Friday nights at the 700 Club, you can catch part of the improv jam sessions that occur with some of our local groove artists. Sure this tiny space appears to be a bit sketchy but it's definitely a jook joint with the dance floor kinda crickety especially when the band is just killin' us with its steady groove. It's one of the few places in Seattle where a motley group of individuals can be seen dancing. Yes, you did read correctly, dancing. Believe it or not, the hipsters have let go of their tenacity to be hip and are getting their groove on, boogie down or however else you want to express it. Don't worry the floor hasn't surrendered under pressure of the folks on the dancefloor. The night is called Jambalaya and it's a night where you can hear and see one of Seattle's most dedicated musicians--Chris "CD" Littlefield, trumpeter/flugelhorn extraordinaire--along with the likes of former Strange Voices frontwoman Nikol Kollars and Piece of Sol.

You also might have seen and heard Littlefield with local funk rock act Phat Sidy Smokehouse. There's a refreshing classic sense to his playing. His horn blowing is strong and it yields a rich tone that can cut between the funky rhythms in syncopation like scatting vocals or at times ride smoothly over any groove. He's on his own now and is obviously keeping himself really busy. Littlefield continues to share his talent with other local jazz/soul bands and besides doing session work, he also has a new project called Cornucopia.

Cornucopia provides a wealth of the Emerald City's best musicians. The 10-piece ensemble masterminded by Littlefield is an ambitious effort indeed. The big band made its debut at this year's Bumbershoot.  [check out eP's exclusive bumbershoot '99 coverage. --ed.]  Not so much emphasis on the idea of big band in the vein of Benny Goodman, Cornucopia's sound is jazz but with a modern soul/R&B flavor. The big band consists of ten of Seattle's finest musicians including Littlefield (trumpet and flugelhorn), Steve Scalfaldi (saxophone), John Speck (trombone), N'Joli (vocals), Plushsafe's Whitney James (vocals), John Wicks (drums), Bob Heinemann (bass), Steve Black (guitar), Daniel Spils (keys), and Libitz (Elizabeth Pupo-Walker) on percussion.

How long have you been associated here with the scene in Seattle?

Chris Littlefield: Eight years.

Did you grow up here?

Chris: More or less. I was born in Oakland, California. Moved here in 1976. I was about ten or eleven when I moved up and we moved to Bremerton. I grew up there more or less from junior high school and high school. And then I lived in Ellensburg where I went to college at Central Washington University for about, off and on, for a good six years.

What are your influences?

Chris: Growing up I listened to a lot of Earth, Wind and Fire, Roy Ayers and jazz and blues... Miles Davis. My dad listened to a lot of blues and jazz. My brothers listened to a lot of Roy Ayers, Frankie Beverly and Maze, LTD; a lot of soul. My folks listened to Bobby Blue Bland to Al Green...Lightning Hopkins; Brownie McGhee. My dad is heavy in the blues. My mother listened to a lot stuff like Carmen McRae, Sarah Vaughan.

Are your parents musicians as well?

Chris: No. just music fans...my dad, affectionately known as Wally, always had blues going, especially in the mornings and weekends. We'd get up and have our family breakfast and he would have always had the blues going and he would try to give you blues lessons: talk about what it is like to experience the blues as a young man. [smiles] He was half serious and half messin' around; he should've been a blues musician...but he wanted to be an athlete throughout high school and college and then he was in the Marine Corps and worked for the government in personnel. But he should've been a musician...a blues musician.

Did you have any formal training as a musician?

Chris: I started in junior high school, in seventh grade; eleven and twelve I started playing and all through junior high and high school.

Did you just click with the horn?

Chris: Yeah, especially early on; I think through junior high school and high school, I excelled quite a bit up to a point where I was a senior. I really floundered by the time I got to college. Maybe it was because I worked so hard up to a certain point and there was a lot of things that I needed to learn and when I got to college. I just came out of a high school period where I was inundated especially my senior year where I was playing junior college jazz band and four or five different ensembles at school like solo ensembles, auditions to get into music programs in college plus marching band, jazz band, and not to mention taking advanced level stuff with the regular curriculum as well. Then I wound up going to school during the summer through the University. I burned out really fast. I wasn't very applied as a horn player in college.

But all that served as some sort of boot camp for a life as a musician.

Chris: Yeah, it's really funny. Until the last couple years I was at Central and also when I was studying in college, I started getting into singing. I started singing a lot more than I was playing my horn. I found myself thinking about becoming a vocalist. That in turn led me back to my horn where I started applying myself in both disciplines and started practicing a great deal more. It was probably the last year that I was at Central where I put more effort and started getting more out of it. I started to enjoy playing my horn again. Then I started to get into improvising. Then that's when I started playing with rock bands and blues band and at that point, I had actually had my own group that was called Oblio.

Chris: No, it's funny; it's a character out of a children's story by a man named Harry Nilsson. The song is "Me and My Arrow." They did this whole album and score for this cartoon called The Boy With the Pointed Head or Land of Point  [the name of the album and subsequent children's cartoon was called the point. --ed.]  Basically it's about this character, this little kid named Oblio who was born into a pointed world with a round head. And that's where the name came from. It was a pop/rock sort of thing that I just sang. There were no horns; me and the guitar player wrote a tune together that actually had some horn playing on it and we actually recorded three tunes, but I sang.

When did you really start playing the horn again?

Chris: Probably wasn't until shortly thereafter...I guess it was my sophomore [year], I mean I was playing my horn in a couple of jazz bands like the Second Jazz Band up there and I was singing in the Second Jazz Choir. It was about '88 or '89 when I started reapplying myself, like all the stuff that I was doing I was kinda just going through the motions. It wasn't until '90 or '91 that I moved to Seattle. It was through the last two years that I was in Ellensburg after playing with different bands outside of the University that I started really enjoying music again. I think it was because I pushed so hard for so long in a very regimented, a lot of technique by playing a lot of classical. Then I discovered the joy of improvising or the joy of soloing or creating music as opposed to being the guy who they always put music in front of my face and I just played it. And that's what I did for a real long time. For a couple of years I started learning how to create music and that put me in a different direction all together.

How did Cornucopia come about?

Chris: Cornucopia is a culmination or a focus of everything that I've gone through in Seattle in bands, playing with different people. I've always been partial to a large ensemble. Being a horn player, starting a band is kinda weird unless you're going to do the Miles Davis thing or you're going to be part of a two-piece section and have an R&B/funk thing or you're going to be in jazz band or play straight ahead jazz. There are certain formats but I've always been a fan of bands like Steely Dan or Earth, Wind and Fire, The Commodores, LTD, Basie. I loved Count Basie growing up, playing in jazz bands...Cornucopia was something that I've been playing with in the back of my mind for a couple of years. Three or four years ago, I was in a band where there was a three piece horn section, two rappers and a singer--Nikol Kollars--called Sharkskins and we had a percussionist who is also the same perscussionist in Cornucopia now, Elizabeth Pupo-Walker. That was a ten-piece band that was improvisational. That was born out of the night called Spice in Seattle which we all come together to play. We were part of the rotation of musicians that used to improvise with the DJs at Moe (now ARO.space). We used to play on Sunday nights which was a popular dance night. It was kinda like the beginning, not really the beginning, but it was kind of a big deal as far as movement of improv music and acid jazz [goes]. That was the first real night where this took off where it was a packed thing every Sunday night. This was three years ago. Anyway a lot of people of that group kinda spun off like we had Alex Veley and Davis Martin from Maktub. Later they broke off and had their idea for Maktub for awhile and they spun off and did that. Nikol Kollars still continued to do her improv stuff as well as all of us in the group but she wound up starting her own group Strange Voices out of that...I was in a group called Phat Sidy Smokehouse and that was just getting started.

Are you still doing stuff with them?

Chris: No, I quit playing with Phat Sidy in May. That was because I was ready to move on. I did that for a good four, four-and-a-half years.

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