Steve Davis: “Jazz opens the doors of the world, it is a universal language”

“Technology has its pros and cons,” says this jazz man who has his latest album, “Bluesthetique” on the main digital platforms, “and one of its advantages is exchanging your music with the band you’re working with by email.” . So the one who coordinates everything in Buenos Aires is the trumpet player and director of his Big Orchestra, Marcelo Loiácono: “we talk a bit, then he sends me a piece of music, I listen to it and we talk again, and then I send him something by mail, and thus follow us. They spoke to me very well about Marcelo and that’s how we started this idea of ​​the shows in Buenos Aires. I feel comfortable working remotely like this. I’m already looking forward to meeting him and playing with him and the other musicians personally.”

Schedule

This meeting will take place this weekend, with four shows at the Bebop Club in Palermo, on Friday the 13th and Saturday the 14th, at 8:00 p.m. and 10:30 p.m., inaugurating a new Buenos Aires festival dedicated to jazz, Summertime 2023, which will take place at Bebop until the end of February with artists from Sweden (Mattias Nilsson), South Africa (James McClure) and the United States (Mississippi blues and soul singer JJ Thames) as well as local figures of the level of Pablo Ziegler, Inés Estévez, Oscar Giunta and Delfina Oliver, among others.

But going back to the four shows that Steve D (“that’s how my discoverer, the saxophonist Jackie McLean, named me,” he says) the trombonist says that part of the fun of being a jazz musician is meeting people from all over the world that “you don’t know , but you connect immediately through music, generating friendships and sound partnerships that sometimes last a lifetime, because jazz is a universal language”.

One of the examples that Davis gives is that of the Argentine trumpeter Diego Urcola “who usually plays with Paquito D’Rivera and always visits me when he passes through New York, where I play a lot even though I live in Connecticut. Of course, there is something annoying in the flexible life of the musician, and it is the planes, and the flight connections and all that part, but I am a musician and they call me to play in many different places. As soon as the shows in Buenos Aires finish, I travel to Israel to do a similar experiment like the one we will do in Bebop but with Israeli musicians, and perhaps more emphasis on my own compositions, and in Tel Aviv I will be able to stay a little since then I have two dates almost immediately in New York, one at Dizzy’s Place and one at Birdland.”

Davis, who is also an established composer of tracks like “Optimism,” which was included on a Grammy-winning album, Christian McBride’s “Bringin It,” is also a professor at Berkeley, so he never just plays his own tunes. . “We have not yet fully defined the set-list that we will do in Buenos Aires, and it will probably vary from show to show, but almost certainly we will do something by Duke Ellington and Thelonius Monk, and maybe we can interpret an arrangement of one of those songs of Spanish roots that Chick Corea liked so much; We are going to see if he gives us the time to prepare everything and rehearse it ”. The Big Orchestra led by Marcelo Loiácono from Córdoba is made up of Joaquín De Francisco on trombone, Gustavo Musso on alto sax, Sebastián Loiácono and Mauro Ostinelli on tenor sax, Andrés Tarditti on baritone sax, Ramiro Penovi on guitar, Pablo Raposo on piano, Mauricio Dawid on double bass, Alejandro Bellman on drums, plus the singer Julia Moscardini.

Born in 1967 and summoned from a very young age by those jazz greats of the last golden age of the genre, Davis even became a member of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers in what was his last formation. Since he lived through that whole jazz world that evaporated in the clouds of smoke from the old jazz cellars, the big question is how he manages to explain those roots to his young Berkeley students. “I do what I can,” explains Davis, “I’m a fan of Dexter Gordon and Lester Young, and feel at home playing hard-bop and a relatively straight type of jazz, but I’ve learned to appreciate all mixes of styles, genres and fusions of anything. With Chick Corea we went from an intimate, almost chamber show, to playing with a symphony orchestra or putting together totally electric or Latin arrangements, and on the other hand I love listening to combinations of jazz with funk, soul and blues. Sometimes I make my students listen to Lester Young as a basic assignment, or I try to influence them with blues and ballads from another era, but the truth is that sometimes they make music that is different from anything known and end up influencing me. Lately I’ve been thinking of new ideas, many of them connected to the big band style, and I’d like to write for this type of formation, or maybe summon another musician to write arrangements of my songs for an orchestra”.