Dmitri Matheny blows into Oakland

Jesse Hamlin is a Bay Area writer. E-mail: datebookletters@sfchronicle.com

Dmitri Matheny, the lyrical flugelhorn player who moved to Phoenix a few years ago but still keeps a room in San Francisco, learned a lot about music and life from the late Art Farmer, the peerless jazz flugelhorn player who mentored and promoted him.

Matheny, who played Duke Ellington's lovely "Warm Valley" at Farmer's 1999 memorial on the master's copper-bell horn, which he now owns, remembers Farmer stopping him mid-solo during lessons to ask if he knew the lyrics of the song - right at that measure - that he was improvising on.

"For Art, if you didn't know all the lyrics and chord changes, you didn't know the song," Matheny says.

Photo: Courtesy Dmitri Matheny

He's a sound-and-melody player in the tradition of Miles Davis, Chet Baker, Stan Getz and Farmer, whose spare solos dispensed with filler licks and patterns.

"That's what I aspire to, and that's why I loved him so much," says Matheny, 46, who swings into Oakland's 57th Street Gallery for a Jazz in the Gallery show Saturday night with a Bay Area quartet after a Valentine's Day gig at the Seattle Art Museum with musicians there.

Accompanied by guitarist Brad Buethe, bassist Ron Belcher and drummer Deszon X.

Claiborne, Matheny will play a mix of standards like "Blues in the Night," his arrangements of film noir themes and original tunes such as the new "Buckshot Rubaiyat," a Persian blues with a rumba beat. It's dedicated to Bruno Mooshei, the late proprietor of the Persian Aub Zam Zam Club on Haight Street, where the composer enjoyed many of Mooshei's fabled martinis.

Matheny, who moved to San Francisco from Boston in 1989 after graduating from the jazz-focused Berklee College of Music, worked as director of development at SFJazz from 1992 to 1996 while playing and recording. His first CD as a leader, "Red Reflections," came out in '95 to wide acclaim and led to his leaving his day job. He came back to serve as SFJazz's education director from 2002 to 2005.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/music/article/Dmitri-Matheny-blows-into-Oakland-4275664.php#ixzz2LA9O2Oxq

Take Five With Dmitri Matheny

By DMITRI MATHENY, Published: January 7, 2013

Meet Dmitri Matheny:
Celebrated for his warm tone, soaring lyricism and masterful technique, Dmitri Matheny has been lauded as "the first breakthrough flugelhornist since Chuck Mangione" (San Jose Mercury News). An honors graduate of Interlochen Arts Academy and Berklee College of Music, Matheny was first introduced to jazz audiences in the 1990s as the protégé of Art Farmer, and has since matured into "one of the jazz world's most talented horn players" (SF Chronicle). Matheny tours internationally, performing material from his nine critically acclaimed CDs, balancing fresh, original works with familiar jazz classics, hard bop, west coast cool and beloved standards from the Great American Songbook.

Instrument(s):
Flugelhorn.

Teachers and/or influences?
Teachers: Art Farmer, Carmine Caruso.

Major influences: Art Farmer, Miles Davis, Chet Baker, Clark Terry, Tom Harrell.

I knew I wanted to be a musician when...
I credit my father and his hip record collection for kindling my childhood interest in music. There was great music on our turntable all the time, from Rachmaninoff to Ray Charles.

According to Dad, one time when I was about five, he was spinning Kind of Blue. I asked, "Daddy what's that sound?" When he answered, "That's Miles Davis, a great jazz musician." I responded, "That's what I want to be when I grow up." The story may be apocryphal, but Miles is still my man.

Your sound and approach to music:
As a flugelhornist, I play jazz—lyrical, modern, mainstream jazz in the tradition of Miles Davis, Chet Baker and Stan Getz.

My discography as a sideman is mostly a balance of instrumental and vocal jazz, including original straight ahead material, familiar jazz classics, hard bop, west coast cool and standards from the Great American Songbook.

As a composer and bandleader, I like to bring in elements from other genres, such as pan-Asian instruments, Afro-Cuban rhythms, and film music orchestration. I'm a romantic who loves to create an atmosphere, set a mood or establish a scene in the mind of the listener. Jazz alone won't do it.

A critic, reviewing one of my CDs, said "their music is a fertile landscape without boundaries." That assessment feels right to me.

Your teaching approach:
Based on what I learned from my mentor, I advocate a lyrical, melodic approach to jazz which stands in contrast to the chord scale and pattern-based methods currently in vogue.

I believe that the improvised solo is an opportunity to express something entirely new and profoundly personal. I encourage my students to create their own melodies, tell their own stories, sing their own songs. The bandstand is no place to be plugging in recycled, memorized material.

In clinics and private lessons, we explore the mental processes that take place while playing a jazz solo and the skills required for true improvisation.

Read More: http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=43663#.UO82jKXhEhQ