I believe that the future growth of our music is tied into a shift of perception towards thinking of it as contemporary instrumental or adult alternative instrumental. This widens the field and pushes the boundaries beyond smooth, which is going to be absolutely necessary to bring excitement to the  music and bring in new and younger audiences – not teenagers but the 25-44 crowd that has not jumped on the bandwagon so far. The artist and band that define this for me are Lao Tizer, the artist, and Tizer, the band.

I have seen them thrill audiences three times in three different settings in the last four years with a completely original sound that has every element that was filtered out as the music smoothed out. They are stepping even further into the multi-generational future when they open for Soulive, the hot jam band, at Clearwater Jazz Holiday in October. I talked to Lao about three weeks after I saw the band live. The goosebumps had not subsided.

SmoothViews (SV): Your new album is a live one that captures what the band does onstage. This is great for people who hear you because they can actually buy the music they got excited about in the first place but it's still a gutsy thing to do because this is not an airplay album at all. Plus, you haven't released a studio album in a while.
LaoTizer (LT): It's pretty raw (laughs). I felt like it was what we needed to do as far as branding the band and defining what we are doing now. I wanted to do a studio record of original music with the band as it is now and capture the live energy in the studio. Even if you intend to do that it's never going to be the same. This is a good representation although the band continues to evolve. Ironically that is the first time this whole band was together onstage. That might not be the ideal situation but actually a lot of magic happened that day. I guess that comes from trusting in each other. We wanted to put out a real representation of what we do.

SV: Do you think it's possible to capture that in the studio?
LT:   When you are recording live there is more spontaneity and the differences in the sound when you are recording on a loud stage. When we go in the studio it will be more polished even if everyone is playing live just because of the environment. The next record will be more fiery and capture the same feeling, but sonically it will be different from recording live onstage.

SV: To me you're like a progressive rock band without a singer. What drew me to progressive rock when I was growing up was the long instrumental parts so completely instrumental music was the logical next step. I was reading a piece about you that talked about some jam band fans who were really getting into your band, which is basically another generation's version of progressive rock.
LT:  We are actually going to be playing with a jam band at the Clearwater Jazz Holiday. We are going to be playing right before Soulive.  They are trying something new here and it's going to be great for us to be with them. I know 100% that we can kill the jam band audience, especially when we show up with two guitars.  I would love to expose what we are doing to a younger audience and that opens other doors. They get into us it's just a matter of getting in front of them.

SV: The other guitar you speak of is Chieli Minucci, a guy who is living proof that people my age are by no means smoothed out (laughs). He has been with you since your first studio CD. He's very established and you were  newcomer. How did you hook up?
LT: I  met him in 1997. I had just moved to LA and I had a publishing deal with this guy. I was supposed to do a three song demo and the guy who was originally going to produce it referred us to Chieli. I ended up going to New York and we did three songs. We just hit it off. He has really been a mentor ever since and now we work together because he is playing a lot of dates with the group. I think if you look at Special EFX and look at where our group is  now it makes since that we did hit it off from the beginning

SV: Seeing him and Jeff onstage at the same time is a guitar geeks idea of paradise. Speaking of that you brought in a rock guitarist, Jeff Kollman, at a time when rock influences were a total no-no if you were trying to cut it in the smooth jazz realm.
LT:Jeff is actually the only original member of the group left. I've known him and Chieli for almost the same amount of time and they have both been really influential in my creative growth. Jeff comes from a rock place but he can play anything. When I first started the band my manager was afraid of it. He'd keep saying “you've gotta lose the rock guitar thing” because he saw me as kind of a new age Yanni kind of thing but that wasn't me or what this band was meant to be.

SV: The Yanni reference is a straight lead into talking about Karen Briggs, who was the violinist on the Live at the Acropolis DVD that sold about a zillion copies. She plays with you now and to me looks much more in her element, a little wilder and freer and all that.
LT: I met Karen about 10 years ago. A friend referred her. We were getting ready to do the release party for Golden Soul at a club in L.A. I needed a violinist who lived in town. I didn't know her by name but I went by her house to drop off the charts and stuff and when she opened the door I recognized her. I wasn't a big Yanni fan but I had seen the video on TV and I was really excited about getting to work with her. We did some shows around 2001 then she moved back to  the east coast for a while. When she moved back we started doing some shows, pretty sporadically at first but now we keep adding more shows. She's an amazing violinist, an amazing performer, and her contribution is one of the major things that makes us so unique and different.
Not many bands have a violinist, especially one who plays like she does.

SV: There are points where it reminds me of Jerry Goodman from Mahavishnu and Jean-Luc Ponty. I heard several people at the show I saw comment about how parts of your songs sound like there is a big mid-seventies fusion influence.
 LT: The funny thing is that that stuff came out of me naturally, not because I heard something else and wanted to emulate it. I'm not the most well-listened guy. I've listened to Weather Report and Return To Forever but not much Mahavishnu, and compared to a lot of musicians I know I just don't have this huge collection of jazz and fusion stuff. Maybe that is one thing that allows me to keep my own voice. I'm very influenced by the people I play with and they bring their influences in too so that's a big part of the evolution of that sound - other people who were influenced by it coming in and shaping the sound of what we are doing.

SV: I can't really think of any people who write or play like you, or any bands that sound like yours. There may be a little bit of something here and there but it's part of a bigger thing that is totally unique. Originality is hard to come by these days, how do you keep it?
LT: I always felt like my gift was to be creative, to write and improvise. That's what always came naturally to me and my parents kind of nurtured that as I was growing up. I started lessons when I was nine but even before I started lessons I was goofing around on the piano and coming up with my own ideas. I was a proficient classical pianist as a kid but I wasn't that great. I enjoy classical music but I don't think I had the desire to be that great at it. I got to a fairly advanced level but but doing my own thing seems to be the path for me. That's where I feel like my real gift is

SV: Your piano lessons were mainly focused on classical?
LT:  As a kid, yes. I went through a couple of different teachers then when I was about 12 or 13 I started studying with a professor at University of Colorado in Boulder. She was strictly classical. She had no interest in my writing or composition but she was a great teacher and really pushed me. I studied with her for a few years then took some time off and when I moved to LA I started studying with Terry Trotter, he's kind of like the piano teacher to the stars out there. People like David Garfield and Russell Ferrante studied with him. That was my first delving into jazz. I think a lot of classically trained pianists have a harder time relating to jazz. I didn't get it until I was about 16. Then it hit me. Listening to the Miles and Quincy live at Montreaux album was when I got into it.

SV: You've kind of dug into this territory that is neither classical or jazz.
LT: Kind of like neo-hybrid or something like that  I don't even know what I would call it. There are elements of all that classical-pop-jazz. The jazz element came along more and more as I got older and started studying it.

SV: Where did the world music influence come in?
LT:  My dad had an extensive collection of world music when i was a kid and I heard all kinds of stuff while I was growing up - sufi music, Japanese shakuhachi, Native American things like Carlos Nakai, Ravi Shankar, all kinds of stuff. I just had an ear for it and an appreciation for it. He wasn't into jazz, which is probably why I got into it so much later and I wasn't listening to the pop music of my day either. I was into the older stuff. The Temptations were my favorite band when I was growing up. I loved all that Motown stuff. I guess it's a good example of why it's important to expose kids to a wide variety of stuff because that's where it comes from for me. I like a diverse mix. My favorite music has a lot going on in it. I love Pat Metheny Group, that's a good example of a group that incorporates composition, improvisation and a lot of world music flavors.

SV: You've said from the beginning that you didn't want your music to be confined to one genre but the music business seems to demand labels and categories. How do you keep from getting pushed into these little boxes.
LT: Golden Soul came out in 2001 and it was my  first full production album. There are a couple of smooth cuts on it but the rest of the album is totally not that, it's more eclectic. When we did Diversify we tried to go a little more into that realm and get radio which only happened to a modest degree. I was kind of disenchanted going into 2008. I had kind of tried to fit into a box that never really was my box. I'm not a smooth jazz guy, especially as it got so homogenized over the years. I respect the musicians who do it. It just doesn't represent what I do and it seems very limited. Then I did the Passages album. I had this fan from Australia who approached me and wanted to help finance an album. He'd seen me performing solo at Universal Studios and loved that side of what I did. That was the push I needed. I realized that I have to stay true to me and do whatever my creative instincts are at the time. Ever since I made that shift things have been on a steady upward climb. For me that's how I am meant to succeed. I am meant to stay true to whatever it is that is driving me at that time. I'm not meant to succeed like, say, Brian Culbertson, who is a great producer, an excellent keyboard player, and he writes great hooky tunes and is really good at what he does. He's meant to succeed in a different realm than I am. In anything creative there are lots of different ways that people are meant to go.

SV: The example you gave is a good one because both of you are meant to succeed by being true to what leads you. He does smooth jazz and R&B, you do world fusion/contemporary instrumental. It's two different paths and they are both important.
LT: That's why fitting into a radio box just doesn't work for me. It's not my gift. What people relate to in our show is that we let it all hang out. They respond to the energy and spontaneity of what we do. We are willing to let people stretch and go to different places in different shows. Around the time I turned 30 I made that shift and since then I've been doing what feels good to me. I never feel like I'm sacrificing anything and it just keeps getting better. It's tough in this business in a lot of ways but we are touring our butts off, every show has been great, and people love what the band is doing. 

SV: Even in the context of trying to do some more “commercial” music, and do something for radio since that was relevant at the time, Diversify was a really good CD. It's not easy to create music for a format without resorting to a formula and you had a really diverse set of songs that were commercial but they were not formula. And it wasn't all smooth, or pop, or jazz, or progressive, none of the songs sounded alike.
LT: I remember a manager telling me I would have to choose one and I just don't buy that. I think I may have chosen a more difficult path but  the rewards are going to be bigger when we get to where we are going. I see what is happening at shows and how people connect with it. If I stay true to myself that doesn't exclude writing a commercial song. You just have to write the song that came to you as opposed to writing the song you think will fit a format or sell. It's a matter of writing what you are inspired to write. If you look at some of the big instrumental hits over time most of them weren't written to be hits. The artist was inspired to write the song and it ended up being a hit because people liked it.

SV: The beautiful thing is that at your shows you get so into the music that you don't feel like you're at a show, it's more like just being surrounded by this amazing music and that's something people really need now.
LT:  I think so too. I still get some pockets of resistance occasionally from promoters who think we are too different, or that we are a “thinking person's band.” I think people need to give their audiences more credit. The band is energetic, the songs are memorable and cool and not so far outside the box that people can't connect with them. It's kind of like our set takes you on a ride.

SV: I've seen you with various configurations of the band three times in the last four years. Every time I see you it's like the whole band has taken it to a  higher level than before. You were amazing opening for Jarreau and Benson in 2007, I saw you in 2009 with Chieli and Karen and that was a big jump forward, then this summer at the beach. Y'all started off at the top and are going higher.
LT: That is what is happening the more we play together and do live gigs.  I've grown so much as a musician in the last year or two. When you've got to trade solos with people like the ones in this band it really elevates your game. I'm so thankful for that. There is no better way than when the magic of the moment onstage moves you to discover new parts of your playing and your vocabulary. There's no substitute for playing live shows and if we can play 10-15 dates a month then it's just going to keep growing. We're pushing each other and that is a beautiful thing to be a part of.