How to go
Who: Saxophonist Warren Hill
When: 8 p.m. Friday, rain or shine, as part of the two-day Rhythm ’n’ Ribs Fest at the Summer Arts Festival; the event starts at 5 p.m. Friday and continues at 5 p.m. Saturday, ending the 2009 festival.
Where: Veterans Park, 250 Cliff Park Road
Cost: Free
SPRINGFIELD — It’s sometimes not enough for a musician to just play music.
Alice Cooper has a sports bar in Phoenix. For $4,500, you can hunt buffalo with Ted Nugent. The late Jerry Garcia had a line of neckties.
Smooth-jazz saxophonist Warren Hill, returning to the Rhythm ’n’ Ribs Fest Friday, July 17, at the Summer Arts Festival, was the skipper on his own love boat until just recently.
For several years, with 2,000 people each time out, he sailed the Caribbean as part of “Warren Hill’s Smooth Jazz Cruise.”
It’s sometimes easier, though, to just be a musician.
“It became, not just a second job, but my primary job for the three years I did it,” Hill said. “I became a musician so I didn’t have to have a job.”
He eventually sold his interest in the venture in favor of a new kind of event this November at the Ritz-Carlton in Montego Bay — “Warren Hill’s Jammin’ in Jamaica.”
On sea or on land, it’s the ultimate fan experience.
“They see us not only performing,” Hill said, “but we’re just hanging out. The whole thing ends up being magical.”
But let’s face it, if there’s a genre of music that has just as many haters as fans, this is it — call it smooth jazz, call it contemporary jazz, call it by its original name, fusion.
Now imagine being stranded at sea with it.
The light funk grooves. The flawless, too-perfect-to-be-crafted-by-the-human-race solos.
The soprano sax.
At least at “Alice Cooperstown,” you can lose yourself in the Diamondbacks game and forget all about the time Alice was on “The Muppet Show.”
Or when you’re with the Nuge, you can “accidentally” place an arrow through both lungs at 42 yards out for his involvement in Damn Yankees.
But what’s one to do about smooth jazz in the middle of the Caribbean?
It’s a long swim back.
“There are two aspects of this music,” Hill, 43, conceded. “There’s the recorded version and there’s the live version.
“The radio format has homogenized it. It’s like the music you listen to at work. In spite of themselves, they’ve made it elevator music.”
Sure, Hill gets a lot of play on smooth-jazz radio — or at least he did — but smooth-jazz radio is a big part of the problem.
“They’ll take that one song on my record that maybe wasn’t intended for them, it was intended for the record,” Hill said, “and that’s the stuff they choose to play.”
Usually, he said, it will be the most ambient piece on the album.
Ambient.
Meaning office wallpaper.
“I want you to listen to my records,” Hill said, adding that it’s not intended to be used as background music while you vacuum the house, either. “I got into music because I’m passionate about it.”
For Hill, a Toronto native whose 2008 album “La Dolce Vita” was named Canadian smooth-jazz album of the year, it’s maybe better to see it live first if you’re new to the whole thing.
“People finally get dragged out to a smooth-jazz concert and they’re hootin’ and hollering,” he said. “The live version of this stuff is a whole different experience. It’s where it comes alive.”
But some people, he admits, won’t be able to get past the words soft or “lite” and won’t even go.
“These are great musicians,” he said. “That’s the sad part.”
Still, this probably isn’t what Miles Davis envisioned back in 1970 when he first fused jazz with rock and R&B on the landmark “Bitches Brew” album.
Or maybe it is.
Lite is in the ears of the beholder.
“It’s music for music’s sake,” Hill said. “It has no prefabricated anything. It’s a drag we have to label ourselves.”
He prefers to call his music “instrumental music with some vocals” — but that’s not exactly a Clear Channel format.
“The definition of jazz in my opinion is improvisation,” said Hill, a graduate of the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston. “Jazz doesn’t mean there’s an upright bass and a piano and an alto sax. It’s the performance of the music that qualifies it as jazz. You have a basic palette of a song and you improvise over that.”
To be on the safe side, though, he says his music, if anything, is pop-jazz. (He even titled a 2005 album “PopJazz.”)
“This style of music,” he said, “is the bridge between pop music and mainstream, straight-ahead jazz.”
As a result, Hill scored his biggest radio hit to date back in 1993 with “The Passion Theme” from the soundtrack to “Body of Evidence,” Madonna’s short-lived foray into erotic thrillers.
He definitely was the right sax man for the job.
Had they gone with, say, Ornette Coleman, “The Passion Theme” would’ve been way too kinky.
Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0352 or amcginn@coxohio.com.
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