JEB BISHOP

I was a band geek in high school. I played trombone while Mr. DeVoe did his level best to reduce music to playing notes as precisely and boringly as possible. I still can't listen to some of those songs we murdered under Mr. DeVoe's baton.

Trombone wasn't one of the cool instruments in band. Most of the parts we played were dull. Occasionally, we'd get a good counter melody, but most of the time we  just played honking accents. There weren't really any cool trombone players to look up to either. The trumpets and woodwinds always played the melody. Everyone who listened to Springsteen knew that sax players were cool. The only semi-cool trombone player was that James Pankow from Chicago, and they were really starting to suck hard in the late 70's.

A few years ago, I started to hear good things about a sax player from Chicago named Ken Vandermark. Vandermark has become much more visible since he won the prestigious MacArther Fellowship(the so called "genius grant"), earlier this year. The spotlight that is now shining on Ken also brings into focus the exceptional musicians playing in his groups. Like all great leaders, Ken has surrounded himself with other fine players. One of these players is trombonist/guitarist Jeb Bishop. While Ken Vandermark has been thrust forward by the buzz surrounding the MacAurther award, Jeb Bishop has quietly been establishing his own identity as a leader and improviser. In the past year, Wobbly Rail has issued a collection of improvisations called 98 Duets while Okka Disc released the debut disc by the Jeb Bishop Trio and a collaboration with Joe McPhee called Brass City.

Jeb Bishop began his musical career studying classical trombone at Northwestern University. After growing disillusioned by the artistic and professional limitations of classical music, Jeb returned home to North Carolina where he played bass in punk rock bands. Graduate school eventually brought Bishop back to Chicago where he began working with Ken Vandermark while playing guitar and a little trombone with the Flying Luttenbackers. From there, Bishop embarked on a journey playing jazz and free improvisation that has brought him to the brink of fame. His debut disc, 98 Duets is a collection of improvisations with some of the leading improvisational jazz players on the scene today. The Jeb Bishop Trio disc finds the trombonist leading a small group through his own exceptional compositions

"I wasn't interested in the trombone for a long time," Jeb admits when asked about his status as a hot jazz trombonist. "I was serious about playing it through high school. I had a lot of training and lessons and went to summer music camps and all that stuff. Then I went to music school for two years up at Northwestern University. All that was oriented toward classical playing. I burned out on that scene because it came to seem very limited musically. Trying to become a jazz trombonist didn't seem like a realistic option for me at the time."

"I quit playing the trombone for a long time," Bishop continues. "I started playing in rock bands. I took up electric bass and then electric guitar later on. All through my 20's I didn't really play the trombone. I played it some, but only on a very peripheral kind of way. I didn't come back to it until I got hooked up with improvisers in Chicago around 1993. By that time I was 30 already. I kind of skipped my 20's, the age at which you're supposed to be hammering out your musical identity on an instrument. I got around that problem by not playing the instrument at all."

"My inspiration has never specifically been trombone players," Bishop continues when asked if there were any trombonists who were role models for him. "There have always been trombone players I've enjoyed listening to, but as far as being inspired to do the kind of things that I'm doing now, I think I was always more inspired by sax players."

"There are trombone players that I admire and have a great deal of respect for," Jeb continues. "In the past few years there are some I've tried to learn from in terms of emulating what they do. George Lewis is probably my favorite of the new music trombonists. When I started hearing Paul Rutherford a few years ago; specifically the solo record, "The Gentle Harm of the Bourgeoisie." That had a big impact on me. That was such a different approach. At the time I hadn't really heard anything like it. Listening to that and trying to figure that out had a big impact on me. In the realm of free improvised music there are lots of trombone players I like a lot. Johannes Bauer is one who's playing I'm particularly fond of. I think he's a great improviser."

My own passion for playing trombone cooled off toward the end of high school when I got tired of playing concert band material. I found the emphasis on technical precision and interpreting scores to be unsatisfying. "If you're trained to play in an orchestra, there is definitely that aspect to it," Bishop admitted when I shared my own frustrations with classically oriented music education. "There are lots of trombone players who apparently want to do that. In order to work, you have to learn these excerpts from orchestral pieces that you're expected to play at auditions. When there is an audition, 150 trombone players show up for one spot in an orchestra somewhere in Kansas. Everyone is trying to play the trombone solo from "Bolero." It just came to seem ridiculous to me after a while."

"I have nothing against people playing the kind of music they want to play," Bishop continues. "It does seem sometimes that people are content to take the harmonic and melodic language that was developed at a certain point and call it quits. You see that with free improvisation players too. They do what they do and they don't seem interested in changing that in any kind of radical way. That doesn't mean that they are not making great music."

"That points to the distinction between two different kinds of improvisers," Jeb says following that thread. "There are improvisers who find a specific direction or idiom and just focus on that very intently and develop all the possible details of that one particular approach that they've discovered or developed. Then there are improvisers who seem to be interested in putting themselves in as many different kinds of situations as possible. Improvisers who want to throw themselves curve balls all the time. That's probably an oversimplification. There are probably aspects of that in all improvisers."

Jeb Bishop's squalling guitar kicks off the latest Vandermark 5 disc, Simpatico. The opening suggests a the fury of punk rock song before the rest of the band kicks in, taking things in a more recognizably jazz direction. I don't mean to read more into a few bars of guitar freakout, but to me it seems like a bridge between indie rock and jazz. I was very interested in Jeb's ability to switch between horn and guitar so seamlessly.

"The reason that the guitar is in those tunes is because that's the way Ken writes the stuff," Bishop states matter of factly. "Decisions about form, instrumentation and general texture are mainly Ken's compositional decisions. I enjoy playing like that and the specific details of how it's going to sound are due to how I react to the instructions to play in a certain way. A lot of times decisions about the forms of tunes will undergo a certain metamorphosis as a result of discussions at rehearsals. I'm not saying that Ken is a tyrant dictating how everything is going to be, but it's his band and they're his compositions so the ultimate responsibility for the way things are organized, it's his show."

"Ken has told me that people have complained about having noisy guitar in the band," Jeb continues. "I've never encountered that myself. Whether people are being polite to me, I don't know. I have certainly gotten favorable comments from people who like hearing the noisy guitar in the band."

The MacArther fellowship has propelled the Vandermark 5 into a whole new arena of media attention. "We were all pretty startled when it was revealed that this thing had been bestowed on him," Bishop relates. "We were half way through the tour when we found out. Ken was certainly as surprised as the rest of us." As far as the long term ramifications of this honor, Bishop says, "I think people see it as a positive development for Chicago music in terms of attracting attention and giving Ken a chance to keep doing what he's doing."

"The trio started because there was a gig," Jeb states when converstion finally comes around to his own projects. "I liked they way it went, so it continued. It's not as if I sat around thinking that there is the aesthetic thing that I want to do and I will put together this group to do it. Once it proved to be a successful group to play with, I was motivated to write some more things for it."

"The thing that I like about it," Bishop relates, "it has helped me learn to deal with stretching out more. In a trio, you're playing more of the solo space proportionately. You feel like you're out in the open more. As the horn player, a lot of the weight is on you that would have been shared if there were someone else in the front line. The trio format lends itself to structures being more loose and more open. It's a little bit easier for things to go into unexpected places because you don't have to coordinate five or six people. I'm already very comfortable playing with Kent Kessler and Tim Mulvenna from the Vandermark 5, so there is a basis for that communication."

"I've done a few gigs with recently with Josh Abrams on bass and Hamid Drake on drums," Jeb admits when asked about reports of line up changes in the trio. "That's a different trio. It's not the Jeb Bishop Trio. It's an as yet unnamed group. We just do completely improvised music. That's why I'm interested in playing with those guys, to explore complete improvisation in a trio format."

"Lately, I've done some gigs with the Jeb Bishop Trio with Jeff Parker sitting in on guitar. I wanted to do that to find out what it would be like to have another instrument adding some textural support and have another element to interact with in the improvisational sections," Bishop continues elaborating on variations in his performances. "I really like Jeff's guitar playing a lot. He's comfortable handling a wide range of musical territories. I like the possibilities the guitar has for everything from standard harmonic material to wide open sound textures. Jeff gets a really wide range of sounds out of his guitar and he does it in a very direct way. He doesn't use a lot of effects."

Bishop explained the genesis of that project saying, "Mac from Wobbly Rail asked me if I wanted to do a record. Matts Gustafsson happened to be in town, so I quickly booked a session. After that I thought about doing a record of duets and began thinking of who I wanted to play with. I had to narrow it down, because I didn't want to have fifteen people with short little duets. I wanted to be able to do somewhat longer things with each of the duet partners. It was going to be just five because I thought that was a good number. Then Mac got in touch with me and said he could set up something with Wadada Leo Smith. I couldn't pass that up, so I expanded it to six."

"98 Duets was made not long after the trio record was recorded," Jeb continues. "If you take those two together, it gives you a picture of what I was up to at that time. I feel my playing had changed since those records were made, but it certainly gives you an overview of what I was doing at that time."

Like other player on the Chicago jazz scene, Jeb Bishop keeps busy playing with several groups and doing various sessions. Other recent projects featuring Bishop's work include the latest Superchunk disc and a band called In Zenith. "In Zenith is a group led by Frederick Lonberg Holm," Jeb explains. "In that group I play electric bass and trombone. That group has been pretty inactive, but the CD just came out. That was recorded in January of '97. That group still gets together to play."

"Lately I have been playing in another group with Fred called Terminal Four," Bishop continues. "That's mostly his compositions. The material is similar to the In Zenith material, only much quieter. In Zenith is more like a rock band. Terminal Four is more like a chamber group."