Eric Alexander Thinks Jazz Has Too Many Chameleons
Introduction
When I was in high school, I attended the Jamey Aebersold Jazz Workshop and discovered Eric Alexander. I remember picking up his CD Eric Alexander: Alexander the Great at the workshop, and I haven’t stopped checking out his discography ever since. Recently, I was able to connect with Eric to learn more about his beginnings, as well as one of his most recent projects, his new album Fifth Quadrant, which is due out on December 4th. For those of you who do not know very much about Eric Alexander, here is a condensed bio below to get you up to speed before we dive into the interview.
Biography
- Eric Alexander carries on the tradition of straight-ahead modern jazz.
- Eric began his musical training on classical piano at age six, picking up the clarinet in elementary school before switching to the alto saxophone at twelve.
- Eric shifted his focus toward jazz while studying at Indiana University, later transferring to William Paterson University (WPU) in New Jersey.
- Eric honed his craft working with the WPU faculty while immersing himself in the recordings of masters such as Sonny Stitt, Dexter Gordon, John Coltrane, George Coleman, and Joe Henderson.
- Upon his graduation, Eric moved to Chicago and built a reputation in Chicago’s club scene.
- In 1991, Eric placed second in the prestigious Thelonious Monk International Saxophone Competition, behind Joshua Redman and ahead of Chris Potter.
- After the Monk Competition, Eric relocated to NYC, and shortly after, he made his debut as a leader with 1992’s New York Calling on Criss Cross.
- Over the years and up to today, Alexander has maintained a busy recording and global touring schedule.
- Eric has recorded as a bandleader and sideman on many albums, gaining much attention and praise for releases such as Man with a Horn (1999), It’s All in the Game (2006), Song of No Regrets (2017), Leap of Faith (2019), Timing Is Everything (2024), and Like Sugar (2025).
Interview
ZS: Who or what introduced you to the saxophone?
EA: I was playing clarinet in the junior high band, and I was just terrible. For whatever reason, I couldn’t read parts and get over the fingerings changing, so I got demoted to bass clarinet. I couldn’t read bass clef very well, so I was then demoted to contrabass clarinet, where I was the worst in the group. I had some friends who were in the saxophone section and played in the jazz band, and I was a little bit envious but just figured I was going to get better at bass clarinet. I called a woodwind teacher in my hometown named Mr. Duxbury and said, “Would you be willing to give me bass clarinet lessons?” And he said, “Hell no! That’s ridiculous. I will give you saxophone lessons.” So, I started taking alto saxophone lessons, and then it became a friendly competition where we were all trying to outdo one another, and it became my whole life.
When I started playing in the jazz band in high school, it occurred to me, especially in the jazz context, that if I was making a mistake, it wasn’t even really a mistake, and I could cover it or just move on. When I was playing concert piano pieces, if I made a mistake, I would have to restart from the beginning, and I didn’t even know where I was, so I started having meltdowns at recitals. That is when I said, “That’s it, I am not doing this anymore,” and just started playing saxophone. Mr. Duxbury was a great but tough teacher who told me exactly what he wanted. If I played the wrong note, he would hit me with a pencil, and he was always smoking cigars and blowing smoke in my face. I studied with Mr. Duxbury throughout high school, but he had a stroke. His son started taking over the studio, but I still wanted to study with Mr. Duxbury. We went through all the Rubank method books, and then I moved on to Concertino da Camera. With Mr. Duxbury, we didn’t cover anything related to jazz, and what I learned was absolute precision in technique. If I didn’t use the exact right fingering in order to execute a particular phrase or passage, he would crucify me, and it just became second nature. Another teacher I studied with was named Cheryl Clarke. I used to go with my friend Daymon Smith to study jazz with her, and she would give us a record to listen to, such as Dexter Gordon Homecoming: Live at the Village Vanguard or Stanley Turrentine: Let It Go; it got me interested in this type of music.
When I went to Indiana University (IU), I was a double major in music and political science, but political science was my focus. By the end of my freshman year, music was it, as I found myself lying in my bed in the dorms at night trying to figure out what Charlie Parker was playing after the four chord on a blues. That is all I could think about. I couldn’t think about anything else and stopped watching sports, becoming obsessed with eating up anything I could find about jazz. I got into the 2nd jazz band, directed by Dominic Spera, and had a great time there and studied a little bit with David Baker. The amount of information I learned from David Baker was incalculable. At the end of my freshman year, I ended up transferring to William Paterson University. At this same time, I got a call to fill in as a tenor player at this wedding gig at a country club in Bloomington. I didn’t know how to play tenor, but my father had bought me a Mark VI for college, and I had never really played it. I ended up having to borrow a mouthpiece from an upperclassman named George Weremchuk (who is a professor now at UCF). I went and played the gig, and although I was tonally lost, I had this strong impression that tenor felt more natural. David was instrumental in facilitating my move to William Paterson University (WPU), as I decided in May that I wanted to go to WPU, and schools don’t accept students in May for September. David called Rufus Reid and said it may be worth taking a chance on me, and Rufus said, “Send him on over.” That summer before I started at William Paterson, I was in Chicago, and since I didn’t know any tunes, I started to learn tunes on tenor, and I never looked back.
The first person I met at William Paterson was Harold Mabern, who was instructing a combo, and one of the most profound players was Joe Farnsworth. I also met Bill Stewart, who was a year in front of me, and Doug Weis, and there are just too many to mention. The teaching core was so outstanding. You had Steve Turre, Norman Simmons, Harold Mabern, Jim McNeely, Rufus Reid, Joe Lovano, and Bobby Watson, to name a few. The faculty was chock-full of NYC heavyweight musicians who would come out and teach us. Quite frankly, when I got there, I didn’t know who most of them were. I was at William Paterson from my sophomore through senior year and studied with Joe Lovano my sophomore year. As he was growing in popularity, he would send in subs, Gary Smulyan and Ralph Lalama. In my junior and senior years, I studied with a combination of Gary and Ralph. My sophomore year with Joe was very profound because he recognized not only my potential, but he knew the things I wanted to work on, and he didn’t try to stop me. He just pushed me toward the material I was already running toward. For instance, I was just starting to listen to Sonny Stitt, and Joe said to go learn some of his solos, so I learned ten of them over the next week. During my lesson, I played through the solos while Joe was on drums, and he said, “Why don’t you take a solo like Sonny Stitt?” And I said, “I can’t, I don’t know what the chords are.” Joe threw his drumstick down and said, “What is wrong with you?” And then he said, “All right, you got to figure out the chords so you know what Stitt is playing over that chord, and then you need to learn that material over the other 12 chords.” Joe would say, “Play me an A on your saxophone, and then make it work over a G minor. Now make it work over an Ab7.” These games were great for me, and I was eating it up.
In the fall of 1990, I was living with a bunch of other friends who had graduated from WPU, and some of them were going into the city to get their feet wet at the jam sessions. Since I had a car, I would drive them in. I just felt overwhelmed and knew I was not ready for these New York cats. Shortly after Thanksgiving, I said, “I am moving to Chicago since my mother is there, and I am going to practice as hard as humanly possible, and then I will be back.” I spent about two years in Chicago, which was a great move, as I had five or six $50 gigs a week, which was enough to pay my rent living with my buddies, playing gigs on the South Side with organ bands and learning standards. In fact, when I did the Thelonious Monk Competition in November of 1991, I was still in Chicago, but I had progressed enough to come in 2nd place and went from absolute zero to pretty good in the span of a year and a half, and then I moved back to NYC.
Moving back to NYC, I was fighting for my life with so many great players and only so many gigs. I was practicing so much and told myself, “When you get to twenty-five years old, if you don’t have enough gigs to support yourself, you quit.” Lo and behold, when I was 23 and 24, I started to get recording opportunities and had to keep going. My buddies were developing too, so we would hire each other for gigs and get together and play.
ZS: Who are your saxophone influences, and have they changed over time?
EA: Dexter Gordon, George Coleman, Sonny Stitt, and John Coltrane are my influences and, quite frankly, haven’t changed since I first heard them; they have remained my favorites. I am kinda selfish in that I heard what I really liked, and that’s it. There are many contemporaries who play great, but they don’t influence me at all. I did a tribute to Joe Henderson after he passed away at a club in Spain, and the promoter called me and told me there were two other tenor players on the gig, George Coleman and Johnny Griffin. So we went to pay tribute to Joe Henderson, who was one of their contemporaries, and neither of them knew a single Joe Henderson tune. George Coleman said, “Eric, why don’t you play that tune that all the college kids like, Inner Urge, but I am going to lay out,” and Griffin said the same. The point is, I used to feel guilty about saying my contemporaries don’t influence me, but I have come to learn that, generally speaking, each generation, especially the great players, looks to the previous generation, and the previous generation looks to the generation before them.
ZS: As you progressed on the saxophone and developed your own sound, what was your process, and when did you realize that you found your voice?
EA: For many of us, it takes a very long time to find our voice. The first thing that starts to happen is you realize who you really gravitate to just naturally, but you don’t realize it in a way of progressing until you have listened to everyone. Remember my peers, Chris Potter, Joshua Redman, Seamus Blake, Donny McCaslin, Joel Frahm, etc. When we were all twenty-one, we were not looking at each other for inspiration. The first person I became truly fixated on in terms of sound was Dexter Gordon. That was the hardest thing for me to stop chasing, as I would play everything I learned as if I was Dexter Gordon. At one point, I said, “I am not listening to a single Dexter Gordon album.” I started to realize at that point that I liked to play in the middle versus a heavyweight sound with a full throat and playing behind the beat because you are playing so loud. I started to play lighter and listen to George Coleman, Eddie Harris, and Clifford Jordan, and it dawned on me that I am a technical animal, and to play various phrases that required much dexterity and speed, I could not do it when playing so loud, so I started to lighten up.
I started practicing so quietly that no one could hear me. Part of it was that I had to in my New York apartment, and during that time, I saw an interview with Billy Higgins, and he said, “Hank Mobley and I developed our way of playing as quietly as a mouse but with a lot of energy.” I also started to realize that if I could get an impactful sound at a very quiet volume, then when I bulked it up, it would still have all those beautiful colors unless I didn’t want it to. I am not an innovator, but I have my own voice. This is something that is missing in my generation and definitely the younger generation. There is such a cookie-cutter sameness to how people play most of the time. It’s a chameleon-type style of sound where you hear them on one recording, and they sound like a late John Coltrane, and then the next tune they are playing like Ben Webster.
What happened to my generation and younger is that there was a saxophonist who was so influential that, although it wasn’t his fault, he dragged everyone toward him, and that was Michael Brecker. He was so good that his sound, playing eighth notes, altissimo, and the way he articulated a harmonic device had players drifting back to him.
At the end of John Coltrane’s life, you had David Liebman, Bob Berg, Michael Brecker, and Steve Grossman chasing John Coltrane hard. Somehow, Michael Brecker is the one who stopped and sounded like a completely new thing. Now, you hear Bob Berg starting to play like Michael Brecker. Cecil Payne told me that it was the saddest day in the world when Charlie Parker died, but it also was an opportunity for players to start writing original tunes and not just playing Parker’s heads. Once you start writing your own tunes, you kind of figure out who you are. I always practiced with a subtone embouchure. I like to think of my sound as air and a little pellet of sound that grew into the edge of the circle of air, but not air on top of the sound. I would just start with air, and then you hear a little bit of sound and then grow it. I always thought that if I wanted to play a beautiful ballad or was playing in a concert hall, if you blow air into the metal, the audience can hear it. It takes more pressure from the abdomen to have that much of an air component in your sound. It is not that wispy air on top of the sound, but air that is in the sound, but you can’t hear it. It’s a bit counterintuitive.
ZS: What is your approach to teaching and practicing? How has it evolved?
EA: I didn’t even know what I was practicing early on. I would practice on my fingers before lessons with Mr. Duxbury. I started practicing like a maniac in college. The first four or five years were spent learning tunes and learning to play jazz in twelve keys all day and all night. The material that I would play through twelve keys was melodic and/or harmonic material that I heard from recordings, so I would extract it, steal it, and then alter it a little bit, and I would keep notebooks of these ideas. Playing an augmented triad over a dominant 7th chord was a good precursor to the resolution to one, so I would write in my notebook, “Play an augmented triad.” Now, I don’t do anything but play tunes. Everything I do is to address harmony that I encounter in tunes, whether a jazz standard, an original, or my own tune. The only thing I care about is how it sounds. The first thing is to chase things that are naturally beautiful, and whether you can explain it is irrelevant.
Every student is different, so the goal is to help them versus confuse them. The number one goal is to see if you can get the student to figure things out on their own or if I can give them something that makes problem-A easy to solve. Everything is a puzzle. You don’t need that much, but you need stuff that you can access and fire at will because if you know good notes to play, then you can play rhythmically. When you have failsafe harmonic intentions and systems, then we can start to take care of something that is very important, which is playing with good rhythm.
ZS: If you hadn’t pursued music full-time, what other career might you have followed?
EA: I have no idea. If I were good at playing baseball, I would have loved to play baseball. I thought about being a lawyer because I could run my mouth and get people acquitted as a defense lawyer, and I wouldn’t find that rewarding, but it is something I could do. Nothing even compares remotely to playing music for me. Music is number one. Johnny Griffin used to say, “Shut up talking about women and sports. The only thing that matters is music.” Music is the purest representation that there is some sort of supreme force in the universe because we really can’t explain why it sounds so good, but we know it does, and it’s a force for good.
ZS: Sideman versus bandleader: Do you have a preference, and why?
EA: I think they are equal, but being a leader is easier than being a sideman, which is much harder. If you are in a recording session, the leader gets to pick the take, so if on take five I played poorly, then that goes on wax, or in perpetuity, that I sucked on that tune. Thankfully, I have had a lot of opportunities to be a sideman because I am good at concentrating, and if I am in a dangerous place, I will keep myself in a very limited playpen. For example, if this tune is hard, I have to figure out how I am going to get through it in the easiest way that appeals to me. You don’t screw up as a sideman. All things being equal, you are just playing music, so I get joy out of both.
ZS: What projects are you currently working on?
EA: My new recording, Eric Alexander – Fifth Quadrant. From the making of that album to the lead-up to it, to the selection of the personnel and material, from beginning to end, it was a total joy. Those guys played so well, and when you have a rhythm section that is firing like that, the soloist is almost an afterthought, and that is how it should be. If you turn off John Coltrane’s solo on “Two Bass Hit” and just listen to Philly Joe Jones, Paul Chambers, and Red Garland, it would be worth the price of admission. If you surround yourself with people like that, you are not going to fall because you can’t sound bad. I was on tour with Jimmy Cobb in 2001 in Europe. I had a recorder with me and started recording the sets. We would finish the set, and I would go back to my hotel room and listen to that set, and it didn’t even matter what I was playing because the beat was so good from Jimmy Cobb, so a great rhythm section would bail out anyone.
ZS: What are your thoughts on equipment? How important is equipment, and how has your setup evolved?
EA: When I first discovered Bob Ackerman’s mouthpiece shop in Irvington, New Jersey, while in college, I thought I found a pot of gold since he had hundreds of vintage Links. I would spend hours there and then buy one. I remember calling my mom or dad and asking if I could please borrow $150. It was such a joy just to sit down, find a good reed, and play that metal Otto Link just to get THAT sound, as there is something special about it. In terms of equipment, even though I have played many different mouthpieces and recorded once on a Phil Barone mouthpiece, everything else is on a metal Otto Link. If I have a good setup, I would like to say I could play a beat-up Bundy and would still sound good. That being said, if you have a good setup and a saxophone that is operational and the intonation is good, then you’ve added another shelf of possibilities. The saxophone is such a bastard instrument. It’s bizarre, it sounds weird, it’s out of tune, and Lou Donaldson told me, “Pick a way to play every note on your horn, whether it’s out of tune or not, where the sound is best.” Saxophone is probably one of the only instruments we can say unequivocally that the best sound you can get on any note is the sound that sounds best, and it doesn’t matter if it is out of tune. That interaction with your physiology, the reed, and the mouthpiece is what you’ve got to have, and then the horn is next.
Equipment
Tenor:
- Saxophone: BetterSax Session – Matte Dark Gold
- Ligature: Vintage Otto Link ligature
- Reed: D’Addario Select Jazz Unfiled 3H
- Mouthpiece: Vintage Otto Link (2010), replated, with a 7 tip opening
- Case: GL Case or Bam Cabine, but my favorite case was a Berkeley hardshell case
- Neckstrap: BetterSax because it doesn’t slip and it’s thin and small
Connect:
