Tulsa World: ‘Race Riot Suite’ Carnegie Hall-worthy
By WASHINGTON I. RUCKER
Published: 10/21/2011 2:23 AM Last Modified: 10/21/2011 4:38 AM
As a Tulsa native, I have some comments on the group Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey.
The group appeared at a local club here in Los Angeles recently and I was in for a major surprise.
After reading about the group in the L.A. Times, I took notice of their ambitious venture into something more than just jazz, “The Race Riot Suite.” It was a sociological undertaking of great magnitude, one that is seldom spoken of anywhere.
As a native Tulsan and a jazz musician, my interests were two-fold: One, the group took on one of the most infamous events in American history and performed this horrific event in a jazz format. Two, my concern that, in addition, the musicians were much too young to understand the significance of this 1921 nightmare.
I, along with a small group of north Tulsans I know, arrived at this club that normally I would not frequent. We were interested in what was being done, how and by whom. All of us had a personal interest in the article and the group.
From the opening blaring note, which nearly knocked me down, I sat stunned by the music, the performance and the musicians themselves.
This was the most exciting and remarkable concert I have ever had the pleasure of seeing, hearing or performing in.
Click Here to read more from this Tulsa World article
JACOB FRED JAZZ ODYSSEY
SAN FRANCISCO – Tulsa’s native sons are on the road, telling a dark and painful story about a long-suppressed chapter of Oklahoma’s history.
At a performance two weeks ago at the Bay Area’s premiere funk venue, Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey settled into a rollicking locomotive groove evoking the territory dance bands that crisscrossed the Southwest during Prohibition. But when the group lurched suddenly into “The Burning,’’ the second movement in its extraordinary, evening-length “Race Riot Suite,’’ the wailing horns seemed to tear away the familiar, zany images of Lindy Hoppers, revealing the horrific, unpunished violence that reduced the nation’s wealthiest African-American community to ashes.
In the midst of an extensive US tour that brings the band to the Boston area tonight for the first in a series of gigs at the Lily Pad, the quartet is focusing on music from its new album “Race Riot Suite,’’ which was inspired by the 1921 pogrom that destroyed Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood, the Negro Wall Street. Though the riot killed dozens and destroyed some 35 city blocks, leaving the city’s 10,000 black residents homeless, it was largely covered up and left out of historical accounts until the state issued a formal report in 2001.
“I grew up in Tulsa and the first I heard about it was in high school, but there wasn’t a lot of information available,’’ said Jacob Fred steel guitarist Chris Combs, the suite’s composer, over a meal with the band after the soundcheck. “I didn’t realize it was the worst race riot in the country and that it was unique in so many ways. The information is out there now, but it’s surprising how hard you had to look to find it.’’
Jacob Fred roared out of Tulsa in the mid-1990s and built up an avid national following through incessant touring and a savvy balance of sonically expansive improvisation and inviting grooves. The name is the product of an absurdist sense of humor and doesn’t refer to anyone who’s played in the band, but the moniker stuck. After more than a decade as a trio, the group expanded to a quartet, and the latest incarnation features Kansas City, Mo., bassist Jeff Harshbarger, Tulsa drummer Josh Raymer, and pianist Brian Haas, the only original member left.
Click here to read the rest of the article on Boston.com
Inspired Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey at the Loft — This Ain’t Your Daddy’s Jazz
By Alfred Howard | Published Tuesday, Oct. 11, 2011
Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey, a quartet from Tulsa, Oklahoma, brought their unique brand of open-minded musicianship to the Loft at UCSD. Touring in support ofRace Riot Suite, the quartet added a five-piece horn section, including Peter Apfelbaum and Mark Southerland. One of the facets giving JFJO a unique tone in the jazz world is lap-steel player Chris Combs. An unusual instrument to be featured in a jazz quartet, it calls to mind melodies of Americana as well as the slow brooding crescendos of Pink Floyd. Chris Combs composed Race Riot Suitein homage to the Tulsa race riot of 1921. The music excels in emotional depth and dynamic, the cacophony of struggle, the swagger of pride, with a brimming turmoil to an all-out explosion of catastrophe….
Click Here to read the rest of the piece on the San Diego Reader website
Heady array of jazz concerts here this fall
Among highlights: Terence Blanchard, Gary Burton, James Farm, Oregon, Jacob Fred Jazz Odysssey and San Diego Bass Summit
Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey. 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 5. The Loft@UCSD, Price Center East, second floor, 911 Lyman Lane, UCSD, La Jolla. $10. (858) 534-TIXS;artpwr.com
The 1921 Tulsa race riots in Oklahoma inspired the 21st and newest album by the four-manJacob Fred Jazz Odyssey, an Oklahoma band whose Spinal Tap-inspired name shouldn’t detract from their increasingly ambitious music.
What makes the group’s concert here especially promising is the list of gifted guests who will help bring this audacious album to life at UCSD. They include multi-instrumentalist Peter Apfelbaum, saxophonists Mark Southerland and David Borgo (a driving force in the UCSD jazz department), trumpeter Yvette Jackson and trombonist/flutist Andy Geib.
Suggested album: “The Race Riot Suite” (2011, The Royal Potato Family)
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2011/sep/30/heady-array-jazz-concerts-due-fall/
Expanded Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey at UCSD
By Robert Bush | Posted October 3, 2011, 3:41 p.m.
UCSD’s the Loft will host a special appearance by the Tulsa, Oklahoma born band Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey at 8 p.m., Oct. 5.
The band is touring the US in support of their new release, Race Riot Suite, (inspired by the 1921 Tulsa melee).
JFJO is a quartet that has endured multiple line-up changes since its 1994 inception. Currently, the band consists of Brian Haas on piano and keyboards,Chris Combs on lap steel, Jeff Harshbarger on bass and Josh Raymer on drums.
Additionally, the Loft concert will include several top-flight horn players, including Bay Area multi-instrumentalist Peter Apfelbaum, and UCSD Professor David Borgo on saxophone, as well as Andy Geib on trombone / flute and Yvette Jackson on the trumpet.
UCSD promoter Brian Ross was actively involved in organizing this concert, working closely with JFJO manager Eric Dunn, to provide the venue and suggest the local musicians.
“I knew this could be a fun show. The spirit was right…it has become something we all just had to do–infectious musical interplay for all to enjoy ! ,” said Ross.
JFJO has released 21 records since their ’94 debut. The group mixes elements of jazz, free-jazz, rock and funk with an emphasis on improvisation.
Expect unusual instrumentation, (lap steel isn’t a common jazz instrument), exciting charts and raucous, mid-boggling soloing.
Radio interview with JFJO founder Brian Hass:jazz88.org/The_New_Jazz_Thing/
LA Times: Tragedy, triumph in Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey’s ‘Race Riot Suite’
The adventurous jazz band’s latest project pays tribute to Tulsa’s Greenwood community, destroyed in a 1921 race riot, while evoking the creative output of 1920s Oklahoma.
By Andrew Gilbert, Special to the Los Angeles Times
October 2, 2011
As a white kid growing up in Tulsa three decades ago, Brian Haas never heard about the 1921 race riot that obliterated Greenwood, a neighborhood that rode the Oklahoma oil boom to become the wealthiest African American community in the United States. That’s not surprising. With information about the pogrom actively suppressed until the late 1990s, most of his black peers didn’t learn about it either.
What’s unusual is that Haas’ band, Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey, recently released “Race Riot Suite” (The Royal Potato Family), an album-length work that celebrates Greenwood and laments its destruction. An adventurous jazz combo that has won an enviable following among jam band and indie rock fans while maintaining jazz cred as hard-core improvisers, the band isn’t in the habit of making overt political statements. For the Tulsa-based quartet the project is a vehicle for coming to terms with its city’s darkest chapter, which included incendiary bombs dropped by airplane, stoking a fire that burned out some three dozen city blocks..
“I went to kindergarten through 12th grade in a Tulsa suburb and got a four-year college degree in Tulsa, and I never learned about the race riot,” says Haas, 37, who performs with Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey on Thursday at the Mint as part of a three-month national tour.
“I heard something about an incident in Greenwood, but I didn’t discover it was a full-blown riot until my 20s. It blew my mind how well covered up it was. I’ve been researching it ever since.”
At the time of the riot, Greenwood boasted a black population of about 10,000 residents and a prosperous commercial district known as the Negro Wall Street, with a flourishing cultural scene as well as a large and prosperous population of entrepreneurs and professionals. Judging by the disturbing “Race Riot” cover art — a washed-out ink and watercolor montage of Ku Klux Klan hoods, a lynching, a skull and a bloody rose — one might expect to hear an anguished and furious musical outcry.
Rather than simply evoking Greenwood’s destruction, however, the suite encompasses the region’s creative ferment. Composed and arranged by Jacob Fred steel guitarist Chris Combs, the score captures the energy of Greenwood’s fervent churchgoers and the rollicking territory dance bands that crisscrossed the Southwest.
CLICK HERE to read the rest of the article…
http://www.latimes.com/la-ca-tulsa-jazz-20111002,0,4445694.story
Congrats to Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey and their new album The Race Riot Suite for reaching #1 on the CMJ Jazz Chart!
All About Jazz: Chris Combs: Jacob Fred’s Tulsa Tale
By DANIEL LEHNER – Published: September 19, 2011
On a Memorial Day in 1921 Tulsa, Oklahoma, an encounter between a young black shoe shiner named Dick Rowland and a white elevator operator named Sarah Page—an incident that was reported with hazy details and shocking incompleteness—started one of the most brutal and tragic race riots in American history. Even more tragic, however, was how little the event was discussed by national or even Oklahoman sources. It was an event that Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey‘s Chris Combs, like many proud Oklahomans, felt needed to be told.
“It was something that people didn’t like talking about. They still don’t like talking about it,” said the lap steel guitarist. “The race riot was ignored for so long that has become one of the strangest and darkest parts of our city’s history.”
Combs’s vision of describing this work in great and impassioned musical detail has already come to fruition. On May 20th 2011, JFJO premiered the Race Riot Suite to a live audience at the Tulsa Performing Arts Center. The suite, which will be released on the band’s Kinnara Records on August 30, 2011, seeks to bring the events into literal and impressionistic light in the best way the quartet can. The suite’s conception was borne out of the guitarist’s inquisition into Tulsa’s past.
Click Here to continue reading on AllAboutJazz.com
From Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey:
This Fall we will be touring North America behind our latest release, The Race Riot Suite. In addition to hitting the road with many of the same horns from the studio joining us live (ie: Peter Apfelbaum, Steven Bernstein, Mark Southerland) we’ve decided enlist the help of local horn players in your city by way of a contest.
We’ve made available the sheet music parts for the song The Burning for Tenor Saxophone, Baritone Saxophone, Trumpet, & Trombone.
We’ve also made available a version of the song The Burning, that has only the core quartet playing on it, no horns. In addition we’ve included the studio version of The Burning as heard on The Race Riot Suite official release for reference. Click here to download everything you need.
After learning the music, record yourself playing your horn part on top of the supplied quartet-only track (labeled HORNLESS) using the digital audio workstation of your choice (ie: GarageBand or Audacity, a free program). Simply import the hornless version of The Burning into your workstation. Then create a new blank track, arm the track, and then record yourself playing one of the supplied horn parts “with” the quartet.
Email your version of The Burning as an mp3 file to: horns@jfjo.com. Label your file as your first and last name (w/ a space between) followed by “burning” (ie: jacob fred burning.mp3). All submissions must be received by no later than October 4th, 2011. Please keep file sizes below 10mb. Please, no more than 2 submissions per person. By emailing your file to us you are waiving any and all rights associated with your track and giving JFJO full control of the recording forever.
Submissions will be posted to the contest’s SoundCloud page (http://soundcloud.com/jfjohorns) so you can hear what others have played
Winner(s) will be chosen by Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey and given the opportunity to play with us when we’re on tour in your city. The winner(s) will be billed as a special guest for the evening and will additionally receive a complimentary copy of The Race Riot Suite on CD. All entries will receive a special download of bonus digital tracks from The Race Riot Sessions and World Premier.
We’re is eagerly awaiting your entries. May the best horn win!
-JFJO
If you still need some help see the following resources:
· YouTube Tutuorial on how to record a track on top of an mp3 using Garage Band: http://youtu.be/g3-n3Ff148Y
· Download Audacity for free: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
· Watch The Burning played live at the World Premier of the Suite at the Tulsa Performing Arts Center: http://youtu.be/bDGHssE4u6s
o This video features the original studio lineup of Chris Combs (lap steel), Brian Haas (piano), Josh Raymer (drums), Jeff Harshbarger (bass) plus horns players Jeff Coffin (Bela Fleck, Dave Matthews Band), Steven Bernstein (Sex Mob, Levon Helm), Peter Apfelbaum (Hieroglyphics, Don Cherry), Mark Southerland (Snuff Jazz) and Matt Leland (a founding JFJO member)
· Additional instrument parts may be available upon request – email horns@jfjo.com if you really want to enter the contest but play a different instrument and ask if it’s possible.
