Steve Cole Talks New CD: Smoke & Mirrors

By: Cher yl Dunlap

Steve Cole’s new album “Smoke and Mirrors,” embodies the guiding sound of hope and forward movement. Its a must have in your musical arsenal as the energy transforms your atmosphere! It will motivate you, inspire you, and fill you with hope. My personal favorites are “ Trust,” “Justice,” and “Wayman!” SJM: It was nice to learn that you from Chicago, because I am in Chicago. Steve: I lived all over the city of Chicago. I have lived in Minneapolis for the past 10 years. SJM: Your Father was a musician, what was it like to growing up with a father as a musician and did it have an influence on your decision to pursue music? Steve: My Dad played the saxophone, so I joined the family business. He introduced me to all kinds of music and my mother was a singer. There was music all over the place, all styles and genres. It was a great environment to grow up in. Before my Dad let me play any note of music in his band, I carried equipment for a few years before I could take the saxophone out, that was one disadvantage, it was the free labor! The cool thing is when I was young my dad would let me play in his band. I learn from a lot of fantastic and accomplished musicians, I had mentors informally and formally. My dad taught me how to play melodies by listening to musical standards. When I got to band to band in school, I could not play the melody all the time, it kind of bummed me out. I did it anyway and was kicked out a couple of times. I would not play my part, I just wanted to play the melodies! I learned to be a team player. Jul/Aug Let the music take you… SmoothJazz Magazine | 15

SJM: Who would you say formally or informally was your musical influences? I read Grover Washington and David Sanborn were some of your favorites? Steve: Absolutely. One of the things my Dad was great about was introducing me to different players. We would listen to Public Radio all the time at night, listening to Jazz shows. He would talk to me about different players, identifying different players, it kind of help me to zero in on what made different players sound different. I was kind like a collage. The saxophone players I could pick out right away was Lester Young, Cannon Adderley, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane. As I got older and started to listen to different kinds of music I gravitated toward Junior Walker and the deep soul crossroads between soul and blues, jazz and pop music. Then I discovered King Curtis, David Sanborn, and Grover Washington. I was looking for players that I could identify that made them unique. My influences were all over the place. SJM: So you currently live in Minneapolis, where the tragic George Floyd death occurred during this pandemic. I know that had to have an impact on you, as well as producing the album. So, with these two guiding forces and with your creativity how do you describe that experience? Steve: It was kind of a one two punch. It was like, the pandemic happens, and all bets are off, right? We're all trying to figure out what does this mean? Life as we know it, how is that going to change and, and then it gets down to kind of, things that are more granular. Thoughts of am I still musician, and what does that mean? How do I do this? And we all were like, is anyone going to care about music? We, have bigger fish to fry. But, music is always, something people gravitate toward. It's a healing force and that helps people make sense of things that are confounding. So it was in-

“ The pandemic allowed us ing during the pandemic, you know people are an opportunity to take a gravitating towards it. So, you know my record deeper look within, to label, called me up. I thought they were going figure out to say, hey we don't know what's going on. They were just the opposite. They said why who and don't you start your next record. I'm like really, what and that was, incredible for me because it's like man, what a great gift to have a project to do. are important I'm certainly not traveling anywhere. That hapto us.” pened to be a lifesaver. Mentally, it's like, Wow, great timing. Then, I called up my dear friend, David Mann. We've produced my last several albums together; we've been working together since 2000. We got to work and it was a little bit different, because, you know, normally we get together in person with musicians and record music in a room together. That wasn't happening, but luckily everybody was available. You know there were some musicians I got to work with that I never, would have been able to because they were mostly on the road and it would be really difficult to kind of pin them down. Most everybody at this point is kind of set up to record at home as professionals; they were able to track their instruments and they sound brilliant, so that was cool. And then, as we're kind of in the process of doing all this and getting really excited about things, then the George Ford's murdered, a couple of miles away from my house. I'm wondering, I actually have to figure out like exactly how far from my front door, this is. SJM: 38th in Chicago, right? Steve: Yeah, yeah 3.4 Miles SJM: 3.4 you are kidding? Steve: 3.4 miles away, Yeah. Jul/Aug Let the music take you… SmoothJazz Magazine | 17

First of all, everything that happened around that event, it was kind of a double edged sword. I mean it was tragic. Yet, some of the things that kind of came from it were, almost, I don't want to say encouraging, but there's voice that was rising up that there was something that was happening. People needed to take notice and it was a very emotional time, especially being right in the center. I mean there were times where the army helicopters. I have pictures of them like from my backyard. We could smell the tear gas in the air. So this is all going on and, part of me was like maybe I should start doing something very deliberate with the music. Then I thought to myself, you know what, I'm just going let it all kind of wash over me, and I'm just going to absorb it. It's happening right in my town. I'm paying attention, I'm learning, I'm listening and I'm emphasizing. I always feel like I write the best music when I don't try to write any kind of specific thing. I just try to be open to what's going on, and allow myself to feel it all. I made a very conscious decision to be very open to feeling it. And also, trying to feel what other people feel really radical empathy, and just allowing myself to feel that and baked that into the music. With music being so important over the past year and a half, it was an escape for me. And it would be the only escape that I would legitimately have I think outside of the family that I could have contact with amazing escape. Some people, including myself, struggled with our emotions. And it was frightening. Sometimes, we have to sit in it, and to feel it. However, in this album, there is that place of hope. And hope is probably not the best word, but every single song, feels like things are going to get better. A reminder that this year was only temporary. SJM: I listened to the album without reading anything about you or the album. It sounds and feels like hope, definitely in the very beginning of the album, I could feel that there was a very deep emotional connection to the past year. But there was always this undercurrent of hope, or that we're on the way to the other side of the pandemic.

Steve: I love that you kind of derive that from, the music. You're right I mean, all of a sudden to deal with this pandemic. Cope with it based on what you know, and the tools we have, and the support structure that we have around us. I'm sure that most people caught themselves kind of going down the rabbit hole a little bit. How bad can this get? How much more bad news can we get? How much more horrors can we encounter one side of the spectrum than the other? But, you know, the thing that I was trying to do is, is to find that hopefulness. This too shall pass. We must, we better be learning something from this, and then you see some things that happen that do give you hope. You know that situation that makes you feel like maybe there is life on this planet. That's what I started kind of keying in on. That got me through kind of the toughest parts of this whole thing was, those glimmers of hope. Sometimes a result sometimes a tragedy there are things that start to make you think we may be on our way here, or at least we're moving the needle. So that was my attitude, I was trying to focus on. It's really cool that you perceive that, in the music because that's a real thing that was there. SJM: There's nothing about that album that will allow you to go to that negative place and I was looking for it. Every sound is about keeping it moving. It's amazing by you were able to tap into a hopeful, positive space, when you were only 3.4 miles away from a tragedy that shook the world. I saw it on TV. I watched it on social media. I can't imagine what it was like to be that close, and musically remain so positive. If I was a musician, the music would have been somber.

Steve: It could have been very easy to go there. Hope is interesting and meaningful, more meaningful, and I'm so glad that you said it landed on you that way. That's, incredible. Thank you for sharing that with me. Jul/Aug Let the music take you… SmoothJazz Magazine | 19

SJM: You're very welcome. Okay, so as I'm a researcher, and I was so very impressed to find out. You are a Doctor, Clinical Phycologist, and a teaching fellow of music, and entrepreneurship at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. You graduated from Northwestern University in Evanston. You have these amazing heavy hitters and incredibly talented musicians on this album. Each of them have a strong entrepreneurial spirit. I would just love to know how that whole process happened and of course your doctorate degree in teaching. Steve: Well, I started out as a music major, but ended up with a degree in economics, that's my bachelor's. I worked for a while and wanted to figure out how to quit my job because I didn't like it, and so I think the best way to do that is going to graduate school. So I studied on the south side (of Chicago), I went to the University of Chicago and got an MBA and. I kind of, did that because that's what people were doing. But when I went to get my master's degree, I didn't really have a goal in mind, other than this is something I should probably do. Fast forward, got back into music, got very serious and started playing with people who were able to, help me kind of move forward in my career. Then I started to make records and tour around the world and stuff. After my third record with Warner Brothers, I got dropped from the label. That was a great run, cool, I got to do that. I thought that was it, and what could I do? I remembered how much I enjoyed, when people would ask me while I was traveling on the road to stop by, colleges and universities and talk to music students about the music industry; because I had a background of business, a background as a performer and recording artist. I realized how much musicians and people who wanted to go in-

and this was even back in to mid, kind of early 2000s. It is incredibly more complicated. I got hired eventually to run the music industry program at Columbia College in Chicago. It was just so incredible to be able to create curriculum for the business of music to help people who want to have lives and careers in music. Helping people really understand what they need to know, and what kind of experiences they need to have, what kinds of background in business and strategy and design that they need to have and it was really incredible. When I moved to Minneapolis I kind of continued on that on that path. Now the funny thing is right after I got the job at Columbia I got another record deal so my second act was a little bit premature. So I’ve been recording, touring, and teaching for the past 15 years. The business has become even more complicated now. Going back and getting a doctorate was really all about how can I learn more about better teach my students and prepare them for careers in this industry, as it becomes, more convergent and complex. So I wanted to learn to design experiences and curriculum that are really going to make a difference in how prepared students are to enter this industry. Pursuing my doctorate was really a very much of a purpose based. I knew exactly why I was doing it. It was great and I'm really glad that I did it because it's helped me become a better teacher. SJM: And additionally, better businessman as well. Steve: Absolutely. The thing about teaching is that, if you want to get better at whatever you're doing, teach it, because it really forces you to look deep, into your own practice, as you're trying to translate it and put it into some sort of a digestible narrative for others. You know I'm a better player. I'm a better business person. I'm a better entertainer because of teaching and certainly much better teacher.

SJM: That's a real interesting way to look at the whole cliché iron sharpens iron. As you are teaching and sharpening someone you're sharpening yourself, because through this challenge you to grow as well. So with touring and teaching how do you make it work? Steve: I've been really lucky because one is never really gotten in the way of the other. Matter of fact, part of how my position in higher education is evaluated on how engaging in your profession I am. So, what I do as an artist is encouraged as these two careers really do fit together very well. Honestly, I identify I'm kind of agnostic, at any given time, if you ask me what do you do for a living, I could say I'm a recording artist, and then I’ll say I'm a college professor. I mean I'm both. SJM: What is behind the title of the album? Does it have a connection to the current time period? Steve: The title, really kind of speaks to what do we see, what do we say, versus what do we do, how do we act. A lot of times you can look at something and you can believe one thing because what you know or what you hear and what you're led to believe is one thing but then when you kind of peel it back you understand that there's something ifferent behind it. At the time that we were in was kind of poignant for me, in the time that the record was being made and the world situation kind of looking at how far we think we've come, versus how far we actually come. Sometimes there are events that need to happen for us to really understand, what's the smoke and mirrors and what the truth is. That can be very personal too. I often find that I encounter people who act a certain way in public and feel a different way, when they're by themselves. What's going on in our society that makes people feel like they have to project one image, when that may not be their true self. So it's a number of different things that I was just thinking about, that led me to feel how can we get beyond the smoke of mirrors and how can we get to the kind of what's real and what's authentic. 22| SmoothJazz Magazine Let the music take you… Jul/Aug

SJM: Within the album, you dedicated a song to bassist Wayman Tisdale and you speak about the loss of the beloved Khari Parker. I understand this was the first time that you had worked without him. Steve: Absolutely! It was strange because in previous albums I would, start working on a particular track and thinking definitely, when Khari gets a hold of this, it’s going to be amazing. It was funny because I felt myself kind of going there a little bit on this record and had to catch myself. One thing I realized how much of my writing, Khari influenced. I would kind of hear him, as I was writing and that would kind of inspire the compositional process and I didn't even realize that until, he wasn't there to do that. So I wish I would have realized that a little earlier so I could have told him that. It made me smile when I of realized that. It wasn't just in the studio and after the fact it was the whole process. You know, he was kind of, definitely played a role. This situation allowed me to, work with, some other musicians kind of honoring Khari, still kind of integrating him in the compositional process, just the drumming was done by other people, and done masterfully so. SJM: With the remaining musicians you chose to work with on this album any specific reasons why you chose them? Steve: Dave Mann played some horns. Trevor, incredible trombone player and Barron on guitar showed up on probably my last five records, they're incredible professionals. I met them through Dave they're all New York guys. They are some of the finest players. The great thing about it is, it doesn't matter what style it is, they're gonna adapt to what they do to the music. And Dave Mann's horn section ranging is just unparalleled. So it's a great combination of people that I have worked together with for so long and in so many different situations. They've always made my music sound amazing so I'm really grateful that they keep saying yes.

SJM: What inspires you to make music? Do you have hobbies? Does life inspire you? Do you have pets or a muse that inspires you? Steve: I think music has always been something that moves me. When I first started listening to it, I felt like I wasn't a passive listener. That it affected me and that made me want to make music. I think the thing that inspires me most to make music is the connection. As a musician and as a recording artist I get to connect with people and in a way that not a whole lot of people get to connect with people. There's this energy, there's this interaction that happens. I'm performing and playing and I'm communicating something that's meaningful to me and it lands on the audience and they give it right back. I think that most when writing music, I Like I put myself in that kind of performance situation where, where there's, there's other people. We're sharing this really great moment together. So I think it's just the humanity around music that inspires me to make it .What it can do and what it can communicate, that energy and that connection it creates between people, between strangers, it’s pretty amazing. SJM: My last question, you said that, chasing your wife, what's the love story real quick? Steve: Suffice to say that. Make a long story short, it was love at first, it was love at first sight. She could have moved to Antarctica, I would have figured out how to get there. SJM: That says it all. It has been my pleasure to speak with you. Thank you for the time, and speaking for us music lovers, thank you for this album. It is phenomenal! Steve: I'm so glad and I'm flattered that you thought of me, thank you so much.