by Kevin Laskey

This weekend, trumpeter and vocalist Wayne Tucker will premiere his Jazz Gallery Residency Commission project. Entitled Blues for Mr. Tucker in honor of Tucker’s late father, the piece features a set of new songs exploring themes of family and gratitude. In a chat over Zoom, Tucker spoke about his father’s impact on his music, capturing a spirit of uplift, and staying emotionally vulnerable on stage.

The Jazz Gallery: You’ve called your project Blues for Mr. Tucker, in honor of your father who passed away this fall. What kind of music was your dad into? Was he someone who inspired your musical pursuits?

Wayne Tucker: It was my mom and my dad and my dad’s sister who first got me and my brother into music. They all played piano, but it was my aunt who was the deepest into it. She had a couple of church gigs—gospel church gigs—and was a school music teacher. And my dad was someone who played in rock and R&B bands on the weekends. 

I can’t really remember from when I was 2 or 3, but at that age, my dad would set up three keyboards in the basement—one for him, one for my brother, one for me—and he would put on some music and we would just jam. That was the first music I made, and it still informs what I make today.

It was gospel music, R&B. My dad was a big Deadhead, so there was a lot of Grateful Dead, Led Zeppelin. It was all in this vein between rock, gospel, R&B, soul, and jazz. That’s where my taste was born, and those are things I really like. 

When people ask me who my favorite musician is, I don’t really know the answer definitively. But since I get asked a lot, I think a lot about it, and what really hits me most. And that’s probably the music of Stevie Wonder. Whenever I hear Stevie, it definitely brings me back to those early times, beginning to make music with my parents and my aunt.

TJG: Has your dad continued to play a role in your music since those origins?

WT: My dad played a part in one of the songs that we're gonna perform as part of the project.  It’s a reimagining of the title track of my last album, which is called “Encouragement.” I made the album at my house, and for this track, I sent my dad a voice memo of myself humming the melody while playing piano. He was never a lyricist, but he always just had an incredible vocabulary and a very unique way of using words, and so I thought he'd do a good job at writing lyrics to it. I sang the song on the album, but for this project, Sarah Charles is going to sing it.

Before that, he was on my second album, Wake Up and See the Sun. The opening track is Frank Ocean’s “Bad Religion,” and it starts with him reading a poem that the sound engineer wrote. Besides my brother, he’s been the biggest musical inspiration that I’ve had in my life.

TJG: In the new songs you’re working on for the commission, are there elements of your dad’s personality, or his musical tastes, that you’ve been trying to capture musically?

WT: He’s been such a big role in my life, that anything I come up with would reflect our relationship in some way.

Me and my brother—we’ve lost so many people in our family over the past 3 or 4 years. It’s been four aunts and uncles, three grandparents, and our dad. I always thought that when those things happened, I would feel a deeper sadness than what I actually feel. It’s not that I don’t ever feel sadness, but it isn’t something that has enveloped my whole world. The emotion that enveloped everything in my life was gratitude. I don’t know if it was just through his passing, or it was partially because of the pandemic, seeing how the world changed. It was this new appreciation for everything in life. In that sense, he was the inspiration for everything I wrote, as it came from that place of gratitude.

There are a couple of songs in particular that I wrote with him in mind though. One is called “Hope That There’s a Heaven.” My dad was a religious person who believed in God, and I wouldn’t necessarily say the same for myself. I grew up going to church and I’m a confirmed Christian, but I’m not a full believer. I’m a spiritual person and open to anyone in their interpretation of belief. For me, when I imagine someone who’s not there, I can feel like, “Man! I hope I’m wrong because it would be great to reconnect to those people!”

Then there’s a song called “Blues for Mr. Tucker.” That song was inspired by his funeral. Instead of doing it at a funeral home, I had the idea of doing it outside in his backyard. I didn’t want anyone to come to his funeral and get COVID and die. That would be a totally unacceptable thing that would pain me more because it was preventable.

Anyway, we had it in the backyard, and my whole band came and played. We had a celebration. It was more of a homegoing ceremony than a funeral. My dad didn’t want people to make a big thing of it, but though I listened to most things he said, I was like, “No, we gotta make a big thing!” I’m glad we did because a lot of people came out and were really happy that we did it this way.

It felt different than other funerals, and I wanted to go deep into the feeling of what it would have felt like to be a sadder occurrence, rather than this celebration. I tried to write a song that felt like something you’d play at a funeral. I let myself live in that world for a second. There are three verses, and it goes from childhood to teenage years to his dying days. It takes three very integral moments that impacted my life from him.

TJG: How do some of the other songs relate to this idea of gratitude?

WT: There’s a song I wrote for my girl that speaks of how no matter what is going on in life, she always surprises me with the gratitude that she has—how she can be happy with something that other people would see and be like, “Hey! I want more!” She’s the type of person who will work all day and then try to cook me dinner. The song is called “Lemons” and that speaks to the gratitude that she always shows. I then wrote some lyrics to “Blue and Green” by Bill Evans, and that’s about the gratitude I have for our relationship.

Then I wrote one for my brother. I have such gratitude toward him because he’s been my biggest inspiration both in music and in life. In addition to playing the saxophone, he also sells cutlery, so he has a business card that says “Saxy Knife Man,” so that’s the name of the song for him. Another song is called “All The Lies,” and that’s a memorial for all the people that we’ve lost during the pandemic.

Most of the songs have lyrics, but I wrote an instrumental one. I didn’t think of gratitude specifically, but I wanted something that would make my band sound good because I have so much gratitude for them. They’re not just my band, but some of my closest friends in the world. My brother and I love Borat and he always says to people “Many blessings,” so that’s the name of that one.

TJG: How do these new songs connect to what you’ve done in prior projects?

WT: We’re actually taking some songs from older albums and doing them in new ways. One song is called “Encouragement,” and then there’s one called “You Gave Me Life.” That one’s for my mom, who’s going to make the trip down here. She hasn’t heard my band in New York in like three or four years. The song talks about how my mom is a really selfless person. She was a teacher, and when you meet her, you feel like being a teacher was her destiny. She was an incredible teacher who gave everything because it was what she really wanted to do.

TJG: You’re working with a number of vocalists for the project. What drew you to wanting to have all of these voices in the music? Are you thinking about voices as a choir, or a collection of soloists? Both?

WT: For me, the beginning of music was with my family. But it was also through church music. That feeling is always there with me. For example, I was playing recently and I felt the intensity drop. If you’re playing at a gospel church, you might play softly, but everything has to have intensity and passion. Everything has to have uplift, no pulling back for a second. I mentioned that to the band, and the drummer was like, “what if I feel like I’m playing too loud?”

I said, “Keep doing it!” There’s something about the spirit of that in everything I play.

With that in mind, as I was writing these songs, I heard a choir—a gospel choir. “Saxy Knife Man” really has that kind vibe. There’s kind of a round in it—I don’t know if that’s the right word. There are just different parts that happen over the top of each other. As I was writing that, I heard this effect where different people are singing their thing, and they stay with their thing, and someone else joins.

 In the band more generally, we like to do that, rather than just go from solo to solo. Everyone has an individual role, and you continue on your path until it feels like you have to do something else. That feeling really comes from gospel to me.

I also wanted a higher frequency sound to respond to the things I said, rather than hear lower voices in response, so that’s why it’s four women. They’re all much singers than I am! I sing a lot, and I think that I have something that can touch people, but I don’t really consider myself to be a serious singer. I really admire all of them as musicians and human beings and was excited to hear their timbres blend together. I wanted to feature each one of them on a song too, but for the most part, it’s more of a choir.

TJG: You’ve talked a lot about creating a strong emotional experience for the listener, emphasizing this sense of uplift. Do you feel like you need to be in that emotional space too, or do you feel like you have to stay above it or out of it in order to get the music across? 

WT: I live in that emotional space while performing. I’ve read a book called Daring Greatly by Brené Brown, and it talks about the emotion of vulnerability and how we often see it as a negative. But it can be a very positive thing. With that in mind, when I step on stage, it’s important to me to allow myself to be vulnerable and open. My hope is that after the show, if people meet me, they feel like they already know me through the music. I think that we’re all experiencing the music together, so if I shy away from those feelings, then we’re not actually living in that moment together.

TJG: Do you have a practice of how you get into that vulnerable space?

WT: I never felt like it was difficult when I’m playing music. Music is like meditation to me. It’s not like everything is easy, but I feel like it’s a very natural thing. I don’t have to activate it when I play, because I’m already there. Sometimes when I practice, I meditate before to get as relaxed as possible. I’m playing an instrument that is based on vibrations and if I’m going to make something vibrate and resonate, a relaxed object is going to resonate more than a tense one.

It all comes back to gratitude. I have gratitude for getting to play an instrument every day, getting to make music with my band—people I care about so much. I’m really grateful for this performance where my brother will be on stage with me and my mom will be in the audience.

Wayne Tucker presents Blues for Mr. Tucker as part of The Jazz Gallery’s 2021-21 Residency Commission series on Friday, March 25, and Saturday, March 26, 2022. The group features Mr. Tucker on trumpet and vocals, Miles Tucker on tenor saxophone, David Linard on piano and keyboard, Addison Frei on organ and keyboard, Tamir Shmerling on acoustic and electric bass, Diego Joaquin Ramiez on drums, and Queen Esther, Julia Easterlin, Mar Vilaseca, and Sarah Charles on vocals. Sets are at 7:30 and 9:30 P.M. E.D.T. each night. $25 general admission ($10 for members), $35 reserved table seating ($20 for members) for each set. The Saturday sets will be livestreamed for $20 ($5 for members). Purchase tickets here.