Ralph Peterson 35th Annual Student Music Awards - Downbeat

Scott tixier
Feeling Rhythms
For someone who demonstrates such a
strong acumen for penning compositions
bursting with singable melodies, sly counterpoints,
vivacious rhythms and sterling harmonies,
26-year-old violinist Scott Tixier says
that he doesn’t overthink his tunes. If fact, he
argues that for his music, improvisation ranks
above compositional guile in terms of importance.
“Improvisation is something that I really
like to put up front,” he explains. “So when
I compose, I think about the same things while
I’m improvising, except that I can go back and
change things. The main thing is that I use my
ears first. When I try to analyze too much, the
music usually isn’t anything that I want.”
On a blustery late-February Saturday afternoon
at Colson Patisserie in the Brooklyn
neighborhood Park Slope, Tixier, with violin
case in hand, has to rehearse later in the
day for a weekly burlesque show at the supper
club Duane Park. Since arriving in Brooklyn
from Paris in 2008, Tixier has made the most
of his new home. His debut, Brooklyn Bazaar
(Sunnyside), deftly captures the cosmopolitan
character of the borough with a set of nine
original compositions that optimize gripping
grooves and sophisticated interplay. He fronts
an emphatic quintet of Brooklyn-based musicians,
whom he says he recruited because they
lived in his Prospect Park neighborhood.
Some of standout selections include the
Afrocentric “Bushwick Party,” on which
Tixier’s violin dances across Arthur Vint’s
jubilant drum patterns and Jesse Elder’s
punchy piano accompaniments; the mesmerizing
“Arawaks,” where guest vocalist Emile
Weibel applies her ghostly wordless vocalizations
parallel to Douglas Bradford’s featherlight
guitar lines; and the r&b-laden “Elephant
Rose,” in which Massimo Biolcati’s initial bass
line resembles that of Stevie Wonder’s “I Can’t
Help It” (made famous by Michael Jackson and
recently recorded by Esperanza Spalding).
Tixier recalls that when he first penned
“Elephant Rose,” his piano-playing twin brother,
Tony, told him that the song sounded too
much like the 1979 Jackson recording. The
violinist theorizes that because he and his
mother, a modern jazz dancer, used to dance
to Jackson’s material, the bass part probably
came to him by osmosis. When he speaks of
his mother’s profession as well as his own tenure
as a modern dancer, the rhythmic spark in
his material makes all the more sense.
“Rhythm is something that I really dig but
not in an intellectual way,” Tixier explains.
“Even for the song that’s in 7/8, I’m not trying
ChRiS dRukkER
to play those rhythms because I want to sound
smart; it’s because I feel them. When I feel the
rhythmic flow of a song, I feel really free to
improvise in any key.”
Tixier grew up in Montreuil, a suburb east
of Paris. Along with his brother, Tixier began
studying classical music when he was 5 years
old. But it wasn’t until he was 13—when he
attended a music festival in southern France—
that the jazz bug bit him. Soon after, Tixier
absorbed a lot of Stéphane Grappelli and eventually
discovered Stuff Smith and Jean-Luc
Ponty. When Tixier was 14, he met Ponty, who
encouraged him to leave Paris for the United
States in hopes of gaining more performance
opportunities. “He was my sponsor; he wrote
the letter for immigration,” Tixier says. Ponty
then suggested Tixier to a litany of jazz stars
such as Marcus Miller, Stanley Clarke, Pat
Metheny and Chick Corea.
Before Tixier got settled in New York, he
stayed with another leading violinist, Mark
Feldman, to whom Tixier pays homage on
“Shopping With Mark F.” Tixier crashed in
Feldman’s office room for two days upon his
arrival in the States; he now says that it was a
great learning experience. “I heard him practice
from 9 a.m. to 11 p.m. every day,” Tixier
remembers.
Tixier is still delving deeper inside the New
York jazz scene, playing frequently with the
likes of Lonnie Plaxico, Anthony Braxton and
Sheila Jordan. In addition to that and promoting
Brooklyn Bazaar, he has his sights on the
follow-up disc, one that’ll involve his twin
brother as they’ll investigate a batch of jazz
standards. —John Murph
JUNE 2012 DoWNBEAt 23