With Originals, Jeff Fuller Finds His New Groove

Local jazz luminary Jeff Fuller and his upright bass invoked the ghosts of jazz past, bending these specters to his modern will. His head tilted toward the strings, as if the bass were telling him a secret.

It was both a tête-à-tête and a séance — a humdinger put on display on Oct. 7 at the 9th Note nightclub on Orange Street. With pianist Darren Litzie to his right and drummer Ben Bilello to his left, Fuller was the helmsman at the rudder for a trip unlike any he’s embarked on before.

“Tonight’s a little bit of a different night for me, for us, for you,” Fuller said in his opening remarks.

Since October, for the first time in Fuller’s over 40-year career, he has been recording an album full of original compositions. No jazz standards or old classics. Just Fuller.

The music has, in his own words, ​“gestated” in his head for quite a while, since as far back as the 1990s or as recently as this past summer. The 9th Note performance, presented by Jazz Haven, was the band’s third effort to ​“break in” this backlog of material.

“We’re all looking for new sounds, new ways to play old sounds,” he said. ​“It’s risky, trying to do something that’s not always done, to play original music. It’s intimidating, you know, to say ​‘here, this is what I am musically.’”

Contrafacts — jazz compositions that borrow or slightly alter familiar chord progressions — made up over a third of the 13 songs played.

Fuller, recipient of the 2014 Jazz Haven Award, made it a point to highlight his unhurried process. He absorbs the sounds coming into his ears, allowing the material to regenerate into something entirely different.

When he comes up with a sound that is his own, he writes it down. He tackles this new music through various angles, reworking it, lengthening it, and revising it until he arrives at a finished product.

More often than not, Fuller said, he gets out of bed with the songs already in his head.

“You may have heard these notes before but never in these combinations,” he said as he introduced one of his new ditties, ​“Two Months Past,” a contrafact. ​“It came to me out of the blue just as I was waking one morning. A lot of songs come out this way.”

The haphazard encounters with music underscore the playful nature of Fuller’s creative process and execution. ​“June Bug,” a jazz waltz, is another song that rattled in his brain until he sat down and composed it. During its performance, Fuller’s left fingers tap-danced on the strings — a digital Fred Astaire leading a waltz along the neck of the bass.

Fuller’s ​“Where Did April Go?” buoyed itself up by a droll backstory. Decades ago, Fuller’s cat April disappeared the day after he spent $175 at the veterinarian’s office, inspiring this frisky melody. He closed his eyes as he played, weaving together what sounded like the soundtrack to a stroll. One could imagine April wandering about, discovering her new surroundings.

Fuller also introduced a few bossa nova – infused tunes during the show, no doubt inspired by his involvement with Sambeleza, a group dedicated to Brasilian music.

He gave one of these songs, a slow and meandering samba, the title of ​“Girando,” the Portuguese word for ​“spinning.”

“I think you’ll get that feel from listening,” Fuller said, and the topsy-turvy piano riffs took the audience’s ears for an amusing whirl.

The compositions remain in flux, Fuller told the Independent last month, as the group might alter some sounds here and there as they record them in the studio. For Fuller, it’s all part of a necessary, organic process.

“It’s time to try and get my music out to the public,” he said.

But why wait so long? Has the New Haven jazz scene been conducive to producing original compositions?

“That’s a good question,” he replied. ​“We’ll see.”