Christopher Hollyday is one young man in a hurry. Only 20 years old, he has already released four albums; been praised by such jazz masters as Stan Getz, Jackie McLean and Dizzy Gillespie; played the famous Village Vanguard in New York; and attracted a cult following on the East Coast jazz club circuit. At the moment, Hollyday, who performs Friday at Glen Ellyn`s College of Du Page, is sitting in a Boston hotel room simultaneously conducting a telephone interview and practicing silent scales on his alto saxophone.
”We haven`t played for two nights, so I can`t wait to play again tonight,” he said. ”I`m just running scales with my fingers so I don`t wake up everybody before lunch. I`ll be making enough noise later in the day. Sometimes I like to go to the pool early in the morning so I can work on my breathing while I do laps, kind of kill two birds with one stone.”
Hollyday has been on the musical fast track since he was 9 and his father bought him his first saxophone. By the time he was 14, Hollyday was reeling off note-for-note duplications of Charlie Parker solos. For Hollyday, such precocious progress was a natural result of growing up in a musical household. ”To me, music is a language, and I was brought up in a family where music was a second language. … I`d come home from riding bikes or what have you, and there`d be Duke Ellington on the stereo. I was brought up in a family that immersed me in good things, took me to concerts. We`d listen to jazz over dinner.”
Hollyday`s musical curiosity was piqued when his older brother began playing trumpet around the house. ”I just said, `Wow, this is hip.` I went to my dad, and he`d give me records, which I`d take upstairs and put on my
`Sesame Street` record player, and I`d listen and listen until I started to get a handle on things like form.”
Then, when Hollyday was in 7th grade, his interest in jazz went into overdrive. ”It really kicked in,” he said. ”I`d practice 9, 10 hours a day for two months straight. Get up in the morning, put music on while I ate breakfast, practice, have lunch, practice, eat dinner, practice, then at 10 I`d go play computer games and stay up all night.
Eventually that wore me down and I got sick for a couple of months.”
When Hollyday emerged on the other side of his musical marathon, he began playing clubs, and was leading his own bands at age 14.
Not surprisingly, Hollyday`s first records reveal an artist emulating his heroes: Charlie Parker, Jackie MaClean and Ray Charles, whom Hollyday admires for his phrasing, and ”just the way he puts his whole life into the music, the whole soul thing.”
But ”On Course,” his new album on Novus/RCA, features primarily original compositions.
”The whole point,” he said, ”was to show where I was at the time we made the album. My earlier records were a way of saying once and for all, thank you guys for showing me the way. In the past year especially, I`ve been trying to make the horn my voice, more than any kind of technically proper tone or whatever.”
Not that Hollyday is turning his back on the roots of his be-bop flavored music.
”The only reason the music is `old` is because it happened to be written 50 years ago,” he said. ”But the music was so advanced for its time that it still sounds fresh today. The whole thing about jazz is, it really is a matter or reaching deep down inside, and deciding what you want to do. If you want to sound like John Coltrane, that`s OK too.”
Chris Hollyday plays with the College of Du Page Jazz Ensemble at 8 p.m. at the college`s Arts Center, 22nd Street and Park Boulevard. The concert will be a farewell performance for longtime ensemble director Robert Marshall. Tickets are $8, or $6 for students and senior citizens. Call 708-858-2800.
