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Bassist and producer and Blue Note President Don Was had a “transcendent moment” at the recent Rock Hall induction ceremony that took place earlier this year in Los Angeles. At the event, he performed with Elton John as part of a moving tribute to the late Brian Wilson.
“It was beautiful, man,” says Was via phone from Los Angeles, where he was attending to the Blue Note duties that ranged from the “mundane to the poetic.” Don Was performs with his Pan-Detroit Ensemble at 8 p.m. on Saturday, Jan. 17, at the Beachland Ballroom. “I was real close with Brian and so was Elton. I really wanted to do it to honor Brian. I wanted to do the song [‘God Only Knows’] justice. It was quite moving. I go back to the ’90s with him. At one moment, I signed him to a label and directed a documentary in 1996 called I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times. We remained friendly. I played on ‘The Last Song.’ It was an intense experience. I was sitting in a room with several musicians and I remember [drummer] Jim Keltner was there. He put the chords down and Brian didn’t tell us what was happening. We started learning the song and I realized it was his coda. It was called ‘The Last Song.’ I looked at Jim, and we both started crying. I was honored that he asked me to play on it.”
Was’s musical history dates back decades. In 1966, Was, who grew up in Detroit, discovered the city’s local jazz station. He particularly gravitated to one guy, Ed Love, who’s in his 90s now and is still on WDET, who played great music and promoted shows in Detroit.
“For the most part, I was too young to get into the clubs,” says Was. “I remember John Coltrane playing the Drome Lounge, which was connected to the Air Drome Bowling Alley in a rough part of town. We just couldn’t get down there. We couldn’t drive. But I often went to Baker’s Keyboard Lounge, which is the oldest jazz club in the country. I remember seeing Bill Evans and Charles Mingus. For the most part, I had to go to shows that had no age limit. George Wayne used to take a Newport Jazz Festival package around twice a year. I got to see the Miles Davis Quintet there.”
In addition, Was was a “rock ’n’ roll kid” who followed Detroit proto-punks the MC5 and radical writer John Sinclair. His Pan Detroit Ensemble, a jazz band featuring musicians from his Detroit hometown, represents a dream come true for him. Famous for his pop-funk 1980s band Was (Not Was), Was heads in a different direction with the Pan Detroit Ensemble, a group that reflects Detroit’s history as a blue-collar town.
“It’s an incredible thing in Detroit,” he says. “I can’t quite explain it. There’s an inordinate number of jazz musicians from Detroit on the Blue Note roster. There’s Donald Byrd, Joe Henderson, Curtis Fuller, Kenny Burrell, Hank Jones, Ron Carter, Paul Chambers and it goes on. There’s a staggering number. There’s something intrinsic in the music of Detroit that is relevant all over the world and resonates. There’s a universal spine to Detroit music. There’s a rawness and honesty that come from a working class town.”
Was traces the idea for the Pan-Detroit Ensemble to an idea he had as a teenager and says the concept has percolated in his mind for decades.
“I remember in 1968 walking home from high school thinking of how cool it would be to have Miles Davis and Merle Haggard in a band together,” he says. “I could hear what that would sound like. I was always facing that. If I have a complaint about the music we made with Was (Not Was), it’s that you can see the seams where we sewed the rock and R&B and jazz together. I wish it were a little more seamless. That’s what I always heard. I knew it would require some work to chase it up and realize that sound. If that’s the thing that is your vision, it can be frightening to chase it and run the risk of not getting it, especially on the world stage. I always put it off. There were always other things to do.”
By “other things to do,” he means producing records for acts such as the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, the B-52’s, Wayne Shorter, John Mayer and Charles Lloyd. As a film composer, he won the 1994 British Academy Award (BAFTA) for Best Original Score in recognition of his work on the film Backbeat. If that weren’t enough, in 2018, he joined Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir to form the Wolf Brothers.
A couple of years ago, jazz great Terence Blanchard called Was because he was curating a series of Detroit jazz for the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.
“He asked me to do a night, and I said I would,” says Was. “He asked me about two years in advance, and about six months before, I realized I had to put a band together. I wasn’t sure how to start. I went back to Detroit and got back with some people who listened to the same music, so we could all speak the language of Detroit.”
The Pan Detroit band includes saxophonist Dave McMurray, Eminem’s Oscar-winning collaborator keyboardist Luis Resto, trombonist Vincent Chandler, trumpeter John Douglas, drummer Jeff Canaday, percussionist Mahindi Masai, guitarist Wayne Gerard and singer Steffanie Christi’an.
“We just got together to play, but the minute we started playing together, it felt like we’d been playing together for decades,” says Was. “It was really comfortable. When you have that chemistry, it’s not to be taken lightly, so we have kept doing it.”
Earlier this year, the group released Groove in the Face of Adversity, a collection of live and studio recordings the band has made in the past year. The group recorded the studio songs at the Detroit studio where it rehearses.
Was first heard “Midnight Marauders,” one of the album’s highlights, in a hotel room in France. He wanted to cover “This Is My Country,” a Curtis Mayfield tune, because it speaks so well to our troubled times.
“The Impressions did ‘This Is My Country’ back in the ’60s,” he says when asked about the track. “I played it on my radio show and thought it was more relevant today than it was in the 1960s. We didn’t see that coming. I didn’t think it would get worse. It seemed like an important statement to make, and we started closing the shows with it.”
The group flexes its funk skills on “Insane,” which comes from the band’s very first rehearsal.
“We just wanted to see how broad a swath we could cut stylistically,” he says of the band’s first rehearsal. “We go from Henry Threadgill to ‘Insane,’ which is a cover of a Cameo song. It was clear that we could dabble in anything and still sound like that group of nine musicians. That was meant to be a test to the parameters. But when we started playing it, it felt so comfortable. Everybody in this band listening to the same radio stations and playing in the same bars and with the same musicians. If you listen to the groove, that could have been a Was (Not Was) song. We slid into that so comfortably. I knew we could those kinds of songs. You never want to be like karaoke. You want to put your own stamp on a song if you didn’t write it. I felt like we Detroit-icized Cameo a bit.”
The show will also feature a performance of the Grateful Dead album Blues for Allah.
“It’s the 50th anniversary of the album,” says Was. “I played half of those songs with Bob Weir, so I know them and enjoy them. We learned them and found our own way to play them, so we’re not doing Grateful Dead karaoke. Promoters wanted to book it, so in every show on this next tour, in the interior of the show, we’ll do the whole album. It’s really great.”
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