Texas is big and multifaceted, and the category of “Texas tenor” saxophone is similarly capacious—big enough to include, say, Houston’s Arnett Cobb and Fort Worth’s Dewey Redman. Like any tradition, per T. S. Eliot, this one stretches to incorporate whatever individual talents bring to it, an ongoing process.
Nate Hook plays tenor and hails from Austin, where he was born in 1991, and his approach is something else again, though it does have that muscular authority which is key to Tex-tenorism. But much of his development has taken place in the Northeast corridor, and there’s a lot of East Coast bustle in Hook’s Progressive Overload.
You can hear as much on the opener “You Probably Thought This Would Be Fun,” with that prowling fuzz-bass line, a swarm of synthesizer chords and a buzzsaw guitar line, all up and running before tenor enters—at which time guitar switches to a complex counter-melody, and drums keep the whole shifting weave in the pocket. That tenor sound is dark and sturdy, whether the surface is smooth or raspy, and Hook’s solos are thoughtful and orderly. He may leave space in a line, pondering a sec before ideas come out in a rush, tumbling over the beat with rhythmic aplomb, and a commendably clean attack. There are no extraneous gestures or wiggling-finger fat. And nothing runs on too long.
Nate Hook was 23 when he recorded this debut, but a long road got him here. “My father is a huge jazz fan with a big vinyl collection, so I grew up listening to Bird and whatever else he listened to. He used to play alto—I still have his Mark VI—and later he showed me a couple of things. My mom got me started on piano early, but I always wanted to play saxophone. When I started on alto in the fifth grade, my fingers weren’t yet long enough to reach the pinky keys, so I’d miss a few notes. After I heard Dexter Gordon’s Our Man in Paris and Go! I knew I wanted to play tenor, and used borrowed ones until I was a senior in high school. By then my saxophone teacher Justin Vasquez had exposed me to some different music: the Brecker Brothers, Brad Mehldau, Chris Potter, Kurt Rosenwinkel.
“Listening to jazz growing up, I didn’t understand the chronology or evolution or who played with who—big bands, Bird, Coltrane doing “My Favorite Things,” it was all one thing to me. When I went to William Paterson University in New Jersey in 2010, I felt like I had a long way to go; East Coast people I met had a better sense of jazz education. Vincent Herring gave me a good foundation in playing over chord changes; I could already play them, but didn’t have a ton of vocabulary. He helped me a lot. When I got there I was still playing piano too—he studied with Harold Mabern, who among other lessons gave the kind of practical education via anecdotes that young musicians used to acquire on the road—“but when I met Billy Test and a few other amazing pianists, I knew I’d have to concentrate on saxophone.
“Early on at William Paterson, I had a group playing my compositions with odd meters and stuff. Playing with that band twice a week was a high for me, but it took months to get five tunes together.” Nowadays Hook plays more complex metrical games: tricky ways of phrasing odd-beat cycles so plain old 7/4 time sounds more fiendish (“Little Demons”) or throwing an even-meter hiccup into an odd-meter cycle—as on “Lantern Face” where a 5/8 loop will expand to 6/8 for a bar—to knock a pattern out of whack.
In New York, Hook took Steve Coleman’s weekly workshops at the Jazz Gallery, for more grounding in looping and nested rhythms, and had a few key lessons with Tyshawn Sorey, who showed him how to shift between meters one beat apart in length, phrasing them so the longer cycle sounds like the shorter, stretched out—as if the tempo slowed and then snapped back.
That’s the rhythmic logic behind “Stabat Ego,” inspired by a rubato line from one of Hook’s favorite modern composers, Krzysztof Penderecki—but there’s some good old churchy call-and-response in there too. That composer also influenced the ballad “Lacrimosa” (with unexpected shades of Gato Barbieri sizzle from tenor) and “Lantern Face,” built on a Penderecki melodic cell, in retrograde. For all that complexity, tunes like “20-40 Hindsight” and “Dialog Day” can be surprisingly catchy; Hook’s hooks sneak up on you. The tuneful flute-laced closer “More Anxiety” could fit seamlessly into a set by ’70s Canterbury rockers Hatfield and the North.
Also in New York, Hook studied with Mark Shim, who has his own dark tenor sound, and who helped him refine his triplet-oriented swing articulation. And while those monthly tutorials were going on, Hook started taking occasional lessons with tenor Gary Thomas in Baltimore. In 2014 Hook moved there to study with him at the Peabody conservatory. Thomas unlocked another harmonic logic for him: extracting cells from symmetrical scales, and stringing them into melodies or stacking them into harmonies (like those synth chords on “Probably”). “We can play with them or against them,” Hook says of those cells. His pieces typically include non-repeating sections, so thematic material crops up midway through, and different soloists improvise on different material.
Gary Thomas’s influence here is plain enough—the way, say, Charlie Parker informed such individual altoists as Jackie McLean, Ernie Henry and Cannonball Adderley. Playing recordings by teacher and student back to back is the easiest way to hear that point. Thomas also likes prowling bass, thorny tenor lines, oblique time and guitar-and-synth thickets. But as Hook notes, “I came up with my own interpretation; I didn’t transcribe his solos, learn his licks, or use his cells. And partly from studying with Mark, I had my own sound and articulation already—a more wide, spread out, Texas-tenor tone.
“When I began lessons with Mark, my time was terrible, and I started playing duos with drummers. Paolo Cantarella and I would get together twice a week—he was studying with Dan Weiss while I was studying with Mark—and we worked on logic sequences and got comfortable playing odd meters. When a bass player set up a session for us with Travis Reuter, he sight-read all my music, no problem. That was around 2012, and Paolo, Travis and I became the core of this current band.” Reuter can play clean jazz guitar (try “Dialog Day”) or punch in the effects boxes; I can’t think of another guitarist whose eccentric timbres sound quite like his, which deftly set off or blend with tenor.
“We tried a few piano players. Billy Test has ungodly facility and chops, but when he first played with us, the music was almost beboppy, not what I was looking for. But when we tried it again a year later, after he’d been studying with David Liebman, it sounded fine.” Test can bring a softer sensibility to the band, on acoustic piano especially. Hear “Lacrimosa” or “Dialog Day” for that.
Getting the right bass guitarist was the hardest part—the bass being where a lot of that metrical ping-ponging goes on. Jazz guys could play the right notes, but didn’t have the right feel on electric. Then Hook heard Paris-born Louis De Mieulle at an apartment concert. “It was 4/4 jazz for the most part, but he had a great sound and feel. He and Paolo really worked together a lot, to make the bass and drum grooves synch up.” Cantarella’s funk-inflected hi-hat, snare and bass drum combinations keep it all crisp.
About the album title: Away from the music room Nate Hook is a competitive weightlifter, and “progressive overload” is a term from strength training: “Basically it means you have to increase weight and/or repetitions to make progress. I think this is mirrored in music and life. None of us—well, except Travis—could comfortably solo over this music when we first started playing it, and one of the overarching concerns I was dealing with when I wrote and prepared most of this music was dealing with the challenges of life in New York City.”
There is a lot of strength and youthful energy on display. Nate Hook, 24 as this is written, is the youngest player here, and the band’s old-timers Reuter and De Mieulle are only in their 30s. Nate Hook says a committed younger crew made sense. “My philosophy is, the music will sound better if it’s played by the same musicians over a period of time—as opposed to using more famous guys when you can, which makes it easier to get gigs.” It’s a big-picture view. When you come from Texas you learn about long roads.
–Kevin Whitehead / May 2016