By Neil Tesser
He’s from Chicago…
Leave it to Eddie Harris to write his own eulogy.
But if it didn’t surprise us, Harris’s death still came as a shock: sick as he had been, most of us figured he would beat it anyway. He had devoted himself to therapies both conventional and experimental. He had adopted a new nutritional regimen. He had sounded much stronger than expected when he appeared at the Jazz Showcase this past spring, and mostly, he was Eddie Harris, too ornery to die–which accounts for some of the shock. The rest comes from the realization that we now live in a world devoid of his astonishing musicianship, his outrageous wit (musical and otherwise), and his funk-sanctified almighty soul.
He introduced
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All true: in 1966, Eddie (who?) became the first major jazz artist other than guitarists to enter the electric age, plugging his horn into a Varitone signal processor to amplify and modify the sound. Harris himself would never have denied that his motives were mixed. First, he maintained a lifelong penchant for gadgets and the technological horizon; in the 60s, before the commercial popularity of portable synthesizers, this took him to electronic tone manipulation. Not long after, he really did fit a saxophone mouthpiece to both a trumpet and trombone, making it possible to play those instruments without wrecking an oral musculature honed for the saxophone. (These Wile E. Coyote hybrids actually worked, sort of. The reed trumpet allowed Harris to achieve many of the trumpet’s idiosyncratic sounds and effects, but the actual tone always fell somewhere between those of the parent instrument–with a definite flavor of plugged-in kazoo.)
The other motivation was accessibility–and the money that such access might bring. But while Harris never made any bones about making money, he also never exhibited greed. I know, because he told me, that he made his funk records in the 70s because he knew they would sell; I also know that he never played music only because it would sell. He said much the same thing to his onetime producer Joel Dorn in an interview for the 1993 Rhino anthology of his music titled Artist’s Choice, which I highly recommend. Discussing the success of Listen Here–the 1967 album that featured the Varitone sax and sold more than a million records, an extremely rare occurrence in jazz–Harris said that although he suddenly “had gone from being a ‘jazz’ artist to a ‘funk’ artist,” it hadn’t happened by design. “All I ever wanted to do in life was play music, just like a factory worker, make music every day,” he continued. “I wanted to do something with my money and have enough peace of mind to just make music. But then I was in the ‘hit record’ business and found it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”
