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The Red Years
1989 was a turning point for Chris in many ways. He graduated high school, was named a Presidential Scholar for academic and musical excellence, received the Hennessey Jazz Search scholarship, was voted America’s top high-school jazz instrumentalist by Down Beat, and received a Zoot Sims scholarship to study jazz at The New School for Social Research in New York -- the city where jazz happens, the Major League, where pretty much any aspiring jazzman has to be ....
Perhaps most importantly, it was the year he met bebop legend Red Rodney at Columbia’s Main Street Jazz Festival. Here’s how Red told it:
“The organizers came to me and introduced Chris as the young local star. They said, ‘We want him to play a few numbers with you’; every town does this, and we always let them play for a couple of songs and send them off. But Chris played so sensationally, we kept him the whole set -- and the rest of the weekend.”
BTW, Red should know when a “child prodigy” is “something special”, as he was one himself: by age 16, Red was working full-time in the big-band big leagues ... and he was also good enough to land the trumpet chair in
Charlie Parker’s quintet [and hold it for three years].
So Red asked Chris to call him when he got to New York later in the year, and Red would introduce him around. But, as it happened, when Chris finally did call, Red had just lost the saxophonist in his own quintet and needed a replacement -- early proof of Chris’s impeccable sense of timing. Red snatched him up immediately:
“I watched him grow. When he got to New York, he went all over, listened to everybody, soaked it up like a sponge -- then spit it out like Chris Potter. He has his own sound, his own style, and his time is by God sensational. Every place I bring him all over the world, people just stand up and cheer, and he’s not the kind of player who plays screech music for that kind of attention; he gets it by sheer artistry.
“He’s something special. It’s funny. Of all the youngsters out here today, they didn’t find out about Chris until after all the ballyhoo. But he’s the man.”
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