Joel Ross via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other...
- Steps from Joel Ross:
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
'mātriks / "source" / from "mater", Latin for "mother". We're real mothers for ya!
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
- Steps forward by: The Matrix
Who I Am & Where I Live
- Name: Joel Ross
- City: Brooklyn, NY
- Country: United States
- Hometown: Chicago
My Life & Work
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Bio:
“I never had a doubt that I was going to do music,” says Joel Ross, the most thrilling new vibraphonist in America. “My whole life it was just about finding a way to do it.” In the past few years, keeping up with all of those ways has, for aficionados, turned into a virtuosic practice unto itself. The Chicago-born, Brooklyn-based player and composer has a way of being everywhere interesting at once: from deeply innovative albums (Makaya McCraven’s Universal Beings, Walter Smith III & Matthew Stevens’ In Common) to reliably revolutionary combos (Marquis Hill’s Blacktet, Peter Evans’ Being & Becoming) to the buzzing debut of Blue Note’s 2018 breakout star James Francies (Flight). Even with his own bands—which include quartets and a large ensemble dedicated to the works of and in-the-style-of Ornette Coleman and Keith Jarrett’s American Quartet—Ross is basically a living blur of mallets and talent and ideas. But 2019 is his year to be the star as he joins the Blue Note Records roster and adds his name to an illustrious jazz vibraphone legacy on the label that extends from Milt Jackson and Bobby Hutcherson to Stefon Harris and now Ross.
Ross grew up in a harmonious home with three older sisters and police officers for parents in a quiet South Side neighborhood. By 3, he and his twin had spent enough time beating on things around the house that it was deemed wisest to buy them separate toddler-sized drum sets. Before long they were taking turns sitting in at church, where dad was choir director at one point. They joined the school band as soon as they could, age 10, and since Joel was the younger twin, he was consigned to xylophone while his brother hit skins. They auditioned for the multi-school All City concert and jazz bands too.
“To be fair my brother was the better drummer,” Ross admits. “We both made the cut and since I already played mallets they said, ‘Why don’t you try vibraphone?’ I was like, ‘I don’t know what a vibraphone is. I don’t want to do this.’” But he did, and found it the most natural way to express himself. He practiced and played constantly through numerous opportunities from the Jazz Institute of Chicago, and later became one of the first students at the city’s first public arts high school, Chicago High School for the Arts. Through ChiArts’ partnership with the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz, Ross got to meet kindred spirits at other high schools around the country, jam with Herbie Hancock (his class of 2013 keynote speaker), and learn from special guest Gerald Clayton, a gateway to the beguiling music of Akinmusire, in particular the trumpeter’s own Blue Note debut When the Heart Emerges Glistening, which Ross didn’t immediately understand, so, naturally he became keenly devoted to unpacking every note.
Still, he’d never had a dedicated vibraphone teacher. Enter Stefon Harris, who after meeting Ross at a festival, invited him to try out for his Brubeck Institute Jazz Quintet at University of the Pacific in Nor Cal. Ross won it, and for two intense years worked to tear down and rebuild his approach to the instrument. “Stefon completely revamped my technique,” says Ross. “We were also learning his [now-famous] ear-training method, applying emotions to chords and hearing harmony in new ways. I figured out how I wanted to sound.” Ross soon transferred to the New School and formed his band Good Vibes featuring his favorite players he met at camps, contests, and gigs along the way.
Contact Information
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Management/Booking:
Management
Zakiya Fola
Fola Management, LLC.
773.639.0930
info@folamanagement.com
Bookings
Chris Mees
US/Europe/South America/Asia
B Natural Management, Inc.
646.397.8705
347.622.1775
chris@bnatural.nyc
My Media & Markets
- ▶ Buy My Music (downloads/CDs/DVDs): http://joelross.bandcamp.com/
- ▶ Twitter: iplayvibes
- ▶ Instagram: imjoelmross
- ▶ Website: http://www.iplayvibes.com
- ▶ YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWD2pqEkDaUXvsQLaZKkrQQ
- ▶ YouTube Music: http://music.youtube.com/channel/UCzM0qQx0mfxQviYRgKvXaDw
- ▶ Spotify: http://open.spotify.com/album/4XZmtRKGaFmcJHak5xii6m
- ▶ Spotify 2: http://open.spotify.com/album/6pOQZLX0cpubgk6Ev0HaG1
- ▶ Article: http://www.npr.org/2019/05/23/725759208/joel-ross-and-his-exceptionally-good-vibes
More
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Quotes, Notes & Etc.
“...Ross’ precocious creativity, facility, and confidence were downright shocking. His style is so unique and developed that it changed my image of the vibraphone itself. Though his musicality [shone] through brightly, I was most impressed by the revolutionary way in which he approached the physicality of the instrument, reworking classic limitations as creative allowances. In contrast to the metallic sustain of players like Gary Burton, Ross’ tone was brittle, percussive and woody; instead of letting his notes ring out and wash over each other indefinitely he exploited the relatively sharp decay of each hit. This allowed him to throw down precise flurries while sounding neither muddy nor blunted.”
— Asher Wolf, All About Jazz
“Ross swings effortlessly on the vibraphone, sometimes opting for a brittle sound reminiscent of Lionel Hampton, other times creating smooth and expressive lines in the vein of Milt Jackson. Yet while Ross’s sound is grounded in tradition, his rhythmic approach is very contemporary—intensely syncopated and excitingly abstract.”
— Kevin Laskey, The Jazz Gallery
“[Ross is a] bright young vibraphonist on his own rocket-like trajectory,...he’s somebody I’ll keep my eye on in the coming months.”
— Nate Chinen, The New York Times
The world's artistry via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other ...
... a project conceived and built in the fertile, fecund and atavistic ground zero of Bahia, Brazil initially for the discoverability of this singular region's dispossessed genius.
All explained in the window immediately below. Followed — beneath this window — by scores of magnificent artists, each leading to myriads more artists/categories. Inside this window also may be found our Brazilian record store radio, named by British journal The Guardian as one of 10 of the Best Radio Stations Around the World!
IF YOU CAN'T STAND THE HEAT
Brazil is not a European nation. It's not a North American nation. It's not an East Asian nation. It straddles -- jungle and desert and dense urban centers -- both the equator and the Tropic of Capricorn. It absorbed over ten times the number of African slaves taken to the United States of America, and much of its aboriginal population was absorbed into the general population-at-large. Its people have lived under oligarchy, plutocracy, dictatorships and massive corruption, with elements of these still strongly entrenched today.
But!
Brazil has buzz...not the shallow buzz of a fashionable moment...but the deep buzz of a population which in spite of -- or perhaps because of -- the tough slog through life they've been allotted by humanity's dregs-in-fine-linen, have chosen not to simply pull themselves along but to lift their voices in song and their bodies in dance...to eat well and converse well and much and to wring the joy out of the day-to-day happenings and small pleasures of life which are so often set aside or ignored in the European, North American, and East Asian nations.
For this Brazil has a genius perhaps unparalleled in all other countries and societies, a genius which thrives alongside peeling paint and holes in the streets and roads, under bad organization by the powers-that-be, both civil and governmental, under a constant rain of societal indignities...
Which is all to say that if you don't know Brazil and you're expecting any semblance of order, progress and light, you will certainly find the light! And the buzz of a people who for generations have responded to privation at many different levels by somehow rising above it all.
Raimundo Sodré, in a conversation ranging from New Orleans to Harlem and the South Side of Chicago ... through Appalachia and Irish villages and Russian shtetls and the unofficial symbol of Brazil's Bahian-born national music (the pandeiro) almost certainly having arrived in Brazil in the hands of Sephardic Jews (including conversos) fleeing the Inquisition, once remarked: "Where there's misery, there's music!"
A pandeirista on the roof. And it's not just music. And it's not just Brazil.
