Search Results for: Logan Strosahl

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Eight years ago, when Rifftides was young, I posted this item from New York following one of the last conventions of the lamented International Association of Jazz Educators.

January 19, 2006

It is impossible to predict the course of an artist’s career, but here’s a name to file away: Logan Strosahl. He is a sixteen-year-old alto saxophonist with the Roosevelt High School Jazz Band from Seattle, Washington. Strosahl has the energy of five sixteen-year-olds, rhythm that wells up from somewhere inside him, technique, harmonic daring with knowledge to support it and—that most precious jazz commodity—individuality. If he learns to control the whirlwind and allow space into his improvising, my guess is that you’ll be hearing from Logan Strosahl.

After that, Strosahl was graduated from Roosevelt High, entered the New England Conservatory in Boston and earned his degree. Attracted to the jazz capital of the world, as jazz artists have been for nearly a century, he moved to Brooklyn in New York City. There, he teams with a fellow NEC graduate, pianist Nick Sanders. Like Strosahl, Sanders is gaining increasing attention. These days, most young musicians at the outsets of their careers make their own publicity. Strosahl and Sanders advertise themselves through a free-subscription series of videos posted on YouTube. Each installment is preceded by a spiel.

In this Dizzy Gillespie composition, Strosahl finds altissimo notes that may not have occurred to Charlie Parker. He and Sanders take improvisational counterpoint a step or two beyond Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond.

A year and a half ago a Rifftides report on the conference of the International Association of Jazz Educators included this paragraph:

It is impossible to predict the course of an artist’s career, but here’s a name to file away: Logan Strosahl. He is a sixteen-year-old alto saxophonist with the Roosevelt High School Jazz Band from Seattle, Washington. Strosahl has the energy of five sixteen-year-olds, rhythm that wells up from somewhere inside him, technique, harmonic daring with knowledge to support it and–that most precious jazz commodity–individuality. If he learns to control the whirlwind and allow space into his improvising, my guess is that you’ll be hearing from Logan Strosahl.

I heard Strosahl again last winter in a student adjudication at the Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival in Moscow, Idaho. For his appearance before the judges, he did not choose pushover pieces with easy harmonic structures; he played Thelonious Monk’s “Ruby, My Dear” and John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps.” Strosahl won a top evaluation, and response as close to an ovation as anyone is likely to get from an audience mainly composed of educators and competitors. For a short biography, click here.

Logan Strosahl
Last night at The Seasons Summer Festival in a concert billed as The Future of Jazz, I heard Strosahl again, not in the anxiety-inducing circumstance of an academic exercise but in a full-fledged gig. Leading a band called the Playtonic Quartet, in an hour’s performance he accomplished–at greater length and in greater depth–everything that prompted my enthusiasm for him in New York. With a rhythm section notable for its sensitivity and responsiveness, Strosahl showed that he has grown. Like Strosahl, bassist Jeff Picker is a national award winner in student music events and about to enter the Manhattan School of Music. Strosahl is off to the New England Conversatory in Boston, where, I predict, he will quickly gain notice when he takes time from his composition studies to jam in the city’s clubs. Pianist Victor Noriega and drummer Chris Icasiano, bright lights in the young adult division of Seattle’s jazz scene, were impressive in support and in solo.
Evidence of Strosahl’s increasing maturity included the opening up of space in his solos; pauses that allowed his ideas breathing room and emphasized the melodic and rhythmic content, including humor, in his choruses. His improvised lines have logic, continuity and originality, with a fine edge of freedom and wildness. His mastery of the saxophone and of harmony evidently allow him to play any idea that comes into his head. Tall and slender, with wide shoulders, he cannot repress the urge to stay in motion. Strosahl moved about the stage in movements between jerking and gliding, pausing to listen intently to his bandmates, uttering syllables of encouragement or approval, then resuming his ballet, often while playing, a thick crop of dark hair flopping over his forehead.
His time feeling is so strong that on a couple of occasions when someone in the rhythm section drifted almost imperceptibly out of plumb, all it took was two or three perfectly placed quarter notes from Strosahl to get things back on course. That is a technique well known to seasoned horn players, evidence of natural leadership in one so young. His improvisation on “It Could Happen to You” was, simply, one of the most satisfying solos I have heard in years. He showed judgment in program construction, with a balance between original compositions and standards to which the audience could relate. In his announcements, he was brief, good natured and informative, if a bit rushed in his delivery.
Strosahl is the son of Pat Strosahl, the driving force behind his family’s conversion of The Seasons from a church into one of the finest performance halls in the west. If this was a case of fatherly favoritism, it was one that could give nepotism a good name.

Earlier this week at The Seasons, an acoustically blessed performance hall in Yakima, Washington, alto saxophonist Logan Strosahl and pianist Nick Sanders demonstrated the like-mindedness that makes them one of the most riveting duos in jazz. Sanders (on the left here) traveled to the Pacific Northwest from New York, his headquarters for a decade. Strosahl was visiting from Berlin, Germany, where he has been expanding his musical trilogy based on the King Arthur legend. The album cover below shows that project’s first volume.

Strosahl’s and Sanders’ repertoire at The Seasons included dazzling original compositions, jazz standards by–among others–Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk, and classics from what has become known as The Great American Songbook. Among the latter was the 1935 Jimmy McHugh-Dorothy Fields standard “I’m In The Mood For Love.” There is no video from this week’s concert at The Seasons, but Logan and Sanders recorded the piece recently in New York City at the club called Mezzrow.

Nick Sanders and Logan Strosahl, now and then put up a video on their YouTube channel. Their recent album is the new Rifftides Monday Recommendation (see the previous post). Here is a standard song not included on that CD. Mr. Strosahl makes the introduction—and a pitch.

Again this year, I swore off voting in what has become an epidemic of jazz popularity contests, also known as critics polls, with one exception. I don’t seem to be able to say no to the persuasive Francis Davis, who conducts the National Public Radio Jazz Critics Poll. How I voted on the day I succumbed doesn’t necessarily reflect how I might have voted a day—or a week—sooner or later. Here’s my ballot:

NEW RELEASES

• Tom Harrell, First Impressions (HighNote)
• Charles Lloyd, Wild Man Dance (Blue Note)
• Maria Schneider, The Thompson Fields (ArtistShare)
• Jack DeJohnette, Made in Chicago (ECM)
• Gary McFarland Legacy Ensemble, Circulation: The Music of Gary McFarland (Planet Arts)
• Antonio Sanchez, Three Times Three (CAM Jazz)
• Carla Bley-Steve Swallow-Andy Sheppard, Trios (ECM)
• Katie Theroux, Introducing Katie Thiroux (BassKat)
• Bill Kirchner, An Evening of Indigos (Jazzheads)
• Matthew Shipp, To Duke (RogueArt)

 REISSUES

• John Coltrane, A Love Supreme: The Complete Masters (Impulse!)
• Erroll Garner, The Complete Concert by the Sea (Columbia/Legacy)
• Lars Gullin, Portrait of the Legendary Baritone Saxophonist (Fresh Sound)

 VOCAL

• Ernestine Anderson, Swings the Penthouse (HighNote)

 DEBUT

• Katie Theroux, Introducing Katie Thiroux (BassKat)
• Logan Strosahl, Up Go We (Sunnyside)

 LATIN

• Paquito D’Rivera & Quinteto Cimarron, Aires Tropicales (Sunnyside)

To see complete results of the NPR poll, go here.

A few days short of a year ago, I told you about four 19-year-old musicians worth keeping an ear on. Three of them were the Uptown Trio, who appeared in concert supporting the gifted alto saxophonist Logan Strosahl. I wrote:

Anyone keeping a future file would do well to add those names. If these players keep developing at their current pace and intensity, it is likely that we’ll be hearing from them.

I remarked in the review that pianist Sam Reider, bassist Jeff Picker (his real name) and drummer Jake Goldblas were taking the business aspect of their careers into their own hands, contacting clubs and lining up tours. Good young players not adopted by record companies and booking agents must do that to get work.
The Uptown Trio, based in New York, has arranged a west coast tour early next month, with dates at important clubs in Los Angeles, Oakland and Portland. To see their schedule and hear a bit of their music, go here.

The other night at The Seasons, I heard four nineteen-year-olds and was impressed. One of
them, the alto saxophonist Logan Strosahl, has been intriguing me for a couple of years. The others, who comprise The Uptown Trio, were new to me except for the bassist, Jeff Picker, whom I had previously heard with Strosahl.

All are beneficiaries of extensive high school jazz education and winners of prizes for excellence, all freshmen at prominent institutions of learning. Strosahl, from Seattle, is wrapping up his first year at the New England Conservatory in Boston. Picker, from Portland Oregon, is at the Manhattan School of Music, along with drummer Jake Goldbas of Hartford, Connecticut. The pianist, Sam Reider is a San Franciscan who attends Columbia University in New York. Anyone keeping a future file would do well to add those names. If these players keep developing at their current pace and intensity, it is likely that we’ll be hearing from them.

At The Seasons, they were equally adept in standard pieces and in–or on the border of–free playing. Strosahl has remarkable energy, technique and harmonic acuity. He tore up Dizzy Gillespie’s “Anthropology.” Following an ingenious Reider introduction, Strosahl electrified the house in his exploration of Matt Dennis’s “Everything Happens To Me.” In “The Disintegration,” the Uptown Trio was impressive in its ability to achieve abstraction without sacrificing continuity and form, then Strosahl melded with them as the piece morphed into a blues for a powerful quartet effort that ended the concert.

I have been unable to locate an internet sample of Strosahl’s playing, but on The Uptown Trio’s MySpace page, there are four performances including “The Disintegration.” Picker, Reider and Goldbas are businessmen as well as players, an essential attribute for survival in the twenty-first century jazz trade. On their own, they have lined up a month-long tour with appearances in major west coast jazz clubs including Yoshi’s in San Francisco, Kuumbwa Jazz in Santa Cruz and Catalina in Los Angeles. The schedule is on their MySpace page.

Another name for that future file: Nick Sokol, a young tenor saxophonist whose band has the unusual instrumentation of tenor and alto saxes, piano and drums; no bass. Sokol opened for Strosahl and the Uptowners with a four-part suite that ranged from lacy, vaguely Oriental, impressionism through free four-way improvisation to Brahmsian gravity. The piece had style and texture. I’d like to hear it again.

The Hampton festival’s core purpose is the development of young jazz musicians. Students from several states converge here to play in big bands and combos, vying for group and individual honors. Nearly 400 youngsters competed in the final day’s events. Before the professionals played on Saturday evening, we heard student winners in several categories.
In competitions across the country it has become predictable that Seattle’s Roosevelt and Garfield High Schools will be among the top big bands. Indeed, they often place one-two. In Moscow, Garfield, under director Clarence Acox, edged Roosevelt, under Scott Brown, for first place and performed in the big hall. Then, fifteen winners in the Outstanding Student Instrumentalist category lined up across the stage in front of a rhythm section. Each played two choruses of “C-Jam Blues.” There was a tie in only one category, between alto saxophonists John Cheadle of Garfield and Logan Strosahl of Roosevelt. The two played together in middle school, but went to separate high schools, each developing impressively. Results in all categories of student competition are posted on the Hampton Festival web site.
Music students from middle schools, high schools and colleges all over the United States and abroad flock to the the Hampton festival and to the jazz education components of other institutions. Undoubtedly, a number who come here and to The Centrum Port Townsend Bud Shank workshop, Jamey Aebersold’s camps, programs of The Commission Project and at least a dozen other such ventures are simply enjoying pleasurable school activities. An appreciable percentage of them, however, plan careers in music. Many of them would like to be professional jazz musicians. Given the low receptivity of the public to jazz, and the resulting economic reality, it is certain that there will not be enough work to provide a living to more than a lucky few. Except during the big band era, that has always been as true in jazz as it is in, say, the classical chamber music business.
Still, here is a puzzle. Thousands of children go through jazz education programs in the schools and colleges. One presumes that they develop knowledge and appreciation, perhaps even love, of the music. These programs have been flourishing for a long time, twenty or thirty years. Why hasn’t that resulted in an expansion of the audience for jazz clubs, concerts and record sales? Let’s suppose that the widely publicized estimates of jazz CD sales as three percent of the total are low. Even if those sales were five percent, shouldn’t the jazz education movement of the past few decades have stimulated greater demand? Do the kids go home from these programs, revert to rock, hip-hop and rap, grow into adulthood and never pursue the higher interests to which they were exposed? I don’t have the answers to these disturbing questions. I don’t know that there are answers, but this is a fertile area for a PhD candidate in economics, business or music searching for a thesis topic or a reporter who can talk his editor into a long investigative project.
As always, comments are encouraged and welcome.

I completed the Yakima-Seattle-New York-Seattle-Yakima odyssey Tuesday evening, only slightly the worse for wear, now rested and restored. Here’s a wrapup of some of my experiences at the IAJE conference and elsewhere in New York:
Buddy DeFranco, approaching his eighty-fourth birthday, played in concert with the U.S. Army Blues Jazz Ensemble. Made up of sergeants of various stripes and led by Chief Warrant Officer Charles Vollherbst, the Blues (named for their dress uniforms) is one of the best big jazz bands at work, military or civilian. It has a stompin’ rhythm section, impressive brass and wind sections, fine soloists, and arrangers with skill and imagination. Staff Sergeant Liesl Whitaker’s lead trumpet work places her among the best in that demanding, punishing craft. Sergeant First Class Graham Breedlove of Lafayette, Louisiana, in addition to being a resourceful trumpet soloist, wrote a masterly piece in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina’s devastation. “Nola’s Lament/Nola’s Return” parallels, in a thoroughly modern idiom, traditional New Orleans funeral music, with a mournful first section and a joyous return. Few non-New Orleans drummers get it right when they attempt a Bourbon Street parade beat. In the turnaround between the two sections, Sergeant First Class Steve Fidyk of Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, nailed it.
Eyes closed, a listener might have thought he had been transported to 1949, so finely tuned were DeFranco’s clarinet chops and his creativity. He made his way through a cross-section of patented bop patterns on “I Got Rhythm” changes as he warmed up with “Lester Leaps In.” But in “Mr. Lucky,” a staple item of his repertoire that might have encouraged coasting, he reached for surprising intervals and melodic turns. Then came George Gershwin’s “Soon” in an arrangement by Master Sergeant James Roberts of Washington, DC, the band’s guitarist. Building on the kaleidoscopic impressionism and time shifting of Roberts’ introduction, DeFranco constructed a solo of breathtaking logic and lyricism, a timeless solo, one that must be among the best of tens of thousands he has played since he turned professional in 1939. In his cadenza on the final piece, Rob Pronk’s “Don’t You Ever Learn,” DeFranco muffed a note in a downward glissando. He played the cadenza again. He still wasn’t happy. He played it a third time, to perfection, and came out of it grinning like a schoolboy. It was an endearing self-correction that a less seasoned player might not have had the nerve to make. Jazz Master, indeed.
It is impossible to predict the course of an artist’s career, but here’s a name to file away: Logan Strosahl. He is a sixteen-year-old alto saxophonist with the Roosevelt High School Jazz Band from Seattle, Washington. Strosahl has the energy of five sixteen-year-olds, rhythm that wells up from somewhere inside him, technique, harmonic daring with knowledge to support it and—that most precious jazz commodity—individuality. If he learns to control the whirlwind and allow space into his improvising, my guess is that you’ll be hearing from Logan Strosahl.
I signed copies of Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond at the Tower Records store at IAJE, which was impressively managed by Tower’s Larry Isacson. Toward the end of the session I shared the table with Maria Schneider. We sold a respectable number of Desmond books, but the line of fans buying CDs for Maria to sign was along the wall of the store, out into the Hilton hallway and halfway to 54th Street. It seemed never to get shorter. A Grammy and four Grammy nominations will do that. It couldn’t happen to a more deserving—or nicer—person. Maria’s one-on-one conversation with NEA Jazz Master Bob Brookmeyer, her mentor, was a high point of the events I attended. She opened with a sound montage of Brookmeyer arrangements that covered decades, then discussed music with him composer-to-composer. The wisdom, affection and humor were palpable. The room was packed. Toward the end of the two hours, Clark Terry took over from Maria for an emotional reunion of two men who made it plain that when they say they are brothers, it is not just rhetoric.
The final night of the conference, Chick Corea, Eddie Gomez and Jack DeJohnette played in the cozy setting of the grand ballroom of the New York Hilton. The room is approximately the size and dimensions of two football fields. It was overflowing, every seat filled and people standing jammed to the walls on both sides and in the back. And yet, the three wizards managed to achieve intimacy as they moved through “Solar,” “Milestones” and “But Beautiful.” Corea, always the conceptual arsonist, seemed to be firing the ideas at first. Gomez was being excessively acrobatic at the top of the bass. The set settled into a cooperative three-way exchange of the kind achieved on a good night by players who have profound knowledge and appreciation of each other’s work.
Out of the hotel, into a cab and over to Columbus Circle to grab a bite at Dizzy’s Club Coca Cola, publisher Mal Harris and I had no idea who was playing. We also had no reservation, but Dizzy’s honcho Todd Barkan succumbed to our disappointment at the initial turndown and installed us on stools along the wall. To our intense satisfaction, the band turned out to be Lewis Nash’s quartet with pianist Renee Rosnes, vibraharpist Steve Nelson and bassist Peter Washington. It was Detroit week at the club and the quartet played a set of pieces by Thad Jones, Tommy Flanagan, Milt Jackson, and one each by John Clayton and Tadd Dameron from Jackson’s repertoire. Nash’s unaccompanied introduction to Flanagan’s “Eclypso,” using only his fingers and the palms of his hands across the drums, was electrifying. The dignified woman on the next stool was moved to break her silence. “My gosh,” she said.
The playing by all hands was exciting, culminating in Jackson’s blues “SKG,” which included Nash’s New York debut as a scat singer. Full of harmonic knowledge as well as rhythm, Nash was not pulling a stunt. He was making music. The piece swung so hard that Barkan was grooving in his seat as he waited to make his post-set announcement. The gumbo was good, if not quite New Orleans quality. The panoramic view of the rainy city through the floor-to-ceiling windows was pure New York. It was a fine end to a long, rewarding day and an IAJE conference so packed with opportunities that no one could take advantage of more than a small percent of them.
Finally, with a couple of hours to spare on Sunday before we left for the airport, Mal and I hiked rapidly through the suddenly freezing New York streets to the Museum of Modern Art. We were particularly interested in the exhibit called The Forty-Part Motet, a work by the Canadian artist Janet Cardiff. She recorded the Salisbury Cathedral Choir singing the 1575 Thomas Tallis work Spen In Alium Nunqua Habui, composed in 1575 in honor of Queen Elizabeth The First’s fortieth birthday. Cardiff assembled the singers in an oval in groups of five, each singer recorded on a separate microphone. In the museum, the oval is recreated with a single speaker for each singer. If you stand in the middle of the oval, the choir wafts over and around you from all sides. If you walk slowly past the speakers inside the perimiter of the oval, you hear the individual voices singing their parts. Most, but not all, sing in tune. If you find an especially intriguing baritone or a bewitching soprano, you can concentrate on his or her voice. This is ultimate surround sound. I’d love to hear, say, the Bill Holman Band or the Vanguard Orchestra, or the U.S. Army Blues Jazz Ensemble recorded this way. Is the Cardiff installation art? It’s in the Museum of Modern Art, isn’t it?
Other pieces of interest in the lightning tour of MoMA:
William Kentridge’s Felix In Exile, a wall projection video of Kentridge’s animated drawings, a disturbing impressionistic story of South African bondage and freedom.
Peter Fischli’s The Way Things Go, another piece of video art, this one displayed on monitors. It shows an endless Rube Goldberg chain of actions and consequences involving fire, ice, explosions, water, oil, tires, metal balls, tipping cans of liquid, dropping weights, catapulted objects. It’s fascinating and exciting. A couple of small boys seated on the floor near where I was standing erupted in glee every time there was a new burst of flame or an explosion. Better than a car chase. Is it art? I refer you to the previous question.