All Your Jazz is excited to bring you an interview with the great jazz duo Tuck & Patti. Despite their hectic schedule in the recording studio and on tour, they agreed to sit down and talk with us about their current album “I Remember You,” their insight on collaboration, and their views on being a successful musician and artist.

We would like to thank Miles High Productions for making the arrangements for the interview, and we would, of course, like to thank Tuck & Patti for taking the time to talk with us. It means a lot to us and our readers.

Coming Soon: More information on Tuck & Patti, including a summary of their work, their current tour, and a review of their last release “I Remember You.”

Mike: You’ve put out a lot of albums, and you’ve been in the scene for quite a while now. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about your inspiration for doing this album “I Remember You.”

Patti: On several of our recordings we’ve included songs from people who are a part of The Great American Song Book, but this is the first time we have done a project completely devoted to that. And really the inspiration, even the title “I Remember You,” is in a way a loving tribute and thank you to them. Artists over the years have done those tunes, so it was really just a walk down memory lane. Most of us grew up hearing these tunes, and our grandparents played them all the time, so everyone has some sort of feeling about them. When you start to approach a project like this, there’s nothing that you can prove. The music has been done by the greatest musicians that have come along, and our approach is to not even think about that because it’s so overwhelming; so you just have to approach it from loving the tune and honoring a thing you love – a thing of beauty.

Mike: Having taken a look at the information on your site, I saw that this is the first album recorded in your new upgraded studio.

Tuck: Well, actually we’ve recorded a number of them in the studio, and this is the first one that we’ve mixed there. We’ve recorded nearly all of them here, with the exception of a couple at the very beginning. Historically, we’ve always recorded the tracks by ourselves and then taken them to various firms in San Francisco to have them mixed. But this is the first time we mixed at home, and we did a lot of fine tuning and upgrading to our listening room and so forth to be able to do that. And we had help from Howard Johnston, whose always been the third member of the band when we got into the studio. He has engineered the mixing of every one of our CDs, and we had him there throughout the process at our new studio.

Mike: It came out very good. The quality of the of the mix was very clean, and I never would have thought that you guys did this on your own for the first time.

Tuck: Well, we’ve had quite a bit of practice. Howard has really taught us well over the years, and also technology has made it possible to have an equal quality of equipment, even though it is a tiny space.

Mike: Comparing some of what you were doing at the beginning with what you’re doing now, I wanted to ask you about overall changes or transformations that have taken place from when you began to record up until now. What progressions have you seen both of you go through, or even individually?

Tuck: I tend to think of them more on the subtle level, and in some ways, I think the significant thing is that we’ve managed to keep the focus the same – which was playing as a duo. I mean, the basics really haven’t changed – hopefully we’ve gotten a lot better at it. But the basics of one guitar, one voice, and make as much music as you can – and constantly listen to each other and be flexible. So that hasn’t changed. But on the other hand, we’ve learned a lot more about space and time, all of these subtleties that are hard to put into words.

Patti: The silence. Having played long enough to take your time and take the pause, let the music sink in – all of those kinds of things. I think you’re right that it is on a subtle level, but I think it helps to make things more sublime.

Tuck: Yeah, and that’s always been the goal. In a way that’s every musician’s goal – to find that one note that touches somebody’s heart.

Mike: You mentioned something really important about observing that silence, and many artists comment that the silence is necessary and adds to the intensity of the song.

Patti: Completely.

Mike: That was actually one of the things I wanted to ask you next, and I’m glad you brought that up. I want to point out that you’ve done that very well in this album. It really does add to the momentum and emotion that is going on in the songs.

Tuck: And I think, in some ways, you have to not be afraid of slow tempos too. Historically, the old guys would say the real test is what you do at a slower tempo. One of the best things you can do as a young musician is take the tempos to an extremely slow pace, but don’t play any different than you would have at the faster tempo. Don’t cram more notes in, just savor every one of those notes more. And if you slow it up enough, you can get to the point where each note is its own separate, unique experience. And ideally, that’s how you want to be approaching music, no matter what the tempo. That’s what I hear in the works of the masters – there’s this element of detail in every note, as if every single note had been crafted. And when playing improvised music, there isn’t always time for that, but there’s a mind set that leads to that, which is that every note is its own little world.

Mike: I think what you said about being in the right mind set is very important.

Patti: And also one thing that we always tell our students: one of the biggest favors you can do for yourself is to work really hard (and as Tuck puts it) “like your life depends on it,” but then when it becomes time, make sure that you take it light and to have a good time while you’re doing it. It’s important to turn the critic off and fall in love with your playing (warts and all). Because when you’re not judging it, you can get into the beauty and joy of it. And savor the notes. I think it’s easier to leave space when you’re not judging everything that is coming through your fingers or your voice. When you turn the critic off, you allow yourself to explore the space, and then it comes out in the music.

Tuck: I think you really want to fall in love with your mistakes – literally. Whatever your greatest deficiencies are, fall in the love with them. That doesn’t mean stop working on it, but absolutely, self-acceptance is critical.

Patti: Yeah, that’s how you bring yourself out of it – how you play yourself out of the corner you paint yourself into. There lies the music, the improvisation and the creativity.

Tuck: If you can walk that line simultaneously between taking it extremely seriously and taking it lightly (realizing it’s all transitory and it’s gone the moment it happens), then it makes you not only more able to make music yourself but also makes you a better collaborator for who ever is playing with you. After all, this is almost always a collaborative music and very seldom just a soloist. That is, one shouldn’t play solo all the time because the interaction is really critical, and that’s what the music is about. It’s just as important to be a great collaborator and support person for someone else as it is to play the hottest stuff yourself.

Mike: After listening to the CD, I could tell that you two collaborate very well and seem to complement each other virtually every place on the album. Whether it be with a guitar fill or simply how you change to another register or inversion with the guitar to complement what is going on in the singing, you both seem to perform very well as a duo.

Tuck: And you’re right, but we have to mention that we pick the best takes for the CD (laughing). But in fact what you just described is definitely a goal. From an arranging standpoint, it reminds me of taking a little more of a pianistic approach to how you fill out the music around a vocalist. I always had an extreme tendency to play guitar chords – you know those normal guitar chords – and it turns out there’s a kind of bumping of heads that takes place if you have somebody with Patti’s vocal range and you have somebody playing normal guitar chords all the time. There’s always this clash and doubling of notes. So pretty early on, we began to tap into that – the fact that I already knew the chord, and it was a familiar one, didn’t mean it was the best one at that point. And we got more into arranging and looking for ways to carve out spaces in the middle of the chord so that Patti had more room around her and wasn’t fighting with anyone else playing that same note or one that was a half step away (unless, of course, that was the intent). It’s caused the music to open up and has extended the range of the guitar in both directions. It has allowed for Patti to have a little more breathing room as well.

Patti: It’s an amazing task to have been playing traditional guitar and then to suddenly say “I’m not going to play the melody” and to figure out how to re-voice everything around that. In turn that does help to open everything up in the song and makes it sound more full because he is playing notes other than the ones I am singing. That allows him to play more notes around me, and it makes the chords much larger.

Tuck: Well, it is jazz and improvisation, and occasionally you do step on each other’s toes. You don’t necessarily know what the other person is going to do (at least not all of the time), but you work through it. We have actually set it up, in every one of our recordings, so that we cannot see each other when we record. It helps to re-emphasize the listening and the idea of “being with.” Experience does play a role, but it also helps to know your partner and be trusted by your partner, such that you can work through the things that don’t work and get to the things that do.

Mike: With all of the recording and the touring, you both must be very busy. What other sorts of ventures did you have planned? Are you going to do any master classes or anything like that?

Patti: Definitely, and we are also accepting private students. We have people sending us emails, and they are students from all over the world. In fact, in a few weeks we have a student coming over from Japan to stay for a couple of days and take some intensive classes. That’s really wonderful to have that going on, and we both enjoy teaching a lot. We used to teach quite a bit before our albums started coming out, and know that we are on tour, we don’t always have the time to do that as much as we would like to. With the exception of master classes, we haven’t been able to do as much teaching, but we are excited to start doing that again.

Tuck: Yeah, this is a big deal for us. We have really had to fight to set aside the time to teach, and we’ve wanted to do it the whole time we have been on the road – the last 20 years we’ve had to put it on hold, but we both like to do it and are pretty good at it.

Mike: As a musician, I remember the time when we would have master classes in our jazz band in college, and I really learned a lot from those experiences – not only as a musician but also as a person. It’s a great opportunity to be able to sit in on one and listen to the wisdom of these veteran greats.

Tuck: Yeah, all of us look back to these key moments when we get to come in direct contact with someone that is really famous. It might not even be new information – in fact, it might be something we have heard before – but there’s something about that experience that makes it come alive in a different way. Patti and I have had the opportunity in the late 90s to come in contact with and share the same stage with some great musicians – those that have been our heroes for a lifetime. And there really is no substitute for that direct contact.

Patti: Yeah, It means everything to know that they have heard of you or know about your music, and that you should continue with that direction. It means a lot to have that happen. And if you could have even a fraction of the ability to give that back to somebody, it’s a privilege and an honor – and you want to be able to do that.

Tuck: That’s right.

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