Jeff Coffin is a busy man. How busy? Let’s start with his role as a member of the Dave Matthews Band, a popular group that tours seemingly on a constant basis. Then there’s his work as an educator, teaching jazz and much more at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Coffin is also an author of numerous instructional books that address fundamentals on the reeds and much more. Finally, there’s Coffin, the bandleader, recording artist and record label owner, who has released many albums on his own Ear Up label. His most recent album, Look for Water, was recorded with New Orleans jazz stalwarts Tony Dagradi, James Singleton and Jonny Vidacovich, as well as cellist Helen Gillet, who acted as the catalyst for this impromptu recording at the historic Preservation Hall facilities.
If all that weren’t enough, Coffin just doesn’t double on tenor and soprano saxophones. He plays pretty much every reed instrument—all the saxophones, as well as numerous flutes. Indeed, some of the flutes he plays were bequeathed to him from Yusef Lateef, one of his heroes and mentors. Coffin spoke with me about his special relationship with Lateef, his managing mastery of all those instruments, his passion for teaching music, his work with the Dave Matthews Band and, of course, his most recent recording.
Listen to our conversation, above
Interview transcript:
Lee Mergner: Before we talk about the new album, I wanted to ask you about your work as an educator and clinician. It's something that's you're really active with and something you've been dedicated to for many years. As someone who's gone into these schools and programs all over the world, how has jazz education changed since you were a student?
Jeff Coffin: Oh, it's changed a lot because of the internet. Even at my time at Vanderbilt University, where I've been teaching for almost nine years now. When I first started teaching there, I was telling the students, “You're fine.” I said, “I've got all these Aebersold’s and I'm going to have you download certain tunes and play along.” They were like, “Our computers don't have CD players anymore.”
Okay. Plan B. We went to iReal Pro which I think has revolutionized the way that students are able to practice. It certainly is revolutionized the way that I teach my students to practice. You can move tempos, you can change keys, and you can do these things internally after every course.
It’s not only that kind of technology, but literally having everything available at your fingertips. On your phone, on your computer. You are able to watch and hear the masters, to be able to see Bird play live or Cannonball or Ornette, although Ornette videos are hard to find actually. Joe Henderson, Coltrane, Sonny, Wayne Shorter. You can watch Monk play with his band or Mingus play with Eric Dolphy. All this stuff is available where you can slow it down to learn the solos. You can watch the players playing.
I'm noticing that there's a lot more really great young players and they're more diverse in what they're doing. Their improvisations are more authentic in a lot of different styles of music. They're what I call wider musicians, meaning they're playing in a wider variety of styles and their virtuosity is kind of astonishing. They can really play the instruments at a very high level at a pretty young age. I think that that has everything to do with the internet.
If you could get one thing across to young musicians and students, what would it be? What do you hope they’ll learn because you can tell people 10 things, but they're only going to remember one or two.
That's a great question. I talk about fundamentals when I'm talking to students, even with my college students, we still talk about the importance of fundamentals. At the top of that fundamental pyramid of what I call the big five fundamental elements of music is listening.
That’s it really in a nutshell, it's all about listening and developing those fundamentals. For example, if you go to a city and you look up at the skyscrapers, whoever built that skyscraper, is a master of foundation. Without the foundation, it's a house of cards, and it's the same with anything that we do.
The foundation of music has to be there. If you have a solid base, the sky is literally the limit, so you can build up from there. But without that, it's going to blow with the wind.
I love the emphasis on listening. I remember seeing Joey Alexander, who was this incredible prodigy at like 10 or 12. I remember seeing him the first time and it was clear that he wasn't there yet in terms of listening. He had incredible technique, but it was almost like he was oblivious to this great rhythm section because that aspect hadn't developed.
Well, that’s because he was 10. Only when he got older that he could listen and notice his other bandmates. But you bring up a really valid point. One of our jobs as educators, is to teach them better listening skills. That they know how to listen, so they can hear things. I say, “Well what did you hear in that?” and they can tell me what they've heard and it's at a very high level. However, the ability to having a meaningful dialogue conversation, many of them are not there yet, so those are things they have to learn.
They can go through and regurgitate changes but it's sort of like, “Okay, after a couple of bars, I've heard everything you're going to play.” We need to have a dialogue. We need to have room to actually interject for the listener to listen and to assimilate what they've been playing. It's challenging and without particular kinds of training, it's really challenging. You have a lot of virtuosity and sometimes very little to say.
Now what do you learn yourself from the students? I hear from teachers all the time that they get a lot from teaching.
What don't I learn from the students? There are so many things. Things as internal as patience, compassion and understanding and empathy. I mean, I love my students. You know, they're friends. I love them as people. I love them as young people. I love them as part of my tribe.
I love that I get to share this information with them. It's a huge responsibility and one that I don't take lightly. It's an honor also to get to work with young people but I've learned a lot about how I hear certain things, how I have to explain certain things, the underpinnings of what I'm teaching.
Here's the thing. If I'm telling a student, just for example, “Hey man, you need to do more long tones,” and they say to me, “Why?” Well, “Because I said so” is not a good answer. It's not a valid answer. I have to be able to explain in detail according to how that student learns. Not the reasons for doing this, but the way to do it, the way to practice it. The idiosyncrasies of things like voicing a note, or things like intonation or articulation, understanding harmony, understanding the skeletal system of a chord before you start putting cord scale relationships in.
There are so many things. When I first started, I had to figure out like what my students needed in general and then get specific. We could talk for hours about this. I've spent a lot of time really going through, it's not even a methodology of teaching, because my undergraduate degree at North Texas was in music education. The big thing I took away from that is that there's no one way to teach. There is no correct way because everybody learns a little differently.
If a student is more of a tactile learner, then you have to teach them that way, but also have the other elements in there. If they learn more from reading a manual or like reading the stuff, or if they prefer to be shown. There are all these different ways of learning things. I've had to learn that for each of my students so my lessons are very individualized. We may be working on the same material, but I'm working on it with student A differently than I am with student B and differently than I am with student C, because they have different learning styles.
You have an incredible series of instructional books, on your website, jeff coffin.com, but the one I was taken with was about the music business, because it's such a crazy changing landscape all the time, with retail, with live shows. How does that book not become obsolete right away?
Well, you bring up a good point. When I wrote it, I pretty specifically did not cite particular websites. because I knew that they would change so quickly. It's almost like when you get a new car, I opt not to get the GPS system in the car itself. The things that are in that book, The Road Book, is basically forty different baskets of things you have to do before you actually leave the driveway on tour. I say they're baskets, since you can contain a lot of stuff in a basket.
For example, here's the basket that contains “What do we play musically?” Then there's a bunch of stuff underneath that. Another basket is how do we get a gig, and that basket details who to contact at the club. Another basket contains information about who do you hire in the band.
I like that at one point you mention: Don't go out without doing a budget because everybody thinks, “Oh, I'm going to get paid.” But they're not thinking about what they're spending. They don't even think about that.
Exactly. In the budget basket there's things like: You have your own van. If not, you're going to have to rent a van. This all has to go into the budget. I remember one night I woke up in the middle of the night when I was doing all my own tour managing. I was doing everything and my head was so full of stuff.
I started just writing things down, everything I had to do before I left. I filled up these sheets of paper and that's where the book came from because I thought, “Wow, students need to know about this.” I mean, there's a thousand guys that can teach you how to improvise and talk about altered scales and playing out, about the augmented scale and the melodic minor scale, or whatever.
But how many guys can talk about what it takes to actually go out and be successful so that when you come home, you're not like, “I'm 1,200 bucks in the hole here.” In the book I talk about merchandise and developing all that stuff. I can talk to students about starting your own record label, the ins and outs of that, why you would want to do that as opposed to why you might not want to do that. Any number of different things.
For example, last summer, I did this talk at NYU about The Road Book. Afterward these students were coming up and they were like, “That was one of the best things we've ever heard” because it's about getting out there and actually doing it. It's not about things like “Play this over this chord change.” There are thousands of books on that. I can talk about that, but what's the point? If we're trying to educate and put out six musicians that have a possibility of success because there's so many jazz schools now. we have to give them the tools to be able to do that because most of them, 99% of them, are not going to be able to make a living playing. Instead, they're going to be in a section, they're going to be playing funk, they're going to be playing rock. They might be playing in a studio. So if they want to go on the road, this book can help facilitate that to give them things to think about. Even thinking about who you bring on the road because if someone's a little bit of a pain in the butt, at the end of two weeks, they're going to be a lot of a pain in the butt.
You’re touring with Dave Matthews. They invented a lot of this touring knowledge such as the merchandise and all that with Coran Capshaw and the whole team there at Red Light Management. Do you remember the movie Bring On the Night with Sting? At one point they asked Branford Marsalis, “What is this like?” And he goes, “With Blakey or my brother I’m playing jazz and I have time to really build a solo and tell a story.” He says, “When I come out with Sting, I have to hit hard from the first note.” Is that the case with you playing with Dave? Is that a different kind of playing that you're doing?
Well, it's different all around. With Dave there's a lot of soloing. There's some stuff that's a set length and there's some stuff that's open. We can go wherever we want. It's an anomaly in music. He loves it when we solo. Everybody's solos. Everybody's a great soloist in the band. He's the only one that doesn't take a solo but he's soloing all the time, vocally. I think it's different, but there’s a lesson and some advice for young students about what to think about when you get called to do a gig.
First, recognizing when you get a gig, that you have to play a role, and being able to play that role very authentically is important. When I got the Dave Matthews gig, I had literally less than 24 hours to get there and to get all my horns there. LeRoi Moore had been hurt in an ATV wreck and he had broken a bunch of ribs, broke his clavicle, his scapula up and he punctured lung.
I got a call from The Flecktones manager because we were off that summer with Bela. He said, “Hey this has happened to LeRoi. He's going to be okay in a few months, but they want to know if you can sub for him until he returns.” And I said, “Yeah, when do they need me?” He said, “Immediately, because the next gig's tomorrow in Charlotte.” I was in New York at a friend's wedding. All my gear was in Nashville. I knew what role I had to play. I had all the horns, flute, penny whistle, all the saxophones and I knew enough about the band.
I didn't know their material, but we had opened for them a lot with The Flecktones so we would play together. I knew the guys and they knew I played all those instruments. I knew that my role was to play all those instruments and to do what I do. It wasn't to come in and be LeRoi It was to come in and be me and play the parts and bring whatever it is that I bring.
Tragically, LeRoi passed a month and a half into his recovery and they asked me to stay on with him. Through various conversations with Bela and the guys, they were like, “You’ve got to do this.” So understanding what your role is in an ensemble is important. I think that's one of the things that Branford was getting at is that it's not necessarily like a jazz gig where you're getting a six-minute solo. Also, who wants to play a six-minute solo anyway? That's a long time to be blowing, man. I'm practicing. I'm really working my chops, but that's a lot of time. A lot of time.
Let's talk about the new album. It's very different, of course, from what you do with Dave and it's a continuation of explorations you've done over the years. It was interesting because this one was recorded not only in New Orleans, but with Astral Project. I was trying to think of a way to describe Astral Project. They're like The Wrecking Crew or Stuff. They're this sort of a unit that can work with anybody, and is kind of their own house band but not in a diminished sense. How did you come to hook up with the guys in Astral Project?
It's funny because when I ask them to do the gig, it didn't even dawn on me that they were part of Astral Project because obviously I know that band. I've known Tony [Dagradi] for years. I've known James [Singleton] for years, and I've known Johnny (Vidacovich] for years. This project came out of another project I had done with Helen Gillet. We had done a cello and saxophone record called Let It Shine. It's a wonderful record and she's an amazing celloist, does a lot of looping and whatnot. She had asked me to play a gig at the Broadside Theater and do our duo stuff. There were two sets and I said, “Okay, we have enough material for one set.” I said, “Maybe I'll get Johnny to play the second set with me. We'll do some duos. You can come up and we'll do some trios.” Some of the material I had been writing at that point was pretty open. I had been playing a bunch of free stuff because we were coming out of COVID, so I was trying to not have a lot of people at my studio.
Johnny was on board, and then I thought, “This stuff could use a bass player and James would be great.” I love playing with James.” I met James through Helen originally on a gig that Tim Green was on. The only time Tim and I ever played together. I called James and he was down and then I thought, “Some of this stuff has harmony on it and I could really use another horn player.” I loved Tony and I wondered if Tony would be down. I called him and he said yes. I was telling people about the gig and they said, “Wait a minute, you got Tony to come out?” because Tony hadn't played out in a year and a half. They said, “How'd you get him?” I said, “I called him and asked him if he wanted to play and he said yes.” We did a rehearsal and we did the gig and it was super fun and loose and really beautiful.
Then I asked, “Do you guys have any time before I leave New Orleans?” I think I was leaving Saturday afternoon and the gig was on a Wednesday or Thursday. They had three hours on a Saturday morning. I was staying at Ben Jaffe’s place, the Preservation Hall house. I had asked him about a studio and he said, “Just use this one. We have an engineer in house. Just pay him for the day and use the studio for free.” Old school, everybody in one room. No overdubs. Here's the thing. With Tony, we didn't have to say one word about articulation, dynamics, phrasing, intonation, nothing. That cat is so heavy.
I felt like we were flying like birds in murmuration. It was loose and messy, fun and free. I didn't know what we would get, but we got nine tunes in three hours. I had written a tune the night before called “New Dawn.” I almost went with that for the new album’s title, but the words “Look for Water” had come in a dream the night before.
I was going to ask you about that because t's a little scary given the world we're in now where ocean waters are rising and people don't have access to clean water all over the world. It's almost apocalyptic.
It's not though. It's actually the opposite of that. The idea of Look for Water is that water is what nourishes us and keeps us alive. Without water, we don't exist. I think about that musically. What are the parts of music that that bring us existence? What are the parts of music that allow us to live in that world? For me, it's playing with people like them. It's writing music, playing for people who really love listening to music and experiencing music. It's things like teaching. It's learning. It's inspiration. “Look For Water” is actually the antithesis of an apocalyptic event. As I said, in some of the notes that I wrote, We looked for water, and we found it together through music. It's about sustenance, I would say.
The album also pays tribute to a few of your heroes, such as Yusef Lateef and Milford Graves. What did those two artists mean to you, personally?
Let's start with Yusef. I started listening to him when I was in college, and just love his playing. It's fantastic. I love that he was such a broad-minded thinker, educator and seeker. He was also a visual artist. He played many different styles of music and railed against the word jazz feeling it's not what I'm doing. He developed his own genre in some ways. I also think it went beyond genre. Call it music. That to me is the idea behind it. He's so influenced by so many things such as Eastern elements which has certainly profoundly influenced what I do.
I got to hear him one time with Adam Rudolph, in Amherst, many, many years ago. It was beautiful with lots of flutes. I have drawers full of wood flutes—three-pronged flutes and double flutes and all sorts of things. I feel like he's a kindred spirit in that sense. When I got his tenor, I had to play it as soon as I got it, because it was Yusef’s tenor. I decided I would record myself playing it for the first time, like an unboxing of sorts, just for my own edification.
That tune basically fell out of the horn. That was basically the first thing that I played on that horn. I always tell people that Yusef left a tune in the horn for me. It's a powerful tune, man. A lot of times I open with it to set a mood, to cleanse the room, if you will. It just settles things and it's got a beautiful energy to it, especially with Tony on the harmony part, it is just soaring. I just love it so much.
Of course, Yusef was an early adopter of music education, jazz education, even though he didn't like the term jazz. Back then serious players really didn't go to colleges and teach but he did.
He was really a proponent of the word education and its etymology. The root of the word education is a Latin word, educare, which means to draw out. I think that he was one of those people who was very curious and he drew out a lot of things from the music he was listening to. One of the reasons I wrote my saxophone books is absolutely because of his repository of scales and patterns. I thought, “Wow, he's just writing stuff in the book that he's working on, and it is really cool stuff. I've worked out of that book extensively over the years. But that was primarily the inspiration for doing that. I thought, “If I'm putting all this stuff in Sibelius for my students, why wouldn't I make it available around the world if they want it?”
You told me that you were part of getting his archive at Vanderbilt, which I had no idea it was there. I would have assumed it was at Amherst or somewhere else. What is in that collection? Instruments and music?
There's a couple of instruments, African instruments actually. The original copy of his book is a there also as a one sided stack. It's a few inches tall on really thick paper. There's a bunch of music, photographs, letters, We did a concert where I had one of my students play his tenor on the show and play some of his pieces. There's ddaghnch of big band stuff that's never been played that, that Ryan Middagh, who's the director of Jazz Studies, is getting digitized so it can be played. There's a lot of plans for this stuff and there's a lot of it. He was very organized.
That's great that the archive is a living archive. It's not just stuff sitting in a storage room.
I have his bass flute and his tenor, and I play the bass flute all the time. I've recorded the bass flute on tons of stuff. It's one of my very favorite instruments actually.
I got into Milford probably in the mid-nineties. I had never even heard of him, which is awful. But he was really underground for many, many years. If you weren't at Bennington or in New York, you probably weren't that familiar with him. He only had a couple records out. Grand Unification was the one that came out on John Zorn's label [Tzadik] in maybe the early ‘90s. But other than that, there were a couple of ESP records he was on, and then nothing, he just went underground.
He was teaching. He was kind of like Yusef in a lot of ways where he was studying a lot of things. He was working on his craft. He was also doing acupuncture, he was foraging. My ex-wife studied with him at Bennington, which is how I found out about him. My brother-in-law, was quite close with him as well. He still plays to this day. He was a chemist at Purdue. Milford and his music has been a big part of their lives ever since they studied with him. The stuff that I was hearing that Milford was playing, I was really drawn to it. There was a record he did with David Murray called The Real Deal.
That inspired me to start doing some duo projects, as well as some of the stuff that Charles Lloyd was doing with Billy Higgins but I just felt what Milford was doing was kind of like what Ornette was doing, in approaching the instrument in a different way. I've been doing some stuff with Bob Moses again recently. We've got some stuff coming up in May that we're going to record in Nashville. The thing about playing free is not that there's no foundation. We talk about this foundation, these fundamentals and Milford's foundation is without question. The same with Bob Moses and Rakalam, as he is known.
I think it's important for people to realize that if you want to play free, that's the highest level. It's all communication at that point and it doesn't always work, but if you getting rid of all the parameters, you have to be so in tune with what you're doing. You have to have such a mastery of that. You watch and you listen to these videos of Milford, like the documentary that was done, Full Mantis. It's one of the greatest music documentaries I've ever seen. His playing was at an absolutely extraordinary level, on the level of people like Trane and Joe Henderson and Ornette and Miles. The list goes on. But he sounded uniquely like himself. That's the goal, right? To sound uniquely like yourself, to be steeped in the tradition, but to sound uniquely like yourself.
You reside in Nashville and there are a lot of great jazz and music improvisers there. There’s Bela Fleck of course, and his band, the Wootens, Edgar Meyer, Take 6, Cory Wong. Is there a scene in Nashville where you guys get together and play? Or is it just ships passing in the night?
No, we play all the time, man. There's a bunch of younger cats and then all the students that are graduating from the jazz studies programs are staying so there's a ton of stuff going on. Joel Frahm moved there recently who is a great sax player. Pat Coil who plays keyboards. Keith Carlock, Viktor Krauss, Jordan Perlson, Daru Jones. Nate Smith was there for a hot minute but he's back in Virginia on the East Coast. There's a ton of stuff going on. Emmanuel Echem is an incredible young trumpet player. He's out with Joss Stone right now and he's got a section with Evan Cobb and Roy Agee. They were out with Lauren Daigle for a few years and now they're with Eric Church.
There are tons of players that are writing great and really playing their butts off. Jovan Quallo also was another one, a really great saxophone player, so I have a lot of jam sessions at my house too. There's other places guys like Andrew Golden and Jake Botts are playing. It's a really big scene and a lot is going on down there with people moving there all the time. Jeff Berlin lives there now. Robben Ford was there for a few years. He's in the UK now.
You're known for doubling, tripling, or I don't even know how many reed instruments you play. What are the challenges and rewards of that? Do you have to practice on all of them? Has anyone told you maybe this was not a good idea?
As far as practicing on the saxophones, I've played them all enough but it used to be like going from soprano to baritone was a really weird thing. Now it feels very natural. Or going from alto to baritone or even alto to tenor. My body is accustomed to it, so, so when I'm practicing saxophone, I'll usually practice tenor or soprano. The other ones just fall into place. With flutes, I'll usually practice C-flutes. Sometimes I'll practice bass flute. I do play piccolo and alto flute as well as clarinet and bass clarinet so I try to spend time on those as much as I can. I also try to spend time on them in a practical application such as when I'm writing, for example or I want different woodwind voicings. I try to put them in a practical application and when I'm doing that, I'm working on fundamentals. I'm also practicing, but I do sit around and I work tunes on those. I usually do clarinet rather than bass clarinet.
Overall, yes, I'm putting time in on all those things as much as I'm kind of able to do around the other things that I have to do because my students are doubling to. I've got a series of improvisational etudes, ten improvisational etudes that I wrote on flute. I’m playing over standard tunes using iReal so that the students have a baseline of which to play it from.
When I was quote unquote happy with my solo, I transcribed ten of my own solos. We've transposed it now for flute, clarinet, alto and tenor trumpet. The piano and the trombone books are going to be coming out soon. I've had to move around the range on certain things, but it works.
I've got a bunch of different people playing those such as Randy Brecker, Sean Jones and a few other guys playing the trumpet etudes and Russ Ferrante, Pat Coil, Howard Levy and Chris Walters playing the piano ones. All of the MP3s are downloadable for free and the books are like twelve or fifteen dollars. I want the stuff that I put out to be really affordable for students and I want it to be something that it will help them progress through their music so that they can hear good voice leading.
They can look at it and go, “Well, this is pretty inside, what's going on here?” As they're doubling, even though they can't yet play a Joe Farrell solo or a Frank Foster solo or an Eric Dolphy solo. So giving them stuff that they can assimilate, that they can play and that they can slow down to listen to—these are things that are really important. That's why I put out that stuff too.
It also helps me on those doubles. I played a ton of flute, an absolute ton of flute. In fact, I just got this on the road, which is one of those, Nuvo plastic instruments. It only goes down to a low D but it sounds pretty good. It's really easy to play. I think it's waterproof. I could play it in the shower if I want it. It's super light and it's got plastic pads and it feels pretty good. I've been playing it literally every day since I got it, and I only got it like five days ago.
It's almost like those road guitars.
They have these for clarinet, trumpet and trombone. You can get them in different colors and this one played the best. I tried a black one. I tried one with blue keys and then one with thin keys that played great. It's like 150 bucks.
Sounds like they now have a new endorser.
I would do it. They’re fantastic for travel.
This conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Learn more about Jeff Coffin's series of instructional books and his touring schedule here.
