Chris Botti goes for ‘visceral effect'

By Richard Duckett TELEGRAM & GAZETTE STAFF

By any standard, trumpeter Chris Botti keeps a busy performing schedule.

It takes him on the road with his band nearly 300 days a year. There are also album recordings and special CD, DVD and TV projects such as last year's “Chris Botti in Boston,” which was made with the Boston Pops Esplanade Orchestra.

Then there's practice.

“I practice every day, whether I'm on the road or not. That's my job,” Botti said. If there's no show on a given day, practice is usually for two to four hours. Practice helps make perfect. “Ultimately it's the sound of my trumpet that resonates with people,” he said during a recent telephone interview from somewhere-out-there on the road.

Botti (pronounced “Boat-tee”) will be in Worcester May 15 for a special concert at The Hanover Theatre for the Performing Arts presented by Music Worcester Inc. as part of the celebrations of the 150th Worcester Music Festival.

He wasn't really blowing his own trumpet when he said that the band he'll be bringing along is “one of the best in the world … I would put my band up against anyone.”

While he now leads his own band, Botti has played for a lot as well.

There are two distinct parts to his professional career — which partially explains the continued practice and urge to keep busy.

The beginnings are very clearly remembered. At the age of 12 he heard a recording of Miles Davis' trumpet rendition of “My Funny Valentine.” The impact was life-changing. “That's forever etched in my mind … I knew I wanted to be a professional musician.”

Immediately, trumpet practice for the young Botti, originally from Oregon, was “eight hours a day, always,” he said.

His talent was noticed early, and over the years he recorded and performed with the some of the best in music, including Frank Sinatra, Josh Groban, Michael Buble, Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell, John Mayer, Andrea Bocelli, Joshua Bell, Aerosmith's own Steven Tyler and perhaps most significantly for him, Sting.

A great-looking résumé, to be sure. He was the trumpet frontman, although the star of the show was someone else. However, his 2004 CD “When I Fall In Love” changed the notes dramatically. It was a spectacular success, and Botti became the largest-selling American instrumental artist. Straddling classic standards of jazz and pop with sophisticated playing and arranging, Botti won plaudits as “Adult Contemporary's Darling.”

He was certainly an adult. “My success came late. It happened when I was 42,” he noted.

Botti said he wants to keep busy to maintain “the good luck I've had.” Besides which, “Three hundred days on the road, if it's not fun, then what am I doing?”

Botti is now 47 — but looks a good deal younger. People magazine has named him one of the “50 Most Beautiful People.”

He said his big break came when Sting invited him to be a featured soloist on his Brand New Day tour from 1999 to 2001. Then, in early 2004, Sting asked Botti to open for him on another tour. Botti opened for Sting around the world that year, and the enhanced exposure coincided in lovely fashion with the release of “When I Fall In Love.”

“That really made it an opportunity,” Botti said. “All these things lead back to Sting.”

“When I Fall in Love” wasn't his first CD, and four others have followed. “My shows, if one thing can be said, are radically different than the recordings,” Botti observed. Rather like an artist such as Miles Davis could make a well-measured recording but then let loose on improvisation if performing the same piece live, so Botti likes the challenge of engaging his concert audiences. “Live, you want to feel the visceral effect — get their blood flowing,” he said.

The highly acclaimed “Chris Botti in Boston,” shot and recorded in 2008 and released in 2009, was sort of a hybrid of the recording and live milieus. There were two concerts at Symphony Hall, more than 100 microphones carefully in place, and a future PBS audience for a television special (broadcast in 2009), but the knowledge that the live audience had to be satisfied. You couldn't mess with the guest artists, either. The lineup included Sting and his longtime guitarist Dominic Miller, Groban, Tyler, “American Idol” runner-up Katharine McPhee, cellist Yo-Yo Ma and violinist Lucia Micarelli.

“If one thing goes wrong, you're screwed,” Botti said. “All the good-luck things have to happen. You can't just re-do it again.”

On this occasion there wasn't a lot of time for practice. But there was plenty of opportunity for nerves. Botti acknowledged he had a case of them.

“Oh my God, yes. Weeks before. Every adjective you have for nerves is what I got. You just never know what's going to happen.”

But then again, “it was really fun that it came out the way it did.”