I was told that you toured with Koko Taylor?

Chris: Not with Koko Taylor but members of her backup band. I was playing with Phat Sidy Smokehouse. We used to have a regular jam night. This was when Phat Sidy was building a following in this town. This was shortly after the time when I stopped doing Sharkskins at Moe but I was still doing these jam things and getting more into that. I was playing this funk jam that Phat Sidy Smokehouse used to have at the Central Tavern in Pioneer Square. The band leader [from Koko Taylor's group] came down to meet me and to hear me play that night and [it turned out that] they were looking for another horn player; the one that they had was leaving the tour. He liked my playing. We hit it off and I went on the road with these guys for six months and the group was called "Burning Chicago." And what it was, was two of the members or three of the members had played with Koko Taylor for some time. They were part of her backup band and they basically spun off and decided to do their own thing and they originally were called "Burning Chicago Blues Machine" and they later shortened it to just "Burning Chicago." But that was sort of a blues funk thing, power blues/R&B/funk/soul sorta thing. That was an interesting experience.

How did you manage getting all the musicians in Cornucopia to commit to this project?

Chris: Well, I kinda pitched to all of them at some point. I had a concept for a band. Originally it started out to be with only seven people at the most. When I first conceived this, I was thinking of a quintet. When the writing progressed, I started thinking: "Well, it would be kinda cool to have a singer." And I thought about that and originally I didn't want a group with a guitar at all. I got up to three horn players eventually and [thought] percussion would kinda be nice and I thought of all these people, these musicians that I have always wanted to play with in the same room. For all of them, I have a profound respect for their ability and their personalities.

And I also thought that it would be a monumental task if you could get ten well-known, really good musicians in the city all within one project; if you could pull that off, you could really have something. Then I started thinking about material too. That was the basis of the pitch. We all knew one another pretty much. I had a different keyboard player in mind originally, a different bass player all together. So I had been putting a lot of thought into it for a while. Anyway, the band has actually gone through three different forms of what it is now. It's kinda weird, we're kind of coming back to the original concept that I had. I first conceived the idea of ten people. The singers that I have right now are completely different from what I've started out with. John Wicks has been the drummer from start to finish, no question about that. [laughs at his definiteness]. Bass player has changed once. Bob Heinemann is the man. I mean, it's really funny because I considered Bob first but this other guy that I met, I really dug his playing but it didn't really work out trying to be in both groups. I wound up getting Bob. He and John play really well together. The guitar player is the same since. The horn section pretty much the same except my trombone player. He did the demo and wasn't able to do the first gig with us and then after that he couldn't commit to the group. So we have John Speck now who came recommended.

The two singers actually are completely different. I didn't consider either of them initially. Whitney comes to us from Plushsafe as recommended to us by John Wicks. I wanted to go with a different feel with the two original singers that I had. I ended up getting N'Joli and Whitney as kind of a more jazzier, warmer approach. A different vibe. Her voice is somewhere between Ricki Lee Jones and Cassandra Wilson.

Chris: I don't go to that many rock shows I guess anymore. As a horn player, it's really nice to have the ability to float back and forth. Also, as a horn player, listening to influences that I had listened to, there are certain things. That's kinda why I finally got out of Phat Sidy Smokehouse because there's a serious rock element in that group that made it hard to go back and forth like playing jazz or blues or more subtle stuff when you're blowing your brains out. When you're playing really hard, there is a lot be said for that excitement. But the subtlety and the nuances [that you can] pay attention to, you can get away with in playing jazz. People are definitely not as much into rock in this town as they used to be, but it's still pretty much a rock town. But a lot of that has to do with DJs and the musicians involved with the DJs, I think. Ever since the acid jazz movement in the late '80s and early '90s, when it finally caught on here in Seattle, people really started to come back to that. But there's always been a big strong movement, well people have always been into dance music in this town. And you have to thank the alternative community for that.

There's always been this cross-pollination of jazz and dance music but they were bringing all different kinds of stuff into that place. Right around the time when Spice was going on, The Art Bar cropped up on the scene, shortly after Spice, Crocodile got into the fray when Spice kind of faded out...they had a night called Strong and actually they ended up getting DJ Nassir. Nassir who was instrumentally responsible for Spice and Tasty Shows back in the day got that all started. But then it went to Strong...prior to that there were a lot of dance things that Tasty Shows sponsored but it wasn't until Spice that they started getting musicians involved with that. Ever since that, it's slowly grown, grown, grown, and grown and a lot more of the acid jazz stuff and there's people like Skerik [another Seattle icon from the band Critters Buggin'] who's largely responsible for doing the crossover thing where he was playing with rock bands, he was hanging out with rock musicians, he knew all these guys, he went to Cornish and he still plays jazz. And then he started developing his own kind of thing, his own musical weirdness or whatever you want to call it. Just music. Skerik's music, Skerik's way of playing and he in a lot of ways defines the public perception of what people look at as a different, creative horn player. And those are the sort of things that I can think of that have been responsible. There are other bands that come along like Hi-Fi Killers, Sharpshooters and all the improv nights at the 700 Club now...now, everybody wants a regular night where they have live musicians improvising on stage and having DJs. The improv thing isn't really nothin' new.

Can you describe the creative process for Cornucopia? Do you just get together and jam?

Chris: Well, the thing that I want to stay away from is the "jam band" approach. The improv scene is one thing but this group definitely is dependent upon composition. That's the strong suit of the group. I want it to be an order of priority: writing, recording and performance. Ultimately I want it to be a recording project and then play to support that. But it's not a band to go out and gig for it to be its bread and butter. Ultimately, in terms of your career, you want it to be fruitful and get something out of it; you want to put a lot of work into it and you want it to be quality work because at the end of it, you want it to kinda yield something for you. You want it to be viable and satisfying. As far as the process is concerned, it is not a jam band; it's all about, you bring a tune in, you pretty much have an idea for what you want; like with me being the primary contributor/writer right now, I go through a lot of time writing a tune. When I come up with an idea, generally, I develop a number of different ways--it could be a melody first, then you start thinking of chord changes and something to complement it or support that melody and then you arrange horns around it to complement everything as well as the whole and then you bring it in. I write charts out and write the scales for the horn parts. Generally the rehearsal process in introducing a tune requires that you need to get the singers together in a totally separate situation and the horn section needs to get together in a separate situations and the rhythm sections, generally I can furnish them with sheet music or chord charts and that sort of thing and a tape. Usually I sequence a lot of the stuff too. Make a tape for them and give it to them, so they have an idea of what the sound is going to sound like and then once everyone has had a chance to at least experience a little bit of what the tune is going to sound like and then you bring it all together and run through it and develop a form.

Any interesting session work lately?

Chris: I do session work as do a lot of the people in the band. Waiting around for session work, especially in the original sense, as opposed to going out and being a studio musician where that's your job where you go in the studio and play other people's music.

Most of the stuff that I did as far as sessions are concerned usually involves that they have an idea and you work with somebody. I did a recording session with R.E.M. on the soundtrack for The Man on the Moon, a story about Andy Kaufman. When you go and do stuff like that, that's great session work where here you are working with these well-known recording artists/rock stars; they're all really cool dudes and they have pretty much a cool idea for what they want you to do; there's no charts involved; they kind of let you interpret what you want to do. But they request that you're playing your sound, your input and what it is you bring to the table. They feed you some ideas, here's what we got going on, you want to play this melody and take a little bit of a liberty, but here's what we got going on. That's cool. That's the kind of session work I get. Or sometimes a band will call me and ask me [to play] and [they say] we want horns on this album but here's a section, we don't really know what's going on and we really want you and your partner, like John Ryser and I, we get together a lot and play on a lot of people's albums. And that's the kind of work I like.

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