We’ve got the jazz

0

If you want to become a movie star, you should move to Los Angeles. If you’re hoping to get your country music career off the ground, pack your bags for Nashville. But what if you want to be a jazz musician? New York? San Francisco?

What about Boulder? 

Unbeknownst to some Boulderites, the county is home to a community of jazz musicians and enthusiasts that might rank among the most serious in the country. The community extends through cultural spheres of academia and musicianship, from jazz studies programs at the University of Colorado to major jazz music festivals such as Boulder Arts and Jazz festival and Jazz on 2nd Avenue in Niwot. With a consistent output of music both live and recorded, Boulder County manages to maintain a community of musicians without what should be a crucial ingredient: a big-time jazz joint.

You’d be hard pressed to find many venues in Boulder County that could be considered trueblue jazz clubs. Sure, there are copious venues that host jazz musicians, and there are events that provide a setting reminiscent of a jazz club, but among those opportunities the community lacks a venue solely devoted to jazz musicians.

This is an unfortunate truth, because among the community are a number of world-class jazz heavyweights. Art Lande, Grammy-nominated pianist, is a Boulder resident. John Gunther, a saxophonist who is the director of the University of Colorado Boulder’s Thompson Jazz Studies Program, is a local. Alongside Gunther on the staff of the jazz program is Brad Goode, an elite trumpet player who continues to play jazz music across the world, but gets his mail sent to Boulder.

Beyond that top tier is a sprawling landscape of musicians and jazz enthusiasts who breathe life into Boulder’s jazz community. One such individual is Christine Robertson, who runs jazzinboulder.com. Robertson grew up around Boulder but didn’t become a jazz enthusiast until she found herself immersed in the jazz scene in San Francisco. When she moved back to Boulder a few years ago, she started her website in an effort to connect with like-minded jazz lovers along the Front Range. It wasn’t long before Robertson says the website struck a chord in the community.

“I started doing this calendar, which from the very beginning has been a huge success, because it links musicians and the audience,” Robertson says. “There is a lot more jazz in Boulder than people realize. A lot of people when they first get the calendar are surprised at how much there is, or that there are venues you wouldn’t think had jazz.”

Robertson cites a laundry list of venues in Boulder that either regularly host jazz shows or have done so, including Caffè Sole, the Laughing Goat, the St Julien Hotel, Nissi’s, Under the Sun, Boulder Elks Lodge and License No. 1 (formerly the Catacombs). The list goes on to include various cafes, resturants and concert halls all around the county.

She says that even though these are not jazz-specific venues, they do provide a stage for jazz musicians to do their thing. And that alone allows for an environment when an audience commits its undivided attention to what is happening on stage.

“It does happen in venues all over Boulder, where everyone in the room is just listening and there is this energy that’s happening between the musicians and the audience,” Robertson says. “When the musicians are feeling listened to and honored, it brings out something more.”

What Robertson is describing is the idea of a “listening room,” where musicians play to a room that, for the most part, is completely silent. Although it isn’t quite as intense of an expectation as that of an orchestral performance, where audiences hold in coughs for breaks between movements, it does lend itself to an air of importance for the music on stage similar to that of a classical concert.

In addition to putting together her calendar online, Robertson also hosts house jams, where she rents space at a venue, brings in a house band of jazz musicians and creates a listening room style atmosphere. One of the jazz musicians at her most recent jam was Annie Booth, a native of Westminster and graduate of CU, where she got a degree in jazz piano performance in 2011.

Booth considers herself to be based in Denver, where she had a residency with her trio at one of the Mile High City’s newest jazz clubs, Nocturne, and currently is a part of the Tom Gershwin Quintet’s residency at the club. Booth echoes Robertson’s longing for a listening room setting in Boulder, citing the difference in settings at Nocturne during her initial residency last spring.

“From night to night the audience would vary pretty drastically; sometimes it would be dead silent and everyone would be listening, and sometimes it would be so loud that we would kind of be background music,” Booth says. “That kind of affects the way you play, if you feel people are really listening or if you feel like they’re not I might go for things I wouldn’t have normally gone for. It’s a big thing performing, the aspect of the audience is huge.”

Booth is a bona fide up-and-comer in the Denver-Boulder jazz scene — she received the “Best in Denver” Jazz Music Award from Westword this year on the heels of the 2014 release of her debut album, Wanderlust. But if it weren’t for a last minute change of heart, Booth might not even be playing jazz right now in the Mountain Standard time zone.

“I was actually all set to go to grad school in LA at [the University of Southern California],” Booth says. “I was committed, and I even found an apartment. I was ready to go.

“Then I don’t know, something just kind of hit me, and I realized I was maybe making a mistake by leaving Denver and never really giving myself a chance to be in Denver and see what the scene is like here. I bailed on grad school, and I’m really glad I did because in Denver I’ve been able to grow immensely in the past two years and play gigs I never thought I’d be able to play.”

Booth’s absence from the scene in Los Angeles has certainly been Colorado’s gain. In addition to her accolades in the press, Booth also got assistance in the recording of her album by way of a grant from Pathways to Jazz, a program founded by Alan Cogen and sponsored by the Boulder County Arts Alliance, which works to give Colorado jazz artists grants to record their music.

Booth was among the five artists who received the first set of grants awarded by Pathways to Jazz — a list that, according to the program’s administrative director Sarah Goodroad, has doubled this year to include 11 musicians. Goodroad says the grants, which vary in size and stipulation for each musician based on a plan that they submit to Pathways to Jazz, represent more than just extra monetary support musicians need to get their compositions recorded.

“It is kind of a means to an end, having musicians record their music and letting them know somebody believes in what they’re doing and wants to see this music and see them succeed,” Goodroad says. “The ripple effect that will occur because of that — that people will hear the music and be effected, maybe fall in love with jazz where they wouldn’t have normally — it’s a farther reaching effect than just funding one musician.”

Goodroad, who has a degree in music from the University of Northern Colorado, sees the jazz community in Colorado as one that is both interactive and on the rise.

“I think there is a lot of real talent in Colorado. We’ve got two universities, CU Boulder and the University of Northern Colorado, both have some tremendous faculty members that are really fostering young talent in the area,” Goodroad says. “I think it’s a close community, it’s a tight-knit community. I think it’s a great community, and from what I see I feel like it’s a growing community.”

Local musician Brad Goode is director of the Colorado Jazz Group and producer and performer in the Jazz on 2nd Avenue festival. In the ’80s and ’90s he cut his teeth as a full-time musician in Chicago before transitioning to work in the academic world, first at the Cincinnati Conservatory before he moved to Boulder in 2004 and became a member of the faculty in the Thompson Jazz Program. He sees potential in Boulder’s jazz scene, both in the musicians and in the potential for some jazz-specific venues on the horizon.

“I know there are a lot of jazz supporters in the community — I can clearly see that from the type of attendance we have at our concerts at CU and at Jazz on 2nd Avenue,” Goode says. “I think Boulder could use some real jazz venues, and I hope there are some people who would be willing to do it correctly and give a boost to the local scene.”

Goode wants to see an environment where musicians in Boulder can support themselves through performance, a scenario similar to the one he thrived within in Chicago years ago. His sentiment that jazz musicians find a way to support themselves through their music is shared by John Gunther, who is entering his third year as the director of CU’s Thompson Jazz Program.

“You know musicians have to be entrepreneurs,” Gunther says. “I think there are probably a lot of places that would be interested if they were approached by some musicians to see if they can have some live music.”

Gunther and Goode both stress that while there are opportunities available for musicians in the community, it is up to the musicians to hold themselves to a standard where they can be properly compensated for their talents. Gunther says jazz musicians in the community can pursue better opportunities for themselves by advocating to not play for free, instead seeking wages and situations that can contribute value to the musicians and their venue.

This fall, Gunther will be performing at the Dairy Center for the Arts with the Carpe Diem Quartet in the first in a series of “Jazz at the Dairy” concerts. Jim Bailey, the Dairy’s music producer, is another advocate of creating a listening atmosphere that promotes emphasis on the music.

“I want to establish a pure listening environment for the jazz musicians,” Bailey say. “There won’t be people that are talking, plates clanging and people in the kitchen — that won’t be going on.”

He continues to remark that the latter description, with background noise and other things going on, is a setting he’s encountered in venues in the area.

“I understand why that happens, it is a problem with venues, but a lot of the venues I’ve been in in Boulder and Denver, there is a significant amount of noise,” Bailey says. He acknowledges that for some musicians and audiences the relaxed atmosphere is ideal, but he thinks there should be opportunities for musicians to perform with an audience’s undivided attention.

But in the local jazz community extending to Denver, Bailey believes there is a level of musicianship and activity in the area rivaled by only a handful of locations in the American West.

“Denver, compared to other places around the country, has more going for it jazz-wise. You would certainly have to go all the way to Kansas City, if not Chicago, to find more going on in jazz,” Bailey says. “And then you’d have to go all the way to LA. There is more going on with jazz in Denver than anywhere else in the western half of the United States until you get to LA.”

The thread that runs through the participants in the local jazz scene is a sense of community and pride in local jazz. Those close to jazz in Boulder believe the area is able to draw talented musicians at a level that is perhaps out of proportion with what could be expected.

“There are a lot of people who, given our size, if this was Iowa or something, they would have already moved to New York or Los Angeles or someplace with a bigger scene,” Robertson says. “But because our quality of life is great here, they stay. We have a very high level jazz community here, and many of those people play in Boulder.”

Gunther also stresses that around Boulder and Denver there are plenty of jazz artists across generations, regardless of the opportunities provided for live music.

“Boulder and Denver has a really strong community of both older musicians and younger musicians,” Gunther says. “And I’m seeing over the years, you see it ebb and flow in terms of the number of places to play, but the quality of the musicianship here both with the older generations of musicians and younger is really exciting.”

With organizations, resources and venues keeping an eye on jazz in the community, it seems likely that jazz will only continue to grow and thrive in the unlikely home the genre has made in Boulder. Residents may not all be privy to the scene, but there’s no question that we’ve got the jazz.

“The music itself is really in great hands with this new generation of young musicians from Boulder,” Goode says. “There are some really fantastic players here. I really hope Boulder can recognize that and support that and give them some venues to play in.”