Just a few weeks before headlining the Houston Jazz Festival, Hubert Laws returned here to visit his mother for her 100th birthday. Laws himself has been around the sun a few times: He’ll turn 80 in November. When I suggest sturdy genes, the jazz legend doesn’t quite take offense. But he corrects me swiftly.
“Perhaps it’s genes, but it’s also a workable and rational lifestyle,” he says. “People like to attribute it to genes. But for her it was diet, spiritual intake, getting her rest. If it was all up to genetics, she’d have been gone long ago, like many of her relatives.”
So at 79, Laws sees a lot of road ahead to keep creating music. Which is remarkable when one considers how much he’s done to this point. Laws’ career hasn’t so much been split jazz and classical music as he’s just served as a vessel for the music that moves him in the moment.
“People like labels, so they can judge you based on the labels they know,” he says. “They don’t like an unknown entity; it can be confusing. My experience is unique, though. I feel like my life has been divinely guided: These events and people in my life: I could not have carved this path out for myself any better.”
Houston Jazz Festival
Day 1: featuring Hubert Laws, the Houston Jazz Collective Band
When: 7:30 p.m. Saturday
Where: Miller Outdoor Theatre, 6000 Hermann Park Drive
Details: free; houstonjazzfestival.org
Day 2: featuring the Houston Jazz Collective Band, others
When: 12:30 p.m. Sunday
Where: Axelrad Beer Garden, 1517 Alabama
Details: free; houstonjazzfestival.org
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His list of credits include working with Quincy Jones, McCoy Tyner, Mongo Santamaria, Milt Jackson, Chet Baker, George Benson, Freddie Hubbard, Grant Green and dozens of others.
Laws found his trail head when his mother, a church choir pianist and matriarch of a remarkable musical family, put him at the piano at age 4. He played saxophone and clarinet at Wheatley High School, where he collaborated with other sharp musicians who’d eventually become the Jazz Crusaders and later the Crusaders.
His band director at Wheatley chose a Rossini piece for commencement, but the band lacked a flutist. Laws scored a flute that was unused in a friend’s attic, and found not just a part to play in the piece of music but the instrumental tool he’d use for decades to come. “It consumed the majority of my time,” he says. “I was just attached to the instrument. And in time it became a means to a livelihood.
“I was fascinated by the sound it produced. And it also allowed me to forget about reed problems, finding the right reed for saxophone and clarinet. The flute at that time was not considered a bona-fide jazz instrument. There were those who played it, but they were doublers who worked with other instruments. With the flute, I could do something different in jazz and also focus on the classical repertoire.”
Laws has since toggled between sonatas and improvisation. His recordings as a leader in the 1970s remains a prime run of creativity ripe for rediscovery. While jazz was being pulled in separate directions between fusion and its avant-garde, Laws sought a progressive canvas that wasn’t as divisively radical as either. His “Afro Classic” in 1970 merged his interest in improvised music and classical. His “In the Beginning” is a recording of breadth and beauty from 1974 that sounds ageless decades later.
“This whole journey is not something I particularly designed,” Laws says. “It’s all just an outgrowth of previous experiences. One thing leading to another. I never had prophetic visions about what was and was not going to happen.”
Laws laughs.
“I just tried to prepare for opportunities that were presented to me. Always be prepared. That has allowed me to love and develop and maintain a skill playing any music that moves me.”
andrew.dansby@chron.com
Twitter.com/andrewdansby