|
|||||||
| Home | Performance Schedule | Contact and Press Info | Discography | FREE Downloads | |||
| Biography | Feature Articles | Interviews | Projects |  |
 Blowing the 'Line'By Chris Riemenschneider Star Tribune November 22, 2006 Jazz trumpeter Kelly Rossum balances a career as educator, bandleader, sideman and mohawk advocate.
"It's just a thing with me," he explains, before rushing up the stairs to his fourth-floor office/studio in downtown Minneapolis. The jazz coordinator at MacPhail, Rossum doesn't take the easy route in a lot of cases. At 36, the guy has had more formal musical education than probably First Avenue's entire lineup of 2006 headliners. And while he clearly has the chops to make a comfortable living in private-party gigs or even classical music (where most of his studies were), Rossum instead hopscotches among a wide array of wilder, from-the-hip projects -- the kind that suit his almost-a-trademark mohawk haircut. Foremost among those projects are his solo CDs, which are consistently among the most innovative yet accessible jazz recordings in town, including the brand-new one, "Line." Rossum also plays on stage with his Kelly Rossum Quartet, performing tonight's late-night set at the Dakota. Plus, he co-anchors the improvisational jazztronic group Electropolis and regularly performs in groups led by other local stalwarts such as Pete Whitman and fellow MacPhail instructor Nachito Herrera. With a rare open window of time last week before he headed down to the Artists' Quarter for the Out to Lunch Quintet CD-release party (yep, he's in that group, too), Rossum sat down to stick up for the often underrated regimen of music education. "I always say I've managed to become a professional musician despite my advanced degrees," he joked -- a backhanded way of saying, "The music business is too much about the business." Rossum followed up his master's and bachelor's music degrees earlier this year by earning a doctorate from the University of Minnesota, which he got for working with some kind of historic, buttonless trumpet-like horn from a few hundred years ago. He showed me a photo of the instrument and tried to explain the significance, but let's just say he lost me at "octave." Someone who is up on the professorial jargon, Minnesota Orchestra trumpeter Douglas Carlsen, confirms that Rossum's abilities are legit. The two horn players performed together in the Omaha Youth Symphony when they were both in high school. "Jazz and classical are definitely two different worlds," Carlsen said, "but anytime I go see Kelly perform, I can tell he has a grasp on the technical aspects and fundamentals from my world." A sign of what was to come, Rossum didn't show up for their symphony's final performance, Carlsen remembered: "It was the biggest concert of our lives up till then, and he missed it to go play a [jazz] gig," he said. You don't need to be any kind of musicologist to enjoy "Line." The CD is based on Ornette Coleman's trumpet/sax/bass/drum quartet, which excelled at what Rossum calls "improvisation with form." The "line" in the title refers to simple melodic structures that the players loosely follow throughout the CD, but of course the real fun happens beyond those starting points. The players who walk this "Line" include the sibling rhythm section Chris and JT Bates (talk about guys with busy schedules), as well as Rossum's frequent collaborator Chris Thomson and another saxophonist, Woody Witt, from Houston. As on all his CDs, Rossum composed the pieces but hardly pushes himself out front more than the other players. One reason, he said, "is because I really don't like the trumpet all that much." Huh?! "It's loud and obnoxious and hard to play," he said. "Everybody remembers the trumpet player from high school. Nobody wants that guy in their band." This contempt for his own instrument helps explain why Rossum is so spread out among projects: He has a hard time turning down offers for gigs when they do come his way. It also might explain his haircut, a cool reaction to a trumpeter's nerdy image. He got the cut for a Halloween gig with Electropolis and kept it as a "social experiment," he said. "You should see the look on the faces of the [MacPhail students'] parents when they come in and see me," said Rossum, who lives a not-so-punk home life in south Minneapolis with his wife, modern dancer Suzanne Wiltgen. Rossum's haircut hasn't cut into his role as an educator. His next big project is a six-part lecture series, "Looking at Jazz," which the American Library Association hired him to helm next spring. He and sax great Bobby Watson are also playing next Friday with the Dakota Combo, a group of local high school students who auditioned for the gig. Even though much of it had nothing to do with jazz, Rossum said his own formal music education "gave me the training to have fun."I learned how to play hard stuff as much as I could," he said, "and basically, I took that training to allow myself to have fun as much as possible." Who knew having fun required so much work? Chris Riemenschneider Star Tribune Read next article |
