composer
A composer is a person who writes music. The term is especially used to indicate composers of Western classical music, or those who are composers by occupation. Many composers are, or were, also skilled performers of music.
Etymology and Defi ...
,
arranger
In music, an arrangement is a musical adaptation of an existing composition. Differences from the original composition may include reharmonization, melodic paraphrasing, orchestration, or formal development. Arranging differs from orches ...
,
steel guitarist
A steel guitar ( haw, kīkākila) is any guitar played while moving a steel bar or similar hard object against plucked strings. The bar itself is called a "steel" and is the source of the name "steel guitar". The instrument differs from a conve ...
producer
Producer or producers may refer to:
Occupations
*Producer (agriculture), a farm operator
*A stakeholder of economic production
*Film producer, supervises the making of films
**Executive producer, contributes to a film's budget and usually does not ...
from
Tulsa, Oklahoma
Tulsa () is the second-largest city in the state of Oklahoma and 47th-most populous city in the United States. The population was 413,066 as of the 2020 census. It is the principal municipality of the Tulsa Metropolitan Area, a region with ...
. He has been a part of the jazz group
Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey
Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey (or JFJO or The Fred) is an American instrumental music group started in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1994. The band has had 16 different members in 20 years and put out 25 albums under the leadership of keyboardist/composer Brian H ...
since 2008 and has joined contemporary artists like
George Porter Jr
George Porter Jr. (born December 26, 1947) is an American musician, best known as the bassist and singer of The Meters. Along with Art Neville, Porter formed the group in the mid 1960s and came to be recognized as one of the progenitors of fun ...
,
Matt Chamberlain
Matthew Chamberlain (born April 17, 1967) is an American session musician, drummer, producer and songwriter.
Biography
Life and career
Chamberlain was born in San Pedro, California on April 17, 1967. He began learning how to play the drums ...
,
Jeff Coffin
Jeff Coffin (born August 5, 1965) is an American saxophonist, composer, and educator. He is a three-time Grammy Award winner as a member of Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, with whom he performed from 1997 until 2010. In July 2008, Coffin began to ...
Skerik
Skerik is an American saxophonist from Seattle, Washington. Performing on the tenor and baritone saxophone, often with electronics and loops, he is a pioneer in a playing style that has been called saxophonics.
He is a founding member of Critt ...
,
Johnny Vidacovich
John Joseph Vidacovich Jr. (born June 27, 1949) is an American jazz drummer and a member of the band Astral Project with James Singleton, Tony Dagradi, and Steve Masakowski.
He has also worked with Bobby McFerrin, Stanton Moore, Charlie H ...
, and Mike Dillon on stage and in the studio. Combs released a self-titled solo album in Oct 2017 debuting a new project called COMBSY.
Ludwig
In 2010, Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey's reinterpretations of Beethoven's 3rd & 6th Symphonies premiered in June as a project entitled 'Ludwig'. The project found Combs playing lap steel on rearrangements of Beethoven's 3rd & 6th symphonies alongside a 50 piece orchestra on June 12 as a headline performance at the
OK Mozart Festival
OK Mozart is an annual Classical music festival held each June in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, except 2020 when it was rescheduled for September. Considered Oklahoma's Premiere Music Festival, OK MOZART brings the highest quality professional musical an ...
. A feat never accomplished before on steel guitar.
Down Beat
' (styled in all caps) is an American music magazine devoted to "jazz, blues and beyond", the last word indicating its expansion beyond the jazz realm which it covered exclusively in previous years. The publication was established in 1934 in Chi ...
called Ludwig "a tour de force of jazz melded with classical."
The Race Riot Suite
In January 2011 JFJO recorded a suite of music based on the
Tulsa Race Riot
The Tulsa race massacre, also known as the Tulsa race riot or the Black Wall Street massacre, was a two-day-long massacre that took place between May 31 – June 1, 1921, when mobs of white residents, some of whom had been appointed as deput ...
. For its 21st album, Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey reached into the dark annals of its hometown’s history and emerged with a masterwork The Race Riot Suite Written, arranged and orchestrated by Chris Combs, the album is a long-form conceptual piece that tells the devastating story of the 1921 Tulsa race riot—a real estate-driven ethnocide occurring under the guise of citizen-dispensed justice.
The oil-elite, civic government and local press colluded to take advantage of a racially tense climate in Jim Crow-era
Oklahoma
Oklahoma (; Choctaw language, Choctaw: ; chr, ᎣᎧᎳᎰᎹ, ''Okalahoma'' ) is a U.S. state, state in the South Central United States, South Central region of the United States, bordered by Texas on the south and west, Kansas on the nor ...
, resulting in the death of hundreds of black Tulsans and the destruction of an entire city district. "The adventurous jazz band's latest project pays tribute to Tulsa's Greenwood community, destroyed in a 1921 race riot, while evoking the creative output of 1920s Oklahoma…the score captures the energy of Greenwood's fervent churchgoers and the rollicking territory dance bands that crisscrossed the Southwest. says the Los Angeles Times
Through propulsive rhythms and melodies, the album reflects an onlooker’s journey through the night that changed Tulsa’s landscape and nearly destroyed the country’s most thriving black community. The music is at times nostalgic, bombastic, anguished and mournful, yet ultimately a celebration of the
Greenwood Green wood is unseasoned wood.
Greenwood or Green wood may also refer to:
People
* Greenwood (surname)
Settlements
Australia
* Greenwood, Queensland, a locality in the Toowoomba Region
* Greenwood, Western Australia, a suburb of Perth
C ...
community and its unflinching resiliency. The Boston Globe says the Suite is "a beautifully orchestrated, melodically rich piece that celebrates Greenwood as much as it laments the wanton violence that destroyed the neighborhood”.
In addition to the permanent line-up of Combs (lap steel), Brian Haas (piano), Josh Raymer (drums) and Jeff Harshbarger (bass), the quartet enlisted the assistance of world class horn players
Jeff Coffin
Jeff Coffin (born August 5, 1965) is an American saxophonist, composer, and educator. He is a three-time Grammy Award winner as a member of Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, with whom he performed from 1997 until 2010. In July 2008, Coffin began to ...
(
Béla Fleck
Béla Anton Leoš Fleck (born July 10, 1958) is an American banjo player. An acclaimed virtuoso, he is an innovative and technically proficient pioneer and ambassador of the banjo, bringing the instrument from its bluegrass roots to jazz, classi ...
,
Dave Matthews Band
Dave Matthews Band (also known by the initials DMB) is an American rock band formed in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1991. The band's founding members were singer-songwriter and guitarist Dave Matthews, bassist Stefan Lessard, drummer and bac ...
Sex Mob
Sexmob (also styled Sex Mob) is an American jazz band based in New York City that formed as a Knitting Factory vehicle for Steven Bernstein to exercise his slide trumpet. Sexmob's sets feature a high proportion of covers, usually familiar pop s ...
,
Levon Helm
Mark Lavon "Levon" Helm (May 26, 1940 – April 19, 2012) was an American musician who achieved fame as the drummer and one of the three lead vocalists for the Band, for which he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994. H ...
),
Peter Apfelbaum
Peter Noah Apfelbaum (born August 21, 1960) is an American avant-garde jazz pianist, tenor saxophonist, drummer, and composer born in Berkeley, California.
Career
Apfelbaum formed the Hieroglyphics Ensemble in 1977. He performed with Carla Bley ...
(
Hieroglyphics
Egyptian hieroglyphs (, ) were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt, used for writing the Egyptian language. Hieroglyphs combined logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with some 1,000 distinct characters.There were about 1,00 ...
,
Don Cherry
Donald Stewart Cherry (born February 5, 1934) is a Canadian former ice hockey player, coach, and television commentator. Cherry played one game in the National Hockey League (NHL) with the Boston Bruins, and later coached the team for five se ...
), Mark Southerland (Snuff Jazz) and Matt Leland (a founding JFJO member).
The Race Riot Suite debuted live on May 20, 2011 with two sets performed by the album’s complete line-up (JFJO and guest horns) to a packed house at the
Tulsa Performing Arts Center
The Tulsa Performing Arts Center, or Tulsa PAC, is a performing arts venue in the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma. It houses four main theatres, a studio space, an art gallery#1 on the CMJ Jazz chart The North American album release tour included two nights at the Jazz Standard in NYC, the
Boom Boom Room
Boom Boom Room were an English band which formed in 1985, comprising Andy Nakanza (vocals), Skid (drums), Inz (bass), and Lushi (rhythm guitar & bass). Lushi was also in a band called One the Juggler. They had one single in the UK Singles Chart, ...
in San Francisco, the
University of California, San Diego
The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego or colloquially, UCSD) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in San Diego, California. Established in 1960 near the pre-existing Scripps Insti ...
, as well as a performances at
Montreal Jazz Festival
The Festival International de Jazz de Montréal ( en, Montreal International Jazz Festival) is an annual jazz festival held in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The Montreal Jazz Fest holds the 2004 Guinness World Record as the world's largest jazz fest ...
,
High Sierra Music Festival
High Sierra Music Festival is a multi-day music festival held in Quincy, California, United States, a mountainous area about 80 miles northwest of Reno, Nevada.
History
The first High Sierra Music Festival was in 1991, and was the genesis of ...
New Orleans
New Orleans ( , ,New Orleans Merriam-Webster. ; french: La Nouvelle-Orléans , es, Nuev ...
rhythms, sometimes all within the same song…expect a heavy dose of history, but an even heavier dose of forward-looking, down-home jazz.”
COMBSY
With influences like
Charles Mingus
Charles Mingus Jr. (April 22, 1922 – January 5, 1979) was an American jazz upright bassist, pianist, composer, bandleader, and author. A major proponent of collective improvisation, he is considered to be one of the greatest jazz musicians and ...
,
Madlib
Otis Jackson Jr. (born October 24, 1973), known professionally as Madlib, is an American DJ, music producer, multi-instrumentalist, and rapper. He is widely known for his collaborations with MF DOOM (as Madvillain), J Dilla (as Jaylib), and Fr ...
,
George Harrison
George Harrison (25 February 1943 – 29 November 2001) was an English musician and singer-songwriter who achieved international fame as the lead guitarist of the Beatles. Sometimes called "the quiet Beatle", Harrison embraced Indian c ...
J Dilla
J, or j, is the tenth letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its usual name in English is ''jay'' (pronounced ), with a now-uncommon varia ...
,
Radiohead
Radiohead are an English rock band formed in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, in 1985. The band consists of Thom Yorke (vocals, guitar, piano, keyboards); brothers Jonny Greenwood (lead guitar, keyboards, other instruments) and Colin Greenwood (bass) ...
,
Marc Ribot
Marc Ribot (;
born May 21, 1954) is an American guitarist and composer.
His work has touched on many styles, including no wave, free jazz, rock, and Cuban music. Ribot is also known for collaborating with other musicians, most notably Tom Wait ...
, “Combsy” is a lush, groove-heavy album that was primarily tracked in October 2016. The core tracks were recorded live as a trio to 2" tape at Fellowship Hall in Little Rock, AR with Aaron Boehler (bass) and Andrew Bones (drums, vibraphone). Horns were added at Marigny Studio in
New Orleans
New Orleans ( , ,New Orleans Merriam-Webster. ; french: La Nouvelle-Orléans , es, Nuev ...
, Combs added Brad Walker (tenor sax, Sturgill Simpson), Dan Oestreicher (bass and bari sax, Trombone Shorty), Carly Meyers (trombone, Roar)