Building musical bridges

Five musicians and three Portland State students will travel to Portland’s Russian sister-city, Khabarovsk, Dec. 11 for the first-ever jazz cultural exchange trip, called The Jazz Bridge Project.

Thursday, they and others will perform at The Old Church in a benefit concert, “Bridge to Russia”, run by the Leroy Vinnegar Jazz Institute and conducted by PSU jazz studies professor Darrell Grant.

The concert will consist of a variety of jazz music, including some Russian pieces.

The Jazz Bridge Ensemble commissioned seven Portland jazz composers to write a piece, titled the “Amur Suite,” to premiere at the benefit concert. They included three of the musicians going on the trip: Darrell Grant, Charley Gray and Alan Jones. The other composers are Scott Hall, Gordon Lee, Andrew Oliver and Ez Weiss; each of the composers wrote a movement for the piece.

Grant will be playing piano at the concert. The bass player will be Gray, who is the director of the Portland Jazz Orchestra and the director of Jazz Studies at PSU. He conducts the Jazz Ensemble and teaches classes in jazz arrangement, techniques and history.

The group’s original saxophonist is unable to attend the trip to Russia, and taking his place is PSU music student Marc Hutchinson. The other two musicians are drummer Jones and vocalist Marilyn Keller. There will also be two special guests, Andrei and Anastasia Kitaev, a married couple of Russian pianists.

Grant formed the Leroy Vinnegar Jazz Institute in 2003.

“Portland has a great jazz community: festivals, radio stations, nonprofit music education programs and a whole pile of great musicians,” Grant said. “So when I came to PSU, I wanted to use the university as a platform for all these things that were going on in the jazz community.”

The institute mostly focuses on outreach, such as music education programs in schools and jazz historical documentation projects. The Jazz Bridge Project was launched through this institute.

Grant’s blog said the project seeks to harness and support the goodwill of our community to share the best of Portland with Khabarovsk in order to share information, resources and expertise to develop long-term initiatives.”

Khabarovsk is located in far-eastern Russia, 5,000 miles from Moscow.

“It’s a long way from the more European part of Russia, so there isn’t a big jazz tradition. The musicians there first learned it via things like radio or smuggled recordings,” Grant said. “I’d like to find out if there’s enough of it now that they have their own tradition.”

Although the weather conditions will be less than hospitable in the middle of a Russian winter, the group has a special reason for going. Dec. 14 will be the citywide celebration of the 70th birthday of award-winning Russian jazz saxophonist Vyacheslav Zakharov.

“Despite the snow and cold, and the fact that Khabarovsk is beautiful in spring, we will be flying to Siberia in early December armed with instruments, goodwill and warm hats,” Grant said on his blog.

Grant first became interested when he started playing in a school band in fourth grade.

“That was really fantastic for me. After that, my knowledge and understanding of it grew,” he said. He had taken classical piano lessons from a young age, but in high school he started taking lessons from a jazz piano player and knew jazz was what he wanted to do ever since.

Grant believes music can be a force for good, which for him is the most interesting thing about it. The Bridge to Russia benefit concert is the biggest project Grant has ever done.

“I wanted to see if bringing music to the diplomatic stage could make a difference in people’s lives. We try to make relationships with other countries through business or politics,” Grant said. “My question is, what if art is the most powerful way to do it? Who knows? I think musicians have a much bigger role than we’ve been meant to believe.”