Walter Chancellor, Jr.: Music man works to keep jazz alive in Twin Cities

Saxophonist, multi-instrumentalist, educator, arranger, and music producer Walter Chancellor, Jr. has been prominent in Twin Cities jazz and R&B the past two decades.

After constant touring early on, he moved to Minneapolis from Des Moines, Iowa, lessening the need to travel quite as much in order to play. Shortly after the move, he performed and recorded with Prince, appearing on two songs for the three-disc album Emancipation (released 1996).

He also has worked with a long list of premiere artists, including Chaka Khan, Larry Graham and the Pointer Sisters. Since the late 1980s, Chancellor has been instructing students in audio and video postproduction for Minneapolis’ renowned Institute of Production and Recording.

He is a founding member of the Twin Cities Mobile Jazz Project, the object of which is keeping jazz alive in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Last summer, the project partnered with the Dakota, Jazz 88 FM and

Minneapolis Parks & Recreation for a fundraiser featuring the likes of Charmin Michelle, T. Mychael Rambo and Regina Marie Williams. Chancellor also participates in the project’s after-school programs.

Interviewed by the MSR via email, Chancellor (WC) reflected on his career and his latest release Hydroponic Jazz.

MSR: How are things going with Hydroponic Jazz?

WC: The [album’s] doing quite well. Not getting the airplay anticipated because the market has changed. It’s just a different culture with music, now, coming with something Hydroponic Jazz because it’s a little more experimental in its way.

MSR: What’s next? What projects or upcoming gigs?

WC: I’m putting together my old band, Conversation Piece, which used to be a house band at Jasmine’s on Wednesdays back about 10 years ago. People like Prince, Larry Graham, Maceo Parker will sit in. [That’s pretty] monumental. We’ll be playing lots of tunes from [my album], some other new tunes as well.

MSR: Just how do you go about picking and choosing what material to use and what to, so to speak, “lose”? Is it tough leaving off songs you just don’t have room for on the album?

WC: What I try to do is think more in terms of a concept. I have dozens and hundreds of tunes, actually, [that] I wrote in the studio. Some just ideas, a lot of them finished products. I try to stick to the subject matter of whatever record it is that I’m producing and what it is I want that to represent in its own project specifics.

MSR: You have a razor-sharp ear for producing. Who are your influences?

WC: Quincy Jones, I would say also even James Brown in the way I put together tunes and things, how they feel and how they work for me and so forth… Prince, a lot of folks. Even before Prince: Curtis Mayfield, even the Beatles. I had a classical background, which influences me with certain tastes and flavors of instruments I integrate.

MSR: How was it working with Prince on Emancipation?

WC: It was a great opportunity. Because, first of all, it gave me an opportunity to be awarded a platinum record — which sold 10 million copies or something like that, five million, somewhere in there. It was quite a bit. It was quite monumental working on that record since Prince had left Warner Brothers at the time. So, that was a very historic moment as it relates to Prince’s career, him going independent.

[That] started a big rage. He pretty much started that whole movement for artists to put their own records out and self-produce. [To decide to] use their own musical guidance of whether they wanted to release what they wanted to release, how they released it, and when. How many songs they wanted to have on a record. Through that I also met Chaka Khan, met a lot of other big people in the business. Just a ton of people.

MSR: The Twin Cities is not a place where jazz enjoys as high a profile as it does in place like Chicago, New York, etc.  How important was it to establish the Twin Cities Jazz Mobile Project?

WC: Well, [it] was modeled after the late and great Billy Taylor who started the Mobile Jazz Truck in New York, where he would go and play in Harlem and [other parts of] the city. People would come in for free jazz concerts. So, we decided to…have that in the Twin Cities to keep jazz alive and give it exposure to kids and other people that normally wouldn’t be exposed to jazz. And more than anything, appreciate jazz as an art form.

Dwight Hobbes welcomes reader responses to P.O. Box 50357, Mpls., 55403.