One Truly Evil Saxophone

Tonight Ivi and I went to a performance of the Eastern Jazz Combo at EOU's McKenzie Theater. This is a ten-person (all or mostly students) group: bass, drums, vibes, three (evil) saxes (tenor, alto, soprano), piano, guitar, trumpet and vocals.

Matt Cooper (EOU prof and killer jazz/classical pianist) directed and played piano on a couple of numbers with the guest Rob Scheps. To quote from the program:

"Oregon native Rob Scheps began studying the tenor saxophone at age nine. He grew up on Long Island, New York. After having graduated high school at age sixteen, he enrolled in the New England Conservatory. He received a Bachelor of Music in Jazz Studies with Honors in performance in 1986. While living in the Boston area he lead his own groups, most notably the True Colors Big Band. In 1988 he moved to New York, formed the Rob Scheps Core-tet and Bartokking Heads and established himself as a formidable force on the jazz scene.

"A member of the Mannes College of Music Faculty, Rob has been a workshop clinician at Bowdoin, Dartmouth, Hunter, Lewis and Clark, University of Missouri at Kansas City, Friends University, and Whitman College as well as Portland State and the University of Connecticut."

Matt also introduced him as a major force in contemporary jazz, who knows almost everybody in the industry, and has just returned from a European tour, most recently in Norway.

The combo played some great jazz pieces, from Miles Davis to Wayne Shorter to Freddie Hubbard to Billy Strayhorn, and for me they really exceeded expectations. I was especially taken by the performances of Trent Shuey on drums and the sax players, Kyson Lamoreau, William Morris and Mariah Boyle. And a couple of tunes into the show, Rob Scheps took the stage ... and blew the audience away. Come and visit and we will play you a CD with his Norway group that we picked up afterwards ... and when he learned that Ivi was a budding sax player, he shook her hand and told her that she shared her first name with one of Duke Ellington's great lead vocalists, Ivy Anderson.

And finally: In one of those remarkable Ivi coincidences, she told me just before we left for the concert that she was listening to a random selection on her MP3 player, Miles Davis' "All Blues" -- which just happened to be the Jazz Combo's opening number tonight.