As Jeff Fuller curled his hand around the neck of his upright bass, Duke Ellington crept into the room.
The spirit of the late legendary jazz composer had arrived in order to help guide Fuller’s fingers up and down the fretless neck.
Fuller, a mainstay of New Haven’s jazz scene for the past 40 years, was summoning Ellington’s spirit Tuesday inside the WNHH FM studio during a conversation on the “Dateline New Haven” program.
He brought his Upton bass fiddle — which he named Henry David (as in Thoreau) — to help him prepare for the annual Ellington Jazz Series, which takes place in Yale’s Morse Recital Hall.
Fuller plans to perform Ellington’s “Sophisticated Lady” when his ensemble headlines the series’ concert on Friday, Sept. 18.
In the WNHH studio, he agreed to demonstrate how he plans to introduce the number: alone on bass. He plucked some notes up and down the neck, occasionally hitting two strings at once. He paused. In the empty musical space, he looked off into space, at Ellington’s invisible presence. Fuller resumed traversing the neck, his fingers flitting along the strings as though traversing a keyboard, at one point sliding two strings in tandem, leading up to …
… the point at which, when he performs at Morse, a vocalist named Naomi Wharry will pick up the melody, followed by drums and piano.
You can watch Fuller play the intro in the above video clip.
In the above video, you can hear Ellington’s own introduction to “Sophisticated Lady” back when he recorded a version of it in 1966. Ellington played that introduction solo on piano. A horn player, not a vocalist, then picked up the melodic theme.
Fuller played some of the same notes in his solo bass introduction. He played some different notes. He varied the phrasing, while producing a similar vibe.
You could call that improvising. But not purely making stuff up: Fuller was paying tribute to the master, offering his own twist while building on, not replacing, the original.
After playing the intro, Fuller talked about it.
“I’m just trying to pay respects to Duke Ellington as a composer,” he said. When he slides down the neck two strings at a time (a “double stop”), “I’m emulating what a pianist would do.”
Next week’s Ellington concert will pay respects to Ellington not just through Ellington-penned songs, but others in the jazz tradition, including some of Fuller’s own original tunes. Six musicians will accompany Fuller, spanning five decades in age. They include professional musicians he has mentored as a teacher as well as older pros with whom he has performed over the years.
The concert is a full-circle moment for Fuller, who’s going strong as a performer at 80 years old.
He first played the Morse Hall (then Sprague Hall) stage 60 years ago as a Yale music student.
He played jazz guitar then. He graduated into New Haven’s jazzstream, regularly gigging at lcoal clubs.
New Haven had three top jazz bassists on the scene, Fuller recalled — all three of whom left town around the same time.
“There were gigs, but no bass players. So I picked up a bass, a little bass guitar, and started playing,” he recalled. He never turned back.
Fuller eventually moved to New York, got regular gigs, played with top band leaders like Dizzy Gillespie and Lou Donaldson, went on tours around the world. He returned to New Haven in 1986, and settled here. He became an instructor at Educational Center for the Arts and the Yale Jazz Initiative. He has been a mainstay at jazz gigs large and small throughout the region as both a combo leader and a supporting player.
“I often say, ‘I don’t play the bass. I play the music,'” Fuller said.
“It means that my role as a bass player is to provide rhythm and harmony. But more so, it is to speak the language, to play the language of jazz in a way that’s that’s pays homage to the past and moves towards the future.”
Like with the intro to “Sophisticated Lady.”
He said his approach comes down to “respecting the composer. … It could be very avant-garde. It could be very angular. It could be very quiet. It could be very loud. It could be very dense. It could be very thin. In whatever way we choose to play it, don’t forget we’re playing that composer. So in a sense we’re saying, ‘Here is this composition again.'”
Click on the below video to watch the full conversation with Jeff Fuller on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven.” Click here to subscribe or here to listen to other episodes of “Dateline New Haven.” Click here for tickets to Fuller’s Sept. 18 Ellington Jazz Series concert at Morse Recital Hall.
