Where did you grow up? Did you grow up around music/jazz? Do you have any familial experiences with music?
"My father was in the Marines so I don’t really have a home. New York is the closest thing to a home as I’ve lived here longer than anywhere. I was born on a Marine Corps base in North Carolina, moved to southern California, then back. From childhood growing up, northern Delaware and Philadelphia would speak to me as far as roots. This is where I discovered that I wanted to be a musician - the particular way that jazz is played in the Philly area made me the person I am and pushed me to this trajectory. I've been in New York since 2001. Growing up as a Marine Corps brat, I never lived in most places longer than 4 or 5 years at a time. In December I will be 23 years here.
I have always been a sax player. My parents are from a humble midwestern background. It never occurred to them to get me into music lessons even though they definitely noticed I had an aptitude for music. My mother can carry a tune really well and has a nice voice and I think my father might have played the trumpet in high school. The radio was always on and my parents, for being blue-collar people without a higher education, were pretty imaginative. I remember my father pointing out the music in the movies on TV when I was very young and it changed my focus to listening to the score rather than the movie itself. I remember watching The Muppet Show as a kid, a little blue muppet called Zoot who played the sax. My mom said I always liked when he came on the screen when I was probably around 3 years old. I remember that by the time I got into middle school, the choice was "art or band" - most of the cute girls picked band so I figured I'd follow and play the coolest instrument which I thought was the sax.
In the beginning, the music I was playing was through school and that was important for me. I was a terrible student and hated school. I was bad at most things except for music. I had a middle school band director who promoted me to playing the baritone saxophone, probably just to keep me busy as I was always misbehaving among the other alto sax players, sometimes making fun of the kids who didn’t practice, and I was sometimes the disruptive kid in class. She would be the one to plant the seed later when she told me that she thought I would be interested in playing jazz one day. So I have to credit her for initially pointing me in that direction. That definitely helped me move towards this path at 12/13 years old. Music, band class, and a teacher who believed in me basically turned me from a C and D student to an A and B student. Music is such an important part of the US education system when it is done right and definitely pulled me up."
When (if ever) did you have a lightbulb moment?
"This came after I moved to northern Delaware at 14. The greater Philly area was much more metropolitan, and thus jazz was much more common to hear than in the rural and southern parts of the US. I was far more exposed to it there and I joined a band in the high school with a band director that had more jazz focus. I was promoted to the first chair alto there and I always thought I wanted to do something in music but wasn’t sure. I thought I would be a Marine for most of my life. I think I was in my junior year of high school and the Count Basie Band was traveling through and did a concert at my school. The lead alto player was running late and I was playing with my band director's local community adult jazz band and we opened up for them. So Frank Foster, who was the band leader for the Basie band at the time, comes up to me - and probably did it to be cheeky - and says "Our alto player is late. Why don’t you sit in for the first couple of tunes?" That was kinda stupid! I was a high school junior, and barely hanging on by the skin of my teeth but it was incredible to do that at the time. I knew then and there how incredible it was to look at this legendary book and to try to play with these guys, feeling that energy. It definitely secured the idea in my head. I had a framed picture of that day but a few years later when I was moving from one apartment to another in Philadelphia, I had a bunch of stuff in a car, including that picture, and that car got stolen off of the street with all of that stuff in it. So that picture is gone, and I’ve forgotten who it was that took the picture. This was pre-social media and broadband internet, so that pic probably only existed as a hard copy or on film. Side note, later the stolen car apparently happened to be used as getaway car in an armed bank robbery (But that story is for another time)”
How would you compare the NYC jazz scene to other places you have played?
"I was in my early 20s moving to New York City. I think I always wanted to move here even though I had never been here before. Pop culture shows us that that’s where the art scene is. In any movie about jazz, New York was always the focus. I wanted to be on the East Coast, it wasn’t necessarily NYC. I felt that there was a ceiling in Philly in terms of how much I could learn and be exposed to. This was pre-internet and social media so I felt I needed to be immersed in NYC. At the time I thought it would be temporary. A lot of the musicians that I moved here with around the same time, a lot turned around and left, either back to Philly or some place easier to live. It's hard here. In Philly, it's easier to get gigs as it's a smaller scene with a better venue to musician ratio and the pay can be better. But you accept that the standard is higher in NYC. You get your butt kicked but you put up with it because the competitive nature of the NYC scene and the high level of the players can make you better. I was relatively close to ground zero on 9/11 and in the months that followed, since I had a job as a waiter at a restaurant that was a short block from the World Trade Center, and I definitely came away with some PTSD that I haven’t had officially diagnosed, but I know that it messed me up quite a bit and I still deal with it today. It changed me from thinking that NYC was just a temporary place for me to live, to then being a place where I had to be because I needed to be with others who had also been through this tragic event. I had to stay - I would never want to equate myself to a soldier, especially growing up in a military household - but I empathized with those who feel they need to re-enlist after coming back from war. I felt something similar to that whenever I’d leave New York to visit friends and family in other parts of the country, even just a couple hours away in Philadelphia and Delaware. I’d get antsy and feel like I was in a bubble and just needed to get back home to NYC. I have a healthy unhealthy relationship with this city but that definitely solidified me staying here, hopefully for the rest of my life.”
Tell us about Bā'sik and Marian’s
"Bā'sik was just a bar in the neighborhood that I was living in, East Williamsburg, that just had a great feel. I stumbled in there one night looking for a bar just to hang out that I could go to regularly. it opened shortly after I moved there. I instantly befriended the bartenders and owners to the point where I was in there 5 nights a week, after gigs or teaching. Over the course of the next several months, one of the bartenders asked me "We have live music here every so often, how come you’ve never asked to play here?" I didn’t want to take advantage of them - I couldn’t guarantee there was always going to be a crowd. I recognize I'm a good musician but not a star so if I didn’t have a good turn out that would be depressing and embarrassing since the owners and the bartenders were now my friends. I told him I would much rather prefer to just drink here and not mix business with pleasure. But they pushed back a little bit so then I told them that I could make the gig a regular jazz jam session and then at least we’d probably get a decent turnout semi-regularly and we could grow organically over time. In a nutshell that’s how it grew. The owners, Jay and Derrek, were really willing to work with me and open to all suggestions. They looked at it like they weren’t hiring me to always have a huge turnout of people to pack the bar and hear music, but rather they thought of me as a way to advertise the bar and since we set up in the window, to show the street that there’s things happening inside, even on slower nights. They were willing to see it through for the longest time until it eventually became one of the best nights of the week there. It was part of the agreement that when I started, I told them to give me the worst night of the week and maybe we could turn that around. It has definitely paid out in the long term. The owners didn’t approach me from a place of desperation like I’ve seen a lot of little restaurants and bars do a lot of my other colleagues when they want to book music, as if that is the thing that is going to turn their business around. The owners and management at Bā’sik just really wanted to collaborate to create something, and that has shown through with the popularity that The Bā’sik Jazz Jam Session has achieved on Sunday nights, now going on 12 years!
Both places ended up being places that I liked to go out and hang out in, initially. Marians was originally called The Wilky - my friend Kelly Green and her trio used to play there a few nights a week and I really love that trio. I was pretty much just there to see them for free, whereas you’d usually have to pay to see them at Mezzrow or Birdland. It was a jazz jam session after the first set and I would sit in. I eventually became friends with the owner there, Dennis, and his son Iain. Kelly went on tour and her gig ended at The Wilky. After that they tried a bunch of people to host the jam session and nothing was working out. The owners came through Bā'sik, saw what I was doing there, and asked me to do the same in their place. I really liked the owners and the bar and said I would try and take it on similar to Bā'sik. That lasted for maybe three months (2020 - then COVID hit) and went really well before being shut down. Through COVID it was closed for long periods, but we played out on the sidewalk when things started to open up in August of 2020 through to the beginning of November. It was Dennis’s idea to bring the music on the sidewalk and get musicians back to playing again and it gave a lot of musicians an opportunity to play out again with other people for the first time in months. It was really special. You could feel that from the community that came out to hang out and listen. Another traumatic event that everyone went through together, but at least we could hang out, listen, and create music together. The following summer, they renamed the bar Marian's (named after the owner's mother). Then in June of '21, we were back on the sidewalk but by July, we moved it all inside to the space at the back with a baby grand piano, house bass, bass amp, drums, guitar amp and PA. Initially, it was just a little upright piano in the corner of the front space which was great but kinda DIY - it is now much more of a performance venue."
Anything you want to promote - album, tour?
"I've been writing stuff for my next record but my daughter has just turned three - most of my time for the last three years has been spent being a full-time dad during the day and being a musician at night. But now she’s in school, NYC’s free 3K program, and I now have all these free hours I didn’t have before so I am trying to put some of my energies back into the record. So, ask me in few months how it’s coming along. Especially after the pandemic though, my main focus has been getting these gigs off of the ground. When things opened up I went full steam promoting these gigs to try to make them self-sufficient. I'm trying to make them as good as the legendary stuff in Manhattan."
Thoughts on KEYED UP! and promotion in general of jazz in NYC and beyond?
"It has elevated things in a major way, even being associated with KEYED UP!, the publicity has brought everything up a notch: the audiences and the musicians in the city see our spots as legit spots to travel to and It allows me to very confidently call musicians to play the gigs because there’s a better monetary guarantee because of KEYED UP!. I never got real hard pushback from hiring musicians before that, but there was notably a modicum of mild reluctance. I could feel it sometimes before, but now everybody wants to play, not just because of the extra bread, but because Keyed Up offers more legitimacy on the NYC scene. For what these gigs are as great social events, in really great bars and venues, the money we get in help from you guys has elevated everything.
From where we’ve come with the Bā'sik jazz jam session, it's all about community, so increasing the scope of the people we reach with you guys is fantastic. The Bā'sik jam can probably rival most other jams in the city because of the people I’ve brought in as regular house band members and our philosophy is all about community. And a lot of credit goes to my partner at Bā’sik, pianist Julia Chen. I can also say this about the house band members at Marian’s as well, and my partner there, drummer Ben Freidkin as well as guitarist Akira Ishiguro who has made invaluable contributions to that gig. And our philosophy there is the same - I’m not here to just showcase my abilities but to showcase other vibrant musicians throughout the city and give them a place to play and be a part of something greater. I feel that we share that with KEYED UP! and Jazz Generation and that’s why this partnership works."
Photo credit - Hirokazu Yokoyama