Steve Davis interview

June 19, 2015

I spoke with Steve Davis on June 17. I’ve known Steve for about 20 years and first heard him at the 880 Club in Hartford closer to 30 years ago. Since then, I’ve seen him on bandstands here, there, and everywhere, including the Jazz à la Mode 30th anniversary celebration in Springfield last November. Stevie-D, as Jackie McLean affectionately dubbed him, arrived in West Hartford in 1985 to study at the University of Hartford’s Hartt School of Music where McLean directed the jazz studies program that now bears his name. Jay Mac took pride in his young charge and recommended him to his former boss Art Blakey. In 1989, the Worcester-born, Binghampton, NY-raised trombonist became the last recruit of the Jazz Messengers and spent the next two years playing in Blakey’s august academy of hard bop proteges. Davis then played with McLean’s sextet, Rhythms of the Earth, through 1997, then, as he discusses in the interview, spent a few years criss-crossing the globe with Chick Corea’s Origin.

McLean instilled in Davis not only a dedication to the highest performance standards of modern jazz, but a commitment to teaching and mentoring. When he was still an undergrad, Jay Mac encouraged him to share his gifts with students at the Artists Collective, the community arts and education center that Jackie and Dolly McLean established in Hartford’s North End shortly after their arrival from New York in 1970. And Davis joined the faculty at Hartt in 1991, where he remains today. In between teaching and international touring with his own groups and the Dizzy Gillespie All-Star Big Band, he maintains a constant presence on area bandstands where he’s often seen encouraging the impressive array of young jazz players who just keep cropping up, among them Davis’s guitar-playing son Tony.

Davis’s new release, Say When, is a tribute to J.J. Johnson, the Indianapolis native long acknowledged as the trombone-playing counterpart to Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Bud Powell. He’s been a hero to Davis since he first picked up a horn, and this homage to J.J. was long and carefully considered. Davis has recorded extensively as a leader for Positone, Jazz Legacy, and Criss Cross Jazz; Say When is his debut release on Smoke Sessions, the label established two years ago and named for Smoke, the Upper West Side nightclub where Davis has been a regular as a leader, sideman, and with One For All, the cooperative sextet he co-founded 20 years ago. This finds him in the good company of five longtime associates: trumpeter Eddie Henderson, tenor saxophonist Eric Alexander, pianist Harold Mabern, bassist Nat Reeves, and drummer Joe Farnsworth. Mabern, who’s now 79, and Henderson, who’ll turn 75 in October, doubled as role models for the rest of these players when they emerged 25 years ago, but by now it’s apparent that they’re all musical peers.

Here’s Stevie-D soloing on JJ’s “Say When” with the U.S. Army Blues big band at the 2015 American Trombone Workshop.

My conversation with Davis runs about 52 minutes, but if you’re pressed for time, here’s an excerpt in which I asked him to clarify something he’d said earlier about players of “serious” jazz.