COURTESY OF OUTREACH COLLEGE
Robert Jospé enjoys mixing jazz with world music.
Work is time
to play
In the booklet for Robert Jospé's latest CD, "Time to Play," his various drums are superimposed over an idyllic photo his wife, Janet, took on Kauai on a recent visit.
"It's on the beach at Barking Sands, looking out towards Niihau," he said by phone recently from Springfield, Va., near the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where Jospé is an adjunct faculty member. He and his band Inner Rhythm arrived in Hawaii this week. While it's his fifth trip to the islands, it's his first working trip, "the one that I wanted to do."
Robert Jospé &
7:30 p.m. tomorrow at the Paliku Theatre, Windward Community College
Inner Rhythm7:30 p.m. Saturday at Orvis Auditorium, University of Hawaii at Manoa
Tickets: $20 general, $15 students, seniors, military and UH faculty/staff
Call: 235-7433 (Paliku) or 944-2697 (Orvis)
Also: World Beat Workshop with Jospé and Kevin Davis, 10:30-11:30 a.m. Saturday, at the Hawaii Kai Public Library. Free to the public.
Local audiences will see two sides of Jospé this weekend -- Jospé the band leader and Jospé the teacher. He'll lead his band through two concerts, one on the Windward side and the other in town, and then do a "World Beat Workshop" with his percussionist Kevin Davis Saturday morning at the Hawaii Kai Public Library.
Jospé's music admittedly "comes out of the Blue Note '60s era. My own writing reflects that as well, where I like to take things in either a Latin direction, or a little more Afro-Cuban." All that will be well-represented in concert as Jospé, along with Davis, saxophonist John Decker, keyboardist Bob Hallahan and bassist Elias Bailey, will be playing their own arrangements to such fine jazz compositions as "Swingin' the Samba" (written by Horace Silver), "Party Time" (Lee Morgan), and "Stone Flower" (a beautiful Brazilian tune by Antonio Carlos Jobim). Originals like Decker's "Help Yourself," Jospé's title track and even his ode to our own goddess, "Pelé," also will be featured.
The veteran New York City musician (who studied with someone no less than Tony Williams in the early '70s) now splits his time between teaching and gigging. "I keep teaching at a minimum," he said. "I mainly give private lessons, and because of my playing schedule, most of the students are pretty flexible. I am a professional player, but I do spend a couple of days a week at UVa, where I'm a member of the faculty quintet. But I also do lecture/demonstrations with my own quintet, as well as quite a bit of workshops, where I best spend my time as an educator.
"I have a multistylistic approach to music -- while some groups might focus on one groove, we like to play straightahead, Latin, swing -- these reflect my preferences, including rock 'n' roll and blues."
With the exception of Bailey, everyone else lives in central Virginia. "Me and the percussionist are from New York City, Bob from the D.C. area and Jeff, from Minnesota, who came to UVa from North Texas State. We're all on the adjunct faculty, and we've been together over 10 years as a group. We've become very close friends and colleagues in music, distinguishing ourselves as the main jazz band in the area.
"It does surprise people when they find out where we're from -- you usually don't consider an area like this to be a place to find this level of musicianship. But we love the lifestyle here in central Virginia, near the Blue Ridge mountains. Not many people do what we do, so we get a lot of work -- this is a big state with a lot of cities and festivals.
"This is a close-knit band, and even though the records we've done are produced under my name, I think of myself as playing in a band of leaders. You can tell on record it's not just a drummer's record." Jospé prides himself that he and his band present concerts that can be enjoyed by both "jazzbos" and general audiences.
"And with the workshops, I teach both little kids and adults how the music we generally hear has a lot of African influences and rhythmic foundations from North America, the Caribbean and South America. It's very interactive, as Kevin and I play just percussion, going through things like rumba, mambo, calypso and samba."
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