Memphis musician-educator channels jazz pioneer for new CD

Dave Lisik

At 35 years old, Dave Lisik is a relatively young man, but he’s “composing” history all the same.

The trumpeter and music educator has been an active presence on the Bluff City jazz scene since arriving in town in 2003, as a longtime member of the Memphis Jazz Orchestra and leader of his own Dave Lisik Quartet.

Last week, Lisik released an ambitious new CD under his Dave Lisik Orchestra banner. It’s a conceptual affair called Coming Through Slaughter: The Bolden Legend, and for Lisik the disc represents the culmination a five-year creative journey and the end of his time in Memphis.

Dave Lisik

A Winnipeg, Canada, native, the well-traveled Lisik attended University of Mary in North Dakota and got his master’s degree at the University of Northern Iowa. After teaching high school jazz band back in Canada for five years, he decided to attend the University of Memphis to finish his doctorate.

“The culmination of that process is the dissertation. And as a composition major with a jazz emphasis, it meant that I needed a project that was new in some sort of sense,” says Lisik.

“It had to be an original composition. And I thought it’d be more interesting to find a concept, something that could be the inspiration for a piece.”

Lisik found that inspiration in a gift he’d been given upon leaving Canada, a copy of Michael Ondaatje’s “Coming Through Slaughter,” a fictionalized history about the legendary, almost mythical New Orleans jazz pioneer Buddy Bolden.

A turn-of-the-century Crescent City bandleader, Charles “Buddy” Bolden was one of the avatars of a brand of improvised music that would become known as jazz. Before he could be widely recognized or even recorded, Bolden’s mental health deteriorated, and he was committed to an institution in 1907 where he eventually died.

Although rumors of Bolden sessions have circulated, none of his recorded work has ever been discovered. Out of this mystery and vacuum, Lisik saw an opportunity to create something compelling.

“Buddy Bolden was the only jazz musician in history who doesn’t have his own soundtrack, per se. And so if you think about doing an original project about Charlie Parker or Dizzy Gillespie or John Coltrane, or any other musician, it’s almost like making the Mozart ‘‘Amadeus’’ movie but hiring John Williams to write the soundtrack,” says Lisik, laughing. “You’re not going to compose new music for a Mozart movie or a Beethoven movie.

“But the situation with Bolden allowed me to be freer and write a modern piece without trampling over any existing music,” he adds. “I was able to be more abstract.”

Lisik soon began writing a concept piece about Bolden, largely inspired by the Ondaatje book. It was successful enough that it helped him earn his doctor of musical arts degree in 2006. Lisik then began teaching at LeMoyne-Owen College, and decided to bring the composition to life.

He completed writing a full 10-movement Bolden piece, and set himself up with a mobile studio and began recording at various locations in Memphis, Indiana and New York.

The project drew sufficient interest in jazz circles that Lisik was able to secure the services of a who’s who of musicians, such as New York drummer Matt Wilson, horn heavyweights including trombonist Luis Bonilla, sax man Donny McCaslin and featured trumpeter Tim Hagans, a respected hard bop blower and veteran of Stan Kenton and Woody Herman’s bands.

“When I was writing the piece, I was actually imagining Tim Hagans playing it. But the idea that I could actually get him to record it didn’t seem a reality at that point. In the end, I was lucky enough to get him and a number of other great players.”

This past week — five years after he first hatched the idea — Lisik put out Coming Through Slaughter on his own Galloping Cow Music label. But the disc’s release also closes Lisik’s career in Memphis. In a few weeks, Lisik will head down under, to begin a new job teaching at the New Zealand School of Music.

“I’m excited about the opportunity,” says Lisik. “It’s about as far away from Memphis as you can get and still be in the English-speaking Western world, so it will be different, but I’m looking forward to it.”

The Dave Lisik Orchestra’s Coming Through Slaughter: The Bolden Legend is available at gallopingcowmusic.com.

© 2010 Go Memphis. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.