The following is an interview between jazz journalist Morgan Enos and trombonist, composer, educator, and Outside In Music label founder Nick Finzer. His new album, Legacy, a tribute to the pioneering trombonist J.J. Johnson, will be released 5 April via Outside In. Links to the forthcoming album and to Finzer’s website can be found at the bottom of this article.

Every artist worth their salt deals with some measure of impostor syndrome. But try recording an album-length tribute to J.J. Johnson, one of the preeminent trombone trailblazers in jazz, on his 100th anniversary, under the chapel ceilings he recorded in.

That’s what Nick Finzer faced, when he stood within the vaunted walls of Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, about to pay tribute to Johnson with the master’s accompanists themselves.

“I was pretty scared,” Finzer tells LondonJazz, noting that some of the records Johnson recorded there were hanging on the walls. “Man, I’m not supposed to…” he adds, trailing off for a moment, feeling the enormity. “I hear the trio playing, and it sounds like J.J.’s record.”

To hear him tell it, none of his trombone colleagues had planned a tribute release to Johnson for his centennial (the maestro was born January 22, 1924, and tragically took his own life in 2001).

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But Finzer got over the jitters and turned in a fantastic program of Johnson or Johnson-adjacent tunes, due to his prodigious talent, but also due to the presence of preeminent players: pianist Renee Rosnes, bassist Rufus Reid, and Lewis Nash. Read on for an interview with Finzer about how it all came together.

LondonJazz News: I’m aware of J.J. Johnson, but not intimately familiar. How would you explain his role in the jazz cosmology?

Nick Finzer: J.J. started working in the late 1930s, and got on the scene in the early 1940s. He started working with big bands like Benny Carter’s. From there, he started to work with and find out about the bebop stuff, through Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker.

He didn’t play what they were playing on trombone, but he transmuted the language into something that can work on the trombone. He made it applicable to the trombone in the early-to-mid 1940s, as he came out of working in these big bands, moving into smaller groups. He recorded with Bud Powell, Sonny Rollins, and Miles Davis in that time period.

That’s how he got known as the father of the quote-unquote modern jazz trombone. He took it out of the swing era and turned it into a soloistic, bebop voice. Everyone after that goes back to taking influence from him.

LJN: How does he play into your personal trombone development?

NF: He was the first trombone player that I checked out as a young musician. I mean, I got into the music through Duke Ellington. But then, as soon as I was like, alright, I want to learn how to play jazz on the trombone, basically everyone sent me toward J.J. Johnson.

It was actually a compilation record – a couple of different records put together. It’s called The Trombone Master [recorded in 1957, 1958, and 1960, released in 1989]. That was a very nerdy, trombone-centric album, but it was my main high school listening from 10th grade to 12th grade.

LJN: Take our readers through the genesis of Legacy.

NF: Maybe four to six years ago, I had been thinking about what other projects I would want to do. I was trying to line it up with something historical, and I didn’t necessarily have anything in mind. And I realised, Oh, J.J.’s 100th is coming up, and I didn’t think too much about it.

But then, I’d been playing a long while with [producer, arranger, composer, and conductor] Ryan Truesdell; he’s got this Gil Evans project. Lewis Nash plays drums for it, and Lewis played with J.J. for a long time. We had a one-off gig at Dizzy’s, and I was eating dinner with Lewis and asking him questions about J.J. Just any stories he had. And I was like, Oh, it would be interesting to see if I could play some of these tunes with Lewis.

Then, I was like, “Hey, Lewis, I’m thinking about doing some kind of J.J. thing; his birthday’s coming up.” He was like, “Well, if we do it, we’ve got to have [bassist] Rufus Reid, and we should try to get [pianist] Renee Rosnes.”

That kind of put terror through my brain: I don’t know if I can call those people. But Lewis was nice enough to make the connections, and they said, “Sure, we’d love to be part of it.” Because they all toured and recorded with J.J. in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

LJN: What’d you learn about J.J. through Lewis?

NF: Some of the stories were about intensity, and focus, and clarity, which comes through in his music. He’s very precise with the way he plays the instrument.

There were stories about having to fire people on the road, and get new people in the band, and having to argue with the manager about getting certain musicians on to certain gigs, because maybe a festival promoter didn’t want a certain person. And how strong-willed he was, which makes sense.

Rufus Reid told me a story about a couple of times where J.J. would write him little notes after the gigs that went especially well, and slide them under the hotel door. Nice things like that. I saw that he was a really genuine, nice person.

I never got to meet him, because he passed away before I even started getting into jazz. So, hearing the stories from these guys has been the only way I’ve been able to learn about my hero.

LJN: How did you choose which J.J. – or J.J.-adjacent – tunes you’d perform?

NF: That was very difficult. There were some tunes I was clear I wanted to do, but I also wanted to draw from different periods of his writing and playing.

An obvious one was his most-recorded tune, which is “Lament.” That was also recorded by Gil Evans, and Miles Davis, and many, many other people. But I wanted to take some tunes that were from his big band era in the early to mid-’60s; “Say When” and “Shortcake” came from that era.

We recorded his arrangement of “Pennies From Heaven” almost exactly. I wanted to do that one because it’s a bass feature, and we were able to feature Rufus. Then, we recorded one of Renee’s compositions [“Malaga Moon”] she wrote for a record date that was for J.J. plus an orchestra.

Then, I wrote a couple of things that draw from tunes that he played a lot. A contrafact on “What Is This Thing Called Love,” and a contrafact on “Cherokee.”

I asked the band members if there was anything they liked to play with J.J., and there was this live version of “Blue Bossa” they used to play on the road. That was not a tune I necessarily would have thought they used to play all the time with J.J., but there’s a video of him playing it at the Umbria Jazz Festival with Rufus on bass and Renee on piano. It’s got this very cool intro that Rufus came up with, so we did that spur of the moment on the session.

LJN: Any final thoughts on J.J. and Legacy before we hop off?

NF: I feel like he’s taken for granted. He’s one of those figures where people know and are familiar with his name, kind of like you said. But when you start to dig a little deeper below the surface, people don’t realise how transformative he was.

LINKS:

Advance singles from Legacy

Nick Finzer’s website