Daniel King, Chronicle Staff Writer
Thursday, January 12, 2006

At first glance, Howard Wiley seems to have everything figured out: The East Bay jazz saxophonist, just 26, plays crisp, hiccupy lines of notes that overwhelm the competition at Bay Area cutting sessions, and he's a major presence at all the big festivals -- without a record contract.

His proficiency on the instrument and autonomy in the studio, however, make him no more influential or original than the next independent jazz musician. What really gives him status, in the Bay Area and New York, is his leadership in the growing movement to make texture, not harmony, the new core of improvisation.

Wiley's texture -- gravelly, tough, sometimes grumbling -- has not come easily for him. "I started on piano at age 3, and then quit," he says over French fries on Market Street. "Then I picked up the trumpet -- and then quit."

Born in Berkeley, the soft-spoken bandleader moved to El Cerrito when he was 8, then to Hercules, where he lives now. At age 12, he headlined at Koncepts Cultural Gallery, then Festival by the Bay in Richmond. Two years later, he was headlining at Yoshi's.

"I was a short little fat kid," he says, laughing, his leather hat pressed gently onto his shaved head. "But I got write-ups."

Also that year, the Grammy Foundation selected him as one of the top high-school players in the country and teamed him with Duke Ellington trumpeter Clark Terry, who decimated Wiley onstage.

"I was 14 or 15, and Clark Terry put the smackdown on me so cold," he recalls. "We were both playing, and he was playing just so much more intensely."

It wasn't until Wiley turned 17, still searching for a texture, that he became a known quantity. He attended the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz in Aspen, Colo., and shared stages with rising pianists Jason Moran and Orrin Evans.

"I was 17," Wiley points out. "You had to be 21 to get into the program."

Wiley has studied at several top jazz schools, including the Stanford Jazz Workshop and Berkeley High School, but his strongest education has come on the road. He is, in a sense, his own academy. "Every prominent jazz artist has an apprenticeship with somebody," he says. "Wayne Shorter had it with Miles Davis; Miles had it with Bird; Bird had it with Billy Eckstein. That's one thing most young musicians do not have." Wiley's development from pudgy trumpeter to aggressive saxophonist has not been smooth: When Boston's acclaimed Berklee College of Music came knocking, the scholarship offer did not include dorm coverage, so he declined. "I'm glad I did," he says. "I got to meet Jules Broussard and really get my sound together."

Singer John Taylor, sax player Howard Wiley and trumpeter Geechi Taylor at work.

Broussard, a San Francisco saxophonist, knows about sound. In Louisiana in the 1940s he pioneered texture and now mentors Wiley.

"I first saw him when he was 15," Broussard says. "People kept saying there's this young saxophonist I should hear.

"Sound," he adds, "is like a great speaking voice -- it's hypnotizing. I remember seeing Gene Ammons in Louisiana, and it's that sound that Gene's got. Howard has it, too."

For Wiley, sound is the hallmark of great improvisers. "Miles Davis wasn't known for his harmonic innovations, but for his sound," he says.

Crackling, almost imploring, Wiley's sound comes alive on his recent album, "Twenty-First Century Negro," available at www.howardwiley.com. Powered by Marcus Shelby on bass and Jemal Ramirez on drums, the music runs from percussive, down-tempo blues ("Big Daddtay's Boogie") to elastic avant-garde soloing ("Very Special").

Onstage, he performs just as intensely, continually changing a note's tempo, hue or overall direction. You can find him at Amnesia in the Mission District on Wednesdays and at Octavia Lounge on Thursdays. He used to play at the Jazz House in Berkeley before the place closed last year.

"Howard always walked in late," Jazz House founder Rob Woodworth says. "When it was his turn, he would blow the back wall off the place. He woke everyone up."

Woodworth now helps promote Wiley's projects, including his forthcoming third album, which awaits a distributor. The music is arresting: Wiley's command of texture, from bubbling to smearing, runs deep.

This weekend he'll lead another cutting session at the Red Poppy Art House on Folsom Street, and he's putting the word out. "Battles are about two musicians trying to play at the highest possible level. I want energy," he says.

At Wiley's first New York gig, however, he missed that mark completely: The tables were packed, but to hear him tell it, the crowd was chilly. "It's so East Coast. You could play the baddest s -- in the world, and everybody would be stone-faced."

If Wiley paints a bleak, exaggerated portrait of New York clubs, that's because he draws such electricity from crowd reaction that the very thought of silence is, for him, numbing.

"I grew up in the church," he says. "My grandma's a very religious lady." His churchgoing days clued him in early on to the cadences of Mahalia Jackson and Bobby Timmons.

He finds similar "transcendent spirituality," he said, in the Angola Prison spirituals, that breathtaking collection of 1950s records made by inmates at the nation's largest maximum-security prison in Louisiana. Wiley said the singing, from Roosevelt Charles' baritone to Robert Williams' anguish, give a snapshot of the purest blues he's ever heard.

"The piece that really got me was 'Rise and Fly,' " he says, closing his eyes. "It takes four or five voices just to give it that body."

Recently he received a commission from Intersection for the Arts to write music inspired by the spirituals. He'll unveil the work in April.

"It's basically a lost art," he says. "The spirituals contain the few living links we have from field shouts to hollers to early forms of gospel music."

A friend of his, essayist and saxophonist Daniel Atkinson, visited the prisoners last year to study their routines. He will speak at the show. With any luck, Wiley's grandfather Sam will come by also. Sam grew up playing saxophone, and they've played together only once, but Sam sounded "just like Dexter Gordon from the '40s," Howard boasts.

Sam also attended Berkeley High School and, it so happens, created its music program. The school had none, so he and some buddies made music stands out of wood and cardboard from shop class, and the administration liked it, Howard recalls him saying.

It's fitting that Wiley finds leadership in his family: As he knows, apprenticeship is vital to the music's newer generations. And if musicians like Wiley keep appearing, apprenticeship will continue to flourish.