Ninety Miles Band - Spiritual Home

As he tells SELWYN HARRIS, Cuba has more in common with New Orleans than you might think probably couldn’t have been done via a more traditional route.

’ve spoken before to Christian Scott, but very briefly. It was at Soho’s Pizza Express Jazz Club just under a decade ago. At the time the New Orleans trumpet teen prodigy was serving a lengthy apprenticeship on tour with his uncle, the saxophonist and Mardi Gras chief Donald ‘Duck’ Harrison. He was just 17 then. Onstage he had an assertive vigour and fluency that impressed, in so far as it was being expressed by such a young man. Offstage when introduced, Scott had a distant authority about him emphasised all the more by the neo-bop suited-and-booted uniform he was wearing. It was a setup at the time that seemed to suggest that here was an eventual heir to Wynton Marsalis. But it hasn’t worked out that way, has it?

The now 28-year-old Scott booms heartily the words, “thank God!” down a shaky mobile connection from New York. OK he might not be Marsalis’ biggest fan but this doesn’t mean he isn’t thankful for the first-hand mentoring he’s received directly from the cradle of jazz. “I think when I was a younger man I was being refined in a way so no one would be able to say that I didn’t have the tradition in my playing,” he says, in typically articulate fashion. “That’s the entire tradition. When I was playing in my uncle’s quintet when I was 14 till 16, 17 years old, those guys were making sure I was listening to everything from Joe Oliver and Roy Eldridge to what Donald Brown was doing. They made sure that I knew and understood all of it so when I decide to make the choice about what I wanted to do about music then no one would be able to discredit me because they would be able to hear the entire lineage of the instrument I play.”

This is an extract from Jazzwise Issue #155 – to read the full article click here to subscribe and receive a FREE CD...