Though rock musicians from Sting to Joni Mitchell to the Grateful Dead have always brought jazz elements into their music, often hiring jazz mercenaries to do it, jazz has rarely used rock as a source of much more than electricity. Tim Ries has set out to reclaim some of the listeners lost to rock decades ago by using the compositions of the Rolling Stones as his main inspiration. As Mick Jagger might have sang, "Jazz, people, it's just a solo away!"
A talented post-bop sax player and composer, he is a well-known figure on New York's jazz scene. However, after playing sax on the "Licks" tour with the Rolling Stones two years ago, he decided to try to bring jazz and rock together. Though blasting away behind "Honky-Tonk Women" is far different from rolling out Charlie Parker-like choruses, Ries has nonetheless tried to bring the two worlds together. His new Stones project arrives in Japan next week to jam on the Jagger-Richards repertoire.
This tour is the follow-up to his recent CD of Stones' classics converted to jazz. Though Charlie, Keith and Ron guest on the just-released CD, titled "The Rolling Stones Project," it is really more jazz than rock, with blues ever in the middle. The guest musicians on the CD -- John Scofield, Bill Charlap, Norah Jones, Bill Frisell and others -- are all jazz heavies, though ones with open minds. For the tour, though, Ries will be joined by four New York downtown jazz guys: Ben Monder on guitar, Drew Gress on bass, Jerome Jennings on drums and vocalist Bernard Fowler.