Bebop, blues and R&B all are a part of jazz music and all are coming to Athens this weekend for the first Winter Jazz & Blues Festival.
Many jazz acts will perform, including The Jazztet, a quintet that plays classic, contemporary and Latin jazz in addition to the music of Miles Davis and Pat Metheny. Old School Union is a seven-member band out of Columbus that plays funk and old-school R&B and has performed with The Temptations. II Juicy is fronted by a vocalist reminiscent of Aretha Franklin.
Also performing is R & B Station, which plays a great range of music from blues to classic rock to soul, and whose bandleader Mike Doughty brought in the lead act, Mark Pender.
Pender is the trumpet player for The Max Weinberg 7, the opening band for the late-night television show Late Night With Conan O’Brien. Pender has been in great musical company, having performed with Diana Ross, Bon Jovi, Joe Cocker, They Might Be Giants, Robert Cray and Bruce Springsteen.
“The only shows I’ve missed with Conan were to do a few dates with (Springsteen) a couple years a go, and he is such an inspiration to work with,” Pender said. “Every time I’m around him I feel like I have learned something … I always just wanted to do jazz, but once I got a load of what that guy was doing I was like, ‘Whoa, you have mad skills.’ ”
While one of Pender’s greatest experiences was playing with “The Boss,” such an opportunity would never have come about if he hadn’t auditioned for Conan O’Brien in 1993 after meeting Max Weinberg.
“Max is a real go-getter; he has an eye for how things work and he got the audition … I was on tour with Robert Cray but we just so happened to have a couple of days off, so we did the audition and while I was on the road I found out we got the gig,” Pender said. “I was blown away … and we taped our first episode of Conan on Sept. 13, 1993.”
Although the stability of 15 years on Conan has given Pender the feeling of being a true New Yorker, he misses his days on the road. Pender got his nickname “The Loveman” from his time playing with Steven Van Zandt, a guitarist for Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band.
“(Van Zandt) was knocking on my hotel room door one night and I had on Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing” and I was singing in my room with headphones on and so I didn’t answer the door,” Pender said. “So that night he introduces me as ‘The Loveman’ and it stuck … its kind of hard to explain (the nickname to your wife) when you are married,” Pender said.
But now Pender gets his chance to get back on the road — at least temporarily — to play the jazz festival this weekend, as well as hold a music workshop for junior high and high school kids Saturday.
“It’s going to be great working with the students directly,” Pender said. “We’ll probably talk about improvising and then just get to playing.”
Pender will be playing each night of the festival, beginning with a jam at Casa Nueva with R & B Station.
No comments:
Post a Comment