Living in Patrice Rushen's World

At first glance, Patrice Rushen might seem like an outside pitch for the San Francisco Jazz Festival, where she’ll play the final headlining slot this year. But there’s more than jazz affinity, or jazz adjacency, flowing through Rushen’s multifaceted career — and for anyone who has forgotten, she’s happy to serve up a reminder. (As you may know, remembering and reminding are the core prompts in two of her GRAMMY-nominated pop songs: the Top 40 disco-soul entreaty “Forget Me Nots,” and the classic Quiet Storm saunter “Remind Me.”) There’s even a way to assess the contour of Rushen’s rooted yet genre-fluid musical project and see a blueprint for the rest of this festival lineup. As the New York Times put it in a consequential profile six years ago, “we’re living in Patrice Rushen’s world. We just might not know it yet.”

At 70, Rushen is savoring the notion of a scene just catching up to her. “This is an interesting time for me,” she reflects, “because finally — finally! — that flexibility and versatility and desire and capability, of being able to speak several musical dialects, is applauded instead of limited.” She was speaking recently by phone from her home studio in Altadena, which mercifully made it unscathed through the January wildfires. And as if to illustrate her point, Rushen was then gearing up to perform on the LA Philharmonic’s jazz series at Walt Disney Hall: the first major showcase of her own music in her hometown.

It wasn’t until some of the industry pressures created the idea of these boundaries and limitations that I had to consider choosing: Are you this kind of artist, or are you that kind of artist? Do you play jazz or do you play dance music?

Rushen is a pioneering educator in the USC Thornton Popular Music Program, which she has long served as chair. Her connection to the school is formative: as a gifted preschooler, she was enrolled in a pilot program at the University of Southern California that combined musical training with early childhood development. “I was in this music class that was actually a graduate course for music education majors who were observing young children,” she says. This early foothold served her well through her time at Alain Leroy Locke High School, home to a dynamic young music teacher named Reggie Andrews. In her senior year, Rushen entered a high school band competition at the Monterey Jazz Festival, and after her combo took first prize, she was signed to Prestige Records. Her debut, Prelusion, was released in 1974.

Rushen made that album when she was barely into her 20s, with Andrews as her producer. And to revisit Prelusion today is to marvel at her youthful command of the hard-bop idiom; note the flexible assurance she brings to a hard-driving octet whose ranks include a heavyweight guest, Joe Henderson, on tenor saxophone. On her next two albums for Prestige, Rushen leaned persuasively into jazz-funk. Then came her move to the Elektra label, and a successful pop-R&B career. But these are all reductive terms that fail to capture how naturally Rushen glided across genre and format. “It wasn’t until some of the industry pressures created the idea of these boundaries and limitations that I had to consider choosing: Are you this kind of artist, or are you that kind of artist? Do you play jazz or do you play dance music?” she says. “And it was ironic that during some of the same years that I was recording those albums for Fantasy / Prestige, I was also on the weekends going over and dancing on Soul Train.”

That spirit of musical multiplicity — a “both/and” approach to the choices at hand — had been modeled for Rushen by a handful of influences, like Herbie Hancock, Quincy Jones and especially George Duke. Today she is her own fulfillment of the ideal, an exemplar and embodiment. She sits comfortably on this festival lineup alongside bassist Dave Holland, who broke out in Miles Davis’ first electric bands before establishing sweeping credentials across the jazz spectrum, including the chamberlike offering he brings in duo with guitarist Lionel Loueke here; and another bassist, Stanley Clarke, whose career has similarly traversed turbocharged fusion, funk and orchestral dimensions, and who headlines on Saturday with the Cuban piano giant Gonzalo Rubalcaba. (Rushen once made a trio album titled Standards with Clarke and drummer Ndugu Chancler, one of her classmates at Locke High.)

Rushen’s versatility across a range of Black music(s) is also a manifest reality for artists like drummer-rapper-producer Kassa Overall, trumpeter and producer Theo Croker, and alto saxophonist and vocalist Braxton Cook, each of whom appears on this edition of the festival. It has deep sympathetic vibrations with alto saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin and her Phoenix Quartet, and with the rising young trumpeter Brandon Woody and his band Upendo. And it jibes with the unbounded sensibility of an elder, saxophonist, flutist and NEA Jazz Master Charles Lloyd, who headlines the fest on opening night with his Sky Quartet, featuring pianist Jason Moran, bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Eric Harland. “There’s so much music that wants to floodgate out,” Lloyd told me several years ago, and his word choice feels apt: the music is surging, irrespective of any gatekeepers, going where it wants to go.

For Rushen’s part, it will travel through the corners of a career spanning more than half a century, with many music-makers in its debt. Her band will actually include two former students, guitarist Enzo Ianello and vocalist (and Bay Area native) Alexis Angulo, alongside a handful of seasoned aces: trumpeter Michael “Patches” Stewart, saxophonist Rastine Calhoun, bassist Andrew Ford, and drummer Rayford Griffin. “The majority of people who know me know more about the quote-unquote commercial side,” Rushen says, pragmatically. “Even within that music, there’s a lot of jazz going on — but they don’t recognize it as that, because I found ways to maintain a certain jazz aesthetic but with commercial sensibilities, because that’s how I grew up. That’s me. And so what you’ll hear at the festival will be some of the hits that you know, and you’ll hear them executed on the basis of the other stuff that you now know.” Consider yourself enlightened — and get ready for further enlightenment.

Patrice Rushen and her band perform in Miner Auditorium on Sunday, 6/15, at 7pm. Tickets for the Festival and more information are available here.

NATE CHINEN is the author of Playing Changes: Jazz For the New Century. A former jazz critic for The New York Times and former columnist for JazzTimes, he is editorial director at WRTI, a regular contributor to NPR Music, and the author of a Substack newsletter, The Gig. A thirteen-time winner of the Helen Dance–Robert Palmer Award for Excellence in Writing, he is also the coauthor of George Wein’s Myself Among Others: A Life in Music.