Jeff Crompton plays life on the outer edge of jazz | EarRelevant

Jon Ross | 16 JUN 2022

Saxophonist Jeff Crompton has spent 40 years playing his brand of off-beat jazz in and around Atlanta. This Friday, he’ll be performing at Elliott St. Pub with mandolinist Majid Araim, showcasing music heard on 2021’s Home Movie. The performance is part of a quadruple bill also featuring Okapi, Flea Circus, and Mute Sphere.

Crompton’s music fits in with those other groups because, though he refers to his music as jazz, he plays more avant-garde-leaning tunes than the straight-ahead music heard at jam sessions around the city or at the yearly Atlanta Jazz Festival. The saxophonist recently explained that he began playing music as an adolescent:

I started playing saxophone in the school band when I was 12 and immediately just loved music. And it didn’t take long to realize this is what I want to do. Somewhere along the line, as a teenager, I got obsessed with jazz. And then I further got into, you know, weird jazz. For years, I played in cover bands, playing saxophone and keys, doing “Wind Beneath My Wings” and all that, but also I always had my own groups playing weird stuff.

My first group in Atlanta was the Bazooka Ants, which was a schizophrenic trio. I wanted it to be a free jazz group; the drummer wanted it to be a funk group; and the bass player didn’t care, he just wanted to play. That was the days of what they called no wave jazz, James Blood Ulmer and stuff like that. So we were kind of a funk free jazz, if that makes any sense.

[Bazooka Ants performed at the Atlanta Jazz Festival four times from the late 1980s to mid’ 90s.]

I had various of my own bands over the years. All this time, I was teaching public school band. I did that for 29 years mostly in North Fulton County. In 2010, they eliminated my position. I had taught long enough to retire, but it was very traumatic at first because that was such a part of my identity: “OK, what Jeff does is get up at 5:30 in the morning and drives up to North Fulton and teaches kids how to play music.” All of a sudden, I was forcibly retired, and I was just miserable for a year.

And then it’s like, “Wait a minute, this is such an opportunity. I can write music and form bands and book gigs.” So to what extent I have a career in Atlanta, it kind of took off at that point.

Crompton pursued extracurricular musical activities while teaching, but he said:

I didn’t realize how poorly I was doing it. Teaching is exhausting, but yeah, I would still have bands and write music and book gigs, but I was just exhausted all the time.”

By the time Crompton stopped teaching full time, the scene in Atlanta as he once knew it had shifted completely. In his Bazooka Ants days, Crompton also credits the Gold Sparkle Band, led by trumpeter Roger Ruzow, for creating an appetite for searching, forward-looking, instrumental music.

They did a lot to open up people’s ears to more challenging jazz. They would open for punk bands and do their screaming jazz stuff. There was kind of an openness. And Rob Gibson lived here then, and he had Quantum Productions, which was a nonprofit that brought just an amazing variety of internationally known weird music proponents. He’d bring in the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Leroy Jenkins.

There was an appetite at the time, which has possibly died out some, but there’s still, I’m gonna call it a weird music scene here.

[Rob Gibson was, in 1991, the founding executive producer and director of Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City, before which he served as the director of the Atlanta Jazz Festival.]

Jeff Crompton (credit: Steve Eberhardt)

Crompton actively plays in five groups. He needs that variety because, he says, “I’ve always felt like I don’t quite fit in anywhere.”

I’ve always felt like I don’t quite fit in anywhere. I’m not really part of the jazz scene with a Capital J in Atlanta. On the other hand, I don’t totally fit in with the, for lack of a better word, what I call the weird music scene. Just showing up and improvising with a bunch of people I’ve never met before, which is what a lot of people do in Atlanta – that doesn’t appeal to me. I’m a composer.There’s just a lot of things I like to do. Every time I practice, a good bit of my practice time is playing through jazz standards just because it’s great exercise if nothing else.

Crompton has started playing those standards, with a twist, in public in the band Standard Practice.

When pitching his music to clubs or telling folks what he does, Crompton admits that he does “use the J word.”

I just say it’s off-center jazz. I call it weird music, but in my circle, that’s not a pejorative – to some people it is – so I just call it off-center jazz or challenging jazz. I try to say something to let people know it’s not hotel lounge jazz.

Crompton is not averse to the jazz label because it’s a handy shorthand for what he does, signaling to potential audiences that he plays instrumental music with an element of improvisation. But he’s happy being on the edges of two scenes, content to live with a foot in two musical worlds.

Some people are just inclined to the fringes of the music. That’s me. I love playing standards, but what I really love doing is playing my weird little compositions and other people’s weird little compositions, just stuff that’s not mainstream. ■