From the Rolling Stones to Bob Dylan and even John Mayer, Don Was' creative thumbprint is on nearly every genre of music you can get your hands on.
He's a six-time Grammy-winning musician, producer and composer, and the president of the jazz label Blue Note Records. But Was' musical past is a rich one as he's produced for the Rolling Stones, Iggy Poppy and more. He also played bass for the Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan and his '80s pop-funk group Was (Not Was).
And now, his current journey involves his own band: Don Was and the Pan-Detroit Ensemble. According to a news release, it features top-tier jazz musicians from Was' hometown of Detroit. It includes Dave McMurray on saxophone, keyboardist Luis Resto, trombonist Vincent Chandler, trumpeter John Douglas, drummer Jeff Canaday, percussionist Mahindi Masai, guitarist Wayne Gerard and vocalist Steffanie Christi'an.
They perform in Clearwater on Thursday at 8 p.m. at the Bilheimer Capitol Theatre. To learn more or purchase tickets, go to Ruth Eckerd Hall's website.
On "Florida Matters Live & Local," Was (real name Don Fagenson) described how the band got together, his experience working with icons like Dylan and more.
The interview below was edited for clarity and brevity.
How did "Don Was and the Pan-Detroit Ensemble" come together?
I got booked to play a concert in Detroit — part of a jazz series the Detroit Symphony puts on. And about six months ahead of it, I realized I didn't have a band, and I didn't have any songs.
I'll tell you something I learned early on in the 1990s. I got to work with a lot of my heroes — Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, the Rolling Stones, Leonard Cohen, Kris Kristofferson, Brian Wilson — and it gave me a really severe case of the writer's block for about five years. I wasn't sure how to get out of it.
"The idea is to create something that will get under people's skin and make them feel something. Help them make sense out of life in a chaotic and confusing world, and at the very least, bring them some comfort for 3½ minutes."Don Was
But five years down the line, I'm in the studio again with Willie, and I'm looking at him again, lamenting the fact that I can't be Willie Nelson. And then the converse hit me: But Willie Nelson can never be you.
Willie Nelson didn't go see the MC5 and The Stooges at the (Detroit) Grande Ballroom in the 1960s. He didn't have George Clinton play a sock hop at his junior high school.
In the music business, we tend to think that being different is a marketing problem, but in fact, being different is your superpower as an artist, and you should emphasize that as much as possible.
So, 30 years down the line, when it became time to put a new band together, I went back to Detroit, called up eight of the best musicians I know. And we got in a room together, started playing, and it just clicked.
In the first 10 minutes, I knew we had something — that we all spoke this common language. Because we all grew up listening to the same radio stations and playing in the same bars and probably for the same audiences.
So there was chemistry from the start, and it was too good. You don't turn your back on that when you have that. It only comes along a few times in your life where you can lock in with musicians and after 10 minutes feel like you've been playing together for a decade. So we started booking tours. We ended up making an album, and here we are in Florida.
You sort of felt like you were overshadowed because they were your heroes. Was there a hesitancy in your own writing?
I think it's just inadequacy.
One night, I was with Bob Dylan in the studio. I said, "How come you can write "Gates of Eden" and I can't?"
And he said, "Well, if it makes you feel any better, man, I remember moving the pencil over the page, but I didn't write it. It came through me."
And I thought, "Man, what a sweet guy. He's trying to make me feel better."
But then down the line, I started hearing other people say the same thing — that the great ideas came from without and you kind of channel them and they move through you.
So I learned to keep my antennae open and not to let self-consciousness or angst or regret or fear get in the way of receiving some good signals. But to be honest with you, some people just have better receivers. They can just pick up the good stuff.
I kind of think of it as like all the great songs are floating in this creative ether up there, someplace, and all the great songs are on the top. And not everybody's got tentacles long enough to get to the top, but a few do, and I'm in awe of that.
You're the president of Blue Note Records. Talk about that balance of being a steward of the rich jazz legacy and trying to find new artists of that genre.
I collected Blue Note records since I was a teenager. Have my first one in 1966 when I was 14. So I was a big fan of the label always, but once I got hired to do the gig, I thought, "Well, we better dig in here and figure out why the music that this label recorded 60, 70 years ago still sounds relevant today."
And the pattern was that no matter what era you look at, Blue Note signed artists who had mastered the musical fundamentals of everything that came before them, but rather than turn it into a museum, they used that knowledge to create something brand new and push the threshold of music.
That could be Thelonious Monk in 1948 or Art Blakey and Horace Silver in the '50s, or Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock and Ornette Coleman in the '60s, or Robert Glasper the year I started when he put out "Black Radio."
And so that's kind of what we look for. What you're trying to do with music — when you're a record company president or a record producer or a musician or a songwriter — the idea is to create something that will get under people's skin and make them feel something.
Help them make sense out of life in a chaotic and confusing world, and at the very least, bring them some comfort for 3½ minutes.
You can listen to the full interview in the media player above. This article was compiled from an interview conducted by Matthew Peddie for "Florida Matters Live & Local." You can listen to the full episode here.
