One of the more unusual retrospective tours of the summer comes to Ravinia Friday night as electric jazz violinist and fusion pioneer Jean-Luc Ponty offers a rare overview of his diverse recording career.
Having been born to music-teaching parents in his native Normandy, Ponty, 48, said he could read notes of music before he could read the letters of the alphabet. He said he also remembers his father giving him a toy violin at age 3.
”My father was a violinist and my mother was a pianist,” Ponty said,
”so when I was 5, I began studying both instruments with them, which went on until age 11, when they asked me to choose one of the two so that I would become good at one rather than average on both. I chose the violin because I felt it was more expressive, and because I could hold it against my body. It became an extension of myself.”
Although the repertoire Ponty worked on was standard classical fare, he remembers playing his father`s jazz 78s when he was home sick from school.
”I didn`t know it at the time,” Ponty said, ”but obviously it was engraving my mind on some unconscious level. We were pretty isolated; we couldn`t tune in Paris radio stations very well, but there were British isles off the Normandy coast that were transmitting BBC programs such as Glenn Miller concerts. If I had grown up in another part of France, I might not have had that early exposure.”
Ponty eventually was accepted at Paris` famous Conservatoire National Superier de Musique, winning that institution`s coveted Premier Prix just before graduating at age 17. While studying there, he heard about a dance band that played swing music. ”They were looking for a clarinet player, which my father had also taught me how to play, and I thought it would be a chance to meet new girls and have some fun at parties. I didn`t know a single standard, and didn`t even know the blues, but I had a good ear and was immediately able to improvise.”
The active Paris jazz club scene in the late `50s and early `60s became a big attraction for Ponty, with major American jazz stars living there and many others coming through regularly on tour. Ponty would often go along to jam, but one time on his way home from the conservatoire, he had only his violin with him.
”I didn`t have a clarinet, and no one would lend me one, so I said,
`Well, I have a violin here,` ” Ponty said. ”It was totally by accident. I started playing the blues on the violin, and everybody stopped dancing and started clapping. The next day, the drummer showed me a rack of records at his home that said `jazz violin`-Stephane Grappelli, Stuff Smith, Joe Venuti, none of whom I had ever heard of before. I was very surprised to find there were some people playing jazz on the violin. I had separated playing classical music on the violin, which was what I played all week, from the clarinet and jazz, which was for weekends.”
On graduation, Ponty was offered a position in the Concerts Lamoreux Symphony Orchestra, where he stayed for three years before deciding to devote his career to playing the jazz violin.
”The first time I played Stravinsky`s `The Rite of Spring,` ” Ponty said, ”I was in awe for hours afterwards, just to be a part of that sound from the inside. But most of the time it was the same Beethoven symphonies, which became boring to play over and over again. It was more exciting for me to go jam after a concert: there was more freedom, and I was a soloist rather than part of a section.”
In order to be heard across a drum set, Ponty bought a 40-watt amplifier. ”Once I plugged in,” he said, ”the sound was far from the traditional sound of the violin. At first I hated it, but I got used to it and realized that it gave me a gutsier sound, which was more appropriate for jazz. I could be as agressive as a trumpet or sax, and the violin was no longer just a sweet-sounding instrument. I began to rethink a new sound world for the violin.”
Ponty soon attracted the attention of rock musicians such as Frank Zappa and Elton John, with whom he recorded.
”At that time,” he said, ”rock musicians were more interested in new sounds than jazz musicians were, and many purist jazz musicians were looking down at me because I was plugging into an amplifier. In the rock community, it was just the opposite. I was once again confronted with a new world: people who had a lot of money to spend in the studio, and who were doing it very professionally.
”It really opened my mind. I wanted to keep the improvisation element from jazz, but combine it with the raw energy and electronic experimentation of rock.”
