Anthony Ricardi: The first thing I want to ask you is about this gig you are going to be doing in Orlando on November 3. Ken Navarro: I am going to be playing at an event that’s sponsored by the contemporary jazz station, WLOQ. I’ve had a very, very long and nice relationship with that station that dates back all the way to 1992. I think the very first show I ever did in Orlando was an event that they put on, so I’ve been just doing things with them…I’ve lost track of how many different events that I’ve done that have been either put on by WLOQ or sponsored by them or happen because of their endorsement. This particular one is a special one because it’s a benefit and it’s to raise money for kids without homes. It’s something that’s being done through Mercedes of Orlando as well, and when they asked me if I would be available to do it, at the time, it was kind of a stand-alone thing, but now I’m playing some other shows around it in other parts of Florida. I immediately jumped at the opportunity to be aligned with such a good cause and also with WLOQ again. It’s always been a good thing for me to do and in this case it made it that much easier with the purpose of the event being what it was. AR: It is a terrific cause – The Children’s Home Society. KN: Fortunately, that’s one of the great things about it for me, doing what I do, is having that opportunity to contribute what I do to causes like that. And the station, one of the great things about the smooth jazz stations around the country, is, not all of them are as proactive as WLOQ, but the ones that are, when you put an event like this together, its always first rate. The presentation of the music, the presentation of the evening, the experience for me as a musician is always really good, too. AR: Speaking of being proactive, did they have anything to do with your live album, Ablaze in Orlando? KN: You’re going to laugh when you hear this… I decided to record it in Orlando, the live CD, this is back in 1998, and we recorded it, I think it was the beginning of May of 1998. It didn’t come out until some time in the late summer but, unfortunately, I don’t know if you recall, but back in the summer of 1998, there were some terrible fires through that part of Florida. There were so many people from Florida that were fans that had been at the recordings and we also did a video of the event as well and people said, why did you call it Ablaze in Orlando? We’re having fires now! It was just total coincidence. One of the things that made me choose to record it in Orlando was because I always had such energetic, interactive audiences when I played in Orlando and Florida in general. The title “Ablaze in Orlando” was meant to say, this is a hot record, exciting, it reflects what it means for me to perform there… AR: As far as your upcoming concert, do you have a venue set yet? KN: Yes, the Trovillion in Winter Park. It will be a fairly intimate thing; about 300 tickets available. AR: Let’s talk about your most recent CD, The Meeting Place. It’s just so uplifting. KN: I get that a lot. It’s interesting because, I certainly write in a way that I think reflects how I feel or how I want to feel. I kind of laugh when I hear an artist say this is my most honest CD and I always think to myself boy, I wish I was as good as my music. What I mean by that is that I think that if you do it right, the music tends to reflect the best of what you have to offer and so when people say that, I’m really pleased by it and I’m glad that I’m creating something that can be a mood improver. But I think that’s just how it comes out for me, it’s not really a conscious thing. I’m not trying to write something that’s uplifting; in fact I think that’s probably where it crosses the line of going from uplifting to being kind of sugary. The new album definitely has some of those feelings in it. I’ve had some interesting e-mails …this kind of music, the fan base, they feel like they know you, which I guess is a good thing, that the music invites them in to that degree and I got an e-mail from one fan and it was just amazing because she figured out what this one song was about completely just from the way the music felt, and I was shocked - it isn’t one of the more uplifting songs. It’s a song called “No Other Way” which if I remember right is the third or fourth song – this is my seventeenth CD – its hard for me to remember all the details. But it is somehow – I wouldn’t say dark - but its definitely a mysterious thing and it’s a song that really has some deep spiritual connotations and searching connotations and this fan just picked that up, just kind of knew that from hearing it. So while I definitely do get a lot of comments that I put your music on and it makes me feel so much better, I do get other ones where people say deeper things and sometimes they are really very accurate. AR: Certain artists are like friends, aren’t they? Certain friends either bum you out or you really look forward to seeing this person again. KN: Sometimes you feel like they’re telling you really more than you need to know. For me, and I’m a listener of music too, I’m going through a pretty intense time of listening to music now that I’ve begun the process of composing the music for the next CD. As a listener, I’m attracted to things that make me feel like I’m being invited in to somebody else’s world, and within that world I look for a whole range of emotions, but there has to be some sort of a humanistic element in there that just is warm and inviting, and to whatever extent my music achieves that then I feel like I’m successful. AR: How much can you share with us about the new CD, that’s in the process right now? KN: It’s very early on. I’m going through a process now where I’m trying very hard to go in musical places that I haven’t gone in before, not so much stylistically but a depth in the composition …and more what I would call linear song forms where rather than it being verse/chorus/bridge kind of thing – its more about ABCDEFG – in other words it’s linear. This is a very challenging thing to do – to write that way and to get into certain areas that I haven’t explored before. It’s kind of part of the learning process. A part of what’s happening with the writing is that I’m actually setting myself out lessons to learn and then the process of writing a song is figuring out the solution to some questions - musical questions - that I’m trying to solve, and even though I’m in my 50’s now, I feel like when I stop doing that, that’s when I shouldn’t be recording any more. So that’s part of what’s happening. I’m also working on collaborating with a new writer musician friend I met this year in Detroit who’s of a like mind and we’re hoping that some of what we do will certainly interact and intersect with each other …in order to take the music to this next level I have in mind. I wish I could be more specific but it’s so early on at this point, the main thing I can say is that I’m really wanting to take a number of steps further into exploring some other areas than I ever have before, not so much stylistically but the tools and the palette, making the palette much broader and much deeper. AR: Discovering new sounds…? KN: New sounds, new rhythms, I’m working on a song that’s in 14/8 time, which means there’s a bar of 4, a bar of 3, and a bar of 3 and a bar of 2 and a bar of 2, when you add that up, that’s 14. So its like a rhythmic thing that has a flow to it that the listener, if I do it right, won’t think about, but it’s going to create a feeling and a flow to a rhythm that’s different than anything I’ve ever done before and so the challenge is to write with a rhythm like that and to make it work and to make it seamless and not to have it come across like anything’s really happening - except that the overall impact is that you’re hearing something that sounds fresh and less easy to pin down than something that you’ve heard from me before. AR: Sometimes, instead of starting out with a template like you’ve just described, do you illustrate a thought? KN: Absolutely, yeah. What I’m doing now is kind of contrary to my usual process; however I will say that what happens for me with writing is that when I’m first getting rolling and I’m really in the first stages, it’s work. Every day I sit down in my studio and say I’m gonna write and there are many days where I would just like to go see a movie, or take a walk or do anything but do that, so what happens is - there’s no way around it, you just have to do the work - and so I do it, and after a couple weeks of this, certainly after a month, something else entirely different begins to happen and I don’t need the tools, the kind of structure I was describing. Instead, sometimes I’ll sit down and a whole song will pour out in 25 minutes. It’ll just all be there because I’m warmed up as a writer. Right now, I’m not that warmed up. I’m getting there, you know? And so whatever I need to get that process to keep moving, whatever it takes to rub the sticks together and have some sparks start to occur, whether its to give myself a structure or whether its to give myself a challenge, can you write something in this odd time signature, or to tune the guitar differently, and what comes out when I do that - these are all things that are valid tools, especially in the early stages. AR: Once you gotten the sparks going, like so many great artists in the past, do you then just stay with it; do you say I’m in the groove, do you go for a couple of days? KN: Yeah, then its easy, that’s when the flow is happening. Instead of waking up in the morning and going o.k., shave, take a shower, go in the studio, keep at it, it’s like I just want to go right into the studio the minute I wake up; I’m inspired, I’m excited, I can see the painting, so to speak, taking shape and I can’t wait to make it better. When you’re pulling stuff out of thin air, which is how it feels in the beginning stages, that for me, takes a lot of discipline and stick-to-it-iveness and so, at this stage , you happened to catch me when I’m at the beginning stage of the process where I’ve been working at it for about seven or eight days now which is actually kind of early for me to start thinking about a new record - usually I wouldn’t start this process till next year sometime. It won’t come out until the end of next year or the beginning of 2009. The Meeting Place is still very much on my plate; the whole business side and promoting the record and making sure that people know about it. AR: The title – does the title for the entire album come to you and I will ask you specifically about The Meeting Place – what significance does that hold and why the bench on the cover and what was that beautiful body of water? KN: Thanks for asking about that. The Meeting Place for me meant a couple of things – primarily for me it meant the position I find myself in with this type of music, where it is very much a coming together of different cultures, different types of people who are pulled together by this type of music. There are a lot of styles of music in America that are really designed for one specific group. I took my daughter to see Justin Timberlake a few months ago and, I mean, that is not designed for me, although I enjoyed it. But, I mean, it is 18 to 24 year old girls – 85 percent. And there’s a lot of music that way – very geared for a specific demographic. But the thing about contemporary jazz seems to me, at least, when I’m doing a show in Philadelphia or D.C. or San Francisco I look out at the audience – it’s like half black, half white, half men, half women, I see people that are in their 60’s and 70’s, I see people that are in their 20’s and 30’s – its such a broad group of people who connect to this music and that is really where The Meeting Place title came from. For me as a musician, the other thing that attracted me to this type of music, the type of music that I’ve chosen to do, is that it allows me to put together my rock and pop influences, my songwriting, my love of Brian Wilson, the Beatles, and all that, with all of my jazz sensibilities and my sense of improvisation and surprises happening in the music, plus the classical influences I have. I actually graduated with a degree in classical voice from the University of Wisconsin in Madison so I studied classical music for quite a few years. The Meeting Place is also referring to being able to blend all of these different things into something that hopefully is my identity. AR: Each song has a flavor all its own. KN: Hopefully there’s something there that ties them together, that makes them sound like me. But at the same time you hear that diversity of influences musically. As far as the cover, every summer my family goes to a little island off of the coast of Ohio called Kelly’s Island – its an island 3 miles by 2 miles – it’s a little oasis; we love going there. It’s a getaway, but it almost feels as though you’ve gone back in time 80 years. When we were there, the one place where you could get internet access we would go to at the end of every day just to check our e-mail and the guy who was our art director chose that week to send us a bunch of different cover ideas that he had based on the title, The Meeting Place. And so one day, one of the things he sent was the final cover on the album, and it looked exactly like what we were looking at every day on this island. In fact, the picture on the back of me is a bench that we found on the upper west northern corner of Kelly’s Island – somebody had propped a bench on a rock that hung out over the water and I sat there and my wife took a picture of me. That photo just made perfect sense to us somehow….somehow, it just gave birth to the idea that The Meeting Place could be this friendly bench rather than some sort of urban type setting which is how I initially conceived it… AR: It’s a very peaceful, soothing image, to go along with a lot of the songs actually. KN: I was a little afraid that it might make people think the album is more sedate than it is, because it certainly has its energetic and up moments; a lot of them actually. But I love the feeling of that photo so much. AR: So speaking of the songs on the album, My Beautiful Girls, you were just mentioning your family. KN: Yeah, that was written for my daughter, Melissa who’s a senior in high school – we’re in that last year with her where we start to really value every moment because it all changes next year – and my wife. My son is away in college; he’s graduating this year and so for the last three years while he’s been at school, it’s just been the three of us. I just felt like writing a tune for the two of them. AR: In terms of the early events of your life, I understand that you were a session musician in L.A. and did everything from TV music to film music. Do you remember any of the movies that you did music for? KN: There were a lot of different ones. I still get residual checks for them. ..When you’re recording for movies, sometimes they won’t even have a final title for it. .. Sometimes the composer has everything written out and sometimes I’d be there almost as a co-writer to bounce ideas off the picture we were looking at. A lot of the work I did was jingle work; I did a lot of commercials. I remember doing some TV shows; I worked for Nell Carter…I played on Family Ties. I had a chance to play with quite a few people; unexpected stuff. I remember playing a backyard party in Beverly Hills; just another gig, or so I thought. But it turned out it was a fundraiser for Gary Hart, and who should show up but Cheech Marin to sing with us. At that time, his big hit was Born in East L.A. To me that was worth going there – I would have paid them! Almost everybody in L.A., no matter what they did, would play a wedding on a Saturday night or Saturday day; its part of how you made your living... I played with a lot of really great people… I met a lot of people doing that… AR: So you went from being at the behest of a lot of different people to being the owner of your own record label, Positive Music Records. How does it feel to be the man in charge? KN: Obviously, it’s a desirable place to be, and I don’t want to sound like I’m complaining, but since you’re the one responsible for all the business decisions – how you’re going to promote a release, how you’re going to get it on the radio, what you’re going to do when technology changes – you have to deal with all that stuff and it can pull you away from being the musician. Early on, when I first started doing it back in 1990 and I founded Positive Music Records, and I had all these hats on, I found I had to forcibly take one off and put the other on, and now it comes much easier to me to go back and forth. I have the priority very firmly in my mind now - musician first, the business is a necessity that has to be handled, but I’ve learned how to do it. The other part that’s a challenge is you are responsible every day for figuring out what you are going to do…sometimes situations dictate those priorities. But you’ve got to be self-disciplined to do what I do and stick with it. It’s a challenge sometimes, and something I resent a little bit, because I would rather just focus on the music. AR: When you get done with the planning, and you finally get to step up on stage and play the instrument, I bet it’s just a relief at that point. KN: Yeah, that I don’t let anything interfere with if at all possible. That’s like…for me it’s an analogy to sports. When it comes time to play the game, all the practice, all the preparation, has to give way to trying to be in the zone. Especially with what I do, where there is quite a bit of improvisation involved. You’ve really got to be in a place where you’re not conscious, even about the music itself, you have to let that flow out on its own; there’s really no room in that situation to be going back and forth with hats… AR: It was a pure pleasure speaking to you. I look forward to seeing you when you get to town. KN: Thank you, I enjoyed it.
