Technically perhaps the most progressive living saxophonist and, without exaggeration, a cult figure among jazz saxophonists.
This won’t be Chris Potter’s first appearance in Brno. He made his local debut with Pat Metheny’s Unity Band, the concert which took place in 2012. Potter helped make that performance spectacular with his dynamic playing. In 2017, he performed again in Brno with his own quartet. In addition to working for other bandleaders, he has long since emerged as a respected composer and leader himself, and as it is widely believed one of the leading jazz musicians of his generation.
Potter was born in the early 1970s and was shaped primarily by the music of 1980s and 1990s, the age of the resurrection of straight-ahead jazz. His prodigious beginnings in Red Rodney’s band are known to many jazz fans, but what made him famous were his apprenticeship years in 1990s. When he totally mastered his skills in the 2000s, he began composing much more complicated structures, largely under the influence of his other employers, Dave Douglas and Dave Holland. It is more than certain that Holland influenced Potter’s composing nature so much that we can still hear it in Potter’s work today. Indeed, he confirmed it years ago in an interview with Harmony magazine: “I’ve actually been interested in the odd metres for quite a long time, but the fact that I could be in Dave’s band certainly provoked my more intense thinking about them, because I was, broadly speaking, in permanent contact with them.”
Chris Potter is one of the busiest jazz musicians of the day. Although he performed in Brno a few times, the audience can look forward to some new surprises with his current trio.
