OK, Don Was, we get it. We understand your full-time day gig as president of Blue Note Records since 2011 keeps you fairly tied to its L.A. headquarters. But between assembling your Detroit All-Star Revue and performing with it at the Concert of Colors every summer for the past 15 years, co-hosting the Don Was Motor City Playlist with Ann Delisi on WDET-FM every Friday night, and saying nice things about Detroit at every opportunity (apologies to Emily Gail), this is still the age of remote employment. If you miss the place so much, why don’t you just move back?
Well, in a sense, he has.
“I just got a place in Detroit,” Don says in a recent Zoom conversation. “Yeah, I’ve been trying to spend more time there, but it’s hard. I was there just a few weeks ago. It was fucking cold, too.”
Things are expected to heat up dramatically when he unveils his new band, Don Was and the Pan-Detroit Ensemble, in live performances Friday and Saturday nights at the Blue LLama Jazz Club and Restaurant in Ann Arbor, first stop on a very abbreviated one-week, six-city Midwest tour.
“It’s tough to get everyone together,” he explains. “But I sure love this band.”
The nine-piece Ensemble features scintillating saxophonist Dave McMurray, Don’s trusted woodwind accomplice even before the ’80s days of Was (Not Was), and the Oscar-winning keyboard genius Luis Resto. Trumpeter John Douglas, trombonist Vincent Chandler, guitarist Wayne Gerard, drummer Jeff Canaday, percussionist Mahindi Masai, and vocalist Stefanie Christi’an round out the nonet, and they all share one thing in common.
They’re Detroiters.
In the press release announcing this tour, Don is quoted as saying, “I’ve been chasing a sound in my head for the past 30 years. It’s jazzy and improvisational, but also glued together with a sinewy R&B groove. It’s not slick or smooth — it’s a very raw, honest, Detroit kind of thing.” And after all these decades of pursuit, he believes he’s finally found the sound with the Pan-Detroit Ensemble.
“There’s a real, tangible, audible Detroit thing we know resonates globally,” the six-time Grammy winner declares, citing hometown influences from John Lee Hooker, Motown, and Mitch Ryder (for whom he just produced a new album, due out this fall) to George Clinton, Donald Byrd, and The Electrifying Mojo. “We know this because even on Blue Note Records, Detroit has had more musicians on the roster than any other city. There isn’t even a close second.”
While he says he’s played with each member of the band at one point in his All-Star Revues, they came together as the Pan-Detroit Ensemble organically — and out of desperation. “What happened was, my buddy Terence Blanchard is creative director for the Paradise Jazz Series at the DSO, and he asked me if I’d like to do a night. I said sure, but they book these things so far in advance I forgot about it. Then about six months out I thought, ‘Fuck! I don’t have a band! I haven’t had one in decades. What am I going to do?’
“I thought, ‘Don’t try to be Robert Glasper or Wayne Shorter: be you.’ So I got together with some like-minded people, went into Rustbelt Studios, and I just pulled four songs I played on the radio with Ann Delisi that week. And from the first note we played together it was like, ‘This band clicks.’ It felt like we’ve been together all our lives. But we’re all people who grew up listening to The Electrifying Mojo. They’re steeped in the history and sound of the city, and they all live here. You can try and throw folks together, but there’s nothing like having that kind of history. We’re just about done with an album, we’ll be out playing next year, we’re going to tour Asia. I’m planning to stick with this band till I drop.”
The Pan-Detroit Ensemble will perform a mix of new, original tracks, interpretations of songs written by artists like Yusef Lateef, Olu Dara, and Henry Threadgill, and modernized cuts from albums Don recorded with his groups Orquestra Was and Was (Not Was). And hey, Don, speaking of “till I drop:” when you’re not running Blue Note you’re producing albums, composing, playing with the Ensemble or Bob Weir and the Wolf Brothers, creating documentaries, and hangin’ out on Detroit radio. Do you have more hours in a day than the rest of us?
“I read this interview Frank Sinatra gave in the ’60s that really had an effect on me,” he reflects. “At the time he’d get up at like five, go to a movie set, and after he was done filming he’d go into a studio and try to cut just one song for the next album. Then he’d jump on a plane and fly to Las Vegas to do a midnight show with the Rat Pack. Next day, repeat. They asked him, ‘How do you do it?’ He said, ‘The most important thing is that whatever you’re doing, be 100% present for it. When I’m in the studio I’m not thinking about what I screwed up on the movie or the show coming up in two hours. I’m completely absorbed in that song.’ Which is an interesting way to restate, ‘be here now.’
“So that’s what I try to do. Just be absorbed in whatever you’re doing. Don’t be staring at your phone or regretting what happened earlier. Just do the best you can in the moment.”
And in the future, more of those moments may be spent in Detroit. “I actually think the quality of life is really great in Detroit,” Don says. “The traffic in Los Angeles is crippling, but I get back to Detroit and I can go 10 miles in 12 minutes.
“Also, I think as you get older, you crave home. I get off the plane, I smell the plants. They smell different. The air smells different. It makes me feel at home. I feel relaxed.”
Don Was and the Pan-Detroit Ensemble perform at 7 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. on Friday, Feb. 21 and 6:30 p.m. and 9 p.m. on Saturday, Feb. 22 at the Blue Llama Jazz Club; 314 S. Main St., Ann Arbor; bluellamaclub.com. They also perform at 7 p.m. on Sunday, Feb. 23 at Grewal Hall at 224; 224 S. Washington Square, Lansing; grewalhall.com.
