Jazz Showcase's Upcoming Shows

In August 1979, the ensemble was the opening band on the first night of the First Annual Chicago Jazz Festival. 46 years later, the CJO stands as not only the oldest professional big band in Chicago, but also the second oldest professional civic jazz orchestra in the United States (second only to the Columbus Jazz Orchestra).

Petra's Recession Seven: Petra van Nuis - vocals Art Davis - trumpet Eric Schneider - reeds Russ Phillips - trombone Andy Brown - guitar Dan DeLorenzo - bass Bob Rummage - drums At the start of the Great Recession in September 2008, Petra's Recession Seven, an authentic Chicago-style jazz band was born at Chicago's legendary Green Mill. The seven piece ensemble is led by Petra van Nuis, a vocalist praised by the Chicago Tribune for her "interpretive savvy...light-and-silvery vocals and, better still, saucy manner of delivery that emphasizes the art of the double entendre." Petra's Recession Seven features a front line of all-star internationally known Chicago veteran horn players. Trombonist Russ Phillips grew up "in the wings" listening to his dad, Russ Phillips Sr. play trombone in Louis Armstrong's All-Stars. Russ Jr. decided to follow in his dad's footsteps, and in addition to Chicago performances is a popular fixture on mainstream jazz festivals and cruises. Reedist Eric Schneider began his early career as a member of the bands of Count Basie and Earl Fatha Hines. Since then, Eric has played with many legends including Benny Goodman, Tony Bennett, Dizzy Gillespie and Ella Fitzgerald and continues to be one of the busiest working musicians in Chicago. Trumpeter Art Davis is charter member of the Chicago Jazz Orchestra and a highly respected jazz educator. Early in his career, Art toured with Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra and Rosemary Clooney and continues to be the top call trumpeter for musicians touring through Chicago. The swinging rhythm section of bassist Dan Delorenzo and drummer Bob Rummage is led by guitarist Andy Brown, recognized in Downbeat Magazine's annual critics poll as a “rising star.” In their hometown of Chicago, Petra's Recession Seven is a big hit at the Jazz Showcase, the Green Mill, Andy's Jazz Club, Winter's Jazz Club and Fitzgerald's. Festival performances include the Chicago Jazz Festival, the Cedar Basin Jazz Festival, the Juvae Jazz Festival and the American Music Festival. Regionally, the Recession Seven has played jazz societies including the Madison Jazz Society, the Starr-Gennett Foundation, the Illiana Jazz Club, the "Masters of Swing" series at Cincinnati's Xavier University, the Lafayette Jazz Club and the Indianapolis Jazz Club. The American Rag, in a review of the band's 2011 on location recording "Live In Chicago" praises “a killer of a band that grabs your attention and doesn't give it back until they are finished playing." www.petrasings.com

CHRIS FOREMAN Chris Foreman is a masterful musician and heir to the throne occupied by the soulful, bluesy jazz organ legends who were once his influence. Blind at birth, Foreman started playing piano at age five and began formal training at seven. As a teenager he was attracted to the organ sounds of Jack McDuff, Groove Holmes, JimmySmith and Jimmy McGriff. This attraction led Chris to pursue playing jazz on the organ, which he undertook through intensive study of recordings. Unlike many African- American musicians whose musical knowledge begins and is established through the church, Chris didn't start his apprenticeship as a church organist until he was almost twenty years old - well after his jazz roots were established. He has arrived at a most exciting blend of blues-gospel and jazz and has developed a stunning command and range on the instrument. The blend of his sound is evident in his professional experience, which has included work with Hank Crawford, Albert Collins, Bernard Purdie, The Mighty Blue Kings and Deep Blue Organ Trio. GREG ROCKINGHAM Drummer Greg Rockingham began playing when he was just three years old and debuted as a professional musician at age five in his father's jazz ensemble. An alumnus of the famed Interlochen Arts Academy and Northeastern University, he has won numerous musical awards from the Notre Dame Jazz Festival. Greg has performed or recorded with a wide range of famous names, including the orchestras of Glenn Miller and Guy Lombardo, vocalists Freddie Cole, Patty Page and Jerry Vale and instrumentalists Nat Adderley, Kenny Burrell, Charles Earland, Irene Reid, Ellis Marsalis, Nancy Wilson, and Deep Blue Organ Trio. GREG JUNG Greg Jung is a Chicago based alto saxophonist, originally from Albany, NY. He earned a Bachelor’s degree from SUNY Purchase where he studied with Jon Gordon, Ralph Lalama, Gary Smulyan, Mark Vinci, Steve Wilson, Todd Coolman, Jon Faddis, Hal Galper, Charles Blenzig and others. In 2014 Greg won the Vandoren Emerging Artist Competition, and traveled to perform that year in Paris, France. He spent three years in NYC before deciding to travel the country, performing in clubs and on the street in many of America’s great cities and small towns. It was in this way that he ended up in Chicago, where he has performed at venues like the Green Mill, Andy’s, Winters, Hungry Brain and the Chicago Jazz Festival. Since emerging onto the scene, he has shared the stage with many of the world class musicians that reside in the city. Greg received the Chicago Luminarts Cultural Foundation Fellowship in 2023.

For as long as she’s been a recording artist, the Chilean-born tenor saxophonist Melissa Aldana has wanted to make a ballads record. With archetypes like John Coltrane’s classic 1963 LP Ballads as her North Star, Aldana saw a slow-tempo project as a way to advance her lifelong quest for sound. Not volume, or technical flash, or even advanced harmonic exploration, but sound: the way the overtones of her tenor can caress an aching melody; the way the sonic presence of her saxophone can move throughout a room, filling it from top to bottom with shifting colors. “I transcribe Sonny Rollins, Wayne Shorter, John Coltrane, Joe Henderson, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, and Don Byas, among many others. For them the sound itself is a tool to express an emotion,” she explains. “Every single note is a whole world. So there is a technical side to playing, but then there is this mystical side of sound that… I still don’t know exactly what it is.” A ballads record, she believed, would help her burrow deeper into the essence of her sound. But how could she approach the concept in a way that’s true to her unique vision? Over the past 15 years, Aldana has moved from one strikingly personal project to the next, matching her reputation as a brilliant, diligent saxophonist with her ever-growing gift as a storyteller. A rote exercise in jazz standards simply wouldn’t do. To start, she reached out to the revered pianist and composer Gonzalo Rubalcaba, one of her “biggest heroes” and an artist she has longed to work with at project-length. His suggestion proved a revelation: Aldana should interpret the filin music of his native Cuba, a gorgeous yet still-unheralded tradition of richly arranged romantic song that thrived between the late 1940s and early 1960s. Filin — the word derives from “feeling” — “created a dialogue between traditional Cuban trova, the bolero and jazz, redefining Cuban musical identity,” Rubalcaba explains. “Filin elevated lyrics to a level of greater poetic and colloquial intimacy, and gave rise to instrumentalists and singers of great virtuosity and creative elegance.” Born in Havana in 1963, Rubalcaba grew up surrounded by professional musicians, and met many of the titans of filin as a child — among them the guitarist and composer Ñico Rojas, the pianist and composer Frank Domínguez, and the singers Omara Portuondo and Elena Burke. The style enjoyed a vital omnipresence throughout his upbringing, and its impact on his own music has been profound. “Filin, its repertoire and nature,” he says, “remains a compositional reference that I constantly return to.” To Aldana, filin songs presented a deeply meaningful new ideal: They reminded her of the lovelorn standards she’d internalized as a jazz saxophonist, but with lyrics sung in her native tongue. “They felt like the ballads that I love from the Great American Songbook,” she says, “but because the lyrics are in Spanish, I was able to connect to these songs in a way that I never thought I could.” With Rubalcaba as her guide, she began exploring the history of filin music and working with him to pare down the songs that spoke to her. A plan coalesced: Rubalcaba would craft the arrangements and play piano, alongside the rhythm tandem of bassist Peter Washington and drummer Kush Abadey. Aldana’s dear friend, the best-of-generation vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant, would sing on two numbers, and Blue Note Records President Don Was would produce, offering his trademark oversight, at once discerning, empathic and open. Aldana put the repertoire through the same in-depth process she employs on all of her projects, carefully transcribing the melodies from vocal versions while also learning the lyrics and their intent. All the musicians recorded Filin together in the same room, without an overabundance of rehearsal. “There is something about being able to feel the person next to you,” she says. “There’s a magic that doesn’t happen when you just have the headphones.” The end product is, in a word, stunning. It’s also unlike anything else in Aldana’s catalog — or in 21st-century jazz on the whole. Throughout these eight tracks, the ensemble enacts a kind of stirring and emotional minimalism — a quiet intensity that places paramount importance on Aldana’s radiant delivery of the melody. This music moves slowly, simmering forward with great deliberation and restraint, which is all the more impressive once you consider the runaway virtuosity these players are capable of. The arrangements, of course, are deceptively simple rather than truly elementary. “Working with Gonzalo,” Aldana says, “I learned about the importance of details, and of focus. I always think about details, but this kind of next-level musicianship was something I hadn’t experienced.” Perhaps most remarkable, however, is the fact that this incredibly patient program is never less than compelling; like great cinema, it holds its audience rapt without bells and whistles. When Aldana solos, she plays in a way that contrasts the longform harmonic probings she’s best known for. Her improvising here is mellifluous and moves like gossamer, with a newfound focus on accenting the core tunefulness. “I wasn’t trying to play the perfect jazz solo,” she says. “I was just trying to play inside the band — to leave space and be as present as I could, let the songs breathe. I’m older too, so I might be feeling less like I have something to prove.” Filin is the sort of record you live with — the kind of timeless jazz LP you can use to bookend your day. It follows that the album is expertly ordered and paced. Filin opens with the breathtaking melody of “La Sentencia,” by the bolero Salvador Levi co-written with Ela O’Farrill, followed by “Dime Si Eres Tú,” a ballad by Cesar Portillo de la Luz, one of filin’s absolute pioneers. (Listen for the sustained outro, a solo clinic in brushes playing by Abadey. As an arranging decision, it’s an elegantly bold, even provocative, move.) Marta Valdez’s torch song “No Te Empeñes Más,” which features a stunning vocal performance by Salvant, is a song that Aldana recalled her mother playing around the house. The saxophonist was also impacted by the version Rubalcaba recorded with Joe Lovano in 2000, for the Charlie Haden album Nocturne. Frank Domínguez’s “Imágenes,” which Aldana first fell in love with through the recording by guitarist-singer Pablo Milanés, closes out Side A. “Las Rosas No Hablan,” by the Brazilian samba innovator Cartola, was a Rubalcaba selection, though Aldana was familiar with its forlorn beauty from hearing Anat Cohen perform it. Here, Salvant sings the lyrics in Spanish, translated from the original Portuguese. “Little Church” was written by another Brazilian genius, Hermeto Pascoal, and is best known from the electric Miles Davis double LP, Live-Evil. In Aldana’s hands, the composition is pure poignant lyricism, devoid of the eerie surreality that defines the Miles version. (At the core of that atmosphere of unease is Pascoal’s famous whistling.) “This is my favorite track on the album,” says Aldana, “and a song I’ve been playing for a little while with my own band. I just had to record it. I was really thinking hard about how to approach it, and the first person who came to mind was Wayne Shorter.” The two closing numbers, José Antonio Méndez’s “Ocaso” and Frank Domínguez’s “No Pidas Imposibles,” come off especially like ravishing midcentury jazz and pop standards. But, Aldana reiterates, “I felt so much closer to this music. The way that these musicians play the melodies and sing, because of the language, is so different than with American standards. These singers often seem to float above the lyric, with a sense of time that’s freer, flowing.” “I also just felt in my gut that I wanted to do a ballads record,” she adds, “that I have something to say.”