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too busy watching movies and television. But
when I finally got hooked into jazz, it was
because it seemed like a mystical path, not an art
institution, and the greatest musicians of that day
were philosophers and shamans—Miles Davis,
John Coltrane, Herbie Hancock. They could
alter your state, they had mystical properties that
could take you beyond the mind.”
Werner emphasized that he develops his
music from less of a technical angle, but rather
he allows his deep creative impulses to guide his
pursuits. “There’s this search for a force inside
of you,” he said. “It’s part depression, and part
questioning about the point of being an artist. In
the late 1980s and early 1990s, I began to wrestle
with this, and I concluded that anything is
cool if my mind is in a liberated state, and nothing
is cool if my mind is caught up in a delusion.
I began to focus on the spiritual passion of playing,
made it an accentuated force and then was
amazed to see the deep effect this playing had on
audiences and listeners. On stage or in the studio,
I’d be sitting in the middle of all this transformative
energy and be so happy. I allowed
myself to be in a state in which every note I
played was the most beautiful sound I had ever
heard. I was intoxicated.
“It is not about trying to give audiences more
good art than bad art,” he continued. “For many
years, I have been trying to satisfy a spiritual
hunger, and that’s what is important, not the
state of art. There is nothing worse than being an
artist stuck in a single mind-set regarding how
they should play.”
At Iridium, bassist Scott Colley and
drummer Antonio Sanchez accompanied
Werner. The trio warmed up with
the standard “If I Should Lose You.” Werner’s
wife, Lorraine, sat at a table in the back of the
club. The couple lives in Upstate New York,
near Kingston, and have recently dealt with the
tragic death of their daughter and only child,
Katheryn, in a car accident in 2006. In the trio’s
set, right before Thielemans hit the stage,
Werner introduced “Balloons,” which he told
the audience was written in celebration of one of
Katheryn’s birthdays. (One of Werner’s most
famous compositions, “Uncovered Heart,” was
written in honor of Katheryn’s birth in 1989.)
Thielemans, who has worked with Werner
over the last dozen years, said that Werner offers
him lessons on the bandstand every night. “He
has his own style, and can play any music, with
each song sounding great,” the harmonica player
said. “His facility with harmony and his research
in how we learn how to play music and derive
enjoyment and emotion from playing have made
a big impression on me. I love how he constructs
different ideas while improvising.”
Werner is a born entertainer. “I wanted to
sing as soon as I could walk and talk, then started
dancing lessons at 3,” he said. The youngest
of three sons, Werner said much of his musical
ability is from his father, Jack, a produce wholesaler
who played saxophone and had perfect
pitch. The family moved from Brooklyn to
Oceanside, N.Y.—out on Long Island—and at 7
Werner started playing piano, learning classical
music and some show tunes. “I went to a
friend’s birthday party, and his father started
playing the piano and was immediately the center
of attention,” he said. “That blew me away.
My parents rented a piano for me, and I could
play songs instantly by ear.”
Starting out at the Manhattan School of
Music as a concert piano major, Werner left
after a year and enrolled at the Berklee College
of Music, where he fell in with the jazz musicians
there, including Joe Lovano, Joey Baron
and John Scofield. A turning point was an introduction
to Miles Davis’ In A Silent Way, “which
featured some of the greatest jazz soloists ever,
and yet you aren’t conscious of their soloing on
the record,” Werner said. This paradigm continues
to be evident in Werner’s own quintet/sextet
recordings like Uncovered Heart and Paintings,
the 2006 live date Democracy (Half Note) and
last year’s Lawn Chair Society (Blue Note).
Werner writes most of his music “by
scratch,” starting with a couple of notes he likes.
“I usually don’t know where I’m going,” he
46 DOWNBEAT September 2008