Saxophone great Darius Jones nurtures string connections on the West Coast
At the jazz fest, New York artist dedicates The Vancouver Suite to violinists Josh and Jesse Zubot, cellist Peggy Lee, and bassist James Meger
Darius Jones says “Strings sound different” here. Photo by Kholood Eid
Darius Jones and Strings with Gerald Cleaver present The Vancouver Suite at Ironworks on Friday, June 24. Jones joins the Josh Zubot Quartet at Performance Works earlier that day, and collaborates with Amirtha Kidambi and Julia Ulehla at Ironworks on July 3.
DARIUS JONES LIKES Vancouver’s ocean views, our relatively crime-free streets, taking long walks in Stanley Park, and the many affordable dining options near the Western Front arts centre—his usual pied-à-terre when he’s in town. But what the New York–based saxophonist really likes about this city is our string players.
Nowhere else, he says, has such a concentration of violinists, violists, and cellists who are able to handle just about any form of music, from complex classical scores to free-form skronk.
“One of the things that I’ve noticed about the community is that you have a lot of string players there that improvise, that do really interesting things with strings,” Jones explains in a telephone interview from his home. “That’s something that’s unique to Vancouver. There are not a lot of places that have just like a gob of string players that are pushing string music into different zones—not just classical spaces. And so that’s something that’s very interesting to me.
“Strings sound different there,” he continues. “The string ensembles I’ve heard really are just fascinating. They don’t always subscribe to to the typical string-quartet or string-group thing a lot of the time. These people really are challenging those sounds.”
Jones is so enamoured of local string players that not only will his upcoming Vancouver International Jazz Festival performance feature four of our best—violinists Josh and Jesse Zubot, cellist Peggy Lee, and bassist James Meger, along with Gerald Cleaver on drums—he’ll use it to debut The Vancouver Suite, a concert-long composition that’s dedicated to those players, their physical environment, and their audiences.
“I’ve had a relationship with Vancouver for some time now—since 2009 or ’10,” Jones notes. “And the relationship has been amazing from the very beginning. The audience really embraced me the very first time I played there, and every time I’ve come back it’s been just always that kind of beauty and love. I’ve grown to know a lot of the musicians, and when I come I try to play with them and get to know more of them. I’m really trying to understand the community as a whole, and also the city itself.”
All of these things will find expression in The Vancouver Suite, and the way Jones describes the work suggests that he might feel some kinship with Duke Ellington, who was known for his sonic portraits of people and places. That might seem a stretch: Jones tends towards fiery abstractions, and when he explicitly references the jazz past his sources tend to be artists such as Sun Ra or the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s Roscoe Mitchell. But he doesn’t disagree.
“It’s funny you say that, because I was like ‘Writing a suite is almost a throwback,’” he explains. “And I thought about Ellington as I was writing it, but trying to not give any of that energy….One of the components that Vancouver afforded me is this idea of pushing my language and my artistic desires and conceptual thinking beyond what it normally is. When I’m there I feel at my freest and my most accepted, because no matter what I’ve thrown in front of the audience, you’ve always been open—super-open, and really embracing of it. It’s really encouraged me to keep pushing my art to grow, and not feel any apprehension about doing that.”
Jones will have a couple of other chances to display his conceptual daring and sonic range during the jazz festival, first during a free Performance Works set with Josh Zubot’s new quartet, which also includes tenor saxophonist Chris Kelly, bassist Karlis Silins, and drummer Chacal del Tamborazo.
Jones hasn’t seen any written music yet, but looks forward to furthering his unlikely musical partnership with the Zubot family. Their backgrounds couldn’t be more different—Jones grew up going to a Pentecostal church in Virginia, while the Zubot brothers hail from a Prairie farm—but they share a similar urge to push against conventional genre boundaries. “I’m completely enamoured with them and their energy and their vibe, the whole thing,” Jones says. “The Zubots are a unique group of people.”
Jones’ third Vancouver appearance might be the most sonically adventurous of them all: it brings him together with two long-time collaborators, Amirtha Kidami and Vancouver resident Julia Ulehla. Both were early members of his genre-defying vocal quartet The Elizabeth-Caroline Unit, whose debut recording The Oversoul Manual is devoted to Jones’ compositions, yet is entirely devoid of sax. Instead, it pivots between almost operatic explorations of the soprano voice and earthy, haunting vocal ensembles that seem to be channeling the ritual singing of some as-yet-undiscovered civilization.
“I’m glad you bring up that ritual component, because as the years have gone on, I keep coming back to that place,” Jones says. “When I was working on The Oversoul Manual, I was really looking into different cultural rituals all over the world, and also specifically American cultural rituals—things that communities do and the sounds that they make inside of that space.
"Even if you think of, like, the sounds that you hear in a boxing match, there’s a part of it that’s ritualistic. We have rituals all the time, and my music is really trying to explore that space.”
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