Backbone > Ear Whacks
Jazzman Plays the Blues

David “Fathead” Newman shuffled out onto his porch in his robe to a chorus of birds chirping in the breezy woods surrounding his Woodstock home. A trim 69-year-old with a thinning head of white hair he smiled and greeted me with a “Good morning,” in a gravelly voice that traced an arc from his distant Texas roots through 50 years of jamming in smoky jazz clubs in two simple words. “I’m running, I’m running,” Newman said, “‘cause I got to go. I got to go do a few errands, and then I got to go to the airport.”

As he invited me in, I had to step around a pile of suitcases that lay open on the floor in the foyer. Two saxophones, a tenor and an alto, waited patiently in their cases preparing for the next leg of the journey. Newman’s wife and manager Karen appeared, laughed and said, “I just threw the underwear in the wash. I got home and thought, ‘Oh my God, I’ve got to wash all the underwear and just throw it back in the suitcase.’ We just got in and we are already on our way out.”
Only the night before, the Newmans had returned from a series of gigs at the Jazz Showcase, a historic jazz club in Chicago. Home for less than 18 hours, Newman had courteously agreed to see me before he left for a jazz festival in Austria. As we repaired to a pair of rocking chairs on the porch for a brief interview, he commented on his mind-boggling schedule. “It’s not always like this, but right now, around this particular period it’s like that. June, July, August, and September are pretty busy and I guess the weekends are taken up all year.” As if his schedule wasn’t difficult enough to handle, he had just found out that the airline tickets that the festival in Austria mailed him were for the wrong day and there was no way to exchange them. “What is terrible is the fact I got to lay out some money and hope they’ll reimburse me. They didn’t send the correct tickets, but if I don’t go at all, it’s only going to make matters worse. Oh well.”

Born in Corsicana, Texas and raised in Dallas, Newman still sports a nickname that he earned from a tough music teacher in high school. When his teacher discovered the music on his stand was upside down because he was playing from memory, he reprimanded him with the tag of “Fathead” and it stuck.

Newman related to me how his earliest aspirations as a musician clashed with the market demand for music in Texas. “I came in on the tail end of the Swing and Big Band Era, and my thing was be-bop. I was introduced to Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie’s music and from the very beginning, that is what I was really striving to play, the be-bop as a jazz musician. But coming from Texas, I was surrounded by blues. So I started out playing in blues bands with the likes of T-Bone Walker and people like this. And you couldn’t earn a living playing be-bop anyway, because people weren’t interested in it. It was a new thing, especially in Texas and down South. Be-bop really wasn’t accepted. But you could earn a living playing the blues. So I was playing with T-Bone and Buster Smith was my big influence.” The same legendary Dallas bop saxophonist Buster Smith would also mentor a young Charlie Parker. (Over 45 years later, Newman would get to play his idol in Robert Altman’s film Kansas City.) As a jazzman playing the blues for a living, Newman laid the groundwork for the star-turn of his career, which came after he met the pianist Ray Charles.

“I was playing with T-Bone in Buster’s band when I first met Ray Charles in ‘51. Ray was being featured with the Lowell Fulsom Band. Ray and I became very close friends. He mentioned to me he was going to form his own band, and I told him I would very much love to play with him, when he formed his band. Sure enough, he gave me a call and I joined the band.” As the star tenor saxophonist for the Ray Charles Band from 1954 to 1964, Newman feels like this period of his career at times overshadows the rest of his extensive catalogue as a jazz player. “Most people associate me, since I came up playing with Ray Charles, as a rhythm and blues player or rock n’ roll player, as opposed to a jazz player.” He let me in on a little secret about the Ray Charles Band. “We had a really progressive wonderful band, and I think that what people don’t know is that his band was all jazz players really, playing his music, of course.”

In 1959 Newman released his first album as a band-leader, Ray Charles Introduces “Fathead” Newman. (Ray Charles never liked that nickname and preferred to refer to Newman as “Brains”.) After 10 years in the Ray Charles Band, he relocated from Dallas to New York City, where his career took off both as a band leader and session musician. Newman has since recorded 35 albums as a leader and sessioned with an endless list of influential players over the course of his 50-year career, including Aretha Franklin, Herbie Mann, and B.B. King. His 1990 collaboration with Dr. John and Art Blakey, Bluesiana Triangle, recorded in Maramoneck, NY, was nominated for a Grammy, and he played on Natalie Cole’s Grammy-winning Unforgettable. In 1993 he moved from New York City to his current abode outside of Woodstock. Gesturing to the woods around his home, he smiled and said, “New York City is a wonderful city, but this area, the Hudson Valley and Catskill region, this area is some place real special.”

Blending jazz, blues, gospel, R&B, and rock led Newman’s sound in a distinctive direction. His latest release, Davey Blue (HigherNote, 2002) is a testament to the diversity of his style, not only on the saxophone but also on the flute. He gave credit to his years in the Ray Charles Band as being highly influential to his sound. “Being with Ray Charles put me in a position where I can play different forms of music and I learned to appreciate different styles of music, because he was so good at that.” The album features both straight be-bop tenor sax on the original tune “For Stanley” and soulful gospel flute on Thad Jones’ “A Child Is Born.” The title track is a reworking of an original 1981 tune that begins as a bluesy ballad and segues into a smooth Latin beat at the bridge. “Amandla”, another original, is a calypso number featuring a punchy flute lead. “Black” is a swinging Cedric Walton bop piece that defines Newman’s earliest influences.

He is silky and smooth and he never attempts to overpower the listener with his instrument, which is easy to do with the saxophone, especially considering that his roots are steeped in the tradition of hard blowing “Texas Tenors,” bluesmen such as Arnette Cobb, Budd Johnson, and Buddy Tate. Even when tearing up scales, he is not so much tearing them up, but finessing around them as he hits every note with nuanced authority. Commenting on how he perceives his own style, he said, “Well, my sound has improved over the years, but it’s always been high on my agenda to get a good sound. Most saxophonists from Texas, that’s the thing that they thrive on, getting the big sound. That’s what Texas is known for, having the guys that play the saxophone with the big sound.” Consider that Newman’s saxophone peers in his youth in Dallas-Fort Worth included King Curtis, Dewey Redman, and Ornette Coleman. “And instead, I have worked on improving the quality of my sound, because I believe that it is the sound of the saxophone that is the most important thing. More important than how many notes you play, or what it is you choose to play. The sound, which is the tone, the emotion, that is the number one thing.” His ability to give understated performances has led to steady work gigging with vocalists. “I love playing behind vocalists. I get quite a few calls to play behind good vocal groups because I’m able to accompany people like Natalie Cole, Aretha Franklin, Jimmy Scott, B.B. King, and Lou Rawls. Recently, I was recording with Jane Monheit, a young lady that’s doing really good these days…”

After Austria, Newman travels to a festival in Ontario, followed by gigs in Massachusetts, New York City, Alabama, and a couple of weeks in Colorado before returning to New York to play at the Belleayre Jazz Festival on August 23. At 69, he finds himself flying around the world playing his music, his career as vibrant as it has ever been. In addition to his non-stop touring schedule, he is currently featured on the Scooby Doo soundtrack and is headed back into the recording studio in September to record another album for HighNote, his current label. His vitality is both a sign of a strong constitution and a confirmation of the importance of following one’s bliss. He verified this “I don’t mind being busy. The traveling around part really gets hectic but I’m doing what I want to be doing.” As Karen appeared at the door and motioned to her watch as a signal to wrap it up, Newman concluded, “My blues background will always be with me, of course but I’m really a jazz musician and I pride myself in being such.”

David “Fathead” Newman plays the Belleayre Jazz Festival on August 23 at 8pm. Tickets are $10 and can be ordered at www.belleayremusic.org or call (800) 942-6904.