Move Over, Dizzy--Former Tucsonan Dmitri Matheny Is Going PlacesWith--Yes--The Fluglehorn. By Yvonne Ervin DMITRI MATHENY IS a multi-talented young man. He's a jazz educator, composer and recording artist, a professional fundraiser and a record company executive. Like many of his generation, this 30-year-old former Tucsonan blames his father for his predicament. "He cursed me and made me feel like I can do anything," Matheny said of his father, a single parent and major influence in his life. "But he didn't tell me that I couldn't do everything!" So he does "everything." Mornings are often spent in the schools where his group, the SOMA Ensemble, is part of the San Francisco Symphony's Adventures in Music program, performing 80 school concerts in a year. Other mornings, as well as evenings and weekends when he's not playing gigs, are spent at the new wharfside offices of Monarch Records, where he's the newly-named general manager. Afternoons are devoted to corporate fundraising for the prestigious San Francisco Jazz Festival. He's taking a break from all that for a tour to promote his debut album. That tour will take him to Tucson for an All-Star Jazz Homecoming, the opening concert of the Tucson Jazz Society's Plaza Suite series at St. Philip's Plaza, 4380 N. Campbell Ave. The concert will be held from 7 to 10 p.m. Saturday, April 6. How does a trumpet player who grew up in the Old Pueblo end up in such a situation? Since he first heard Miles Davis' Kind of Blue album in his father's collection, he has wanted to be a trumpet player. He started studying the instrument at age nine. Seven years later, while attending Canyon del Oro High School, he formed his first jazz band, the Foothills Jazz Quartet, patterned after Wynton Marsalis' neo-traditionalist group. Even at 16, Matheny was savvy to the business side of jazz, sending out a professional promotional packet and press release for every gig. After a successful stint at the Interlochen (Michigan) Arts Academy, where he won the coveted Interlochen Jazz Studies Award, he had his pick of scholarships to the top jazz schools in the country. He chose Boston's Berklee College of Music because it was in a "culturally vibrant place." While hustling for a playing gig in Boston, he discovered an affinity for fundraising. During college, he took a job fundraising for the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. After graduating from Berklee in 1989 (magna cum laude, of course) he performed at the Monterey Jazz Festival, fell in love with the West Coast, and moved to San Francisco. He worked in development (the euphemism for fundraising) for the San Francisco Museum of Art before taking a similar position with the Jazz Festival. "Now when I write a grant," he said of the transition, "it's about Dizzy Gillespie instead of Andy Warhol." Throughout this successful career in arts administration, Matheny never let go of his horn. He continued to perform and, finally, to record. "The thing that matters most to me is my music. I just released my first CD as a leader and I found that even though I've been wanting to put a CD out for 10 years, what I've learned on the business side has served me very well," he said, sitting on the dock of the bay near the Monarch offices. "With my first CD I have excellent distribution, sales, radio play. It's in the Top 30 in the country on the Gavin charts and 13 on the college charts. That's unheard of for someone who is relatively unknown....I want to have a foot in both worlds: always tour and perform and always have a foot in the business, whether it's a record company or a festival." With his debut release (Red Reflections on Monarch Records), Matheny is carving a niche for himself as a performer on the flugelhorn, a larger, deeper instrument that often sits on the stand of trumpet players, gathering dust. In Matheny's case, the opposite happened. "I really wasn't a very good trumpet player.... I was never able to get a good sound on trumpet," Matheny recalled. "There is a player I studied with in Tucson, Albert Woods, who could get a great sound. I tried different mouthpieces, even took a Brillo Pad to the bell trying to change my sound. Finally someone said, 'Why don't you play the flugelhorn?' I was 14 or 15, didn't even know what the flugelhorn was, but by 18 I had switched to flugelhorn." He then turned his attention to the master of the flugelhorn, Art Farmer. He wrote letters and sent tapes to Farmer at his home in Vienna, Austria. "I knew I wanted to study with Art Farmer," Matheny said. "Art's music was becoming like religion for me. I had about a hundred of his recordings...was enamored with his complete mastery of the flugelhorn, his beautiful tone and the effortless logic in his improvisation." Finally, the bass player in Matheny's band, who had been Farmer's bassist in Vienna, introduced the two, and Farmer took Matheny as his student. In promoting his debut album, he played concerts in San Francisco and New York, the two top markets for jazz record sales. Of his New York City debut in Carnegie Hall's Weill Recital Hall, he said, "The bathrooms at Carnegie Hall are nicer than some of the stages I've played on! The people were wonderful and professional. And the New York rhythm section plays with a different energy than the West Coast--more aggressive, intense, less relaxed. I like both." Tenor saxophonist Tony Malaby is a former Tucsonan who now lives in New York City and has the New York energy to which Matheny refers. He will appear in tandem with Matheny on April 6. (They are both former Tucson Jazz Society scholarship winners). Matheny had hoped to include Malaby in his Carnegie Hall date but it didn't work out. Matheny said he's looking forward to his hometown engagement with Malaby and a trio led by the jazz mentor to a generation of talented Tucsonans, Jeff Haskell. "Jeff Haskell taught me something that I think about to this day," he said. "When I was first learning to improvise, I was trying to play everything that I knew. He taught me about tetra scales or tetra chords, three- and four-note patterns, but what he was really teaching me was about space when I improvise. All of my favorites, like Miles (Davis) Art (Farmer) and Abbey Lincoln, always used a lot of space. I feel like I owe a lot to the man and it's really exciting to me--it's a lot of fun to go back to my hometown and play with one of my very first teachers. It's really neat." Dmitri Matheny and Tony Malaby kick off the Tucson Jazz Society's Plaza Suite Series with an All-Star Jazz Homecoming concert at 7 p.m. on Saturday, April 6, at St. Philip's Plaza, 4380 N. Campbell Ave. Tickets are $7, $3 for Jazz Society members, and are available at the door only. For more information call 743-3399.

		© 1995-97 Tucson Weekly . Info Booth