Wayne Wallace: Trombonist on the Run

It's hard to know where to begin with San Francisco-based trombonist Wayne Wallace. Since going professional at 16, he's played with such varied legends as Ray Charles, McCoy Tyner, Lena Horne, Earth Wind & Fire and John Lee Hooker. He's twice been nominated as "Talent Deserving Wider Recognition" and once for his trombone playing in the Down Beat Critics' Poll. He's won a National Endowment for the Arts grant, lectured about music around the Bay Area and taught classes in Germany and Cuba.

He runs his own music label, Patois Records, and has released seven records of his own since making his debut as a leader in 2000. He produced records for other musicians, sometimes releasing them on Patois. He's done arrangements for Pete Escovedo and others, and he is a first call bandleader when folks like Gladys Knight come to town for gigs and need someone to put together a band to back them. He's written scores for plays and dance pieces. In a city with a smaller jazz community, he could be called a one-man jazz scene, but in deference to the other Bay Area musicians, let's just say that Wallace is a force of nature.

This multifaceted talent is apparent on his excellent new Latin jazz album 'Bien! Bien!,' which features three Wallace originals as well as tunes by Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, Eddie Harris and Sonny Rollins. The originals are excellent vehicles for his Latin Jazz Quintet (with guest vocalist Kenny Washington and trombone legend Julian Priester also making appearances), but what really turns heads is the way that Wallace takes a jazz ballad like Ellington's 'In a Sentimental Mood' and rearranges it into a Cuban bolero, or how Eddie Harris's bebop classic 'Freedom Jazz Dance' becomes a bomba, which is a traditional Puerto Rican dance music with roots going back to Africa.

"I am a product of the Bay Area in so many ways," says Wallace, who grew up in San Francisco in 1960s. "I was here during the Peace-Love movement and the end of the Fillmore [Street] jazz scene, I missed the heyday, but I caught the end when some of the clubs still existed."

Not surprisingly, he listened to and played all kinds of music back then, but didn't really embrace Latin music until he began working with Pete Escovedo in the mid-'80s. By then he'd already long been a bebopper with an extensive skill set that also included pop, rock and funk. While he defers to the sheer size and history of the Latin music scenes in Miami and New York, he's quick to point out that his hometown scene has a lot to offer.

"The Latin scene, for me, goes back to Pete Escovedo and him allowing people in his band, like myself, to experiment," he points out. "He ended up being like the Art Blakey of this scene -- everybody at one point passed through his band. The band was such a great platform and I learned so much without going to New York. Then when I started meeting New York musicians, it expanded even more."

Wallace eventually found himself in Cuba in 1993 in a workshop where he'd teach the Cubans about bebop and they'd teach him about the various music traditions like son, bolero, cha-cha and the rest. Not content to just play the music, he composed a Jazz/Afro-Cuban suite in 1996. Wallace has even learned Spanish, which he believes gives him an insight into music on a deeper level.

"I studied how aspects of African culture were retained in Cuba and how Cubans embraced it in their music and culture," Wallace explains. "I started to understand that, then I did a parallel of the differences and similarities of other countries like Puerto Rico and Brazil. I kind of became a closet ethnomusicologist."

It's this understanding of context that allows Wallace to make such strong and imaginative arrangements in his own work as well as those of others, but that is only the half of it. According to Wallace, his choice instrument is important as well.

"Have you ever noticed how a majority of trombonists are arrangers?" he asks. "I did a gig with Nelson Riddle and we talked about this, and his thought was that because the trombone section is in the middle of the band and they hear everything. Looking back, it seems that my skills kind of meet in the middle. I'm a facilitator. If somebody has an idea I can help bring it to life."


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Working in conjunction with All About Jazz, Tad Hendrickson is Spinner's weekly jazz columnist.