Featuring Matt Sazima – piano Garrett Baxter – bass, Alan Jones – drums Harvey Wainapel – saxes
Original compositions; fresh arrangements of standards; songs that ought to be standards; plus some Brazilian spice!
Siskiyou Music Project welcomes back Bay Area saxophonist Harvey Wainapel. Harvey will be performing with a great rhythm section featuring Portlands Matt Sazima on piano, Alan Jones on drums and Ashland’s own (now a Portland resident) Garret Baxter for an evening of straight ahead jazz and Brazilian music.
Please note this will be a matinee performance and will start at 4 p.m.
“Wainapel proves that he is amongst the most imaginative, sensitive and creative saxophonists of the post-Coltrane era…” ––The San Francisco Examiner
“Wainapel displayed incredible intimacy with the language of Brazilian music and great stage presence…” ––O Globo (Rio de Janeiro)
Can a man serve two masters?
If the cat in question is Bay Area reed expert Harvey Wainapel, and the disciplines are jazz and Brazilian music, the answer is a resounding yes. A supremely eloquent clarinetist and a saxophonist of unusual presence and power, Wainapel is a truly ambidextrous artist who has delved deeply into two vast and variegated traditions. Of course, musical currents have ebbed and flowed between the two continental nations for much of the past century, and Wainapel is fully at home at the confluence of those influences (he’s toured widely with Brazilian jazz giants Airto Moreira and Flora Purim). But most of the time he’s got his feet firmly planted in one country or the other, even if his experience in the south shapes his work as an improviser. “The Brazilian side injects a lot of emotion into my playing, and it opened up my concept of melody and harmony,” Wainapel says.
Wainapel (pronounced wine-apple) got his start as a jazz musician, and over the past three decades he’s performed with masters such as pianists Kenny Barron and McCoy Tyner, tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson, drummer Billy Hart, and fellow reed expert Joe Lovano. He made his recording debut as a leader with 1994’s At Home/On the Road (JazzMission Records), a critically hailed post-bop session exploring compositions by the likes of Woody Shaw, Sam Rivers, and Wayne Shorter. Wainapel followed up two years later with Ambrosia: The Music of Kenny Barron (A Records), featuring a suite of Barron’s tunes arranged by Jeff Beal for the Metropole Orchestra and a set of Barron’s Brazilian-inspired music for a sextet with Marcos Silva on keyboards. Kenny Barron himself was on hand for piano duties on Wainapel’s acclaimed 1998 straight-ahead quintet session The Hang (Spirit Nectar/JazzMission), which also features drummer Kenny Wollesen and the brothers Phil and Larry Grenadier on trumpet and bass, respectively.
Wainapel’s first full recording of Brazilian music was 2004’s New Choros of Brazil (Acoustic Music Records/Proteus Entertainment), a gorgeous duo collaboration with legendary Brazilian guitarist Paulo Bellinati. Rather than focusing on Brazilian standards, they assembled a program of previously unrecorded choros by masters like Sergio Assad, Guinga, Sergio Santos, and Dori Caymmi. “I’m really proud of it,” says Wainapel, who plays clarinet exclusively on the album. “That project gave me a lot of confidence.”
His two most recent recordings, Amigos Brasileiros and Amigos Brasileiros Vol. 2, are part of Wainapel’s ongoing process documenting his passion for contemporary Brazilian music. Recorded with a superlative cast of Brazilian instrumentalists he’s befriended during his many travels around the country, the albums include several tunes written specifically for the project. In many ways Amigos Brasileiros serves as a savvy on-the-ground survey of the contemporary Brazilian scene, a thoughtfully curated guide to musicians; musicians in a nation bound together by sound.
