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Friday, August 10, 2001

By Nate Guidry, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Karl Denson grew up on Coltrane, but was also "feeling that James Brown, Sly Stone and Ohio Players vibe."

Karl Denson has paid his dues and then some. He has played all types of music, from acid jazz and blues, to stints in bands led by Fred Wesley and Lenny Kravitz.

	Music Preview SO MANY ROADS TOUR WITH: Ratdog, Rusted Root, Karl Denson's Tiny Universe, Keller Williams. WHERE: Post-Gazette Pavilion. WHEN: Sunday at 6 p.m. TICKETS: $24-$35. 412-323-1919

But his first love is jazz, especially jazz with a danceable groove. Denson and his Tiny Universe band will present some of those grooves Sunday at the Post-Gazette Pavilion as part of the So Many Roads Tour.

"I've always felt that jazz was dance music," said Denson from his home in San Diego. "If you have any understanding of the history of jazz, you know that Count Basie and Duke Ellington were leaders of dance bands. I tell my band all the time, when in doubt, think of people dancing. That's the bottom line ... get the people dancing."

Much of the music at Sunday's concert will come from Denson's Blue Note debut, "Dance Lesson #2," featuring a collection of funky, soul-driven songs that spotlight several fiery saxophone solos by the leader. The band also features guitarist Brian Jordan, trumpeter Andy Cleaves, bassist Ron Johnson, keyboardist David Veith and drummer Eric Bolivar.

"Blue Note has opened a whole new world to me," says Denson, who recorded a series of jazz albums for Minor Music, a small German label. "This wasn't the album we were expecting to take to Blue Note. We had already recorded it and were shopping it around. My manager knew people at Blue Note and they supported the project.

"It was a real honor for me when they signed me to the label. All of the great musicians I grew up listening to were part of the Blue Note roster."

Denson grew up in Santa Ana and started playing the saxophone at 13. Around the time he picked up the saxophone, his older brother introduced him to jazz.

"We were listening to a lot of the music of John Coltrane," Denson recalls. "We had a nice stereo system set up in the garage, and I listened intently because everyone told me that Coltrane was the best sax player around."

Later Denson gravitated to the Joel Dorn catalog, which included the music of Yusef Lateef, David "Fathead" Newman, Rashaan Roland Kirk and Eddie Harris.

"Those guys were probably my biggest influences," he says. "But I was also feeling that James Brown, Sly Stone and Ohio Players vibe."

Denson says it wasn't until his days at Fullerton College and later Cal State Long Beach that he learned to play bebop. It was around then that he began to experiment with free jazz.

"I did this for a while and really loved it," he says with a chuckle. "But then I had an epiphany. I realized that no girls were going to come to a show to hear me play this music. So I concluded ... I think I want to play jazz for a larger audience. Still, my love of free jazz had a major benefit. When I was experimenting with it, I was so intent on it that I totally missed falling into the fusak [fusion] trap of the '80s."

In the early '90s, he formed an acoustic jazz band that featured much of the music of Charlie Parker, Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter.

"We played songs like 'If I Were a Bell, and 'Spring Is Here,' " he says. "It was around this time I started to do some of my own writing. But the most important thing about those bands was that we played with enough groove that people could dance if they chose to."

Around that time Denson was thinking about getting together with a DJ, and he met DJ Greyboy.

"Greyboy came to one of my shows and we talked," he says. "What really impressed me was that he knew what boogaloo meant and who Lee Morgan was. We immediately made sense to each other."

He and Greyboy formed Greyboy Records and recorded the 1993 single "Unwind Your Mind," that became a huge club hit.

"I remember touring with Lenny [Kravitz] and hearing our tune in every club we went to after the gigs," Denson says. "I was grooving then and I'm still grooving."

And he plans to present Pittsburgh with his version of the groove.

"I'm just trying to be honest with my music," he says. "I'm not some guy who peppers his food with jazz. I've been listening to and playing jazz for the last 25 years. What I'm doing is in direct connection to the jazz lineage."