Biography
Over a lengthy career, tenor saxophonist Fred Hess has established a reputation as an adaptable and open-eared composer and performer able to move comfortably across many jazz contexts. Much like Joe Lovano, with whom he is frequently linked, the longtime Colorado resident thrives in avant-garde environments yet remains equally at home in what players call “the tradition”—meaning straight-ahead idioms such as hard bop, bebop, cool jazz, swing and post-bop rather than fusion, electric jazz-funk or crossover styles. Hess shares Lovano’s inside/outside outlook: he sees no requirement for jazz musicians to remain inside “the tradition” at all times, yet he stops short of the extreme radicalism associated with free-jazz firebrand Charles Gayle, whose outside playing has been deeply shaped by John Coltrane’s post-1965 work. Hess draws on an extensive and varied range of sources. Among avant-garde figures he cites Ornette Coleman, Steve Lacy, the Chicago-based AACM, Roscoe Mitchell and Anthony Braxton, though he has never pursued Braxton’s consistently outside path. Eric Dolphy has also left a mark, as have successive phases of Coltrane’s development. When working within “the tradition,” Hess incorporates aspects of Sonny Rollins and Lester “The Pres” Young. Acknowledging Young’s influence does not imply that Hess is a swing-revivalist or that he aims to replicate Young’s sound from the 1930s, ’40s or ’50s; rather, he shows that a player can absorb elements of Young’s or the hard-bop Rollins’s tone while pursuing an entirely different improvisational logic. When listeners liken Hess to Young or Stan Getz, the resemblance concerns timbre and intonation, not the specific pitches chosen. No one would confuse one of his abstract, AACM-informed inside/outside solos with the phrases Young contributed to Billie Holiday’s Columbia recordings during the Franklin Delano Roosevelt years. Hess was not born in Colorado; he entered the world in Abington, Pennsylvania—a Philadelphia suburb—in 1944 and was raised in New Jersey, where he later attended Trenton State College. At age 37 he relocated to Boulder in 1981 and, the following year, established the Boulder Creative Music Ensemble. He continued his studies in the state and, in 1991, received a doctorate in music composition from the University of Colorado, Boulder. His first recordings as a leader appeared in the early 1990s with the Colorado-based Capri label; the debut, Sweet Thunder, was followed in 1994 by You Know I Care. Entering his sixties—he turned sixty in 2004—Hess issued several albums in the early 2000s on another Colorado indie, Tapestry.
Albums
