It takes a bold, knowledgeable, and inventive group to call itself The Verve Jazz Ensemble. The moniker Verve conjures the legendary jazz label Verve Records: once home to the greatest pioneering names in the artform – from Duke Ellington, Stan Getz and Ella Fitzgerald to Bill Evans, Count Basie, and Buddy Rich. It is in the spirit of the Verve label’s 1950s - ‘60s hard bop heyday that The Verve Jazz Ensemble composes, arranges, and performs jazz of a timeless quality. Across eight albums and counting – the latest entitled All In – the “VJE” has been satisfying the cravings of critics and audiences alike, consistently placing near or at the very top of the JazzWeek radio chart for the past decade. No less than Ellis Marsalis, the late, revered patriarch of the highly distinguished Marsalis Family that gave us Wynton, Branford, Jason and Delfeayo Marsalis, observed, “The VJE is the new MJQ,” referring to the fabled Modern Jazz Quartet.
Drummer Josh Feldstein founded The Verve Jazz Ensemble in 2006 as a band that paid homage to the past while vehemently establishing newer, younger audiences for the now vintage sound. “Part of the band’s mission,” said Feldstein, “is to expand the audience of classic instrumental jazz, to identify melodies that pop audiences can easily relate and groove to – but not need a degree in music to dig.”
The Verve Jazz Ensemble is a band that “chooses to move in a musical direction that’s appealing to radio as well as our broad base of US and international listeners,” Josh added. “Our mission is to bring forward the acoustic jazz artform in a way that both veteran listeners and newcomers to Jazz easily appreciate.”
Feldstein’s passion for acoustic jazz stems back to when he was 11 years old and living with his family in Queens, New York. He was taking drum lessons at the time from a teacher who turned him onto the volcanic Gene Krupa. “One day my teacher told me I sounded like Krupa,” Josh recalled. “Well, I don’t think that was remotely true, but I dug Gene’s drumming intensely and couldn’t stop listening.” The LP he pointed Josh to was “Verve’s Choice: The Best of Gene Krupa.” Josh was hooked.
"I spent the next 10 years grabbing up all of the jazz albums recorded for Verve Records that I could,” he states. “I hung out listening to Papa Jo Jones and the Countsmen at the West End Café on Broadway and 113th street in Manhattan. I’d catch the incredible Buddy Rich and his big band, and legends like Max Roach, Art Blakey, and Count Basie. Any given month would bring into town the best of the best like (saxophonist) Stan Getz, (pianist) Monty Alexander, and on and on.
“I put music on the backburner once I entered college, however, because I didn’t think I could make money as a jazz musician,” Josh said. “While I kept practicing and did play from time to time – I even toured for a while with a big band in the mid-Atlantic area – it was part-time stuff by and large.
“Some years later, when I was living in Connecticut, I came across the playing of a young saxophonist / keyboardist named Jon Blanck. He really impressed me as a young cat who could really play in the authentic hardbop idiom, which is my foundation. I approached him to play locally – just for fun. We ended up booking restaurants and country clubs and becoming close friends. The band developed a strong reputation and a faithful following. Once the VJE started playing clubs throughout Connecticut and eventually in New York proper, things started happening.”
The VJE was a quintet when it first ventured into the studio to record its debut album, It’s About Time (2012), followed by East End Sojourn (2014) which featured guest Peter Bernstein on guitar. Both charted Top 10 on the JazzWeek radio charts. Those albums were followed by top 25 Perimeter (2016) and yet another top 10 album, Swing-A-Nova (2017), recorded by the rhythm section as a trio album. For 2018, Feldstein expanded the tenor sax, trumpet, piano, bass and drums quintet into a septet with alto / flute and trombone for the VJE’s fifth album, Connect The Dots, a change that shot the band to the #1 position atop the JazzWeek chart for two weeks. Next came Night Mode (2019) – another top 10-charter – followed during the Covid lockdown by The VJE: Very Live! (2021) - recorded at a pre-pandemic benefit concert in Hadley, MA - which kept the VJE brand alive and well.
For VJE’s eighth and latest album, All In, the septet joyfully explores the theme of “Mid-20th century Americana” via two original compositions and eight arrangements of some classic and other little-heard material. The band consists of Tatum Greenblatt on trumpet, Willie Applewhite on trombone, Alexa Tarantino on alto sax / flute, Jon Blanck on tenor sax, Matt Oestreicher on piano and guitar, Elias Bailey on bass, and VJE leader Josh Feldstein on drums.
Highlights of the album include the Tatum Greenblatt original title track, “All In;” an Afro Cuban approach to Neal Hefti’s beloved “The Odd Couple Theme;” another Greenblatt original entitled “What I Meant to Say Was,” set up as a musical conversation between trumpet and alto sax; and a piano trio whirl through Jean “Toots” Thielemans “Bluesette.”
All this music, along with the rest of “All In,” is in passionate keeping of The Verve Jazz Ensemble’s sworn mission to expand the audience of instrumental jazz in the United States and worldwide. “This is very important to all of us,” Feldstein shares. “My daughter is in high school, and she and her friends like our music. There are listeners everywhere of all ages who don’t know any jazz history. But when they hear our approach to jazz, they soak it in. Identifying and performing jazz melodies that pop audiences can relate to – catchy yet legitimate music, with a pulse – that’s our target.”
https://www.verve-jazz.com/
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