JAZZ FACES : Harper Brothers Go for Something New

Trumpeter Philip Harper--who is co-leader of the Harper Brothers, the highly touted new acoustic mainstream jazz band--points to his tenure with Art Blakey in the late ‘80s as a pivotal moment in his still young career.

It’s when he learned to take risks as a musician.

“When I joined Blakey (and his Jazz Messengers band), I did what was safe, which meant not playing too fast . . . not going past a certain register so a note wouldn’t crack,” said the Baltimore native, 25, who leads the band with his brother, drummer Winard.

“Then Art sat me down and said, ‘You’re going to appreciate what you do more if you really want it. If you’re not pleasing yourself, you’re not going to do anything for the (audience) in the long run.’ So I started going for it. . . . The more chances I took, the better it got. Now I go for something new every song.”

The style of the Harper Brothers, a sextet that will be at Catalina Bar & Grill on Tuesday through next Sunday and whose latest album has just been released by Verve, doesn’t fall into a single jazz category--even though the brothers’ own approaches were strongly shaped by such classic be-bop-oriented artists as trumpeters Clifford Brown and Lee Morgan and drummers Blakey and Max Roach.

“I can’t say exactly what we’ll play (when we perform), but you’ll probably hear every groove you can think of, from bop to avant-garde,” Philip Harper said.

“What we want to do is to be like Cannonball Adderly’s band, where whatever (Adderly and his brother, cornetist Nat Adderly) played--from borderline commercial tunes to waltzes to be-bop--they made it seem fun.”

But fun doesn’t necessarily mean easy.

“Though we’re (working regularly) and making records, I’m learning by playing this music on the bandstand. It’s school for me,” Harper said. “Our main concept is to create new things every time we play.”