Mackenzie Leighton Handles the Bass-ics

Mackenzie Leighton. Photo by Michael Oletta.

The decision to take a gig playing bass on a cruise ship didn’t have the career implications a young Mackenzie Leighton had hoped for—but it did end up shaping an even more important part of his life.

When asked how he became a professional musician and teacher during a recent interview, Leighton explained, “I started gigging in high school and the phone never stopped ringing.” After a few seconds, he added, “The only conscious decision I ever made was to work on cruise ships. Before I even played the bass, when I was in eighth grade and playing trombone, I always thought that I would be going to college, and then play on cruise ships.”

Having visited France while in high school, Leighton already had his passport in hand as he approached graduation from San Diego State.

“When I was wrapping up my final semester of college, I did a a little video audition with an agency, and then I flew to Australia for a cruise ship.” That first cruise did teach him more discipline, he said, than he’d possessed before.

“The first was a little cocktail trio. We played five hours a night every night for the entire duration of the contract. It was kind of jazz, ballroom dance, and a little bit of pop thrown in. It was cool because when I was younger, I wasn’t much of a practicer. I wasn’t the guy to sit in a practice room for six hours going at it.

“Ed Kornhauser’s reputation is that he’s always doing a million gigs, and he was already doing that when we were in college. And I just wasn’t that organized. I didn’t even have a calendar—I didn’t have that side of it together when I was in college. But when I was on the ship and doing the gigs, I learned how to do gigs. I missed the driving to new gigs every night, but I got lots of hours of playing in, learning new tunes on the fly.”

Leighton with Irving Flores. Photo by Manuel Cruces Camberos.

While on a cruise, the musicians are scheduled to play seven days a week with no nights off, Leighton said. Each contract was usually between three and four months, and then when the contract ended the cruise line would fly him home from whatever port he was in.

“I did a whole summer in Alaska, and so they flew me home from Vancouver. I always tell people if you’re unsure about cruising, Alaska is the one to try because you can gain more from seeing the sights from the ship than any other cruise.

“We would do cruises to New Zealand out of Sydney. I’ve been to every continent except Antarctica.”

Leighton said that after spending four years working cruises, he decided to get a master’s degree, so he could teach, which might make for a more balanced life.

And then there’s fact that he met the love of his life on one of the cruises—and she was not a fellow staff member. “I met my wife on a ship. She was a passenger;  we got in a lot of trouble,” he said, laughing at the memory.

STARTING OUT
“I was born in Minneapolis; my parents are both from there. They moved out here when I was seven. The company my dad worked for opened an office out here. I think they jumped at the chance to get away from the Minneapolis winters.”

Leighton is an only child, and so he had no older siblings to help him navigate popular music while growing up in Coronado.

“I remember going to Sam Goody with my dad and got Victor Wooten’s A Show of Hands and Jaco Pastorius’ self-titled album.”

Leighton with joshua White. Photo by Manuel Cruces Camberos.

Leighton said he ended up being more interested in the Pastorius album and feels that probably shaped his subsequent interest in serious jazz. As far as playing music goes, he took up trombone in middle school. He doesn’t recall why he chose the trombone but said he took private lessons in Coronado from Dirk Koman.

“[Koman] is a trumpet player who had a really methodical teaching method that sort of ended up setting me up. A lot of it transferred over when I picked up the bass.

“When you play a brass instrument, your embouchure and your lip muscles have to stay in shape. What he’d do is we’d work on other fundamentals while we were doing that. The way the trombone is set up, you have a chord in each of the positions, so you’re learning music theory while you’re learning technique.”

He said both of his parents were very supportive of his music. His mom had played in the school band as a child and on top of that, “I was getting into some trouble when I was 12, but when I got into music it really focused me, and my parents saw that it was good for me and so they were supportive.”

After three years of playing trombone in middle school, Leighton suddenly switched gears. “I borrowed a friend’s bass the summer before high school. He’d had it but was tired of it. Basically, I locked myself in a room and figured it out.”

That fall, he began classes at the Coronado School of the Arts, which he described as “a separate program on the campus of Coronado High School. The arts students would stay on for extra eighth and ninth periods focused on arts curriculum: music, theater, visual arts.”

It was here that his enduring friendship with pianist Ed Kornhauser was forged. Leighton said he started out on electric bass before learning the double bass around the age of 15—and admitted that going from the fretted neck of an electric bass to an upright bass, with no frets, was a challenge.

“It was pretty tough for awhile in the beginning. I still remember very clearly trying to play the bass line from ‘A Night in Tunisia.’ I couldn’t play it; I had a little skill on the electric bass, but I could not make it happen on the upright. Ed Kornhauser teases me because he remembers my saying, ‘I’m going to quit upright bass.’

“I started taking some classical lessons from Erik Johnson; he’s not in the symphony, but he plays a lot of freelance classical stuff around town. We were getting in with the bow and getting the intonation together. A typical electric bass has a 34-inch string; a double bass has a 42-inch string, so the notes are going to be further apart.” He said Johnson taught the positions using bass method books, written by Franz Simandl (1840-1912) , a double bassist from Austria Hungary.

Leighton also pointed out that there are actually more notes on a double bass. “An electric usually has 24 frets, or two octaves. An upright bass can usually get past that—a little bit more range, although most people aren’t playing up there that often.”

LEARNING
It was during high school—and through school connections—that Leighton first got paid for a performance.

“We played at an unveiling of a new fountain at City Hall. And at 15 or 16, I played in the orchestra for some musicals at City College.”

But music wasn’t yet set as his professional path.

“I enrolled at San Diego State as a music major. But I wasn’t sure I wanted music as a career. I was taking a geography class and liking it.”

Leighton with Ed Kornhauser.

Leighton changed majors but kept music as his minor and kept his seat in the SDSU jazz band—but his bachelor’s degree is in geography. It was at SDSU that he fell in love with jazz as well as the upright bass.

“It probably took me at least a year to sort of decide I want to really get my head around jazz,” he said.

“My dad is a huge music fan—a big Stones fan, Bob Marley, Springsteen. And even though he never listened to a lot of jazz until I begin playing, for some reason he had some Thelonious Monk records when I was growing up.

“I got into jazz through Jaco. Probably at first more through admiration for his chops more than anything, then realizing the guy had insane musicianship. Then I started branching out, listening to Mingus Ah Um.

In high school, a few of his fellow students were into jazz, but at SDSU he was surrounded by music students who were heavy into jazz. “Doug Walker and Harley Magsino were grad students, and I was blown away by those dudes. Being in that environment with people who took it seriously was motivating.”

“I was at SDSU for nine semesters—seven out of the nine. I was in Bill Yeager’s band, called the A Band or just the jazz ensemble. We just called it the A Band.”

Leighton said the only two semesters he wasn’t in the band were his first and last. And he described the ensemble as a typical big band, with 17 or 18 pieces, depending on who auditioned.

“There was often but not always a B Band, and the way they did it at SDSU in the first week of classes was that everybody auditions, and then they piece together bands based on people’s skill levels and class schedules.

“During my last semester there was a geography class I HAD to take in order to graduate. The conversation telling Bill, it was like disappointing your parents.”

PERFORMING
While Leighton’s current calendar is heavy on jazz dates, he does keep one foot in the rock and pop worlds.

“I’m in a band called The Secret Agents, a 1960s-themed band. One of the things I like about playing in that band is I get to play a little electric bass. It’s very jazz adjacent—crooner blending into both Frank and Nancy Sinatra. There’s a nice blend of styles in that group.

“We do some shows as a creative project but being a corporate event band was always part of the idea behind it. A lot of times we’re at a convention or a show, and so we’re the show and background on the same [bill].”

“But mostly I play upright bass. Upright is home—that’s where I’m most comfortable.”

Drawing of Leighton by Katya Mezhova.

Leighton said that when he was growing up, he had no idea how many great bassists either grew up here in San Diego or ended up moving here. It’s a roster that includes recent San Diego Music Hall of Fame honoree Bob Magnusson, Gunnar Biggs, Rob Thorsen, Nathan East, Mark Dresser, Bert Turetzky, Preston Coleman, Chubby Jackson, and more.

“It’s a crazy bass town! I really didn’t figure that out until later!”

But despite that high level of talent, Leighton said it’s not a cut-throat environment at all.

“It’s not competitive. The scene is very welcoming and friendly overall in San Diego, and on top of that bass players are generally easy going. If I can’t make a gig, I’m always happy to recommend other guys. It’s a two-fold thing of just being San Diego, Southern California and having that attitude culturally; second, bass players are just very friendly. The only angry bass players are Mingus and Jaco.”

When asked about Magnusson—who played symphonically as well as in jazz settings—being renowned for the use of the bow even when playing jazz, Leighton said, “I have a little rule that I try to use the bow at least once on every gig, just to keep myself accountable. It’s easy to ignore it.”

His current bass was made by the Upton Bass String Instrument Company in Mystic, Connecticut. While not custom, “I picked the model and some of the features. It’s like buying a car. It’s modeled after the old Czech basses.”

As far as his performance schedule, “I play with Peter Sprague quite a bit; I don’t do every one of his gigs, but I’m in the orbit.” He’s played with Sprague for about 10 years.

“Playing with Peter is so great in San Diego, because he’s developed such a following over the years. There will be so many times we’re packing up after a show and somebody comes up and says, ‘I first saw you in 1973.’”

But even in the jazz idiom, Leighton said there are occasional corporate gigs and wedding receptions. “We played a gig with Pat Metheny, which was a surprise for a client’s wife’s birthday.”

Leighton with Charlie Arbelaez. Photo by Manuel Cruces Cambero.

Leighton said he’s not opposed to corporate events or other non-concert settings, because you never know what the crowd is going to be like until you get started. Music obviously serves many purposes, but it’s really nice when you’re there to play and the people are there to listen. And they don’t even have to be big jazz clubs—it’s just nice to play your music or creative music in front of an appreciative audience.”

Asked if he had a favorite performance memory, he cited the birthday party gig above.

“Honestly, yeah. From that gig with Metheny, I think we closed with ‘Song for Bilbao.’ That’s one of his best-known tunes. We played a relatively short set—for Pat, a minuscule set, just 90 minutes! John Opferkuch was on piano, and he got maybe a few solos all night, then on the last song [‘Song for Bilbao’] we went around the band, and everyone took a chorus. John took the last chorus—that’s how we rehearsed it—and on that last chorus he kicked it up another level. And I thought, ‘I could quit right now.’”

TEACHING
Leighton currently teaches at Palomar College (directing both jazz ensembles) and also at Cal State San Marcos; he gives lessons at Point Loma Nazarene University and Saddleback College.

A few years ago, he and his wife moved to Mission Viejo in Orange County when she was offered a new position.

He said the commute to North County for Palomar and CSUSM isn’t bad, and his trips to PLNU work out as he usually includes a visit to his parents, who still live in Coronado.

His first teaching gig was at SDSU, teaching bass for a year after Magnusson retired. He began teaching at CSUSM in 2017, and he’s steadily started collecting college gigs.

Leighton with the Kamau Kenyatta Band.

While he admitted that his busy teaching schedule sometimes leads to him turning down a live date he’d otherwise want to pick up, that is balanced out by the fact that “I don’t have to play $100 bar gigs” to pay the bills.

“There are two bands (at Palomar): the night band and the day band. The day band is called the Jazz Ensemble, and the night band is called the Repertory Jazz Ensemble. The night band is definitely more advanced. It’s the A Band. Both bands are a pretty good split of community members and students. Both bands have members who are older than me, who are retired or have a day gig.”

He said each band has a three-hour rehearsal every Monday, and both perform two concerts per semester.

For the fall semester this year, Leighton said the Palomar Dance Department will join the jazz ensembles for a choreographed performance of Duke Ellington’s Far East Suite.

At Cal State San Marcos, rehearsals are Tuesdays and Thursdays.

“I teach the jazz ensemble, which is like a big combo. It’s freshmen through seniors, all skill levels. I do auditions at the beginning of the semester just to weed out anyone who shouldn’t be in there.” When asked if those conversations—informing a student they’re not ready—are uncomfortable, Leighton said, “Not usually.” More typical, he said, is a sense of relief from the student.

The CSUSM repertoire does standards from the Great American Songbook, he explained.

“Today we’re rehearsing ‘The Days of Wine and Roses,’ and in the spring we did a Gershwin program. About two years ago I started having a theme every semester, picking a composer. This semester we’re doing West Coast jazz or cool jazz.”

At Point Loma Nazarene and Saddleback, he provides individual instruction, mostly for bass players.

“I have taught some guitar students and piano students as well. And in the bands I direct, I’m teaching horn players, too—but not in a one-on-one setting.” The skill levels vary widely, he said, from “almost total beginners to some very advanced students over the years.”

Leighton said he thinks he’s pretty easy-going as a teacher, “Sometimes, I think to a fault!”

And he reads feedback that students are required to give all faculty at the end of each semester and feels that that feedback has allowed him to improve as an instructor over the years.

What draws him to teaching? “Honestly, one of the best parts about teaching is the performance at the end of the semester, seeing it all come together. I don’t use a baton, but I am conducting; I’m up there waving my arms around!”

COMPOSING
Leighton said his songwriting process can be a bit onerous. “It’s been a while since I’ve written original music. I’ve been working on arranging. I’ve been really interested in Harry Warren of late. He just had a lot of range.”

When he is writing, “I’ll set parameters—a prompt” to help get him started. He said Sprague told him that writing a song offers infinite possibilities, so by choosing a structure—AABB or something else—he at least narrows the possibilities so he can begin the process.

“I usually write a tune, then I have to take it into rehearsal and play it a couple times and then go back and edit it. Danny Green (jazz pianist) is a guy that when he composes something it comes fully formed. We were playing one of his new songs once, and I said, ‘What if I do this?’ and he just said, ‘I like it how it is.’

“If I’m composing, my wife can’t be around because I play the same four bars over and over. She’ll like it when it’s done, but she can’t stand hearing it over and over, so I’ll usually plug my headphones into the keyboard.”

“I put out a record last April, I Remember, which was nominated for a San Diego Music Award; that was pretty cool.”

He also recently issued an earlier recording from 2016, M.L. Trio, which he’d never gotten around to putting out. “I recorded it, and then that business part of the business—marketing—makes me want to puke. I expected to lose money on the record but had all this music and wanted to preserve it.”

LOOKING AHEAD
Not yet 40 years of age, Leighton said he’s already played with a lot of his musical heroes but has a few itches left to scratch. For one, he’d love to do something at the La Jolla Playhouse. “I’ve played most of the big theaters in town, but not the Playhouse; I did a long show at Lamb’s.”

He also cited the new Rady Shell as a venue at which he’s not yet performed.

The final item on his bucket list he shared was wanting to play with jazz musician Kurt Rosenwinkel. “A guy I really admire is Kurt Rosenwinkel, the guitarist, but he lives in Berlin, so the odds of me playing with him are pretty low.”

Catch Mackenzie Leighton and his quartet at Lou Lou’s Jungle Room on Thursday, October 2, 7 and 9pm.