Impromptu jam sessions are a crucial proving ground for
young jazz musicians during their formative years - and for artists who thrive
on spontaneity, they're also a heck of a lot of fun. While his increasingly
busy calendar proves that saxophonist Chad Lefkowitz-Brown learned all the
right lessons from those informal early gatherings, it also means that
opportunities to enjoy such creative camaraderie have become fewer and farther
between. So for his new digital-only release, Standard Sessions - now available
via Sound Frame Records, available at www.chadlefkowitz-brown.com/music -
Lefkowitz-Brown decided to make those opportunities happen. He invited some of
his favorite musicians to gather together, blow on some familiar standards, and
see what happens - just like in the old days.
Of course, for Lefkowitz-Brown the "old days"
aren't really that old. The saxophonist arrived in NYC just eight years ago,
and was fortunate to settle on the bottom floor of a house in Harlem where the
basement lent itself to musical gatherings. "There was a drum set and an
upright piano, so every day I would bring people over to have sessions,"
he recalls. "I look back fondly on those days as some of my favorite
musical experiences, and they came out of just playing tunes in the basement."
Over the ensuing years, however, Lefkowitz-Brown found
himself increasingly in demand: touring the world with pop superstar Taylor
Swift, playing with jazz greats from Dave Brubeck to Clarence Penn, and
performing as a member of Arturo O'Farrill's Grammy winning Afro-Latin Jazz
Orchestra. The friends he'd been jamming with were on their own career
trajectories as well, meaning that none of them could spare much time for
basement jam sessions.
"I started to miss it," Lefkowitz-Brown says, so
he came up with the idea for the series of spur-of-the-moment recordings that
became Standard Sessions. One thing that had changed since those no-pressure
early days was Lefkowitz-Brown's diehard social media following. Using a few
tricks that he'd learned from the media-savvy T-Swift and other observations of
the pop music world, he has cultivated a worldwide fanbase numbering more than
70,000 followers across platforms like Instagram, Facebook and YouTube. For
these jam sessions, those fans would become the virtual audience; each session
was recorded and aired via YouTube, with 12 highlights now collected for this
album, available via iTunes, Spotify, and other digital outlets (all 18 can be
found at Lefkowitz-Brown's website).
Every session represented a unique first-time gathering,
joining Lefkowitz-Brown with a rhythm section that had never played together
before. The invitees represent a wide swath of the thriving Manhattan scene,
cutting across generations, styles, and experience levels: pianists Manuel Valera,
Carmen Staaf, Victor Gould, David Meder, Steven Feifke, Takeshi Ohbayashi, Adam
Birnbaum, and Josh Richman; bassists Yasushi Nakamura, Jonathan Michel, Eric
Wheeler, Tamir Shmerling, Ben Tiberio, Raviv Markovitz, and Ricky Rodriguez;
and drummers Kush Abadey, Allan Mednard, Charles Goold, Michael Piolet, Bryan
Carter, Chris Smith, Jeremy Dutton, and Darrian Douglas.
"There were people at the sessions that I'd known for
10 to 15 years," Lefkowitz-Brown says, "and then there were people
that I'd known for 10 to 15 months. It was cool to see someone that I had known
practically since childhood and someone I had only met recently playing
together on the same session."
Two tunes, "On Green Dolphin Street" and
"When Will the Blues Leave," feature Feifke, a pianist that Lefkowitz
started collaborating with when both were teenagers, together with Piolet, a
drummer he had met recently but never shared the bandstand with before that
day. Then there were meetings between veterans like Cuban-born Valera, who has
been in the city for nearly two decades, and newcomers like Tiberio, who had
been on the scene for less than a year when they recorded their fiery take on
"Alone Together."
To ensure the in-the-moment invention that he was seeking to
replicate, Lefkowitz-Brown left the choice of tunes up to the assembled bands,
decided on the day, just before they were recorded for posterity. Each piece
was allowed a maximum of two takes, with most accomplished in one - or with the
first one chosen for its raw vitality.
"Those first takes usually felt the best,"
Lefkowitz-Brown explains. "It's definitely harder to make things
spontaneous when you have in your mind that this is actually going to be
permanent, but I told everyone, 'If we don't like it, I'll trash it.' I think
because of that everybody was able to go in there pretty relaxed and just feel
like it was a jam back at my place in Harlem, which was my goal. I wanted to
recreate what happened when people got together to just play tunes in a
basement and have lunch together."
Hailed as a "sax phenom" by The New York Daily
News, Chad Lefkowitz-Brown is one of the first prominent jazz musicians to
emerge out of the millennial generation. He has toured globally as a soloist,
and with numerous jazz artists and pop icons ranging from Arturo O'Farrill to
Taylor Swift. Chad is also a member of the multi-Grammy Award winning
Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra, and is on faculty at the San Francisco Conservatory
as a visiting artist. DownBeat Magazine selected his latest release, Onward,
which features jazz legend Randy Brecker, as an Editor's Pick for 2017,
commending his "technical abilities that mask the difficulty of his wondrously
intricate lines." His debut album, Imagery Manifesto, was named
"Debut Album of the Year" by jazz critic and author Doug Ramsey. A
native of Elmira, New York, Chad established himself as a jazz prodigy at age
11, performing throughout New York State under the mentorship of local jazz
hero, George Reed, who was known for backing legends like Teddy Wilson, Buddy
Tate, and Marian McPartland. Chad went on to pursue a formal education in the
arts at the Brubeck Institute, a prestigious fellowship program created by jazz
legend Dave Brubeck. While studying at the institute, he performed regularly
with Brubeck and was a member of the Brubeck Institute Jazz Quintet. Chad
received many accolades during his scholastic career, including 15 DownBeat
Magazine Student Music Awards for categories such as "Best Jazz
Soloist" and "Best Original Song." Since graduating from the
Brubeck Institute, Chad has performed throughout four continents, and has
appeared at venues including Carnegie Hall, the Super Bowl, and Madison Square
Garden.
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