LARRY CORYELL: SHOOTING FOR ‘LEVEL ONE’ BY MARK KMETZKO SCENE MAGAZINE: JULY 8 - 14, 1976

Reviews of Larry Coryell are often laden with high praise for the guitarist’s taste, technique and power, yet when you look at the musician's long career, it is his adaptability and willingness to change that has most distinguished him from the 1000’s of guitar players on the jazz and rock scenes today. 

I would imagine much of his chameleonic behavior is owing to his early college days, during which he played in two Seattle bands, one rock and one jazz. As the story goes, he played with the rock band early in the evening, and then joined the jazz group for the later sets. Coryell‘s ability to go “both ways” followed him through work with Chico Hamilton, Gary Burton and Herbie Mann, and through his own early solo albums on Vanguard, but his rock/jazz training truly paid off when the two musics became so intertwined in the late sixties. 
Coryell was one step ahead of most of his competition in blending technique and imagination with sheer power, and he quickly moved into the spotlight as one of the two musics' top players.
Not satisfied with this position, Coryell gave further indication of his adaptability by injecting bits of funk into his music, when it became clear that both jazz and rock were headed in that direction. 

Since his record label switch just over a year ago from Vanguard to Arista, this R&B feel has been particularly apparent, making Level One and Aspects (his last two albums) a very good “now” combination of rock, jazz and soul – plus a semi-classical acoustic guitar piece thrown in once in a while for good measure.
On stage, Coryell and his band, The Eleventh House, remain true to the variety of their records, keeping the shows constantly fresh and interesting.
The lineup of keyboardist Mike Mandel, bassist John Lee, drummer Gerry Brown and newly acquired Japanese trumpet legend Terumaso Hino - with their myriad influences - further pushes and pulls Coryell in the many directions that have come to characterize his music.
The guitarist discussed his hard-to-pin-down music, his new album, and his career in general, with SCENE recently while in Cleveland for a concert at the Agora.

SCENE:  The new album is a little more R&B-influenced than the last. 

Coryell:  Well, that was the whole point. The last one was so esoteric, and we wanted to present aspects, various aspects, so we’ve got everything from “Rodrigo Reflections”, which is acoustic non-rock music, to the other stuff which is in the opposite direction.  Plus all the stuff in between.  

SCENE: I wondered if the increased R&B influence was meant to reflect the direction in which jazz is moving today.

Coryell:  Yes, that’s true, but we just did it because we wanted to make some good, thinking man’s funk.  Not for children, but some futuristic, innovative funk.  People with advanced minds are listening to music that stimulates more than just the intellectual.  It’s the feeling of something good.  You got to have a good beat and you got to have something funky in order to grab the people.  And once you grab their attention, maybe they’ll listen to the rest of the album which has the more esoteric, the more virtuosic.  We try to reflect a balanced section of aspects for this record.

SCENE:  What do you think of Weather Report, one of the bands that got this whole R&B thing started?

Coryell:  I’m prejudiced against Weather Report; they don’t like me.  Wayne shorter and Joe Zawinul are great players, but I think the band is tremendously overrated.  They remind me of an old R&B group I used to go hear in Seattle when I was a college kid. I think Wayne Shorter is holding the future of the tenor saxophone between his two fingers and pissing on it.  I’m not gonna deny their talent, especially when the two guys play spontaneously together.  That’s taking me to some of the highest heights I’ve ever been to.  Their TALE SPINNIN' album is a studio masterpiece, but then you go and see them try to create it live and…they’re just not that great.

SCENE:  One of the funkier numbers on ASPECTS is "Ain't It Is".  Will that be a single?

Coryell:  The rest of promotion people like it for a single, and what I'd like to do is put vocals on it and release it as a single.  My managers took steps to have "Ain't It Is" taken off the record, and I called 'em up and said I was going to get new managers immediately, if they didn’t put it back on the record.  They're still back in the Mahavishnu era as far as music is concerned.  They don’t understand a lot of my music.

SCENE:  The trumpet/guitar combination in your band is a strange one.

Coryell:  I had always wanted Randy Brecker in one of my bands, so when I fired Steve Marcus [who played saxes- Ed.] in 1973, I did so in order to get Randy to play with me. From that point on, we saw the Eleventh House identity as defined by a trumpet.  We tried it without a trumpet for a while, and it didn’t work.  When we got Hino, the new trumpet player, the spark came back. I think he has a fantastic future.  He’s new in the states, but he’s like Christ in Japan.

SCENE:  How did you originally get together with him?

Coryell:  Our bass player found him.  He found out about Hino while doing a date in Europe and suggested him when I was looking all around New York for a trumpet player. After the second rehearsal with him, I said “You’ve got the gig if you want it“.  It was a beautiful merger.  I love playing with the cat; I find it so easy to work off his ideas and vice versa. 

SCENE:  Has he brought any Eastern music ideas into the band?

Coryell:  No, man, he’s jazz.  Screw that Eastern shit; he wants to play jazz.

SCENE:  The Eleventh House seems to be a pretty democratic organization in terms of writing.

Coryell:  That is part of the original concept of the Eleventh House.  We want to have freedom within the structure. The freedom was easy to have, but nobody could figure out the structure, so I said “That’s easy; everybody write somethin'.“  And that’s how we’ve been doing it.

SCENE:  But you’re still the leader.

Coryell:  I’ve come to realize that my writing is far superior to everybody else’s in the band. This year, especially, I don’t know where it’s coming from, but the writing's been coming out of the woodwork.  My astrologist tells me I’m mainly a messenger from the outer planets - Pluto, Uranus, Neptune.  Especially Neptune, which rules music.  She says as long as I keep my channels open, I will be the given assignment of writing twice as much as I’m writing now.

SCENE:  How much control do you exercise over the members of your band?

Coryell:  I choose the best possible musicians I can in order to have them go out and do their thing.  They’re there not only to enhance my band, but also to enhance their own reputation, which I feel is a deserving one.  John Lee and Gerry Brown, I feel, deserve to be heard.  I feel Hino deserves to be heard.  It’s my duty to be leader of the whole thing, and if I don’t do that well, then it’s nobody’s fault but mine.  There are times when you should be very dictatorial and there are times when you should be very passive.  But ALWAYS, if you have something to say to your band, if you just let it fly out, it will be received wrong. But if you put it in the proper framework, then a message can be communicated.  These are lessons I’ve had to learn the hard way.

SCENE:  You said before that this year you’ve been writing an unusual amount.  Can you see why?

Coryell:  This is the first time I’ve had a really good year - in terms of total integration of all things.  A lot of my potential has not been realized in the past because I haven’t learned how to overcome certain obstacles.  Now that I am becoming aware of how to overcome these obstacles, I’m starting to get where I want to go.

SCENE:  Mental obstacles?

Coryell:  Mental, emotional, everything.  I’m just finally getting myself together, after years of screwing around and pretending not to care and really caring.  It’s knowing how to reach higher states of awareness.  Now that I feel I’m on the path to becoming more aware of myself, I feel that everything else in the career will follow, according to the divine plan.

SCENE:  Are you reaching this through meditation or some other kind of discipline?

Coryell:  I can’t go in the corner and meditate and get inspiration like that; I have to do something physical like play tennis.  And usually I write a song after I get really good and well laid.

SCENE:  Does the physical thing extend to you’re playing as well as writing?

Coryell:  Yes.  The only level I like to reach is the level where it’s super exciting – not super loud – but when I’m really on.  I’m always shooting for, what I call, "level one." Unfortunately, you don’t always get it, but I’m always trying for that brass ring up there.  I guess that’s what life‘s all about.