Jazz musician Chris Botti

Apr. 7—details

—Chris Botti

—7:30 p.m., Monday, April 10

—Lensic Performing Arts Center, 211 W San Francisco St.

—Check for ticket availability; 505-988-1234, lensic.org

It takes a lifetime of dedication to forge a career as a touring jazz musician. But if you ask Chris Botti, it also takes a little bit of luck.

The master trumpeter doesn't bring up good fortune as a way of devaluing his accomplishments: He's earned a Grammy, sold more than four million records, and considers Sting to be one of his best friends. It's just that he recognizes how difficult it can be to make a name for yourself in the music business.

"When I say the word 'luck,' I don't mean I didn't put in the work or I'm not a great act on stage or don't have a great band," says Botti, who will play the Lensic Performing Arts Center on Monday, April 10. "There are so many talented people, and I think in order to reach mass appeal, you need some stars to align.

"For instance, I was opening for Sting [in 2005], who would later become my closest friend, at a show in New York. Someone in the audience happened to say, 'Boy, this guy is super talented. He should be on Oprah. I'll call Oprah.' We were on Oprah a week later and kablang! We're a known entity. So that's whatever that is. It happened to me. And I'm so unbelievably grateful."

Botti isn't being metaphorical; his appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show led his career to skyrocket. The Seattle Times reported in 2005 that in the week following his appearance on Oprah, his album, When I Fall In Love, jumped up the Billboard charts from No. 146 to No. 37.

That album topped the jazz charts and ultimately sold 500,000 copies.

But Botti's success was hardly overnight. The Oregon native had been recording for a decade and touring even longer. Today, the 60-year-old points out that he was 42 when he got his big break and jokes that every meteoric rise is buoyed by "10 years of absolutely terrible restaurants and hotels."

In truth, his career began even earlier than that.

Botti says that many classical and jazz musicians start as early as five or six years old and often devote decades to perfecting their craft. It can take dedication bordering on obsessiveness — he quotes musician Joni Mitchell, who said that great artists are 99 percent drive and 1 percent talent.

In his youth, Botti was selected for the McDonald's All American High School Jazz Band program and got to play in Carnegie Hall before he even went to college. Those kinds of opportunities are great for young musicians, he says, but that doesn't guarantee success later in life.

"You have to somehow pay your rent," he says. "That whole notion of being a prodigy — doing things great at 13 or 14 — is overrated. I can count zillions of musicians that I've seen getting accolades from the press because they're so talented when they're young. But the real gravy is: Can you put it together when you're 22 or 23? It's a completely different thing to do it day in and day out and to actually get better and form a career. Everyone's convinced their kid is Paul McCartney when they're 12. But when they're 20 and they're broke, [their parents are] like, 'I think you should be a doctor.' Then the fun begins because you have to convince your mom and dad that you really are meant for this."

For Botti, his life as a touring jazz musician began right before he was scheduled to graduate from Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. And he has one of the best reasons for dropping out of college on the brink of graduation.

"It was the only excuse my mom would be on board with," he says. "I left school and joined Frank Sinatra's band. I got to meet him. I shook his hand. We didn't rap about music, but I got the privilege and honor of being in his band and playing his music and getting to know him. I was only 22."

That was just the beginning of future brushes with music legends.

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He toured with Paul Simon during Simon's Rhythm of the Saints tour, and he toured with Mitchell. He spent four years in Sting's band and later became Sting's opening act. Even before he recorded his own music, Botti was collaborating with iconic singers like Aretha Franklin and Bette Midler.

On his 2005 album, To Love Again: The Duets, Botti collaborated with Michael Bublé and Gladys Knight. To this day, he's most proud of the fact that he gets to work with artists he admires.

"Music is like a currency," he says. "The most important currency is getting respect from your peers."

The one jazz giant that Botti hasn't worked with, ironically, is one of his greatest inspirations. While Botti grew up listening to Miles Davis albums, the two never shared the same places as musicians. They came close, he says, but only once, and it was well before Botti had a record deal.

"I got really close to him. I played at the Hollywood Bowl," he says. "And he was toward the end of his career. It must have been like 1988. I saw him walk by with all of his bodyguards and stuff like that, but that's the closest I ever got to him. I'm perfectly okay with admiring my idols from afar."

Botti's most recent album, 2012's Impressions, featured Herbie Hancock, Andrea Bocelli, and Vince Gill, and Botti played compositions from artists as varied as Frédéric Chopin and R. Kelly. Impressions won the Grammy for Best Pop Instrumental Album and punctuated a long and successful run of releases for Columbia Records. It also started the first decade-long absence of recording in his career, when, between 2012 and 2023, Botti says the recording industry basically collapsed.

"The last time I made a record, records were for sale," he says. "Imagine you owned a Japanese restaurant, and one day, the government said, 'All Japanese food is free tomorrow.' You might not go to work. When I made records — and I was recording for Columbia Records — they sold a ton of records, and we were very profitable for them. Spotify and these platforms that have come along have removed all of that. So there's literally no incentive."

Despite changes in the industry, Botti recorded an album — tentatively scheduled for release in October — on longtime jazz staple Blue Note Records. The album only took about seven days to record, and unlike some of his previous albums, doesn't include a big cast of supporting artists.

About half a dozen musicians are on the album, Botti says, with some guest vocals provided by singer-songwriter John Splithoff. Much of the album consists of standards and was produced by David Foster, who has 16 Grammys and worked with such artists as Bublé, Barbra Streisand, Celine Dion, and Michael Jackson. "I think it's the only jazz album he's ever produced," Botti says of Foster. "I think he's arguably one of the most successful record producers ever. He was gracious enough to say yes."

Botti says he has played in Santa Fe a half-dozen times before and calls it "arguably one of the most picturesque places in the world." His current tour started in November in the Middle East, and while he took a brief break, he's been touring nonstop since.

The biggest crowds Botti has ever played for were at Rock in Rio, which he estimates was about 200,000 people, and in Central Park, where he played for about 750,000 fans. But he says he doesn't feel additional pressure in front of big crowds. In fact, it might be easier.

"It's not nearly as nerve-racking as playing in front of two people you care about," he says. "If there's one person in the audience you're nervous about, then you have butterflies. But if you're playing for a lot of people, it's not exponentially more intense."

Either way, he feels lucky to be there — and the audience does, too.