The StLJN interview: Eric Person

Saxophonist, composer, bandleader and St. Louis native Eric Person has a new independently released CD, Rhythm Edge, and is in the midst of a four-week tour to promote it.

Speaking Tuesday night from Madison, WI, where he and the members of his band Meta-Four were scheduled to do some master classes the next day at a local college, Person said they’d play in Chicago and Detroit before coming to St. Louis to perform at Finale Music and Dining on Saturday. “It’s really challenging for me on a lot of different levels to put a tour this long together,” he said. “It’s an experiment in a way - on a certain level I prefer shorter tours, but this time we wanted to reach more people and really support the CD.”

Why the extra effort? Well, it's Person's first studio CD since 1999, and, equally important, “I really feel like this is my best work,” he said of Rhythm Edge. The CD also represents what the Normandy High School graduate calls a “new direction” in terms of both musical content and the recording process.

With nearly 78 minutes of music, Rhythm Edge is filled-to-bursting with ideas. Most of the compositions are Person’s, though the CD leads off with a modernist re-imagining of the Jerome Kern standard “Yesterdays”. Some of the tunes, such as “Beauty,” “Reach,” “Multitudes” and “I’ll Be Just Fine” were road-tested by Meta-Four for months before the recording sessions; others, like “Pretty Strange Love” were brought brand new to the studio.

All benefit from the cohesive playing of Meta-Four’s rhythm section, which consists of Peter O’Brien on drums, Adam Armstrong on bass and keyboard player Jerod Kashkin, who gets plenty of solo space on the CD and makes good use of it. The group has been playing together as a unit for year now – Kashkin is the most recent addition, having come on board in the fall of 2006 – and they’ve developed some very nice teamwork, with the kind of tight-but-loose feeling that permits funk and freedom to co-exist on the same track.

For Rhythm Edge, though, Person wanted to work with a larger palette of sounds. “The way I made this CD was kind of getting away from the way I’ve been making the last few records, by featuring my quartet or quintet,” he said. “This record I had some guests come in and augment the horn section," specifically Ingrid Jensen on trumpet and the (most excellent) Robin Eubanks on trombone. Person also added a guitarist and percussionist on several tracks, and made greater use of studio technology than in the past by overdubbing himself on tenor sax and flute. “That provided a larger sound, which is what I was looking for,” he explained.

Many of the compositions “are leaning toward a more rhythmic aspect, and I tried to have a varied program instead of a mono-direction. You get a lot of records where the music is very similar. I try and have an overall program that gets away from that,” he added. At the same time, Person wanted to make sure the music on Rhythm Edge still would be playable by the quartet. “I like to have the recording experience be reflective of what’s happening in live performance. I’m not going to come out with a CD with strings or something like that.”

Though he plays tenor and flute on the record, “when we’re out on the road, I just play my alto and my soprano,” Person said, noting that he tends to lock in on a specific instrument for each composition. “I kind of instinctively know what horn works best on a particular song,” he said. When he accidentally left his soprano mouthpiece behind at an earlier gig on the tour, for a couple of days certain songs like “Beauty” had to be played on alto rather than soprano, and Person found it a bit disconcerting. “You get used to certain inflections on certain notes, and so playing it on the alto felt a little funny,” he said.

While this tour is concentrating on material from Rhythm Edge, Person said Meta-Four also mixes in a few songs from other composers, such as Miles Davis’ “Solar,” Herbie Hancock’s “One Finger Snap,” and the aforementioned “Yesterdays”, making projects of trying to develop their own distinctive approaches to each tune. “We’re working in a freer space, just trying to stretch the melody to give it that elasticity. I’ll stretch this melody out, and these guys delve into a freer and looser rhythmic approach.,“ he explained.

Person’s definitely fired up about what he’s doing, and especially enthusiastic about the way the music has continued to develop since the band has been on the road. “Even since the record, I think the music has really jumped to another level,” he said.


Eric Person and Meta-Four will perform at 7:30 p.m. and 9 30 p.m. Saturday, October 13 at Finale Music and Dining. Copies of Rhythm Edge will be available at the gig, or you can purchase it online from CD Baby.

Note: Person talked about some of these same subjects with the Post-Dispatch’s Kevin Johnson, who devoted most of his column this week to the saxophonist. Read it online here.