There were many well-deserved headlines when the Central High School Jazz Band won the international Essentially Ellington competition last year, but The High School, as it’s known, has been fostering world class musical talent for decades. One notable example: A combo sporting three notable students who would ultimately accomplish much in the annals of music. The bandleader, a precocious pianist named James Williams, would go on to great acclaim in the jazz world, releasing scores of albums with some of the genre’s giants. The bassist was Sylvester Sample, who would go on to back major jazz, pop, and R&B artists and is now an instructor at Rhodes College.
And a third player in Williams’ high school combo was saxophonist Gary Topper. Like his bandmates, Topper has gone on to greatness, perhaps with less celebrity, but as a well-established A-list session player nonetheless. Today, he marvels at how much those high school years foreshadowed his career at the intersection of straight ahead jazz, funk, rock, and R&B.
“I started playing in the band at Snowden Junior High School,” Topper says, “Once I got into Central, I met James Williams and Sylvester Sample and they already had this group together, playing stuff like ‘Mercy, Mercy, Mercy’ or ‘Soul Finger.’ All these instrumental R&B tunes. And we were having a big time! We’d rehearse over at James’ house or my house, and even played the Eastern Star Baptist Church fashion show.”
But they were also hip to the cutting-edge jazz coming out at the time. “We started getting ahold of these jazz albums, going, ‘Ah, we’ve got to check this stuff out!’ and trying to play all these [mid- to late-period] Miles Davis tunes and stuff before we could even play any standards, putting the cart before the horse! We eventually circled back and tried to learn the real repertoire.”
That group of players kept evolving together beyond their teens. “We all got out of high school and ended up at Memphis State, in the jazz band. We played at the Kennedy Center one time with our quintet. We played the Newport Jazz Festival. Marion McPartland got us on that because James was buddies with her.”
Heady times indeed for an aspiring 20-something jazz and R&B virtuoso in the ’70s, and, with all of those influences and more, he was eventually swept into many years of living in New York, working as more than just a session player. Like many of his cohort from that era, Topper is a world class composer and arranger. “I had gone to the Eastman Arrangers’ Workshop a couple of summers and studied with Ray Wright and Manny Albam,” he notes.
Since then, Topper has either played with or scored for the crème de la crème: Keith Richards, Al Green, Tony Bennett, Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, Patti LaBelle, Nancy Wilson, Lena Horne, Ella Fitzgerald, Solomon Burke, Paul Rodgers, Toots Hibbert, and even Jimmy Buffett. But it’s not often that he releases work as a band leader — and it’s been a mighty long wait for the follow-up to his 1986 debut, Earth Tones. This year, that’s changing.
Yet over the past five years, the world’s been seeing more of Topper as a leader via the off-and-on residency he’s enjoyed at B-Side (and elsewhere) under the name Symmetry, his “little big band” that includes six horns (including Topper on saxes, flute, and clarinet) backed by a full rhythm section of drums, bass, guitar, and keyboards. They largely play Topper’s tightly scored arrangements of his own compositions, albeit graced with inspired solos by his fellow virtuosos in the band.
The end result? A bewitchingly eclectic sound most comparable, in my hearing, to Gil Evans’ ’70s masterpieces like Where Flamingos Fly: powerful beats, skewed melodies, the grooviest funk rendered with intriguing chords, horn punches and pads, intricate melodies, with detours through New Orleans and beatnik dives, all sprinkled with superlative reed, brass, guitar, piano, and synth soloing. It’s captivating, utterly unlike any other music being created in Memphis now, and, in a way, the fruit of seeds sown way back in those Central High School days.
While Symmetry is a fairly recent ensemble relative to the span of Topper’s career, it was honed into a fine working unit by those years of B-Side gigs. Once they’d really locked in, Topper took them into the studio to lay down the definitive versions of his most favored creations. Now those tracks are being unleashed upon the world, with Gary Topper & Symmetry’s debut EP, “Night Shade,” released in March, and his full-length LP (and CD, and streaming album), The Bebopper’s Guide to the Galaxy, coming out this Friday, May 22nd.
And if you guessed that the LP’s title refers to Topper’s five-part suite evoking Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy franchise, you are correct, lucky reader! That fact alone should immediately endear the album to the sci-fi humor nerd demographic (and we are legion). Better yet, these are the sincere ruminations on that universe from a nuanced composer, producing a multi-layered work that Topper describes as “a little edgier than the EP was.”
Though the album was inspired by sci-fi, it eschews the electronica so often associated with the genre. “I tried to get as spacey as I could using real instruments,” Topper says, “and not lean too much into synth sounds. Though there is Tony Thomas’ solo on ‘Don’t Panic,’ which almost sounds like a runaway theremin, and gives that tune kind of a goofy science fiction-y flair.”
Other Hitchhiker’s-adjacent titles on the album (aside from two stand-alone pieces unrelated to Adams’ universe) include “Hyperspace Detour,” “We Apologize for the Inconvenience,” “Z’s Revenge,” and a ballad conjuring fantastic realms worthy of Ravel or Strayhorn, Topper’s flute showcase, “Flying Over Islington.” Throughout, there is a spirit of anything-goes whimsy in effect which, says Topper, may have been this album’s greatest challenge. “I really tried to bring humor in,” he says. “Like I was just telling my wife, the hardest thing to do as a composer is to be funny.”
Gary Topper & Symmetry will host an album listening party at B-Side Memphis on Sunday, June 14th, 4-6 p.m.