Live in Manila: Chris Botti!

Quite a freebie treat did music lovers enjoyed two Fridays ago at the Greenbelt 5 Fashion Walk, courtesy of Radio High 105.9 and its head honcho Francis Lumen. 

Promenaders were surprised to see a concert stage crop up to face rows of spectator seats under a makeshift tent where ramps used to be set up for seasonal fashion displays. Otherwise the area simply serves as a plaza that leads to gardens flanked by restos — oh, and the giant Swatch watch that pays allegiance to the Yellow Army now under PNoy.

In the afternoon of Nov. 4, trumpet maestro Chris Botti faced some media peeps for a brisk press-con at the Shangri-La Manila hotel in Makati, where he and his band were billeted for a one-night gig before proceeding to Seoul.

The 49-year-old Botti, who has recorded a dozen increasingly popular music albums, has been much in demand for concerts in various world cities. Last September he performed twice with Andrea Bocelli at Central Park in New York, the second concert free to the public. Next on tap after South Korea was the Boettcher Concert Hall in Denver with the Colorado Symphony on Nov. 9. In between tour dates, Botti has been busy recording his 13th album in London, with former Dire Straits honcho Mark Knopfler featured in at least one cut, What a Wonderful World.

Botti has a track record of having played trumpet for and with the best and brightest in the music scene for over two decades now, from Frank Sinatra in the early 1980s to Aretha Franklin, Joni Mitchell, Natalie Cole, Bette Midler, and Paul Simon. He has shared the concert stage with other music greats such as Yo Yo Ma, Steven Tyler, Josh Groban, John Mayer, and Sting. The last he credits to have started him off on his own vaulting solo career — after Sting asked him to join a 1999 concert tour. 

Jazz, pop music, and the classics are all fair game for the Portland-born trumpeter whose mother was a classically trained pianist. Till now, those who are trigger-happy in pinpointing particular genres are hard put to classify Chris Botti, albeit some still try to pin down his versatile music as “smooth jazz.” Critic Alex Henderson scoffs at this, arguing that Botti’s music is certainly a cut above much of that genre, stating that “it would be a major mistake to lump it in with the outright elevator muzak that Kenny G, Dave Koz, Najee, and Richard Elliot were known for ... Botti is capable of a lot more.”

His solo debut album, “First Wish,” was released in 1995. The following year, he composed the score for the 1996 film Caught. Albums that followed were “Midnight Without You” in 1997, “Slowing Down The World” in 1999 (with vocal contribution from Sting), “Night Sessions” in 2001, December in 2002, “A Thousand Kisses Deep” in 2003, “When I Fall in Love” in 2004, “To Love Again: The Duets” in 2005, “Chris Botti Live: With Orchestra and Special Guests” in 2006, “Italia” in 2007 (with Bocelli), “Chris Botti in Boston” in 2009 (with the Boston Pops Orchestra and Yo Yo Ma, among others), and “This Is Chris Botti” early this year.

Botti has been nominated for a total of five Grammy awards in 2007 and 2009, including Best Pop Instrumental Album and Best Long Form Music Video. Three of his albums have reached the No.1 position on the Billboard jazz albums chart.

For his one-night gig at Greenbelt 5, Botti brought along a terrific vocalist, Lisa Fisher, violinist Aurica Duca, and a stellar band composed of Billy Kilson on drums, Andy Ezrin on keyboards, bassist Carlitos Del Puerto, and electric jazz guitar wiz Mark Whitfield.

The superb repertoire included Miles Davis’ Flamenco Sketches, Enrico Morricone’s Cinema Paradiso, Burt Bacharach’s The Look of Love, Astor Piazzolla’s Oblivion, and the rhapsodically sentimental Emmanuelle by Michel Colombier — the particular cover of which, on that night, was enough to send Botti devotees home with a sense of total gratification.

For an encore, Chris asked for a volunteer from the audience who could take over one of the band’s instruments. The crowd was pleasantly surprised to see Gary Valenciano sheepishly come up on stage to take over the percussion seat. Laughter erupted when Botti announced that the encore number would be Nessun Dorma. And so it was, a stirring, soulful rendition with trumpet and violin, and for the triumphant crescendo, Gary Valenciano got to pound on the drums, bringing the whole tent down.

Between the press-con and the concert, I was privileged to have a one-on-one Q&A with the personable, gregarious, and highly articulate Chris Botti. Following are brief excerpts from his replies:

On having his music classified as “smooth jazz”:

“It’s so interesting, that with rock music, for instance, there are a lot of people that can tell the difference between Pearl Jam and John Mayer, the Grateful Dead and Tom Petty, they can actually sort of differentiate… But to the mass world, well, there’s a lot of people that think I play the saxophone, just because Kenny G. was so famous on saxophone. So they see a guy selling lots of records and relating to a popular culture, playing an instrument that you blow into, and they just think: saxophone. And so there are gonna be critics who say because it’s popular or it’s melodic, it’s ‘smooth jazz.’…

“I would say that the core of what we call smooth jazz in the US is R&B music. It’s basically like if you remove Luther Vandross’s voice, what’s left underneath, the harmony and the way that the sounds are, it’s much more likened to R&B music, which I don’t really have much of in my music. My music is either coming out of jazz or classical, sort of, coming out of those. It’s parlayed through my filter of being around other people in popular music. But I kinda view that whole argument as an incredible compliment to what we have been able to accomplish by selling a lot of records.

“Everyone just gets so caught up in that world — is it jazz, is it not? When Michael Bublé releases an album, he’s not saying he’s the next Frank Sinatra. He’s just trying to reach his fans, and make records that appeal to them. And that’s all I’m trying to do too, I mix it all up, and I do my thing. But on the forefront is the trumpet playing, and that’s really what I hope people take away with them.”

On genres: “You would never go to a rock musician, say, go to Alanis Morisette, and relate her to the genre that Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell set up. She’ll say — what’s that got to do with me? It all just trickles down, and yes, she’s a singer-songwriter in that way, and they’ll talk about her lyrics and how she relates to the culture and her fans, but they don’t always put them in a box of history. But with jazz, you’re either in that box of history, and the critics go, you’re too commercial, so therefore, you are X. Or you can never be jazz.

“But with my new record, Herbie Hancock and I wrote a suite together, and it’s jazz, it’s full-on jazz. But you know, I’m not interested in making a straight-ahead bebop record, because why would I do that? You’ve got Wayne Hargrove, and Winton Marsalis, they all do that and it’s fantastic. And now I have an audience all around the world while doing this, and I like this other kind of music, it’s more for me, for my lyrical type of playing, for the kind of classical crossover stuff, with Andrea Bocelli and Josh Groban… And I like it, it’s working!”

On the greatest trumpeter before Botti:

“Well, ha-ha, I wouldn’t necessarily say I’m the greatest jazz trumpeter at all. Winton Marsalis is alive and kicking, and he’s, you know… the man. If you’re gonna say, technically speaking, there’s Winton, Clifford Brown, Freddie Hubbard, Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong. But if you’re talking about the span of a career, and the ability to be a visionary, all of it wrapped into one, then it’s Miles Davis. For me, for what I love in music, I just love his playing. He has that magic thing, especially in the years from 1959 to 1967. When he got into the electronic stuff, he kinda lost it for me. But when he was in shape and he wasn’t doing bad things to his body, he was great.”