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Walter Beasley’s Sax Therapy

Twenty tracks from a saxophonist who has spent forty years teaching at Berklee and making the kind of records the academy tends to sneer at. Both facts are relevant.

Professor Beasley

Walter Beasley was born in El Centro, California in 1961, graduated from Berklee College of Music in 1984, took a short-term teaching post there a year later, and never left — he is now a full professor. He plays soprano and alto saxophone, sings on his own records, and runs his own label and publishing company.

That combination is worth pausing on. Smooth jazz is routinely dismissed as commercially motivated fluff made by players who could not cut it elsewhere. Beasley is a career academic at one of the most demanding music schools in the world who has chosen this idiom deliberately, and his stated influences — classical training, jazz education, a lifelong love of R&B and funk — describe exactly what the records sound like.

What to listen for

The covers are where his taste shows. "Killing Me Softly" and "It Might Be You" are the obvious ones, but the interesting choices are elsewhere.

"Sideshow" is the Blue Magic song — a Philadelphia soul deep cut that few instrumentalists would think to reach for. "Aubrey" is the Bread song. "Be Thankful" is William DeVaughn's "Be Thankful for What You Got," one of the great 1974 soul records.

"Reasons" takes on Earth, Wind & Fire, which for a saxophonist means taking on Philip Bailey's falsetto with a horn — a real test.

"Strasbourg / St. Denis" is the outlier and the most impressive thing here: it is a Roy Hargrove composition, from the hard-bop trumpeter's Earfood, and playing it signals a jazz allegiance the smooth-jazz label would not predict.

"Intimacy," "Heartfelt" and "Acceptance" are the originals, and "Gail's Groove" is the funkiest thing here.

Go deeper

For Your Pleasure (1998) and Ready for Love (2007) are the albums.

Roy Hargrove is the essential next stop for anyone who liked "Strasbourg / St. Denis" — Earfood and the RH Factor project are two very different sides of one of the great modern trumpeters, who died far too young in 2018.

For the saxophone lineage this music comes from: Grover Washington Jr., Hank Crawford and David "Fathead" Newman — players who made instrumental soul records without anyone calling it a compromise.

A last note on the day job. Teaching at Berklee for four decades while releasing commercial instrumental records is an unusual combination, and it shows in the choices — a Roy Hargrove composition sitting next to a Bread cover is the selection of someone with no anxiety about hierarchy. The genre's reputation for playing safe does not really survive contact with this tracklist.

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