JamBase Questionnaire: Jeff Coffin

Coffin is, along with Karl Denson and Skerik, among the best of the newer generation of innovative sax players. These are guys who have the jazz background and chops but are playing and creating music that is danceable and much less constrained than jazz has become. Recently Jambase interviewed Jeff briefly:

There’s a streamlined intensity to Jeff Coffin. Even when he smiles – and he’s got a great one, especially when he’s really feeling it full bore onstage – one gets the impression that he’s serious as a freakin’ heart attack about delivering only the very best music he and whatever aggregate of hyper-talented folks are at his elbow can muster. Miraculously inventive on saxophone, clarinet and flute, Coffin is a willful musical chameleon who rejects any limiting tag, preferring to be simply known as a ‘musician’ without qualifiers. His playing reflects this wide-armed embrace of music in the grandest sense. Though Coffin can get down ‘n’ dirty with the New Orleans boys, he can also rock convincingly with the Dave Matthews Band, which he joined in 2008. He’s one of the few contemporary woodwind players able to pull off Rahsaan Roland Kirk‘s impressive, multi-tonal circular breathing technique, which allows him, as it did Kirk, to play multiple instruments simultaneously. In lesser hands this could be a simple crowd-wowing stunt, but like everything Coffin does, there’s an intelligence and musicality to it that just elevates the scope and possibilities of whatever he’s involved in. Whether reinventing Christmas music with longtime foils Béla Fleck and the Flecktones, carving out a unique piece of the sonic universe with his own stellar band Mu’tet, or dropping in high quality studio turns for a crazy diverse array of artists that includes Umphrey’s McGee, Dixie Chicks, John Scofield, Garth Brooks, Chris Thile and countless others, Jeff Coffin is always an exciting, indestructibly fine player, one of the best out there – no caveats required. (Dennis Cook)

Here’s what Jeff had to say to our inquiries.

1. Great music rarely happens without…
LISTENING (I would say it never happens without this)

2. The first album I bought was…
Tom Scott & the L.A. Express

3. The last song or album to really flip my wig was…
Anything by the Tuvan throat singing group Alash

4. When I was a kid I wanted to grow up to be…
A musician