A Poolside Costume Party Conversation with Tower of Power’s Larry Braggs – HuffPost 11.1.13
Mike Ragogna: Larry Braggs from Tower Of Power, what does a Smooth Jazz Cruise mean to you?
Larry Braggs: People don’t realize that the Smooth Jazz Cruise is the greatest party at sea because the phrase “Smooth Jazz” just didn’t fit it after a few years. So now, it’s just the greatest party at sea with some of these great artists like Marcus Miller, David Sanborn, Brian Culbertson, Boney James, all the great hosts, Jonathan Butler… It’s kind of an eclectic mix of a lot of musicians. We don’t get to see each other a lot through the years, so we’re on this ship for like two weeks or a week at a time and I think we have more fun than the guests because the camaraderie we have with everybody playing together and that mix of musicianship and all types of music and backgrounds and culture coming together, that’s why it’s called the greatest party at sea. It’s not even a jazz fest anymore.
MR: You’ve got something that doesn’t resemble what they used to call smooth jazz, which was this sort of light jazzy pop music. Now it’s got funk, soul, hip-hop elements… How do you see Tower Of Power as part of that? Does Tower Of Power play a role in this phase shift that’s happening in smooth jazz?
LB: Well, it does. Tower Of Power never considered themselves smooth jazz artists. When you look at the makeup of the Tower Of Power band, it’s jazz, it’s funk, it’s soul, it’s a lot of different things; it’s R&B, it’s kind of like a gumbo melting pot of music. So for it to be in this particular genre is perfect for it because the brass is all there, the syncopation of the groove and all the funk that’s going on. Even some kinds that we don’t do, we have elements of them in the music.
MR: Maybe we should call it “groove jazz,” what do you think?
LB: Groove jazz! That’s why it’s called the greatest party. You know, music always comes back around. It circles back around, so when you think about all of the musicians and the types of music together… Back in the seventies, when they had Bill Graham in San Francisco, he used to put groups together like that. He used to put Miles Davis with Aretha Franklin. He would put things like that together that didn’t make any sense, but people loved it because it wasn’t one type of music. We got away from that, but this is kind of like that genre again, this is like everything together.
MR: It’s touching people in the same place, creating a shared musical value.
LB: Music is the only thing we have that’s still universal. It’s the universal language of everything. No matter what background people come from–their creeds, their colors, their culture–when you play music it’s just one person, it’s one world, everything’s together at that one moment.
MR: I know that you were with the band for thirty-six years. But why? What’s the staying power? What’s the secret that keeps you guys going this long?
LB: You know, Emilio [Catillo] always says the band is selfish because they make music for themselves. They tried to do the disco scene back in the seventies, they tried the eighties thing, and they always wound up sounding like Tower Of Power. So they just decided, “Hey, we’ve just got to be Tower Of Power.” It’s got a cult following now. There are generations of people that raised their children and their children raised their children on Tower Of Power. We go to Europe and we have this following of sixteen or seventeen-year-olds who know all of the music. We go to Japan and all of these other countries where people don’t speak a lot of English but they know all the words to every song. That’s a tribute to the band’s staying power.
MR: Where do you think Tower Of Power is heading?
LB: The resurgence of the band, it’s just churning. It’s churning and churning and we don’t know where it’s headed but people love it. Next year, the band’s going out on tour with Journey. So it’s Journey and Tower Of Power and we played the America’s Cup together. It was a blast and we loved it. But yeah, I think the music is going to evolve and evolve until it gets back to real music. There are so many things going on that you could call the flavor of the month now, but I think real musicianship is always going to be there and as long as Tower Of Power is playing, even if you hear the band make a mistake, it’s still real musicianship and it’s like, “Wow, listen to that, man, that’s so great.”
MR: You have that awesome classic, “What Is Hip?” that kind of says it all.
LB: “What Is Hip?” has been around forever and you just have to question, “What IS Hip?” and that just tells you that music is going to be around for a while, live music. People still want to know what hip is. We always think we do but we really don’t.
MR: What advice do you have for new artists?
LB: Stay true to the music that you’re going to do. Music always touches someone, whether it’s good or bad. You want to stay on the good side of it.
Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne