Topping the charts

Rodney Whitaker "Oasis"

John Bishop

It’s homegrown, Lansing grown. I’m pretty proud of our little town turning into a mecca.”

Rodney Whitaker

Across the nation, people are driving to work, typing in cubicles, flirting in coffee shops and doing God knows what else to the swinging sounds of a brand-new jazz CD with origins in Greater Lansing.

World-renowned bassist and bandleader Rodney Whitaker’s “Oasis” hit No. 1 on the Utah-based Roots Music Report Top 50 Album chart in jazz for the weeks of Jan. 21 and 28. “Oasis” is the third in a series of albums by Whitaker devoted to the music of another Lansing-area musician, Gregg Hill.

“It’s homegrown, Lansing grown,” Whitaker declared. “I’m pretty proud of our little town turning into a mecca.”

Whitaker, director of jazz studies at MSU, assembled a first-rate group, fronted by trumpeter Terell Stafford and saxophonist Tim Warfield, to dive into Hill’s lively, cat-in-a-bag compositions.

Hill, a former truck driver who confesses to having a “jukebox for a head,” is a longtime Lansing jazz patron, a largely self-taught composer and, this month, a chart-topper, to his own surprise.

“It’s a fickle world out there,” he said. “You don’t have any control over what people pick up on. College stations and big-city, late-night jazz stations are playing it, and it’s very satisfying.”

“It was a labor of love,” Whitaker said. “Gregg and I put in a lot of work.”

Hill and Whitaker have different takes on why their music suddenly zoomed to the top of the jazz-o-sphere. (“Oasis” also hit No. 7 on the JazzWeek Top 50 chart Jan. 30 and No. 3 on the NACC Top 30 Jazz chart Jan. 24.)

Whitaker thinks listeners are picking up on Hill’s slightly off-center, fresh take on jazz.

“He writes from his heart,” Whitaker said. “He’s not thinking, ‘Will this be radio friendly?’ or anything like that. He really just thinks about creativity.”

“It doesn’t go where you think it’s going,” Hill said. “That’s what makes it interesting to the players. They think they know where it’s going, and then I throw them a curve.”

While working in the studio recently with jazz pianist Geoffrey Keezer, Hill caught Keezer staring at the score, shaking his head.

“This isn’t a chord, it’s a pretzel,” Keezer told him.

“I took it as a high compliment,” Hill said. 

At the 2017 GroundUp Music Festival in Miami Beach, Hill got some advice from no less a creative soul than David Crosby, who died Jan. 18 of this year. 

At a creative workshop, Hill confessed to feeling blocked as a composer. Crosby told him to forget all that, sit down at the piano and “doodle away,” and something would come. 

Many of Hill’s tunes percolated up from his years as a regional trucker based in Holt in the 1980s and ’90s. He would pop in thousands of tunes on cassette, from the World Saxophone Quartet to Duke Ellington to Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown.

“You can hear in his tunes that he spent a lot of time listening to jazz,” Whitaker said. “But there’s always something quirky that keeps them fresh.”

Back in Lansing, Hill picked up an armful of jazz theory books from Marshall Music and made a serious study of it. Guitarist Elden Kelly spent hundreds of hours working through the tunes with him to get them on the page.

Hill didn’t even think of enlisting Whitaker for a project until a Jazz Tuesdays gig at Moriarty’s Pub in the fall of 2016 when Whitaker overheard him talking about putting together a recording.

“Why didn’t you give me the call?” Whitaker demanded.

Hill was taken aback.

“I thought he was way, way above me in the musical hierarchy,” Hill said. “From then on, I’ve given him the call.”

Hill’s moody and episodic composition “To the Well” reminds Whitaker of the rich and evocative music of Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn.

“It’s a fresh take on something they would write,” Whitaker said. “All of Gregg’s tunes sound fresh, but they also remind me of the tradition.”

The tune unfolds the way a day does, if you’re treating a day right. Stafford’s clarion trumpet solo illuminates a garden of mysterious beauty until Warfield’s tenor sax moves into the shadows, setting the stage for vocalist Rockelle Fortin’s mystical lyrics invoking the “great unknown.”

“Puppets” drifts and circles like a ring of smoke as Stafford’s muted trumpet and Warfield’s soprano sax negotiate Hill’s sneaky, shifting time signatures. Whitaker’s commanding bass solo provides the center of gravity.

The melody of “Interlude” floats in the air like a classical art song, warmed by Fortin’s haunting vocals. Her vibrato brushes the bottom of each note like a storm wind on a leaf, and she infuses the word “moon” with the uncanny glow of the orb itself. 

She sings on four tracks for the album.

“She’s picking the hardest tunes and writes these great lyrics,” Hill said. “Not many people can do that. Her voice is so versatile, she’s got great range and sings with so much feeling.”

The group rehearsed and performed the tunes for more than a week in the fall of 2021 and played them live at UrbanBeat in Lansing and Cliff Bell’s in Detroit. Between gigs, they went to Ann Arbor to record three tracks each day for the album.

“We had a lot of prep time, a little moment to live with the songs,” Whitaker said. “That’s not always the case with new tunes.”

Hill hasn’t written anything new for more than two years. He’s still grieving over the sudden death of his 41-year-old son, Matthew, in July 2022.

“I’ve noticed that people are usually pretty lousy at consoling people,” Hill said. “But music is a healing force. It’s not a cliché. It really helps you get through things.”

But he doesn’t want to repeat himself.

“I don’t want to pick over the same territory I’ve been in the last 145 tunes,” he said. “That’s always a mystery. The day arrives when you start playing again, start writing again.”

“Life goes on,” Whitaker said. “You’ve got to keep pushing, keep being creative.”

Topping the charts

Topping the charts