Finding his path

4/1/2020 12AM

How Kentucky native Zach Brock became the top violinist in jazz

 

by Scott Hall

 

Hearing Zach Brock’s origin story as a well-tutored child of a musical family, one can see how he wound up as one of the world’s leading electric/acoustic jazz violinists.

 

But as he tells it, the path didn’t become clear until he got hit by a car.

 

More specifically, during his sophomore year studying classical violin performance at Northwestern University, his bicycle was struck by a hit-and-run driver. The crash shattered his left leg, requiring a lengthy convalescence that upended his life for a few years, but eventually brought him clarity.

 

“I had to really make some serious choices in my life, at least I felt I did at the time, to acknowledge that the thing that really most fascinated me and inspired me was improvisation and specifically jazz improvisation,” Brock says. “Not just the act of improvising, but … the possibility of high-level cooperation and incredible, transportive, transcendental moments being created out of this, between people, with no language. That was something that always excited me.”

 

Since then, Brock has become an established composer-bandleader with several recordings under his belt, as well as a sought-after collaborator and sideman who has recorded and toured with jazz greats like Stanley Clarke and Phil Markowitz. Named Downbeat Magazine’s Rising Star Violinist of 2013, he is perhaps best known as a member of the cutting-edge instrumental collective Snarky Puppy, with whom he shares a 2016 Best Contemporary Instrumental Album Grammy Award for their release Culcha Vulcha.

He has now formed a new band in preparation for a U.S. tour and the fall release of a fresh collection of compositions for quintet, trio and solo violin.

 

“It sounds more like me than any of my other records to date, I hope,” he says, in a telephone chat from his NYC home. “I’m trying to take my time and really explore with sounds and writing different kinds of songs. It’s not a straight-ahead jazz record, but of course, that runs through it because that’s where I come from.”

 

Geographically, Brock comes from Lexington, Kentucky, where he grew up surrounded by all kinds of music. His grandfather played jazz trombone and owned a music store. His father played trumpet and guitar, and his mother was a pianist and voice teacher. Brock began Suzuki violin instruction at age 4, and his parents started taking him to folk music gatherings.

 

By his early teens, he was studying classical music and also playing jazz, inspired in part by the legacy of Stéphane Grappelli, the French-Italian violinist who rose to fame playing with gypsy jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt in the 1930s. Brock began accompanying his father to jazz gigs and jams that drew top players from Cincinnati, Indianapolis and elsewhere.

 

“It was pretty much the only scene where white people and black people would play music together in Lexington, and I didn’t really think about that, but I think about that a lot now,” Brock says. “That was really meaningful to me, to have relationships with people, musicians, mentors who were my dad’s age, and working together to create something that we all dig. And I got a lot of tough love, and I got a lot of lessons from people in the community who were playing these gigs.”

 

The older players turned him on to a wider range of jazz – especially bebop and post-bop horn players – and he began to appreciate jazz violin forebears who were less conventional than Grappelli: Stuff Smith, who used an electric amplifier while playing in swing bands with the likes of Dizzy Gillespie and Ella Fitzgerald; and Jean-Luc Ponty, the classically trained Frenchman who caused a stir in the ’60s and ’70s with his electronic effects and rock influences – an approach that presaged Brock’s work with Snarky Puppy.

 

Meanwhile, as a teen, Brock was looking to rebel a bit and chart his own course as a musician. Among other ventures, he picked up guitar and started a rock band.

 

“I wanted to find a way to (pursue music) that didn’t really reflect what my parents wanted me to do with it,” he says. “I got into hardcore punk rock, I was really into skateboarding, checked out all that stuff and pretended I liked it, even when I didn’t. It was kind of a big stewpot of things that were happening.”

 

Then came college, and the accident, and a clearer sense of direction. One quality that kept bringing Brock back to jazz was its ability to absorb influences from other genres and cultures while still retaining its spontaneity and essential identity. For example, the rhythms and melodies of Indian music have greatly influenced jazz, but jazz harmonies and chord changes have little place in Indian music.

 

“You can write a song that’s based on a raga, or you can play a raga scale in a jazz song, and you can even play a jazz song in a way that doesn’t sound like traditional jazz,” he says. “It might even be closer to an approximation of Indian classical music, but the way you improvise and stuff like that, it’s still jazz. I just find that absolutely fascinating, and I find it really inspiring.”

 

After finally completing his degree in 1999, Brock was active on the Chicago jazz scene for several years before moving with his wife to Brooklyn and launching headlong into collaborations with New York players. Among many projects, he has released three albums as a bandleader-composer on the Dutch label Criss Cross.

 

With each step, he hones a musical vision that incorporates all of his influences – classical and rock, acoustic and electric, tradition and innovation – into a distinctive individual voice.

 

 “The original jazz pioneers, they were putting their energies into creating their own identity in a very fierce and fearless way, but while they were aware of the past and the tradition of the music, it was not their predominant motive to just preserve that, so it was less like classical music and more like ‘How do you find your own voice in this music?’

 

"And I think that really spoke to me as a rebellious teenager, and also as somebody who wanted to hold on to some idea that in this big mess of a world and a country that we’re in, there is still a possibility of creating something more beautiful, more fair, more democratic, more just, and I heard that in jazz.”