Chris Botti: The trumpeter who took over the world
Chris Botti lives out of a suitcase. He once bought a ritzy home perched atop Hollywood Hills, but he soon sold it and moved into a hotel in New York City. It's his favorite place to stay when he's not on tour. He has no spouse or kids, though he did, briefly, date Katie Couric.
"I mean, I don't even live anywhere," Botti says in a telephone interview from a hotel room at the Hyatt Regency in Wichita, Kan. "I've given up all the trappings that people define as their life's goals. So I don't have a family, I don't have a dog or a cat or a plant. And to a lot of people that's a deal breaker."
A chart-topping jazz instrumentalist and one of People Magazine's "Most Beautiful People" in 2004, Botti's lone-traveling lifestyle is far from the most spectacular thing about him. In music, he is a bit of a unicorn — at once jazz messiah, for showing the world that "dude plays trumpet" can be a global hit, and jazz pariah, for being, in the eyes of some critics, too silky smooth.
For artists emerging from the world of straight-ahead jazz, mainstream success has tended to be singular, inimitable. Botti, who plays at the Palladium in Carmel on June 4, epitomizes this. Because who is like Botti? Wynton Marsalis? Kenny G? The "popera" star Josh Groban, another stately master of the musical uplift? Perhaps.
No one is really like Botti, though. Not his well-greased machine of success, looks, jazz and classical pedigrees — not the way he blows gilded, feathery romance out of his horn.
Botti is cool personified. You can hear strands of Chet Baker, as well as the "Cool" Miles Davis of the late 1950s, in his tone. "My records are very much taken from Wynton Marsalis' 'Hot House Flowers,'" he says. "It's the same orchestral blah blah blah with beautiful trumpet playing romantic. That's kind of the nuts and bolts of it."
"People always ask me at the airport or during interviews, how my success happened," Botti once said. "And I always tell them there are only four ingredients: Practice, practice, practice and be friends with Sting."
The real story begins with a young trumpeter barely scraping by in New York City and ends with four back-to-back studio albums that hit No. 1 on the Billboard jazz charts, including 2013's Grammy-winning "Impressions." A pupil of the David Baker school of jazz at Indiana University Bloomington, he joined Paul Simon's touring band early in his career and, in 1999, caught a cosmos-sized break when Sting asked him to share the stage for two years.
"The odds are you're not going to have this kind of career," Botti says. "It takes a lot more thought process for the general public to grasp an instrumentalist, more than they do a little singer singing a tune or a rock song. I'm really reluctant to say to kids, 'Forgo this, forgo that, practice seven hours a day and take really good lessons, you'll have career.' I don't know, you might not."
Album sales were never Botti's focus. After his tour with Sting, he took his own band on the road, losing money on each gig and loving every minute of it.
"What we do live is completely different than my records," he says. "The way that we morph in all the special guests and the different styles of music all in one night of music, I think that that's become more of my calling card than anything else.
"More than the records, more than the Grammy, more than all that crap. It's the way the show morphs. That's really been my currency for the last seven or eight years."
Botti's not exaggerating about the live shows. In 2008, he performed and recorded a concert that would in many ways become his magnum opus. "Chris Botti in Boston" featured the trumpet player sharing the stage with a crack ensemble that included Sting, Yo-Yo Ma, Steven Tyler, John Mayer and Josh Groban. He was every bit their match, but, more than that, he helped them lift music beyond classification.
Cheesy jazz-pop fusion this was not. The show was album-minted, video-documented proof that Botti is not just a musical athlete of Olympic decathlon proportions — he's also a tower of seduction whose spiked silver coif and trim figure, which looks like a "7" when he leans back on the trumpet, recalls the cool eroticism of Vincent Van Gogh's "Starry Night." "Chris Botti in Boston" was pop music, easy listening and an achievement in discipline all rolled into one.
The single life, says the 52-year-old, is worth it for that kind of achievement. It's worth it for the fans who stop him on the street, for the wild cheers in the stadiums and concert halls. Worth it for the people he shares the stage with and worth it for the music — an art form Botti didn't quite understand until he heard Miles Davis' yearning opera of emotion, "My Funny Valentine," at the age of 12. Before Miles, the Richard Davis show tune was immortalized by Duke Ellington, Frank Sinatra, Bill Evans and Chet Baker. Now it was Botti's turn, even if it means living out of a suitcase.
"I don't see it as a sacrifice. I think it's the opposite," he says. "I look at it as this incredible opportunity.
"I thought I knew what home was. I went and bought a big flashy house in L.A. and all the trappings that could go along with it. I wasn't happy in it. So I got rid of all my possessions, and I moved into a hotel. I feel more at home in a hotel than I do in a home."
Doesn't it get lonely?
"Sure. But that wouldn't change if I had a house. That's a whole other conversation."
Star reporter Wei-Huan Chen can be reached at (317) 444-6249 or on Twitter at @weihuanchen.
If you go
What: Chris Botti live
When: 7:30 p.m. June 4
Where: The Center for the Performing Arts, 355 City Center Drive, Carmel
How much: $35-95