Jazz Giant Gary Burton Celebrating New Quartet, CD And Autobiography

Celebrating the 70th year of his birth, Gary Burton, the seven-time Grammy Award-winning jazz giant, premier vibraphonist, bandleader, innovative college educator and discoverer and nurturer of young talent, is on the road again promoting his latest disc, “Guided Tour,” with his acclaimed New Gary Burton Quartet.

With a brilliant career spanning a half century — including early stints with such jazz legends as George Shearing and Stan Getz, followed by remarkable artistic achievements with his own all-star bands and classic collaborations with lifelong friends like Chick Corea and Pat Metheny — Burton has much to celebrate as he leads his New Gary Burton Quartet (NGBQ) on Thursday, Sept. 26 at 7:30 p.m. at the University of Connecticut’s Jorgensen Center for the Performing Arts on the Storrs campus.

Burton and his co-celebrants, the phenomenal, young guitarist Julian Lage (the mallet master’s most recent protégé in a royal succession of guitar greats); bassist Scott Colley and drummer Antonio Sanchez grace the 2013-2014 season opener of Jorgensen’s popular cabaret series. With its intimate, candlelit table-top setting, the series’ nightclub ambience complements Burton’s signature style, a luminously lyrical but also emotionally-fiery brand of chamber jazz.

Burton’s career has been filled with innovative accomplishments, both as a musician and as an influential, long serving educator at Berklee College of Music. These range from his early pioneering experiments in fusing jazz and rock, even blending jazz and country, to his development of Berklee’s first online courses, among other breakthroughs on both the bandstand and in the classroom.

Burton, a jazz improviser who’s a master of the sound of surprise, comes up with one of his biggest surprises ever, with the publication this month of his new, compelling, candid autobiography, “Learning to Listen: The Jazz Journey of Gary Burton” (Berklee Press). It is, by far, one of the best, most insightful, deeply self-analytical jazz memoirs in recent memory, a book written by Burton (sometimes seemingly in blood), with an editing credit for Neil Tesser.

Rather amazingly, it turns out that Burton, in his triumphant debut as a full-fledged author, can actually write, and write quite well, clearly, cogently and with an amusing, even self-deprecating sense of humor.

His life story itself has biopic written all over it, from an early scenario featuring little Gary, a child prodigy, playing across the rural heartland with his lovable, all-American family’s touring vaudeville band. One of “The Burton Family” troupe’s highlights featured the multi-talented boy wonder and future jazz great in a show-stopping dance number in which he simultaneously tap-danced while playing “Bye Bye Blues” on the marimba.

On his adventurous life’s journey from Indiana country boy to international jazz sophisticate, Burton encounters and performs with a colorful cast of jazz characters, as well as meeting no less fascinating, figures from other musical worlds. Among these are country greats like Hank Garland, classical composer Samuel Barber and the great tango genius, Astor Piazzolla, with whom Burton quite happily collaborated to great acclaim. Among the anecdote-packed rembrances of things past, there’s even a brief, odd, but quite funny encounter with B.F. Skinner, the famous behavioral psychologist and social philosopher.

Openly and most eloquently, Burton writes in a chapter titled “Who Is Gary Burton?” about coming out as a gay man for the first time officially in 1994 in an interview with Terry Gross on NPR’s “Fresh Air.” By then, Burton, who had long been deeply conflicted about his sexual orientation, was already in his 40s, had been married and divorced twice and had two children, a now adult son and daughter.

After years of internal struggle and ambivalence, he writes in “Learning to Listen” of his ultimate and liberating realization of who he actually is, was and always will be.

“I knew that I had to understand the crosscurrents that had churned just below the surface throughout my life…I had the ‘aha’ moment where I fully realized: I’m gay, and I always have been gay,” he writes. “I could hardly believe it had taken so long to see this. I had buried my true feelings for such a long time. I had kept them secret not only from everyone else, but from myself, too—all to avoid threatening the career I loved, and the life I believed society expected me to lead.”

Along with deeply personal and serious aesthetic matters, the book, which is a good read, is also seasoned with Burton’s often trenchant reflections on people and places, all tempered with his perceptive sense of humor, which lives up to the familiar image of the jazz musician as a great, amusing storyteller.

His account of a hilariously catastrophic concert at Carnegie Hall that featured a hapless, blind organist named Joe Mooney, a wheelchair-bound Stan Getz and a hyper Dionne Warwick struggling to walk across the stage in oversized, Kleenex-stuffed silver lame shoes, is like a madcap scenario right out of the Marx Brothers’ “A Night at the Opera.”

Recently, The Courant chatted by phone with Burton from his home in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., where he lives with his husband, Jonathan Chong, his companion of 8 1/2 years whom he had married a month earlier.

Q: What motivated you to write your autobiography?

A: Reflecting back, I began to realize that my story had some unique issues that were not the typical jazz story, besides the fact that I had discovered, or figured out, that I was gay at some point along the way, and that I had this dual life of teaching and playing. The more I got into it, the more I felt like I had something to say.

Q: What was the hardest part to write about?

A: The hardest parts were writing about people I’m still close to, namely Chick Corea and Pat Metheny, who I still tour with, record with and play with. I found it much easier to write about Stan Getz, for instance, because I could look back on the entire Getz experience, which had a beginning, middle and an end, a full package.

But with people I’m still currently involved with, it’s still a work in progress. So I struggled when I got to them. But I couldn’t leave them out because they were among the most important musicians in my career. That gave me the most difficulty.

Q: How did you strike and maintain that candid tone, not whitewashing your life, people and events you knew all about?

A: Part of my preparation for writing the book was to read as many jazz bios as I could, particularly about people that I actually knew, like Stan Getz, George Shearing or Duke Ellington and others.

The main thing I noticed from doing that was that everything was pretty much, ‘Oh, everybody played great and the music went great.’ And then, in some bios, comes the obligatory, ‘Well, I was a drug addict for a while, but I got over it.’

It just seemed to me that the books never really say the kind of things that I am used to hearing from fellow musicians in the car when we’re driving to Cleveland for eight hours, and everybody’s talking and being very forthright about who they like, who they don’t like and why, and the great stories they have to tell.

Q: As part of the candor, you’re also quite self-critical. Why is that?

A: I wanted to not come off like I was flattering myself too much. I’m well aware of the mistakes I’ve made and the weaknesses that I have, and the various confusions I’ve dealt with over my life.

That whole thing about ‘learning to listen,’ the book’s title and good advice for anybody, became a key for me. The three main themes of my book are my jazz life, my gay life and my teaching life. And in each case there was a lot of soul-searching, a lot of sitting quietly and getting answers from intuitions and from what I call my ‘inner player.’ I was trying to figure out how things work creatively.

Q: What was your writing experience like?

A: For about a dozen years I kept trying to make a start at it. I had collected about 100 or 150 index cards filled with anecdotes and ideas. Every time I would think of something that might be interesting to write about, I would make a little note to myself and keep it in my stack of cards that I kept a little rubber band around.

Q: You used to lug around a duffel bag full of books when on the road. Have you converted to e-books?

A: I love what has happened with e-books, which means I can carry dozens of books around with me now when I travel, all on my iPad. I read constantly and switch from book to book, trying out books. When I read a book review of something that sounds interesting, I can quickly download a copy and check it out.

Before e-books, I always carried six or eight books with me, and was afraid I’d run out when I was traveling in foreign countries. I’d say, ‘God, I won’t be able to buy any books in English for the next four weeks. I’ve got to make do with what I have until then.’

Q: Did anything that you read as prep for writing your autobiography discourage you at all?

A: The book that I read that almost caused me to give up this project was Sting’s autobiography. He’s such a fantastic writer. It’s like poetry. By the time I finished his book, I almost said, ‘Oh, I shouldn’t be doing this.’

I never thought that I would write books someday, but I felt I’m just going to give this my best shot, and hope I’ll be honest enough to see at the end if it was up to the standard that I would want.

Q: You seem to observe things — even small but telling character traits — more like a novelist than a jazz memoirist. Was that deliberate?

A: I was really trying for that. In fact, I even toyed with the idea of writing the book in the third person, of writing about this jazz musician who was meeting all these people and having all these experiences. I thought about it and thought about it, but decided I didn’t have the writing chops to pull that off. I decided it was easier to write it as if I were sitting right across from you telling you my stories.

Q: When you were writing the drafts, did you ever confer with friends about what you had written?

A: I did. After I went through a couple drafts, I decided that I needed some feedback. Up until then only my friend, the Chicago jazz writer Neil Tesser, had seen it, offering some suggestions and doing some fact checking for me on dates, etc. I started choosing people, including fellow musicians like Pat Metheny, my manager Ted Kurland, my ex-wife and my two kids. I wanted to get feedback both from people who were jazz fans and from people who weren’t, to see what they thought.

Q: How did that influence your writing?

A: I tried to make the book as readable for the average person as possible. I stayed away from too much technical jargon. And I made sure that when I wrote the little portrait boxes of people, like Hampton and Ellington, I gave their history. I didn’t presume that the reader already knew everything about them.

I tried to focus on the things that only I knew about them, leaving out, as much as possible, the things that you can look up on the web or read about in other bios. When Neil suggested that I stick to things that I had actually experienced with these figures, I shortened most of those bios by half.

Q: What’s been the early response so far?

A: The people who have been most congratulatory — and this surprised me — have been professional writers. I thought that would be the toughest crowd. I figured they would read it and say, ‘Oh, here’s an amateurish thing that I wouldn’t have done.’

I thought professional writers reading my writing would be like me listening to somebody’s demo record. I’d hear every weakness and every flaw, or, maybe, hear how good it is. Nothing gets by me since I’ve been listening to and doing this music for 50 years.

So, I figured writers are not going to be understanding about an amateur like me writing his own book. But I’ve been really pleasantly surprised by the compliments that I’ve gotten so far.

Q: You deal with this issue so eloquently in the book, but what was the experience of coming out like for you?

A: I started coming out in the late ’80s to friends and family members. So friends like Chick Corea and Pat Metheny knew about this before I did the NPR interview with Terry Gross, but the general audience wouldn’t have known. I consider Terry’s interview my big coming out because suddenly I was getting tons of letters in the mail from people who had heard the show.

Q: Were you apprehensive about any potentially bad impact from that interview, an electronic way of coming out?

A: I was prepared when I was coming out for some negative blowback. I thought it might be a problem at Berklee, or it might be a problem with some of the musicians I knew who might not call me so much anymore for projects.

I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I had accepted who I am and how I wanted to live. I didn’t want to keep trying to hide it. So, I thought, if there’s any momentum lost along the way because of coming out, I’ll just deal with that and settle for what I’ve got.

None of that ever happened. I never got a single angry or negative letter because of the NPR interview. And certainly among my friends and family, not a single person said to me, ‘I can’t handle this. I disapprove.’ Or, ‘You need help,’ or maybe ‘It’s a passing phase. Are you really sure about this?’

Q: What did you think of this positive result with no blowback?

A: I felt very fortunate.

I joked and said, ‘I’ve either got great taste in friends, or people are actually accepting this more than we realize.’ And I think it’s probably both of those things.

But even back in the late ’80s, when I told my ex-wife — by then we had been divorced a couple years —- the first thing she said was, ‘Oh, Gary, who cares! It’s the ’80s.’ like that was real modern times.

I was nervous about the impact coming out might have, but by the early ’90s, it was common knowledge, and, if anything, my career has gone even better in these two or three decades that have followed. At this point, I can hardly remember what it was like not to be out.

The New Gary Burton Quartet performs Thursday, Sept. 26, at 7:30 p.m. in the cabaret series at UConn’s Jorgensen Center for the Performing Arts, 2132 Hillside Road, Storrs. Tickets: $60 for cabaret tables; $51 risers (floor); $44, mezzanine; and $40, balcony, with some discounts available. Tickets and information: box office at 860-486-4226 or online at www.jorgensen.uconn.edu.