Chris Speed

Clarinetist and tenor saxophonist Chris Speed has sustained a prominent role in New York’s creative music scene across more than thirty years through his harmonically bold and rhythmically dynamic approach. Although grounded in post-bop jazz, he has consistently ventured into numerous other idioms, encompassing avant-garde exploration, free improvisation, modern classical composition, Eastern European folk traditions, funk, and additional genres. As an engaging soloist he produces a warm, rounded timbre on clarinet, while his tenor saxophone delivers forceful expression even at subdued dynamics. He further applies an extensive palette of extended techniques to both instruments and displays notable ingenuity when uncovering fresh sonic textures and timbres. Arriving in the early 1990s, Speed quickly established himself through sideman appearances alongside figures such as Tim Berne, George Schuller, and Dave Douglas. Leading his own projects, he has released a succession of forward-looking, avant-garde-inflected recordings, among them 1997’s Yeah No, 2000’s Emit, and 2014’s Really Ok. He co-founded Jim Black’s AlasNoAxis and John Hollenbeck’s Claudia Quintet, and has maintained ongoing partnerships with longtime associates drummer Ben Perowsky and keyboardist John Medeski, including their 2019 album Upstream.

Born in Seattle, Washington, in 1967, Speed encountered classical music during childhood. He began on piano and clarinet before developing an interest in improvisation and tenor saxophone while in high school. Relocating to Boston, he enrolled at the New England Conservatory and soon joined the cooperative group Human Feel, whose members also included drummer Jim Black (likewise from Seattle), alto saxophonist Andrew D’Angelo, guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel, and bassist Joe Fitzgerald. Speed further participated in Orange Then Blue, the inventive large ensemble directed by drummer George Schuller (son of Gunther). Two notable documents from this formative phase are Human Feel’s Scatter (1992) and Orange Then Blue’s While You Were Out (1994), both issued by GM Recordings.

Speed’s most significant achievements unfolded after his move to New York City, where he became involved with several influential ensembles on the downtown scene. These included Tim Berne’s Bloodcount, the Dave Douglas Sextet, and Myra Melford’s The Same River, Twice, each widely regarded among the decade’s foremost working bands in creative jazz and improvised music. He continued with Human Feel, which endured the principals’ relocation from Boston and issued two quartet recordings without bassist Fitzgerald during the 1990s before reuniting to produce 2007’s Galore on Speed’s Skirl label. (He likewise remained with Orange Then Blue following the group’s shift of operations to New York.) Bloodcount and Human Feel sustained Speed’s longstanding association with drummer Jim Black; their performances together in these and later downtown configurations revealed a deep musical rapport across varied contexts.

Speed first developed an interest in Gypsy music while based in Boston and, together with fellow Orange Then Blue alumnus Matt Darriau, emerged as a leading New York figure connecting jazz and creative improvisation with Eastern European, Mediterranean, and Middle Eastern folk traditions. The Pachora quartet served as one of Speed’s principal outlets for this dimension of his work. Besides Speed on clarinet, the ensemble included Black on dumbek, drums, and percussion, Brad Shepik on Portuguese guitar and electric saz, and Skuli Sverrisson on electric bass. Speed showcased his command of engaging folk-inflected clarinet phrases on Pachora’s groove-oriented compositions, which combined contemporary sensibilities with traditional character. Pachora issued three Knitting Factory Works albums—Pachora (1997), Unn (1998), and Ast (1999)—followed by a fourth, Astereotypical, on Winter & Winter (2003).

Although Speed functioned as one of four equally assertive artistic voices within Pachora, he assumed clear leadership of yeah NO, a quartet that perhaps most fully revealed the breadth of his musical outlook. Speed performed on both tenor saxophone and clarinet alongside trumpeter Cuong Vu (another former Seattle resident who attended the New England Conservatory and played with Orange Then Blue), with Sverrisson on bass and Jim Black on drums. While Eastern European folk melodies and rhythms appeared in yeah NO’s music, these elements never functioned as stylistic constraints; instead they formed part of a wider spectrum that embraced focused, occasionally lyrical creative jazz compositions, four-way collective improvisations, and investigations of ambience and texture. Like the earlier Human Feel, yeah NO frequently disrupted conventional front-line and rhythm-section hierarchies, allowing any combination of the four musicians to merge or separate, shift between foreground and background, or alternate between soloist and accompanist roles.

Stylistic affinities between mid-1990s Human Feel and the later yeah NO can be attributed in large part to the shared presence of Speed and Black, yet both quartets also shared a connection through Sverrisson, who co-produced Human Feel’s Speak to It, released by Songlines in 1996. Songlines also issued three recordings by Speed and the yeah NO band: the self-titled Yeah No (1997), followed by Deviantics (1999) and Emit (2000); Swell Henry appeared subsequently on Squealer (2004). Concurrent with his work in Pachora and yeah NO, Speed led a trio featuring keyboardist Jamie Saft and drummer Ben Perowsky. This often vigorously swinging unit highlighted some of Speed’s most robust clarinet and tenor playing, supported by Saft’s fiery Hammond organ and Perowsky’s propulsive drumming. The Chris Speed Trio’s Iffy, released on Knitting Factory Works in 2000, underscored the reedman’s edgy, exploratory stance while referencing post-bop, soul-jazz, and groove-jazz traditions.

Alongside his activities as a leader, Speed appeared as a sideman with Mark Dresser, James Emery, and Ben Perowsky. He participated in multiple Dave Douglas sessions, including the Dave Douglas Sextet’s Soul on Soul (2000), the trumpeter’s acclaimed Mary Lou Williams tribute, and the following year’s Witness, both on RCA Victor. He also performed with the Balkan street-band-styled Slavic Soul Party!, contributing to In Makedonija (Knitting Factory Works, 2002) and Bigger (Barbes Records, 2006). Additional associations included longtime collaborator Jim Black’s AlasNoAxis quartet, documented on AlasNoAxis (2000), Splay (2002), Habyor (2004), Dogs of Great Indifference (2006), and Houseplant (2009), all issued by Winter & Winter, and John Hollenbeck’s Claudia Quintet, heard on I, Claudia (2004), Semi-Formal (2005), For (2007), Royal Toast (2010), What Is the Beautiful? (2011), and September (2013), all released by Cuneiform Records.

In 2006 Speed established the independent Skirl Records label to document Brooklyn-based artists whose work centers on creative jazz yet crosses stylistic boundaries. He appeared on numerous Skirl releases, all featuring artwork by Karlssonwilker and DVD-sized digipaks, including two albums by the Clarinets—the self-titled debut (2001) and Keep on Going Like This (2011); two albums by trombonist Curtis Hasselbring’s New Mellow Edwards quartet, The New Mellow Edwards (2006) and Big Choantza (2009); the aforementioned Galore by the reunited Human Feel (2007); two albums by Endangered Blood, the self-titled debut (2011) and Work Your Magic (2013); and Ruins (2014), a duet recording with Italian drummer Zeno De Rossi. In 2013 Speed also appeared on another Hasselbring project, the conceptual Number Stations, issued by Cuneiform and featuring Hasselbring leading a septet that included members of both New Mellow Edwards and another of the trombonist’s ensembles, Decoupage.

Following a decade of substantial contributions to collaborative projects, Speed released a new leader album, Really OK, on Skirl in 2014. The recording presented the reedman exclusively on tenor saxophone, fronting a trio with Dave King (the Bad Plus, Happy Apple, Buffalo Collision) on drums and Chris Tordini (Okkyung Lee, Claudia Quintet) on acoustic bass. Consisting primarily of original material while also including the standard “All of Me,” Ornette Coleman’s “Round Trip,” and John Coltrane’s “26-2,” the album found Speed drawing from tradition yet applying his distinctive perspective to the classic saxophone-bass-drums trio format. In 2019 he issued the trio recording Respect for Your Toughness, again with bassist Christopher Tordini and drummer Dave King. That same year he joined longtime collaborators drummer Ben Perowsky and organist John Medeski for Upstream.