February 9, 2005
Interview by Elizabeth Ware

SmoothViews (SV): Hi Steve. Thanks for taking time out to talk with us today! The first time I saw you play was at Capital Jazz Festival in 1999. You had your own gig there, and you played with Brian Culbertson as well, and if memory serves – and it usually doesn’t – you came out and played with someone else that weekend too.
Steve Cole SC: Oh yeah, I think I ran into Rick Braun in the lobby and he was like, “Come and play with me!” and I was like, “Alright, sure, what the hell!”

SV: My husband and I agreed that you basically owned that weekend, and we’ve been listening to your music ever since! Your music is in frequent rotation at my house.
SC: Thank you for that! I appreciate it!

SV: I want to talk a lot about your upcoming release, Spin, in a minute, but first, your current CD, NYLA, was a bit of a departure from your first two CDs, Stay Awhile and Between Us! In the current climate where playing it safe and staying within a certain formula is certainly encouraged – regardless of your musical genre – making NYLA was a pretty gutsy move! You really explored some new areas – some different blendings of musical styles. Two years later, how do you feel about that? How was it received out on the road by the fans? By radio?
SC: You know, it worked out great because regardless of what… and I think this changes with my current record company because I believe Narada to be one of the most open-minded musical record labels out there. I think they really concentrate on the music and they want the artist to be themselves and do their best work. But not withstanding… I think that even though most record companies do like to stick to a formulaic approach… kind of an “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” kind of thing. I think the fans are different. I don’t think we give our listeners enough credit. At least the record companies don’t. I do, because I actually see them. (laughs) The comments that I got… some of the music may be a little bit of a departure from previous records... I got nothing but positive feedback about it. I think it’s important to provide something new every time you come out and make another record. I think the problem has been that people are sticking to the same kind of formulaic approach to making their records, and if you’re going to keep making the same record over and over again, why is anyone going to want to buy your new record. So I think we owe it to the listeners to give them something different and creative every time we make a record.

SV: I certainly applaud anyone’s effort to go out on a limb a little bit to do something different, and I absolutely loved it. Some of the things that you blended in there come from your Chicago roots a little bit too. Maybe you approach music a little differently because you’re located in Chicago and are not in LA?
SC: My musical style, anyone’s musical style comes from where they live, who their influences are and the type of music that’s around them all the time. And I always felt that I was really lucky to live in Chicago because the musical community is so diverse here. It’s the home of the blues, there’s great straight-ahead jazz here, there’s great funk music going on, we have one of the best symphony orchestras in the world, we have one of the best opera companies in the world, so you can't help but have a little attitude (laughs) when you live in the city of Chicago as a musician. I mean, it rubs off on you, doesn’t it?

SV: Do you find that it posed any difficulties with the Smooth Jazz center of the universe located in LA? Does it pose any problems being away from that?
SC: No, not really. I kind of like to separate my work and my home life. When I’m home I’m home, and I’m able to think about music and write music and be influenced by music without really having to think about my business. You know what I mean? When I go out and tour, when I go to the coast, it’s usually to work. And having the place where you work and where you live all in the same place, as a musician… for me, I prefer it the way I do it. When I’m home, I’m home, and it’s kind of far away from the music business.

SV: You kind of get the best of both worlds there.
SC: Yeah, I get great music, but not a whole lot of the business here.

SV: NYLA is a Warner Brothers release. With the closing of their Jazz division, you were probably faced with a few extra challenges over the last couple of years! You were commenting earlier that your new home on Narada has already been a real positive experience. Spin will be released on April 25. Tell us about it.
SC: I take my influences from the music and genres that I think are robust creatively. For a long time I was influenced by more soul and R&B because I thought there was a lot of great music and creativity going on in R&B – this was back with my Stay Awhile record – and I kind of continued that tradition a bit throughout my next two records, Between Us and NYLA. They were very much built upon an R&B platform. The music that I’m most influenced by currently is more Pop music. I feel that in the Pop world… the Pop world is becoming a lot more robust. It used to be like the girl bands and the boy bands and it was all very programmed and very commercial. You could look at them and say, these aren’t artists that will be around for 25 years. They’re going to make a lot of money really quick and then they’re gonna…

SV: Make a lot of money for somebody anyway…
SC: Exactly. But now you’ve got guys like John Mayer, and you've got artists like Five for Fighting and Jason Mraz and Maroon5, and Gavin DeGraw, and these guitar players, singer/song writers - people who can sing great, write great music and play their instruments very well. And the songwriting in that genre has just been flooring me! I’ve been listening to that pretty much exclusively for the past probably two years, and being very excited about that. So what I did, I bought myself a guitar (laughs). About a year ago I bought a guitar, and first of all, it’s always good to change things up when you’re a writer because you find yourself falling into a lot of the same traps when you're writing with an instrument you’re too familiar with. So not only did I want to learn to play the guitar, I wanted to write music on the guitar… exclusively. And that’s what I did. And I took my cues and my inspiration from these new artists in the Pop world who are making great music. And that was the influence for this record, Spin, because I thought to myself... no one is incorporating this very exciting, creative movement in Pop music into instrumental music, because everybody is still kind of basing their records on an R&B platform. And I’m a guy who puts my money where my mouth is. When I say that every time out you should try and push the envelope and really try and take the music up another level every time you make a record… that’s exactly what I do, and that’s why it took a long time for me to make another record, because I certainly wasn’t going to make the same record I made last time, because what’s the point in that? I don’t want to be one of these guys who are hanging around and always making the same record. So I made this record and wrote all the music on the guitar, on acoustic guitar. It’s a very Pop, guitar-driven production, very organic, uncomplicated. But the writing is… I teamed up with a very good friend of mine named David Hiltebrand, who’s a guy from Chicago who is a great guitar player and bass player and writer – a young guy too, and we got together and started working on this new music to tried to forge some new territory in this instrumental genre that we have. I’ve never been more proud of a project ever.

It’s really exciting. The music, I think it’s the best writing I’ve ever done. I produced this record, and my friend, David, co-produced it. And it was really kind of the first record that I can honestly say is truly a representation as an artist, as a player, as a writer and a producer/arranger. I had a vision for this record, and luckily the folks at Narada saw my vision and allowed me to proceed without any kind of obstruction at all. They said, “We love what you are doing. Call us if you need us, but proceed as planned.”

SV: That had to be nice.
SC: It was remarkable! It was absolutely remarkable. And, thank God, at the end of the day they loved the record, and I loved record. So everybody’s happy. And I do think it’s something that is very different from anything you’ve heard in this genre, and I think it’s really exciting and it’s going to break down a lot of boundaries and allow people to realize their vision without necessarily feeling they have to be hemmed in by what they perceive to be the constraints of the genre. Because I think good music has no constraints. I think the radio stations have an open mind about that, and the record companies do, and if you do great work it’s going to work for everybody.

SV: You and David wrote all the songs on here?
SC: Yeah. There are a few songs that I wrote myself, but the majority of the songs were co-written by myself and David Hiltebrand.

SV: Who are the guest artists?
SC: Guest artists, none. The music speaks for itself. If there was an artist that I’m friends with that I thought made sense musically, I would have certainly… I wouldn’t just dismiss that out of hand… but really, this was very personal, and I had all the right people working with me so I didn’t have to go outside and get people on the record just to say I had so-and-so on the record. The players on the record… my whole concept for this thing was to keep it in the family, so to speak. Because the creative pursuit of this thing was really near and dear to me, I wanted to make sure I recorded it with people who really shared my vision of it, who were dedicated to the music and who were going to buy into it. I’m very fortunate that some of my very good friends happen to be world-class musicians… it’s very lucky. My friend, Todd Sucherman, who’s the current drummer with the band Styx [and] has been for years now. He played [drums] on just about all of the tunes. My good friend, Ricky Peterson, played organ on most of the record – Hammond B3. And then I played a lot of the guitar parts, and David played a lot of the guitar parts. But also, what I did was... whereas I would listen to other Smooth Jazz releases to get ideas about other musicians to use, what I did, because this record is more similar to a Pop record, I went and listened to… I went through my record collection, but I went to the rock side of it and said, "I really like this guitar part on the last Goo Goo Dolls record. Who’s the guitar player?" I obviously couldn't hire the lead singer who plays guitar, but there’s a guy named Tim Pierce who played a lot of electric guitar on that. It just so happens that he’s this huge session guy in LA – plays on all the big rock records. And I called him up and said, “Hey man; this is what I’m doing. Would you be interested in playing on this project?” and he said, “Absolutely!” So I was really lucky. And then there’s another guitar player named Michael Thompson, whose discography would fill up the Library of Congress… everybody from Celine Dion to Michael Jackson, and I love his playing and called him up, and he was down for it too. So it’s really a fine group of musicians on this record and it’s an all-live record. There’s very little synthesis, very little programming – anything like that. And, of course my good buddy, Lenny Castro, is playing percussion on the whole record.

SV: Will you be touring a lot this summer? Just Steve Cole?
SC: That’s my preference. I’d like to do as many of the dates this summer on my own as I can because it’s going to take a different kind of band to pull it off. Whereas a lot of the Smooth Jazz guys will have two keyboard players, I’m going to have two guitar players. But there are other possibilities of packages and things. It’s really kind of too early to tell.

SV: You grew up in a musical family. Your Dad is also a sax player. You were classically trained in high school and college. You really learned to play the sax in a classic setting.
SC: I did. Yeah. I started studying the sax in high school. I wasn’t really a good student of music up until then ‘cause I was kind of aimless. They talk about how teachers can make or break you. If they inspire you, you can do great things. But if you’re not lucky enough to get a teacher who inspires you, you may not realize something you may have the propensity to do. It just so happened there was a guy named Wayne Richards who I studied saxophone with in high school. He studied at Northwestern University and also the Conservatory in Bordeaux, France. And I was really inspired by his playing and his concept towards music. But he was a classical player. He was a saxophonist and a flutist. So we studied the classical literature and serious music written for the saxophone, and all of the fundamentals of classical performance. And that’s where I started out. It was really fascinating. I got to do some exciting things. I got to perform with the Chicago Symphony, I got to go to Amsterdam and perform original music for saxophone and string quartet. It was very cool. It’s great to do when you’re a student and you don’t have to worry about making a living.

SV: With the current trend of putting out records of jazz standards or American Pop standards or movie themes… do you ever get a wild-hair and think about making a classical music album?
SC: Oh yeah! Branford Marsalis did it and played a lot of the pieces I played as a college student. And he actually, I believe, studied with my old teacher, Frederick Hemke, at Northwestern, I’m not sure. But I know that when I was in college, Branford came to school to perform, and even then was talking about making this record… but I’m not sure… don’t quote me on that. But the guy I studied with at Northwestern is kind of one of the top classical saxophone players in the world, so I wouldn’t doubt that he and Branford hooked up before Branford made that record. I would love to make that record. I would love it! It would be a joy! But who’s going to pay for it and who’s going to buy it?

SV: Let’s talk a little bit about the times we live in as far as music is concerned. Certainly a lot of the traditional ways of doing business are being challenged. While larger labels continue to struggle, they seem tied to the bottom line more than ever and no longer really nurture creativity the way they once did. But a lot of smaller labels seem to be thriving. Satellite and internet radio are challenging the way mainstream radio does business. File downloading poses all kinds of challenges, both good and bad. As an artist, what do you see as the biggest challenges? What do you see as the most exciting developments?
SC: Well, I think the most exciting aspects of all of it, at least as it pertains to my genre and where I live as a musician… over the years, and I’m sure you’ll agree, the number of artists and the number of choices in the genre are vast – they’ve become very vast. Unfortunately, with so many people in the game doing very similar things, it’s hard to get motivated to buy anything because there are so many artists out there and they all kind of sound the same. You know what I mean? I think the thing that’s happening with the concentration on the smaller labels… as large record companies start to divest themselves of instrumentalist, like Warner Bros… I was at Atlantic Records first, and it was me and Brian Culbertson and Jeff Golub and Wayman Tisdale… that got folded up into Warner Bros. and Warner Bros. had basically 90% of the artists. And then Warner Bros. went away because it wasn’t worthwhile for them to keep going on with it.

I think that we’re going to find that instrumental music is going to go back to the way it was 20 years ago when you had a few artists who were very different from each other, who were putting out high quality work every time… when it was like Spyro Gyra and George Benson and David Sanborn and Grover Washington. And everyone was doing well because there were fewer artists and there was a lot more… what’s the word… differentiation between the artists. So people would be inspired to buy your records. People would listen to your records actively. And people weren’t buying your record to put on while they did something else… you know what I mean... whether it was cooking or driving or sipping wine or whatever happens after sipping wine… yeah… music is good for all that stuff as long as you also put on the music to listen to it and enjoy it and understand the artist and feel like you know the artist through the music. I think that’s something we’re lacking now, and I think that’s something that a lot of people are kind of crying about… but I actually think that in the long-run it’s going to be for the best. And that may seem a little bit cocky of me because I’m hoping, I’m including myself as one of those artists that is going to be sticking around, who people are going to be like, “I’ll want to buy his record because I feel that he’s always doing something different and he’s always doing something to get my attention.” So I think it’s good that this is all happening.

I think downloads like things like the Apple music store, where people are able to get your music right away, and it’s not stealing… you get paid for it… it’s so easy, and like the iPod is being sold by the millions. I think it’s great. It gives people a lot more freedom to choose the music that they want. Of course there is a downside to all of it, but I’m trying to just really concentrate on what’s positive about it and live in that space. To be honest, if you sit around and complain about it and just kind of commiserate with like-minded people about how awful the radio stations are, how awful the record companies are, how awful the listeners are, and how awful technology is, it’s completely unproductive! So if you concentrate at all times on doing your absolute best work, and try to innovate every time you go out and make a record… because the title of “recording artist” isn’t something that people should take lightly. It’s a responsibility. We get to do this, and in turn, we have to do our best work to deserve the title. Concentrate on good work, and everything is going to be fine.

SV: When you aren’t on the road or in the studio, what do you like to do, you know, with all that illusive spare time that is probably so plentiful? (both laughing)
SC: The spare time… what’s that?

SV: Want me to spell that for you? (both laughing)
SC: It’s funny because there is a little bit of time that we do have free… and it’s all together… January and February. There’s nothing to do! I actually go nuts during that time. But, what I love to do when I have time… first, I’m a simple guy. I like to hang out with my wife. Because I like her a lot! As a matter of fact, on this new record, I actually wrote a song for her for the first time. We’ve been married for eleven years. I went to my high school prom with this girl, that’s how long I’ve known her. And in all that time, I’ve never written her a song. This record, I wrote her a song. Her name is Laura, and I wrote her a song called “A Letter to Laura” which is a big long four-minute love letter. But I like hanging out with her. And we like to just dig in and open a nice bottle of wine and hang out. BUT when I’m not doing that, I love to cook. If I couldn’t be a musician, I would be a chef. I’m not saying that I’m any good at it, but I love it!

SV: Well, that probably makes her happy too, I can tell you!
SC: Yeah, she does like that. She likes to… you know, the division of labor around the house is always cool as long as I cook. I just love it. I think a lot of the same things that go into music when you put your heart and soul into music, and I think you put your heart and soul into cooking. I feel like the same thing when I’m trying to figure out how much of a spice to put into something. It’s almost the same thing… it’s like playing a melody. That’s got to be just right or you’re going to ruin it, you know. So I Iove to cook.

SV: So you don’t like to follow a recipe? You like to improv…
SC: You know what? I use them as a suggestion. (laughing) And I’m finding out that certain recipes work and certain ones don’t. A certain amount of my own improvisation in the kitchen works and a certain amount doesn’t, but I’m going to keep trying every time. (laughing). It’s like, “Uh, honey, you better get some more water because this is a little spicier than I thought it was going to be. Uh…” As long as I have a better average of good than bad, she’s still sticking with me on the cooking.

SV: Steve, thanks again for taking time with us today.
SC: Absolutely! Thanks for thinking of me.

For more information visit Steve's website at: www.stevecole.net

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