Daniel Blake will be the first to tell you that finding one's place in the unforgiving and overwhelmingly crowded music world is not easy: "I've got a little bit too much stress, and I don't sleep a lot," said the Tufts alum (LA '03). But despite all the challenges that come with being a young artist, this jazz saxophonist and composer has set a goal much larger than himself: changing the face of jazz in Boston.
With co-director Marianne Solivan, Blake founded the Boston Jazz Collective (BJC), an organization committed to fostering community in this "very solitary, very individualistic" art form. According to Blake, "the community aspect has been lost in the last three decades ... and we are trying to create an environment to cultivate this."
The BJC produces a free monthly newsletter and a website containing a musician/band database, where Boston-area musicians and jazz fans can network and share gig information.
Through regular BJC-organized concerts, Blake hopes to educate Boston audiences about the importance of the music that he is so passionate about. In the most recent BJC newsletter, Blake jokingly hypothesized why jazz is less popular than baseball in Boston: "Jazz is not as important to Bostonians as baseball because most Boston baseball fans probably don't know what jazz really is, and wouldn't know where to go even if they did! What if [the Red Sox] played jazz instead of baseball?"
But, even in an imaginary perfect world where crazy metaphors came true and jazz became as popular as baseball in sports-obsessed Boston, Blake would shun the dogmatism that often comes with being a Red Sox fan. His style is all about letting musicians and fans do what they want, and not saying "it has to be that way." Accordingly, the BJC does not require or promote any one form of jazz; "we aren't trying to force-feed jazz on anyone," said Blake.
The idea for the BJC came from frequent appearances at the usual Tufts venues as an undergrad. Blake regularly participated in jam sessions at Brown & Brew, Hotung and especially Oxfam. "I would sometimes play [at Oxfam] every week for months."
As a double-degree student with the New England Conservatory, however, Blake had little time to participate in extra-curricular activities, save for a stint on the cycling team during freshman year. The child-development and jazz performance major speaks highly of the NEC program, which is one of the few of its kind in the nation.
Even while enrolled at a prestigious conservatory, however, Blake felt at home in the Tufts music department, which he feels is "underappreciated." He counts John McDonald, the music chair, as one of his greatest mentors. "If I hadn't met him, I wouldn't be as developed. I owe a lot to him."
In addition to running the BJC, Blake devotes much of his time to teaching. A full studio of sax students and a teaching position at a South Boston charter school keep him insanely busy. "I'm throwing my guts into music right now." But he insisted first and foremost on one thing, "I am a jazz musician."
Blake is intense but thoughtful about his music, describing his own work as "straddling many different fences ... attempting to combine many influences, with American jazz as the central influence." Accordingly, he prefers to write compositions that "allow me to set my own parameters," and his list of musical influences reflects musicians who are not known for a cookie-cutter approach to music: Thelonious Monk, Sydney Bechet and B?©la Bartok, just to name a few.
The former Jumbo also credited his semester spent in the Tufts-in-Paris program as providing him with "a whole different way of thinking about sound. [Paris] totally affected the way I play the saxophone." There, Blake often collaborated with musicians from around the world, including many from the Middle East.
His latest work, a "Party Suite" comprised of four movements, reveals Blake's disgust for dogma and love of experimentation and influence mixing. Recently featured at the Artists-at-Large gallery in Hyde Park, the composition is a playful musical story of someone getting ready to go out and party, including everything from the "lazy morning shuffle" in the morning to the actual main event. Contemporary, yet without any of the boring stuffiness typically associated with "modern" music, the piece is fun to listen to, mixing frequent, well-timed melodic intervals with thoughtful improvised interludes.
Eventually, Blake hopes to attend grad school in order to improve his artistry, both in composition and performance. But he's always thinking about the larger picture: "I like making my own music, but I want to fit into something bigger than myself."
