of strong songs on the CD. At first I was thinking that you really pushed some  boundaries here, which you did, but going back and listening to the older CDs there are a lot of places where you give us a taste of what you elaborated on in Rising Sun.
Najee: I kept it within a certain boundary for commercialism but I think it was time to stretch a little more. I listen closely to my fans and what they want to hear, and when I play live with my band we do tend to stretch it
more.

SV: I've seen you live several times and haven't you noticed that people love it when you do stretch it out and kick it up a few notches?
Najee: Absolutely. I'm grateful that people have responded and it's an indication that we can grow and move in some other directions, which is nice.

SV: You did a really interesting take on "Clarity," the John Mayer song, because you took an acoustic pop song with a complicated melody structure and jazzed it up and made it your own but you stayed true to the spirit of the original.
Najee: To be honest, his song was not easy to do because the best way to do his song is to stay as close to the original and to interpret the way he sings was very difficult to do on saxophone. I did that track several times to try to get as close as I could. It's not a standard common melody.

SV: Exactly, that's what makes it so interesting. How did you choose that song?
Najee: I've always liked it and I thought it was different. When I first heard it I started thinking about how it would sound with an instrumentalist reinterpreting it so I took a chance on it. I realized it was going to be a different energy from what I normally do and at the same time it's not foreign to me as a musician or in terms of things I like to listen to. I like artists who are really honest and he's definitely one of those. He communicates well with what he does.

SV: Kirk Whalum started riffing on "Waiting for the World To Change," when I saw him with Guitars and Saxes earlier this year and Steve Cole's Spin CD was based on bringing in influences like John Mayer an Maroon 5. I think it's great that artists are being influenced by and covering types of music that go beyond the traditional smooth jazz boundaries.
Najee: I agree. Unfortunately the market suffers as a result of that kind of thinking because people have bought a lot of  that stuff already. There are only so many times that we can do Earth Wind and Fire songs and Stevie songs . Cover songs are not uncommon for instrumentalists, that was even so back in the straightahead days but I think we have to make the music interesting so people will want to have it in their collections.

SV: Did you  have any qualms about putting that one right in front at the start of the album.
Najee: No, I did that intentionally because I didn't want it to be buried deep in the album. You know how it is, a lot of us will get five or six songs deep and then we're done. So I purposely put it up there.

SV: You did something similar on My Point of View, where you put the jazziest, most improvisational song on as the opener.
Najee: Exactly. It was strategically done. I think sometimes people think that if you are doing the smooth jazz thing it mean you aren't a legitimate player and there are a lot of us who really do play for real.

SV: That's the case with the majority of the ones I've seen live. This whole idea that if you do commercial music or play what we call smooth jazz means that you are not a serious player has always seemed
off base to me, but you hear it a lot in some circles.
Najee: Thats right. I came up in New York and when I was a kid the teachers I had encouraged us to try to play as many things as possible. They would tell us not to be afraid to play something like classical. You may not become a brilliant classical player but familiarizing yourself and struggling with the music makes you better. The experience makes you more well rounded as a person and a musician.  I come from that type of thinking which is why I enjoy the term "multi-instrumentalist" as opposed to being a sax player. I love the flute as much as I love the sax.

SV: Which did you start playing first?
Najee: The saxophone, actually. Tenor sax. I started with clarinet then switched to tenor, then I picked up alto and the flute.

SV: Your brother was coming up as a musician at the same time too, wasn't he?
Najee: He's a guitarist. He doesn't play much anymore. He's more dedicated to other things in the business, and he pretty much holds me together as a business manager. He played professionally for many years. He recorded a lot in the 80s and he and I toured with Chaka Khan together back in 1983. We were barely out of high school, just in college and we left Boston to go on the road with her.

SV: That must have been something to hit the road with a major artist at that point.
Najee: It was. We were young, we were in our early twenties.  We kind of joke around and say how hard she  broke our cherry for real (laughs) on a musical level, you know. We were thrown in the heavy R&B, rock and roll element. It was really good for us.

SV: You ended up getting  your solo deal through contacts you made on that tour didn't you?
Najee: I did. There was a singer named Me'lisa Morgan who was one of the backup singers. After we finished doing the tour with Chaka she put together her own band to go into a place called The Cellar in New York. She basically took the band that had been with Chaka and we just played gigs in The Cellar.  She got signed to Capitol and asked me to play on her first album. Her manager at the time said he had an outlet to develop a jazz artist and he asked if I was interested in trying to fill that slot. I said I was, not really knowing what I was doing. I didn't have a clue really. It was an opportunity that was given to me and actually what happened was that the first album was a collection of demos that I gave him with a certain concept in mind. He ran them over to EMI and EMI did such an excellent job of breaking my career that we had a gold record within a few months.

SV: It had been done before but I think that with that album you became the artist who set the standard for using shadow vocals - using a vocal chorus to sing background vocals behind an instrumental lead.
Najee: Some artists had done it but I believed at the time that there was a huge audience out there who could relate to instrumental music if there was something that made it accessible for them, At the time there wasn't any smooth jazz radio as we know it now and the radio outlets we had as instrumentalists were the Quiet Storm shows. My music was actually played on Quiet Storm formats at night on stations in markets like DC, Atlanta and New York. Those are the markets that broke my career by playing my songs at night. The vocals really helped me to be accessible to the R&B stations. I intentionally went with the element of tapping into the R&B audience and it worked. One of the brilliant things was that the manager I had, Charles Huggins, put me on tour opening for Freddie Jackson, who was a huge artist at the time. That was tremendous for me as far as building my career because I was playing in front of anywhere from 2,500 to 5,000 people a night.

SV: I heard "Najee's Theme" last night and it doesn't sound like dated at all. Some late 80s music has this synth-heavy sound that pins it to that era but that song still sounds really contemporary.
Najee: When I hear it on the radio I'm grateful it's there but when I first started I didn't have a clue as to what I was doing. Thank God it worked.

SV: Do you think that not having a clue might have helped because you didn't calculate anything or try to imitate anything. You just went in and played?
Najee: Yeah, exactly. I went in and played and most of those takes are first takes because we didn't have the money to do them again! We had a small budget and most of that was used in the mixes. The actual recording part of it was really low budget. I would say something to the guys who were producing me like "man, that horn's out of tune," and they'd go "No, that sounds fine! "

SV: That's funny because the album sounds really polished.
Najee: I didn't know whether the album would be successful. I'll never forget when I got my first gold album. I didn't know what it really meant. I thought everybody got a gold album. A lot of people I knew had gold albums so I thought it was just something you got.

SV: Kind of like those awards they give out at the office Christmas party or something.
Najee: Yeah. I didn't know it meant you were becoming a celebrity. All of a sudden I'm walking through airports and people know my face! I thought that getting on Good Morning America and in USA Today was just the normal way the record industry ran. I really didn't realize that that was a successful record.

SV: When you went in to start working on the follow up did you feel pressure to recreate that sound and that success?
Najee: Of course you go in with the attitude that it has to be as big as the first one and fortunately it did do well. I think I learned a little more about the recording process and the production end by them and there were some conscious decisions made. I didn't want to change up the path we had already started.

SV: You survived over 20 years and several record companies.
Najee: I started with EMI then went to Manhattan Records, then went back to EMI then went to Capitol for a minute. Then I went to Verve and did one with them then went to another label that unfortunately folded after 9/11 then ended up on N Coded for one. After a stint with them I ran into Dave Love from Heads Up at James Lloyd's birthday party. We started talking and that's how I ended up there to record My Point of View.

SV: How do you navigate all those changes and still maintain a sense of yourself as an artist and your individual style when the business is in such a state of flux?
Najee: Honestly, I don't know (laughs). I just do what I do. I don't have in my mind what will be successful, or that I know if I do this it will work. Most of the time the things I do are really experimental. I'm experimenting and hoping that  this is a sure shot that way. I've been fortunate that over the 20 years I've developed my career to the point where I don't worry too much about whether something is going to be successful. I do the best I can and hope people will get it, and I make myself available to do what I need to do to promote it.

SV: You have said that you like to give your audience what they come to you for and to kind of stay within the realm of what is commercial, in the best sense of that word. But you are also experimenting and expanding the range of your work. How do you approach that, and how do you know how far you can go and how supportive is the record company.
Najee: It's always a fine line for me with the record company and the audience because the record company wants to sell CDs, but as an artist you have an obligation to the audience. You're selling yourself really, you're selling your artistry. People aren't just buying a CD, they are buying you. That's the way I feel about it. It's not just the songs that go on the record. It's me that goes on there. You want to sell as many records as possible but you want to stay creatively as interesting so people will want to listen and hopefully buy. The smooth jazz market is suffering. We just are not a major part of the industry right now.

SV: That's true but a lot of the more creative artists and types of  music are not very important to the industry right now, and people are starting to bypass the industry to find the music they like. It just takes longer. When the quality is there, and you've got something this good with the initial reaction affirming that but the resources you used to rely on like airplay and music retail have pretty much dried up how do you get it out there.
Najee: I just record the project and hope the record company gets it out there, that the timing is right and that they do the right thing. I try to think as a consumer would think when I do a record. I don't make records for musicians. I've played with some of the best of them but that's not my target. I'm really trying to go for the audience who gets something out of it.

SV: You have a really diverse group of songs on Rising Sun, you do more alto than you usually do, you did some straightahead, you've got some big horn sections goin' on in some of the songs. When you were approaching it did you come in saying you were going to do something different?
Najee: I did. I actually consulted my brother. I've always trusted his advice, and he said that the one thing I
needed to do was connect my audience with who I really am. When they come to my live shows they get a different experience than what they hear on the record. I needed to do a record that connected them more with what I did live. I thought about that and that's why I decided to do the straightahead song. We still made it with a contemporary feel. "Moody's Mood For Love" was a real New York anthem. When I was growing up Frankie Crocker used to end his show on WBLS with that one. Then I ran into James Moody and his wife in a saxophone shop in New York and that gave me the perfect idea, that I should cover that song.

SV: That was pure serendipity, how likely is it to just be in a shop and run into an influential musician who wrote such  classic song.
Najee: It's likely in the sense that it s a saxophone shop in New York that all the professional players come to when they are in town and need supplies. It was uncommon in the sense that here's this legend of a man that I've always admired and I'm just up there trying out flutes and he comes up to me and asks me how I get that sound. Here's James Moody, one of the greatest jazz flute players asking me how I get that sound on flute. I felt really tickled about that. He's a very gracious man.

SV: Chris Davis did a lot of the songwriting and production and played a lot of the backup instrumentation on these songs. He did some work on your last CD too. He isn't one of the usual household names that artists default to and his work is fabulous. Who is he and how did you start working together?
Najee: To me he's a genius. I met him when I was doing some spot dates with Will Downing and he was playing keyboards. I was on stage with him but I'd never heard of him. We talked about getting together and doing something and I called him when I started working on My Point Of View. It was an easy mix, it was easy to do.

SV: He co-wrote a lot of the songs on this one too. Which brings up a point that over the years your  music has been very identifiably Najee, but a lot of the songs you've recorded and become identified with were written by other people.
Najee: I do that because it keeps the project a little more interesting. I've written a lot of things for myself but I think that as a writer you can become a little jaded. For me it takes a lot of pressure off me to be able to work with other people. I can go to them and tell them what I need, or check out what they are doing. With somebody like Chris he's very easy to go to. It's like going to Macy's - one stop shopping (laughs), you've got so much to choose from.

SV: What's interesting is that they seem to write in your voice.
Najee: That's the trick for me. They write a lot of things and work with a lot of people. They have to really tailor it, that's the trick in it all. With Chris, I've heard things he's done with other people that are very nice then when he and I get together it's a little more work to tailor it to what I do.

SV: You've worked with some of the biggest names out there like Herbie Hancock, Marcus Miller, George Duke, and all the session heavy hitters and on other CDs you've worked with a group of people who seem to be kind of an inner circle for you, people you've worked with over the years. Is it a different experience?
Najee: Obviously working with veterans like Herbie and George is amazing. The first time I worked with George I remember being very nervous because I grew up listening to people like  him and Herbie. I was a kid when I first heard Herbie Hancock playing with Miles Davis on the Four and More album so to have this big giant of a man playing on my album, to say that I was paying Herbie Hancock to play on my album, was kind of different for me. For me it was a great opportunity and an amazing experience. I've always been good at identifying people who have tremendous talent but no outlet to bring it to the world. In the case of Chris Davis here's a guy who has been in the laboratory for many years and it wasn't until he and I started working together that the world got to hear what he was doing. Now he's working with Kim Waters, Vesta, all these other people and his world has opened up more. That's what it's all about.

SV: You got to work with Prince a few years ago. How did that happen?
Najee: Wow!!! (grin you can hear over the phone). It kind of came unexpectedly. I think it was in 2000. I went to one of his concerts in New York at Madison Square Garden and I got word through my attorney that Prince wanted me to come jam at his after party at a club in New York City. I said sure I'd love to do it and I went and brought my flute. I got a call from Doug E. Fresh and he was telling me that Prince was watching a video of me playing flute and really dug what I was doing. I didn't think anything about it then I was at home in LA and I get this call from this guy who tells me Prince would like to talk to me. I say "OK, cool" and he says Prince will call me back. About an hour later the same guy calls back and says "Najee, I've got Prince on the phone" so Prince gets on the phone and says "Yo, man, what's up," and I say "I don't know, man, what's up?" (laughs). He says "When are you and I getting together?"  I said I don't know, you tell me. So he says "What are you doing right now?" I told him I was at home and he says "Why don't you come out to Minneapolis right now?"  I said I couldn't just get up and come to Minneapolis right now, that I could come out in three or four days. He said he'd call me back and hung up the phone. About an hour later I get a call from a travel agent prince had told to book my travel to Minneapolis. I flew up there and it started out with me hanging out at jam sessions and going to clubs. We just hung out and played some music, then he asked me to record with him, that was on the Rainbow Children album. Then he asked me to come out on a two week tour with him. That two week tour turned into two years. After that I had to leave to support an album I had recorded.

SV: What was it like being onstage in the middle of that kind of energy?
Najee: The funny thing about his shows is that people never sit down. It's high energy from the time it starts till it's over. Nobody ever sits down.. It's an amazing experience. Most nights it was almost surreal for me because you are onstage doing what you do but you're not feeling the impact the way it's coming across out there. A lot of times I would look around and be amazed that this guy could command this kind of power over people. I truly believe he is one of the greatest artists of our time.

SV: Do you think we compartmentalize too much? Like when we say that an artist can't do straightahead or be really high energy onstage because they do some albums that fit the smooth jazz mold. Or if someone does the rock/fusion side they can't have any straightahead credibility. And so on?
Najee: Unfortunately big business has somewhat helped kill creativity. There are some great musicians out there. I did the smooth jazz cruise this past year and one of the greatest things was to be able to interact and perform with the other artists on the ship. I got to play with Al Jarreau, Marcus Miller, George Duke, I played with Peter White and Rick Braun. When you do the jam sessions you get to see how multidimensional people are.

SV: And people get off that boat and wish they could hear more of the side of the music that isn't just "smooth and relaxing."
Najee: Exactly! We had a few jam sessions where it just went off !  And when it went everybody could go there. It was just refreshing. Call it a smooth jazz thing but you've got real musicians who can really play. If they could get more support when they do that it would be really good.

SV: You're rehearsing right now. Does that mean we can look forward to some tour dates around the CD?
Najee: Yes. We're putting together some things right now and throwing around package ideas. Unfortunately I can't mention any names until we get everything in place.

SV: Is it going to be a package tour or you and your band?
Najee: It's going to be me and my band but I would like to do some kind of package tour at some point.

SV: That would be fun. We'll just have to keep an eye out on the tour dates. Thanks for the conversation and the wonderful music and we will be looking forward to hearing you live sometime soon!