[Dixielandjazz] Cow Bop: Bruce Forman interviewed

[Robert Ringwald]

Cow Bop: Bruce Forman Lassos Jazz, Country Styles
by Lee Hildebrand
San Francisco Chronicle, August 7, 2011
A decade ago Bruce Forman was leading a double life. He lived in San Francisco and
played bebop jazz guitar at the now-defunct Jazz at Pearl's and other clubs when
not touring the world with his trio. On days when he was not making music, he traveled
to the Carmel Valley, transformed himself into a cowboy and began participating in
Western horseback riding competitions that measured such skills as reining, cutting,
team penning and roping.
Forman, 55, points out that those activities differ from "that gladiatorial stuff
you see at rodeos." "You do it at a slow speed and try not to traumatize the cattle,"
he says of ranch roping.
One day after branding cattle, Forman noticed some cowboys singing and playing "Red
River Valley" around a campfire. He picked up a guitar and joined in. "I started
playing the way I normally play, rather than just the three-chord things they were
doing," he explains by phone from his present home in Sierra Madre, near Pasadena.
He moved there four years ago to be closer to his job as a guitar instructor at the
University of Southern California's Thornton School of Music.
Forman recalls that after they'd finished playing, he was approached by an elderly,
slow-talking cowboy who said, "You know, son, you play better than you ride."
The incident led Forman to merge his two lives into one. Nine years ago he formed
Cow Bop, a quintet that mixes bop and western swing, a hybrid of country music and
jazz popularized by Texas fiddler Bob Wills during the 1930s and '40s. It helped
that the band's vocalist, Forman's wife, Pamela (known professionally as Pinto Pammy),
was as well versed in country songs as she was in swing-era standards. Alex King
and Jake Reed, Cow Bop's current bassist and drummer, respectively, are both jazz
musicians, while fiddler Phil Salazar played bluegrass before joining.
"You just gotta imagine Bob Wills and Bird and Diz and Django and Wes and Patsy Cline
and Peggy Lee and Spike Jones all sorta locked in a closet together," the guitarist
says of Cow Bop's style. "And it's got a good bit of 'Blazing Saddles.' I have to
blame Mel Brooks for a good part of this band."
"Too Hick for the Room," Cow Bop's recently released third CD, includes unique renditions
of Wills' "San Antonio Rose," the Sons of the Pioneers' "Cool Water," the Patti Page
hit "Tennessee Waltz, the Willie Nelson-penned Patsy Cline classic "Crazy" and such
other standards as "Besame Mucho," "Anytime," "Comes Love," "It's a Sin to Tell a
Lie" and "Alabamy Bound." Forman's arrangement of "San Antonio Rose" incorporates
elements of Thelonious Monk's "Straight, No Chaser." The disc's one instrumental,
"El Cumbanchero," a Puerto Rican number popularized by Desi Arnaz in the 1946 film
"Cuban Pete," is given a heavy Dizzy Gillespie infusion, including quotes from "A
Night in Tunisia" and a full chorus of his breakneck-tempo tune titled "Bebop."
"There's a lot more bebop and modern jazz harmony in the way we weave our way through
tunes that Bob Wills may have played," Forman says. "It's very much not an attempt
to be a retro band or a museum piece. As much as we love and honor that music and
consider it part of our roots, there is no attempt to re-create that. We just use
that as a foundation.
"We draw on that basic beat, which is somewhere between a swing two-beat and a polka.
We use that as our basic springboard. We'll shift gears and go to a Count Basie-style
groove or to Max Roach and Philly Joe Jones straight-ahead bebop.
"It's the ultimate American fusion in a lot of ways," adds Forman, who was born in
Springfield, Mass., spent his childhood in Dallas and relocated to San Francisco
as a teenager. "Instead of looking at rock and jazz, we decided to take straight-ahead
jazz, swing jazz and western music and put 'em all together, to the chagrin of many
people but to the delight of more."
Cow Bop has delighted fans across the United States at jazz and cowboy festivals,
clubs and restaurants (including road trips along Route 66 doing impromptu gigs in
exchange for meals and tips at various venues) and on tours of France and New Zealand.
The band's engagement Thursday at Yoshi's in Oakland will be followed by appearances
Sept. 9-11 at Sisters Folk Festival in Sisters, Ore., and on the afternoon of Sept.
18 at the Monterey Jazz Festival.
The band has its detractors, however, especially among jazz purists who loathe anything
associated with country music. Several decades ago, after Down Beat put Merle Haggard
on its cover, the jazz magazine was flooded with angry letters from readers. Jazz
orchestra leader Stan Kenton weighed in against country music, apparently having
forgotten that he'd once made an album with Tex Ritter. And Wynton Marsalis would
later make negative statements about country music.
"He was a big ---hole about it, and the next thing you know, 20 years later, he's
making records with Willie Nelson," Forman says of the trumpeter.
"The first reaction of the purists who haven't heard Cow Bop is a negative one, as
if cowboys and jazz can't coexist, while they continue to willfully accept basically
every other form of music to be a part of jazz," adds the guitarist, who still does
straight-ahead jazz gigs with his trio when not playing with Cow Bop. "It's so funny
how this is the one that creates the most tension, and I'm glad for it. They're wrong.
We're playing as much jazz as any band out there, we're playing it as seriously as
any band out there, and we're having a good time."
__________
Cow Bop: 8 p.m. Thurs. $20. Yoshi's, 510 Embarcadero W., Oakland. (510) 238-9200.
http://www.yoshis.com/
 . To hear Cow Bop's music, go to
http://www.cowbop.com/


--Bob Ringwald
www.ringwald.com
Fulton Street Jazz Band
530/ 642-9551 Office
916/ 806-9551 Cell
Amateur (Ham) Radio K6YBV

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