Joni Mitchell and Chick Corea. Bob Dylan and Wayne Shorter. Emmylou Harris and Herbie Hancock. Sara McLachlan and Charles Lloyd.
These are just some of the artists who have prized four-time Grammy Award-winner Brian Blade’s ability to elevate their music with his unusually sensitive and impeccably crafted drumming.
His contributions to such landmark albums as Dylan’s “Time Out of Mind,” Corea’s “Trilogy,” Mitchell’s “Travelogue,” Shorter’s “Without a Net” and Harris’ “Wrecking Ball” handily demonstrate Blade’s singular ability to shine in any stylistic setting.
So do his seven albums as the leader of the genre-blurring Brian Blade Fellowship Band, which will play two concerts Wednesday night at La Jolla’s Athenaeum Music & Arts Library. The five-man group is now on tour in support of its wonderfully absorbing 2023 album, “Kings Highway,” a showcase for their beguiling blend of impressionistic jazz with elements of gospel, funk, various Americana-music styles and a hint or two of progressive-rock.
Wednesday’s La Jolla gigs, which kick off the Athenaeum’s 2024 summer jazz series, are the first of four area performances Blade has scheduled for this year. He will drum Aug. 6 with Norah Jones at The Rady Shell at Jacobs Park, then return Oct. 27 to do a “Legacy of Wayne Shorter” concert at The Conrad in La Jolla.
‘Brian is amazing’
“Playing with Brian has been one of the most inspiring things I have ever done,” said Jones, who has featured Blade on six of her albums to date. “He has really brought my songs to life.”
“Brian is amazing,” Corea told the San Diego Union-Tribune in 2020, a year before his death. “He drums with so much imagination.”
For Blade, a Louisiana native and resident, drumming is an art that requires an equal command of finesse, intensity, texture, shading and an ability to dig deep to best support and propel the music at hand. This enables him to deliver some of his most high-impact playing by stressing nuance and understatement over velocity and percussive acrobatics.
“If you just steamroll through, the music won’t have the malleable power that it could have,” Blade said, speaking from his home in Shreveport. “I try and find the balance so I can fulfill my role with conviction and be supportive. Am I giving the music what is needed here? Or am I just coming with my own agenda to make it be what I think it should be?
“Regardless of the genre, you have to know what the situation is and what’s needed. If you are playing with a symphony orchestra, you don’t want to bury the violins!”
Invention and surprise
Blade’s sensitivity and flexibility are two of his trademarks as a drummer and composer. So is his musical eloquence and originality. His playing almost never goes where a listener might expect, but always sounds exactly right.
The result is a welcome sense of real-time artistic invention and surprise, be it through a perfectly timed percussive punctuation here, an elastic contrapuntal inflection there, or the subtle reshaping of rhythms and pulses.
“I was blessed to spend 20 or so years in Wayne Shorter’s band,” Blade noted. “And he always said about his (music) writing: ‘It’s never finished!’ — even though, genius that he was, everything with him was so perfect. It was almost like an element of oil painting: ‘This canvas isn’t dry yet, so (new) paint can still get mixed in here’.”
Shorter died last year at the age of 89. He was close friends with Joni Mitchell, with whom the saxophone giant began collaborating on record and in concert back in the mid-1970s.
Blade chuckled when asked if he saw similarities between Mitchell and the late Shorter, whom he still speaks of in the present tense.
“Wow. Absolutely,” Blade said. “They are both pictorial speakers who musically manifest things with imagery, colors and shapes. So, yeah, they share that for sure — and this boundless creative power and focus. They both have the improvisational willingness to go deep within a song, not holding it so tightly that it can only be this way. They’re both like: ‘Oh, where can it go tonight?’ ”
Was Dylan similar when Blade drummed on his epic “Time Out of Mind” nearly 30 years ago?
“Yes,” Blade replied. “As clear and intentional as Bob’s words and poetry might have been on the music stand (in the recording studio), it was still a mystery he was after with his music. I was so thankful to experience that. Here are these superhuman heroes of ours — Wayne, Joni, Bob — and they’re still going for that mystery in their music. There’s no (artistic) formula that has all the answers in a box. For them, the answers are in the wind.
“It’s not like Joni or Bob or Wayne couldn’t just make records on their own, alone. But they want that camaraderie, that interaction with other musicians, in order to bring to it what they don’t necessarily bring on their own.”
Blade first recorded with Mitchell on her 1998 album, “Taming The Tiger,” and was the drummer for her concert tour that year with Dylan and Van Morrison. He was the co-musical director — along with his Fellowship Band keyboardist Jon Cowherd — at the pair of 2018 all-star “Joni at 75” birthday concerts at the Los Angeles Music Center’s Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.
In Blade, Mitchell found an especially simpatico musical partner who colored her music with exceptional taste and sensitivity. In his words, “it was a dance we were having — and, hopefully, are still having.”
Mitchell is a lifelong jazz fan and her sophisticated song structures are full of rhythmic twists and unusual melodic and harmonic changes. What did Blade key in on when performing with her on stage and in the recording studio?
“It was always about the stories with her, the lines that she drew. What she does harmonically and rhythmically are important, yes, but what are the words saying’ If there was an order of importance, she puts great emphasis on the poetry and the story so.
“So that was my emphasis as a drummer and band mate. I wanted to make sure I was serving that with all of my attention and never eclipsing a moment someone might receive in their lives (from her stories), where someone might say: ‘Oh, yeah, I know what she was talking in that song,’ or ‘Now, I am getting something new (from her words)’.”
Gospel roots
Blade was born into a creative family. His mother, Dorothy, is a now-retired kindergarten teacher and his father, Pastor Brady Blade, Sr., led The Hallelujah Train gospel-music group for decades. Brian’s older brother, Brady Blade, Jr., is a gifted drummer who has worked with everyone from Indigo Girls, Solomon Burke and The Waterboys to Jewel, Steve Earle and X singer Exene Cervenka.
In 1983, when Blade was 13, he replaced his brother as the drummer at the weekly church services presided over by their father. Blade, Sr., hosted a weekly Sunday morning public service program, “The Hallelujah Train,” which was televised for years in Shreveport. Mr. and Mrs. Blade co-hosted a long-running gospel radio show that sometimes featured both of their sons.
“I read the news on the air!” Brian Blade said with a chuckle.
He was 18 when he enrolled at New Orleans’ Loyola University and then New Orleans University. Blade studied with two of the city’s top drummers, Johnny Vidacovich and Johnny Lee. He also hosted a campus radio show, playing records by everyone from jazz sax icon Sonny Rollins to the pioneering blues-rock power trio Cream.
Blade moved to New York in 1991. He soon began gigging with saxophonists Kenny Garrett and Joshua Redman, pianist Brad Mehldau, and other rising young stars. In 1993, Blade performed with Redman at San Diego Street Scene. In 1997, the same year he drummed on Bob Dylan’s “Time Out of Mind” album, Blade formed his Fellowship Band.
Yet, while he has soared in multiple stylistic settings, Blade credits his hometown church gigs as a teen for providing his musical wellspring.
“I’m so thankful I played in the worship services,” he said. “Because they became the foundational bedrock for any other situation that came after, no matter whether it was a concert hall, a dive bar or Street Scene.
“Playing music in church taught me to truly listen. Most of the singers in the choir don’t sing outside of church, so they are not looking for professional gigs. They just want to praise the Lord in song… Playing with them taught me that — if someone didn’t move from the root form of a song and wanted to stay there — you don’t force them to move on. You stay there with them until they move on in the song.
“That gave me a heightened acute listening experience that has made it easy for me to gig in every other situation. The most important thing I learned was that degree of attentiveness.”
Fellowship in music
Brady has performed here twice previously at the Athenaeum, first in 2020 with a trio led by bassist and UC San Diego alum Jeff Denson, then with a trio led by Austrian guitarist Wolfgang Muthspiel. Also, Blade has played twice in the Athenaeum Jazz at TSRI series: with trumpeter Ron Miles and guitarist Bill Frisell in 2018, and with the Steel House Trio in 2019.
Blade’s Wednesday concerts with his Fellowship Band at the 150-seat Athenaeum will come four days after their Saturday performance at the nearly 18,000-seat Hollywood Bowl. In any venue, large or small, he has the same artistic goals.
“I see the music as a gift God has given us to share,” Blade said.
“Hopefully, I’m cultivating the gift for myself and for the group as well. And even though it’s instrumental music — these aren’t what you would call ‘gospel songs’ — I hope the sound will stir something in people listening. Our concerts are a moment we share together, to congregate, and I hope that also translates into a great feeling of joy, not just musically, but a sonic dream that will inspire people.”
Apart from its guitar chair, the lineup of Blade’s Fellowship Band has remained largely constant since its inception in 1997. For this tour, the temporarily guitar-free group features keyboardist Jon Cowherd, tenor and soprano saxophonist Melvin Butler, alto saxophonist and bass clarinetist Myron Walden, and bassist Roland Guerin.
“What I look for first in a band mate,” Blade said, “is the willingness to be part of the story and create something together. It’s a willingness to submit to making the music that much deeper for all of us, and to do whatever is necessary to achieve that touch and that sort of healing sound that I hope comes from our collective voice.
“I feel that healing sound very much when I play with Jon, Myron, Melvin and Roland. Everyone is leaning into each other and listening. And perhaps that means I don’t play here, or I accompany in another way. Whatever that role might be shifts from moment to moment, depending on the needs of the music. I hope I can give that to to the musical story we are telling as a band.”
Blade’s own story will come full circle with the July 26 release of “Pastor Brady L. Blade, Sr., & The Hallelujah Train.” A live album and film that he co-directed, it celebrates the legacy of his father, who has been the pastor at Shreveport’s Zion Baptist Church since 1961 and still preaches, teaches and sings there today.
“It’s coming out next month and my brother and I both drum on it,” Blade said. “It has 40 singers from the Zion Church Choir, along with a band that includes Daniel Lanois, Buddy Miller, Greg Leisz and Ada Small. It features my father — who turns 85 this year —and tells his story about his 70 years in the ministry.
“I can objectively say: ‘Wow’ This is great and people are going to love it!”
Brian Blade & The Fellowship Band
When: 6 and 8:30 p.m. Wednesday
Where: Athenaeum Music & Arts Library, 1008 Wall St., La Jolla
Tickets: $40 (members), $45 (non-members)
Phone: (858) 454-5872
Online: ljathenaeum.org/jazz-at-the-athenaeum
Other Athenaeum 2024 Summer Jazz Series concerts
June 30: Chris Potter Trio
July 20: Peter Erskine Trio, with Bob Mintzer
Aug. 4: Camila Meza Trio
