Preview: Trumpet and Flugelhorn Player Leads Area Stars
Thursday, trumpeter and flugelhorn player Steve Horowitz leads a quartet of Larry Ham, piano; Rich Syracuse, bass; and Cliff Brucker, drums. Horowitz says Brucker also assembled the rhythm section, modestly adding, “They all have resumes about a mile long and mine is maybe a few feet by comparison.”
Steve Horowitz holding trumpet; flugelhorn at left. Photo supplied Ham played with Lionel Hampton and Illinois Jacquet and recently joined Brucker’s band Full Circle. Brucker also leads the BWC Jazz Orchestra, and Syracuse played for decades with piano giant Lee Shaw. Horowitz also plays with Gypsy jazz bands Gadjo and Helderberg Hot Club and occasionally with the Hot Club of Saratoga. He was the only trumpeter among 250 players at Northampton’s guitar-dominated Django in June festival of workshops and jam sessions.
Jam sessions were his entree into the area jazz scene for the Long Island native who came to SUNY Albany to study computer science. Here he met many players including saxophonist Cliff Lyons, drummer Mark Foster, bassist Otto Gardner, pianist Ray Rettig and guitarist Sam Farkas. He played some with Don Dworkin’s Doc Scanlon’s Rhythm Boys and often saw saxophone hero Nick Brignola.
Trumpeter Mike Canonico particularly inspired Horowitz who hails the late master as “one of my favorite trumpet players and a major influence.” Horowitz calls Canonico “a complete player…with a very strong upper register and a wonderful tone, a very melodic improviser.”
It all began when a music teacher told Horowitz’s parents their 10 year old has perfect pitch and recommended lessons. He studied trumpet technique systematically, like the software engineer he later became. On “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White” from one of his father’s 40s and 50s Latin jazz records, for example, he heard a trumpeter bend a note and tried for years to learn the trick, with the third valve and a flexible lip.
Returning here after his work with IBM in Poughkeepsie ended, Horowitz again found mentors and friends in jam sessions, including Peg and Bill Delaney and Cliff Brucker. “I was just having fun going to wherever the jam sessions were.”
He learned by listening and playing; inspired first by assertive high-register masters Maynard Ferguson and Freddy Hubbard before emulating melodic players Warren Vache, Chet Baker, Harry James, Ruby Braff and Roy Hargrove – especially when Hargrove played flugelhorn.
Horowitz calls flugelhorn his “secret weapon.” When he took his used flugelhorn to a jam session the same day he bought it, fellow players asked, “Where have you been hiding that?” Horowitz recalls, “They said, ‘More flugelhorn, less trumpet!’”
Horowitz says the flugelhorn “has a naturally forgiving, softer sound,” and will play flugelhorn, the larger, lower cousin to the trumpet, on about half the tunes Thursday at Jazz on Jay.
“The simpler I can keep it, on flugelhorn, the better,” he says. More generally, he says of his all-standards program, “I like to keep things relatively short so we can fit a few extra tunes into the hour and half.”
Jazz on Jay free concerts are noon to 1:30 p.m. at Jay Square, the new park space opposite Schenectady City Hall. The rain site is Robb Alley at Proctors, 432 State St. Seating is provided indoors at Robb Alley, but patrons are invited to bring their own seating and refreshments to Jay Square.
Jazz on Jay is presented by the ElectriCity Arts and Entertainment District and sponsored by the New York State Council on the Arts, a Schenectady County Legislature Arts & Culture Grant, Downtown Schenectady Improvement Corporation, The Schenectady Foundation, Price Chopper/Market 32, MVP Health Care, Schenectady County, Schenectady City Hall, and Proctors Collaborative. This blog is a series media sponsor.
“My career is no longer for the benefit of just me,” says “he’s-everywhere” jazz bassist Christian McBride on his website.
McBride brings his new band of younger players – Ursa Major – to open the McCormack Jazz Series Thursday at the Spa Little Theater on the SPAC grounds.
Don McCormick supports jazz everywhere, especially around Saratoga. As founder of the Skidmore Jazz Institute (in 1987), a training and mentorship program with world-class teachers, McCormack is very much on the same page as McBride in nurturing next-gen talents.
Christian McBride. Photo provided
As performer, composer and leader, McBride earns his “he’s everywhere” thing by leading five bands, plus Ursa Major: Inside Straight, The Christian McBride Big Band, The Christian McBride Trio, Christian McBride’s New Jawn, and A Christian McBride Situation.
He’s played everywhere including often at Freihofer’s Saratoga Jazz Festival. In 2007, McBride, Jack DeJohnette and Bruce Hornsby hit Northampton’s Calvin Theater on their Camp Meeting tour; a few months later he played the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall with Pat Metheny and Antonio Sanchez.
McBride’s bands are an opportunity one for fresh talent. Inside Straight co-stars pianist Christian Sands, vibraphonist Warren Wolf and drummer Ulysses Owens Jr. McBride’s trio features Sands and drummer Jerome Jennings. A Christian McBride Situation adds turntablists DJ Logic and Jahi Sundance to conventional players pianist Patrice Rushen, saxophonist Ron Blake and singer Alyson Williams while the New Jawn is McBride with trumpeter Josh Evans, saxophonist Marcus Strickland and drummer Nasheet Watts.
One of the busiest leaders, educators, catalysts in jazz, McBride keeps exploring in new directions.
His new “But Who’s Gonna Play the Melody?” album with Edgar Meyer may be as basic as jazz gets – two double bass virtuosos swinging and rocking. Ursa Major is aggressive young virtuosos.
Now 62, McBride stands half a musical generation older than this new crew.
Pianist Michael King started on the drums in his Chicago church at four. A graduate of Lincoln Park High School, Oberlin Conservatory, the Thelonious Monk Institute and the Ravinia Jazz Scholars Program, King has played with Bobby Watson (as did a young Christian McBride), Kevin Eubanks, Dave Liebeman, Gary Bartz, Billy Hart, Joel Frahm, Rufus Reid, Antonio Hart and others.
Drummer Savannah Harris grew up in Oakland with musician parents and chose the drums at two. She plays experimental and straight-ahead styles, recording and touring with Geri Allen, Jason Moran, Ambrose Akinmusire, Terrence Blanchard, Linda May Han Oh, Billy Childs, Immanuel Wilkins, Joel Ross, and Aaron Parks. In 2019, Savannah received the Harlem Stage Emerging Artist Award and earned her master’s in jazz performance from the Manhattan School of Music.
Saxophonist, bandleader, composer and educator Nicole Glover plays with Artemis, including the supergroup’s two albums and A Place for Jazz October 4. She has also released solo albums, including the award-winning “Strange Lands” with pianist George Cables. Growing up in Portland, Oregon, she studied with the American Music Program and William Patterson University with Harold Mabern, Mulgrew Miller. She performs with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, and the Philadelphia Orchestra in Mary Lou Williams’s “Zodiac Suite.” She teaches at Princeton University, the Manhattan School of Music and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.
Guitarist Ely Perlman is still a Berklee College of Music student; he studied earlier at the Thelma Yellin High School of the Arts and the Center for Jazz Studies at the Israel Conservatory of Music, Tel Aviv. A busy bandleader, he fronts a jazz quartet and a the indie-rock band SWIMS.
These Ursa Major players have a VERY imposing example to follow.
Philadelphia-born Christian McBride graduated from the Philadelphia High School for Creative and Performing Arts (CAPA) whose alumni also includes Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson of The Roots, Joey DeFrancesco, and Kurt Rosenwinkel. At first, McBride emulated hometown smooth-swinging soul and R&B artists before switching from electric to acoustic bass and exploring jazz at Juilliard with important mentors all the way including Bobby Watson, Ray Brown and Chick Corea.
Winner of nine Grammys, McBride is Artistic Director of the Newport Jazz Festival, the New Jersey Performing Arts Center (NJPAC), the TD James Moody Jazz Festival, and Harlem’s National Jazz Museum.
He is also Artistic Director of Jazz House KiDS and the Jazz Aspen Snowmass Summer Sessions and hosts NPR’s “Jazz Night in America” and “The Lowdown: Conversations With Christian” on SiriusXM.
In a remarkable coup, McBride was nominated in 2020 to two Grammys in the same category — Best Jazz Instrumental Album — for RoundAgain with Joshua Redman, Brad Mehldau and Brian Blade; and Trilogy 2, a live double-album with Blade and Corea.
The versatile McBride’s oratory masterwork “The Movement Revisited: A Musical Portrait of Four Icons” honors civil rights leaders Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Rosa Parks, and Muhammad Ali.
He is Artistic Director at the University of Richmond and leads jazz programs at Richmond, Jazz Aspen, and the Brubeck Institute.
As Creative Chair for Jazz at the LA Philharmonic, he curated 12 concerts a season at the Hollywood Bowl and Walt Disney Concert Hall. In his first summer as creative chair, McBride proudly presented his musical hero, James Brown.
These world-class credentials make an impressive list, but McBride reaches far past the paperwork in how he plays. He cruises and grooves, with the confident drive of Philly soul in its uncanny balance of muscular push and inviting, calm grace. His highly evolved harmonic mastery combines with alert listening so his bands are always cooperative, interactive and organic.
Saratoga Performing Arts Center honored Don McCormack, Dean of Special Programs at Skidmore College and founder (in 1987) of the Skidmore Summer Jazz Institute in a special observance at the 47th Freihofer’s Saratoga Jazz Festival in June.
Don McCormack. Photo provided
SPAC continues celebrating McCormack’s support of jazz, including the training of young artists, in the McCormack Jazz Series, presented in the Spa Little Theater.
The McCormack Jazz Series at the Spa Little Theater continues November 22 with Dorado Schmitt and Sons: Django Festival All-Stars (acoustic stringed things, swinging as fast as possible) with the very compatible local opener Hot Club of Saratoga. Cuban pianist Alfredo Rodriguez leads his Trio April 5, 2025, and the series concludes May 1, 2025 with singer Veronica Swift – no relation to that other singing Swift.
Christian McBride and Ursa Major launch the McCormack Jazz Series Thursday, October 24. 7 p.m. The Spa Little Theater is east of the Hall of Springs and Gideon Putnam, at 19 Roosevelt Dr., Saratoga Springs. Tickets for Christian McBride and Ursa Major are $81.50 – $51.50; students $31.50. http://www.spac.org.
Don’t we fans just hate it when two fine jazz crews play here the same night?
Both the Bill O’Connell Quartet at A Place for Jazz and Old Friends Beckoned/New Sounds Reckoned at WAMC’s The Linda feature Capital Region jazz heroes Friday. Both mix experienced stars with younger players, and both presenting organizations are non-profits.
Union College-trained bassist Santi Debriano plays at A Place for Jazz in the rhythm section of the Bill O’Connell Quartet featuring Craig Handy, alongside ageless drummer Bill Hart (84 next month), while Schenectady-raised saxophonist Matt Steckler leads the Old Friends Beckoned project which features prolific, versatile bassist Lonnie Plaxico (64 as of last month).
After noting those similarities, I flipped a coin to chose which show to explain first, or to attend on Friday.
Old Friends Beckoned are Steckler, keyboardist Yayoi Ikawa, bassist Plaxico and drummer Tony Lewis; it’s also the title of the album they just made together and are introducing Friday.
From left: Larry Lewis, drums; Lonnie Plaxico, bass; Yayoi Ikawa, piano; and Matt Steckler (aka Matty Stecks), reeds. Photo provided.
Schenectady High School grad Steckler got busy back here after training at Trinity, the New England Conservatory and NYU; then a teaching stint in Manitoba. After previously leading Dead Cat Bounce, Persiflage and Musical Tramps, he assembled these NYC players to improvise together. The band played Caffe Lena before Lewis joined; more recently Steckler played Jazz on Jay and at his three-band birthday party in Bennington.
Tokyo-born pianist/composer Ikawa has released two albums of original material and played festivals here, in Europe, Japan and the Latin Caribbean.
Plaxico has played here most often with Cassandra Wilson, but his past gigs include experimental and straight ahead jazz masters Sonny Stitt, Dizzy Gillespie, Alice Coltrane and Abbey Lincoln, in addition to making five albums as bandleader.
Diverse assignments also shaped Lewis, from jazz giant Dizzy Gillespie to rock stars Little Richard, Sam Moore (Sam & Dave) and Sting to bluesman B.B. King and genre-jumping originals Me’Shell N’degeocello and pop diva Cyndi Lauper.
In a late addition, Steckler brings in trumpeter Chris Pasin and singer Wanda L. Houston for Friday’s performance
Old Friends Beckoned aka Steckler/Ikawa/Plaxico/Lewis (plus two) play WAMC’s The Linda Performing Arts Studio (339 Central Ave,, Albany) Friday, Oct. 18 at 8 p.m. $20 General Admission. 518-465-5322. http://www.thelinda.org.
Meanwhile, 16 miles away (26 minutes, at the speed limit) and starting 30 minutes earlier, A Place for Jazz presents the Bill O’Connell Quartet featuring Craig Handy.
Bill O’Connell, left; Craig Handy, right. Photo provided
Oberlin-trained hyper-versatile pianist-leader O’Connell has won awards and nominations as a jazz writer, composer-arranger, and performer inspired by Keith Jarrett, Bill Evans, Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock; as well as valued sideman with straight-ahead stars including Sonny Rollins and Chet Baker, and Latin jazz giants Mongo Santamaria, Dave Valentin and Gato Barbieri.
Craig Handy played trombone, piano and guitar before Dexter Gordon’s playing inspired him to settle on saxophone, training at North Texas State University among David Murray, Joshua Rodman and other stars and earning the Charlie Parker Scholarship. Moving to New York, he accompanied singers Betty Carter and Dee Dee Bridgewater, played with the Mingus Big Band and smaller groups led by Art Blakey, Roy Haynes and Abdullah Ibrahim (at The Egg November 17!). He also portrayed Coleman Hawkins in Robert Altman’s film “Kansas City.”
Trained at Union College, the New England Conservatory and Wesleyan University, bassist Santi Debriano is perfectly cast on Friday: He has accompanied many saxophonists including Sam Rivers, Pharoah Sanders, Sonny Fortune, David Murray, Lee Konitz and more.
NEA jazz master drummer Billy Hart may be the most celebrated name in Friday’s two jazz shows after playing with Wes Montgomery, Jimmy Smith, Herbie Hancock, Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, McCoy Tyner and Shirley Horn.
The Bill O’Connell Quartet featuring Craig Handy plays Friday at 7:30 p.m. at A Place for Jazz in the Carl B. Taylor Auditorium of the SUNY Schenectady County Community College Music School. $25, students $10. http://www.aplaceforjazz.org.
When singer-songwriters Stephen Clair and Michael Eck shared a New Orleans apartment, they tag-teamed a two-man poetry workshop on the same typewriter. One typed by day, the other by night. A tattoo of that typewriter on Eck’s arm marks that connection.
The two will tag-team again Sunday, Feb. 25 in WAMC’s Live at the Linda Live series, a tasty two-fer for fans of incisive songwriting and post-punk performing. The shared show celebrates a decades-deep musical friendship with shared stops on America’s musical map, but different paths at times.
Both have played live on the radio, both came up in Albany’s punk-rock scene, both have recorded with bands and solo. They’ve played in each other’s bands and together often, including with their hero Pete Seeger.
Another hero, one-man rock show Hamell on Trial, inspired both to play solo in area clubs and coffeehouses in the 80s. Eck – who has played electric guitar with a power drill – calls this approach “maximum solo acoustic,” where intensity and insight combine.
Early on, Eck and Clair collaborated “only in the most ridiculous ways,” as Clair said by phone from Beacon recently. “We would jump onto one another’s shows to both complement the show and make a mess of it.”
“I don’t think we’ll be sabotaging one another’s sets at The Linda,” he said, sounding innocent but playful.
Stephen Clair – Hillary Clements Photo
Each will play solo, Eck going first since Clair has the most recent album, the all-solo “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.” Clair said, “I’m really looking forward to this show because I think it has something to do with making this record.”
Playing live on radio suits both lovers of music on the air. One of Eck’s several active bands is the Lost Radio Rounders, and he produced and hosted “Performance Place: Live Concert Radio at WAMC.” As a teenager, he eavesdropped on punk-rockers the ADs in his Slingerlands neighborhood. “When I heard the ADs on the radio, I realized these were the guys I heard playing in the basement – and they’re on the radio,” Eck told me last year. “I realized you could do this, in your community.”
In Albany’s do-it-yourself music community, Clair played briefly in Eck’s band Doubting Thomas while Eck played in Clair’s punk-rock trio Glaze. Surprisingly, Glaze landed a remarkably rare appearance on mainstream radio power-house WGY-AM which seldom paid attention to music in general, even less to local acts.
Neither Eck nor Clair stayed local. Both pilgrimaged to Austin as well as New Orleans, then their paths parted for a time. After recording his debut album “Altoona Hotel” (1997) with members of Oneonta rock band Subduing Mara, Clair earned an MFA in writing. He moved to Brooklyn and left music-making for a writer’s life. while Eck drifted back to Albany to start a family.
Clair resumed recording with “Little Radio” (2003) in Queens with friends. The album,“got what for me was a lot of attention,” he said. “WFUV started playing it in heavy rotation,” unusual attention to a completely independent album. When the New York station broadcast interviews with Clair and and live performances, “I was kind of riding high.”
Although made with a band, Clair’s “Little Radio” ride launched solo tours. In Texas, rich in stages and stations open to solo troubadours, he recalled, “Pretty much every live show I would do, I would also do a live on-air at the local radio station that day or the day before.” Playing live on radio, Clair found, “There’s the illusion of a concert in front of a live audience, physically, while also being on the radio.”
After touring with Texan Robert Earl Keen, Clair borrowed Keen’s band for “What Luck” (2007), and he worked with producer Malcolm Burn (a colleague of Daniel Lanois) on “Strange Perfume” (2019). By then he’d moved to Beacon, started a family, opened a music school and formed a regular band: Daria Grace, bass; Aaron Lapos, drums.
New geography brought a new sound. “I got away from the rootsy thing and it’s this bridge that I’ve constantly been straddling my whole life,” he said, “the singer-songwriter who’s also a little bit rootsy, but simultaneously a little bit like New York, punk rock 70s too – all rolled into one ball.”
Making his new album “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life,” he said, “took getting to the point where I felt brave enough, and had songs that were interesting enough on their own, when just laid bare like that.” He wrote 100 songs to feel confident he had 11 keepers. He recorded each song live, without edits.
“Some days I would do a dozen takes of a song, and it just wouldn’t be hitting and I’d walk away,” he said. “Then I would work on other songs for a few weeks and then I would come back to that song…Of course, no single take is perfect…These recordings have fully exposed warts – which I’m 100 percent fine with.”
Comfortable with playing solo, Clair now feels he’s reached a new level. “People come up to me and thank me for being so generous,” he said. I think it’s because I’m completely myself when I’m onstage.”
Clair added, “When you perform solo, it’s like you’re giving a talk or telling a story; those elements are more at the forefront than they are when you’re playing with a band… it’s really so pleasing and so energizing to just engage with an audience over these songs, so these songs feel almost like an excuse to be able to have that opportunity. It’s really, really great.”
When not performing, writing or recording, both Eck and Clair work musician-appropriate day-jobs.
Clair founded and runs the Beacon Music Factory; his “full-time side-hustle,” he calls it, “a music school that lives a double life.” By day, it offers private lessons, mainly to school-agers. “Then at night, there are all these adults who come in and play in these adult rock band camps, or a string chamber group or a saxophone quartet,” said Clair, proudly noting how these ad hoc bands build close friendships. “That continues to be a huge inspiration to me in running this place.”
Eck has reviewed music and drama for the Times Union, worked in publicity for the Proctors Collaborative, then wrote promotional information for a west coast instrument maker. While a stroke, COVID and other health challenges curtailed day-job work, Eck continued to perform. Sitting to play initially, he performs regularly with the Ramblin Jug Stompers, the Lost Radio Rounders, Good Things and a duo with percussionist Brian Melick that grew from the all-star band Tin Can Alley. He has also curated performance series at Caffe Lena, WAMC’s The Linda, Union College and Borders, and produced recordings by Jim Gaudet, Coal Palace Kings, the Plague and others.
Michael Eck – Lori Van Buren/Times Union photo
Eck was inducted into the Eddies Hall of Fame in 2022 and his Lost Radio Rounders (a duo with Tom Lindsay) are nominated as Folk/Traditional Artist of the Year in the 2024 Eddies Awards (awards ceremony April 21 at Proctors), honors Clair would likely have harvested if he still lived here.
Both have raised creative offspring; Eck’s are twins and older than Clair’s. Eck is delighted his daughter and her husband live in his childhood Slingerlands home, where his first bands rehearsed and down the block from where Eck eavesdropped on the ADs. Clair notes his younger child Schuyler will surpass him as a musician, or already has.
A few days after we spoke, Clair Facebooked a concise new mission statement: “Making songs filled with longing, love, chickens, drugs and flowers into records and hitting the road with a vengeance since the 90s, with more than ten studio albums, and at least that many fans.”
On that same (unnecessarily) humble note, Eck borrowed the words of Northampton area rock troubadour Ray Mason to proclaim, “I play the same show in front of four people as I would in front of seven.”
Stephen Clair and Michael Eck play solo at WAMC’s The Linda (339 Central Ave., Albany) on Sunday., Feb. 25 in the “Live at the Linda Live” series hosted by Peter Hughes, 7:30 p.m. $25. 518-465-5233 x158 www.thelinda.org
FURTHER ON, DOWN THE ROAD
Stay tuned for details on Eck’s plans for an ensemble show with guests on Friday, April 19. He’ll celebrate his 60th birthday and introduce his new album “Fermata,” his sixth. Eck recorded “Your Turn to Shine,” his previous release, live and solo in the studios of WMHT (for its “AHA” program) and WEXT.
Hoke's Jukebox 