Nashville Jazz Crusader Rahsaan Barber's
Third CD as a Leader,
"The Music in the Night,"
Set for November 3 Release
On His Jazz Music City Records
New CD Focuses on Standards
After Two Recordings of Mostly Original Material
October 17, 2017
Saxophonist, composer, and bandleader Rahsaan Barber's
years of activity as a performer, producer, presenter, educator, and
most recently DJ in his native Nashville have established him as an
integral part of the city's vibrant jazz scene. In fact, Barber named
his record label and concert production company Jazz Music City to make the point that there's more to America's "Music City" than the Grand Ole Opry.
With the release on November 3 of The Music in the Night, he also reveals there's more to Rahsaan Barber
than his reputation as composer of the cutting-edge modern jazz works
that were the primary focus of his two previous albums, 2005's Trio Soul and 2011's Everyday Magic.
Only glimpsed there were his gentle side and his skills as a gifted
interpreter of standards that, in his hands, are transformed in fresh
and highly original ways.
Barber writes in his liner notes that recording an album of
standards was his mother Stella's idea. She told him "how much she
missed hearing my approach to standards, and how much she felt my
ability to interpret familiar songs sets me apart from my peers." He
also followed the advice of his grandmother, the late Zepher Selby, who
told him to "play pretty" and "make sure you put a blues in every set."
Every track on The Music in the Night is notable, ranging from the swinging opener "Isn't She Lovely" to the gorgeous treatment of the Michael Jackson hit "She's Out of My Life"; from a reggae-tinged rendition of Rodgers and Hart's "My Funny Valentine" to the Ray Charles classic "Georgia on My Mind" treated as a slow blues with a backbeat. Then there are versions of Hoagy Carmichael and Johnny Mercer's "Skylark," the lyrics of which inspired the album title, and Antonio Carlos Jobim's "The Girl from Ipanema."
While it never achieved the popularity to qualify as a standard, "The Backbone"
(composed by bassist Butch Warren for a 1964 Dexter Gordon album) is a
tour de force showcasing the chops of Barber's rhythm section: pianist Matt Endahl, drummer Derrek Phillips, and 20-year-old bassist Jack Aylor.
Family played a huge role in Rahsaan Barber's
musical development. Stella and Robert Barber Sr. named their twin
sons, Rahsaan and Roland, born in Nashville on April 2, 1980, after the
late multi-reed master Rahsaan Roland Kirk.
The twins grew up listening to hymns at Nashville's St. Luke
CME Church, which their great-great uncles and aunts had helped to found
in 1915 and where their grandmother later served as pianist and choir
director. At home, they heard records by Luther Vandross, Stephanie
Mills, and other soul singers favored by their mother, a singer herself.
Their father, a blues fan originally from Memphis, began taking
saxophonist Rahsaan and trombonist Roland to sit in at blues clubs when
they were as young as 14. And his grandmother introduced Rahsaan to the
music of such early tenor saxophone giants as Coleman Hawkins, Ben
Webster, and Don Byas.
After graduating high school, the brothers enrolled at
Indiana University (IU) and studied with onetime George Russell
trombonist David Baker, who, Rahsaan says, "redefined
what jazz education could look like and sound like. He was a trailblazer
culturally." Barber also credits Tom Walsh, his
saxophone teacher at IU, "with the grand majority of what I can do with
the saxophone. He was a godsend-the right person at the right time at
the right place."
The twins spent five years at IU, both receiving bachelor's
degrees and Artist Diplomas in jazz and instrumental studies. After
recording Twinnovation, their only album
together, in 2001, they spent two years at the Manhattan School of
Music, earning master's degrees in jazz performance in 2005. Roland
today teaches at Vanderbilt University, where his parents had met years
earlier. Rahsaan taught at Belmont College for six years and at
Tennessee State University for two and a half years before recently
retiring from academia.
Photography: Rusty Russell
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