Jazz this week: Stooges Brass Band, Jazz at Lincoln Center Group, Bonerama, Johanna Ballou, and more

For the middle of January, it's a comparatively busy week for jazz and creative music in St. Louis, with tastes of NYC and New Orleans on the musical menu along with plenty of home-cooked favorites. Let's go to the highlights...

Wednesday, January 14
Saxophonist/clarinetist Victor Goines, one of the group of Jazz at Lincoln Center musicians doing an educational residency this week for Jazz St. Louis, will present a free performance and clinic at Saxquest.

Also tonight, singer Eve Seltzer (pictured, top left), a St. Louis native who with her husband, guitarist Ben Wood, recently moved back home after nearly twenty years living and working in New York, will perform at Nathalie's in the first instance of what's projected as a recurring monthly show for her.

Thursday, January 15
New Orleans' Stooges Brass Band, known for infusing the city's venerable brass-band tradition with a serious dose of hip-hop, will play at the Broadway Oyster Bar; and guitarist Dave Black and friends, including singer Feyza Eren, will be at Nathalie's.

Friday, January 16
Billed as the Jazz at Lincoln Center Group for their two nights this weekend at Jazz at the Bistro, Victor Goines, trumpeter Terell Stafford (pictured, center left), trombonist Chris Crenshaw, and drummer Alvin Atkinson all are veterans of the JALC Orchestra who are in town leading workshops and master classes with local students as part of Jazz St. Louis' education program.

As is customary, the clinicians are finishing their week by joining forces to perform, and while the ad hoc nature of the ensemble makes their precise repertoire difficult to predict, expect feature numbers for each member drawn from their own personal song catalogs, with perhaps some additional standards in the mix, too. Regardless, the standard of musicianship no doubt will be high, and you can at least get a sense of what each of the front-line players can do via this video showcase post from a few Saturdays ago.

Also on Friday, the Broadway Oyster Bar presents another slice of New Orleans, courtesy of the trombone-centric funk-rockers Bonerama; singer Nnenna Freelon appears in the multi-media performance “The Clothesline Muse” at Washington University's Edison Theatre; and the Ambassadors of Swing play for dancers at the Casa Loma Ballroom.

Saturday, January 17
New Music Circle presents St. Louis pianist Johanna Ballou (pictured, below left) playing a program of music from contemporary composers at the 560 Music Center. One of the selections, Frederic Rzewski's "Les Mountons de Panurge," involves some audience participation, which will be facilitated by an open rehearsal of it at noon Saturday at the Tavern of Fine Arts.

Also on Saturday, guitarist Brian Vaccaro's trio will be joined by singer Feyza Eren for a performance at the south side house concert venue KindaBlue, 6101 1/2 Idaho.

Sunday, January 18
The St. Louis Jazz Club presents Miss Jubilee in a matinee performance at the Doubletree Hotel St. Louis at Westport; and jazz/funk/R&B quartet Good 4 The Soul plays an early evening gig at BB's Jazz, Blues & Soups.

Monday, January 19
Guitarists Eric Slaughter and Tom Byrne will co-lead a quartet at BB's.

For more jazz-related events in and around St. Louis, please visit the St. Louis Jazz Notes Calendar, which can be found on the left sidebar of the site or by clicking here. You also can keep up with all the latest news by following St. Louis Jazz Notes on Twitter at http://twitter.com/StLJazzNotes or clicking the "Like" icon on the StLJN Facebook page.

(If you have calendar items, band schedule information, news tips, links, or anything else you think may be of interest to StLJN's readers, please email the information to stljazznotes (at) yahoo (dot) com. If you have photos, MP3s or other digital files, please send links, not attachments.)

StLJN Saturday Video Showcase: Winter/spring 2015 jazz preview

Today, it's the first part of StLJN's winter/spring 2015 jazz preview, in which we bring you music videos from jazz and creative music performers who will be visiting our city in the first part of next year.

First up are The Bad Plus, who will be back in St. Louis from Wednesday, January 7 through Saturday, January 10 to play at Jazz at the Bistro. The group has been visiting the Bistro early in January for nearly a decade now, and since their last trip here, they've put out a new recording of all original music, Inevitable Western. In the video up above, you can see them playing a song from that album, "Gold Prisms Incorporated," during a gig in September at the Blue Note in Milano, Italy.

After the jump, you'll see the Stooges Brass Band playing "Hot." They'll be in town on Thursday, January 15 at the Broadway Oyster Bar; the video was recorded in July of this year in New Orleans for the web series "Jam in the Van."

Below that you can see their fellow New Orleanians Bonerama, who will be here the very next night, Friday, January 16, also at the Broadway Oyster Bar. The clip is an audience-shot video of them performing "Hey, Hey, What Can I Do" last month at the Cutting Room in NYC.

That same weekend, the Bistro will feature a band being billed as the Jazz at Lincoln Center Group, an ad hoc assemblage made up of musicians doing week-long educational residencies for Jazz St. Louis that will culminate in public performances on Friday, January 16 and Saturday, January 17. The front line features two familiar faces, trumpeter Terell Stafford and saxophonist/clarinetist Victor Goines - both of whom have fronted their own bands here - along with trombonist Chris Crenshaw, with Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra drummer Alvin Atkinson quarterbacking the rhythm section with a bassist and pianist TBA.

In the fourth clip, you can see Stafford performing a very nice version of Billy Strayhorn's "Day Dream" at the 2013 International Trumpet Guild convention, backed by pianist Bruce Barth. Below that, there's a clip of Goines working out on his composition "Turning Points" during a 2011 gig with pianist Aaron Diehl, bassist Phillip Kuehn, and drummer Marion Felder. Crenshaw is represented by a clip compiling excerpts from a concert for a Smithsonian traveling exhibit that the trombonist played in March 2013 in his hometown of Thomson, GA; the rhythm section is Josef Patchen (keyboard), Travis Shaw (bass), and Edwin G. Hamilton (drums).

Today's final video features the Arturo O'Farrill Sextet, who will visit St. Louis Wednesday, January 21 through Saturday, January 24 to play at Jazz at the Bistro. O'Farrill, a pianist, composer/arranger and son of the famous bandleader Chico O'Farrill, was here a decade ago with his Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra to play the long-defunct St. Louis Jazz Festival in Clayton, but this will be his first visit here since. To get an idea of what to expect, check out the video of O'Farrill's octet recorded in September 2013 for an NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert.

Look for the second part of StLJN's winter/spring 2015 jazz preview in this space next week. You can see the rest of today's videos after the jump...

Stooges Brass Band, No BS! Brass Band set for shows at Broadway Oyster Bar

The Broadway Oyster Bar, home to monthly gigs from the Funky Butt Brass Band and frequent host to various New Orleans acts, has booked two more brass bands for gigs early next year.

New Orleans' Stooges Brass Band (pictured) will return to St. Louis to play the BOB on Thursday, January 15, while the No BS! Brass Band , an eleven-piece group based in Richmond, VA, will perform on Sunday, February 8.

The Stooges have played in St. Louis before, most recently in August of this year at the Oyster Bar, but as best as we can tell, this will be the first local show for the No BS! Brass Band. (We'll have videos of both groups in StLJN's winter/spring 2015 jazz preview, which starts tomorrow.)

Admission for the Stooges Brass Band will be $10 at the door. There's no ticket price for the No BS! Brass Band listed yet on either the Broadway Oyster Bar site or the Facebook page for the event, but given the BOB's usual pricing, it likely will be the same or similar.

Jazz this week: Stooges Brass Band, free outdoor concerts, and more

Things are fairly quiet again this week for touring jazz acts coming through St. Louis, with tonight the notable exception as the Stooges Brass Band will be in town to perform at the Broadway Oyster Bar.

They're not as well known outside New Orleans as the Dirty Dozen, Rebirth or Hot 8, in part because until recently, they haven't toured as much, and in part because they've released only one recording, back in 2003. But the Stooges have been around since 1996, with former members including notables such as Troy "Trombone Shorty" Andrews and Big Sam Williams of Big Sam's Funky Nation.

Like most of the contemporary NOLA brass bands, the Stooges incorporate a variety of influences, and their version of the tradition highlights beats in a hip-hop style. Their Facebook page describes them as "Genre Funk, Hip Hop, Brass & all the things that make you GET DOWN," and you can see and hear exactly what that means by checking out the video and audio samples there.

Elsewhere around town tonight, guitarists Tom Byrne and William Lenihan will duet at Remy's Kitchen & Wine Bar; and Miss Jubilee will be back at Thaxton Speakeasy.

Tomorrow night, the Ambassadors of Swing will play for dancers at the Casa Loma Ballroom; Sarah Jane and the Blue Notes will perform at Nathalie's; bassist Darrell Mixon leads a trio at Cigar Inn; and the Broadway Oyster Bar will have more brass band music, this time in the form of St. Louis' own Funky Butt Brass Band.

Looking ahead to Saturday, Samba Bom will bring a bit of Brazil to a free outdoor concert at Kirkwood Park; Wack-A-Doo performs at Evangeline's; singer Joe Mancuso, pianist Kim Portnoy and bassist Glenn Smith will play at Tavern of Fine Arts; and singer Erin Bode and her band will return to Nathalie's.

On Sunday, in addition to a recently proliferating variety of jazz brunch options too numerous to list here (but tallied in detail on the StLJN calendar) the St. Charles Municipal Big Band will play a free outdoor concert at Frontier Park .

Then on Monday, the Sessions Big Band will be back for one of their every-other-month gigs at BB's Jazz, Blues & Soups; and guitarist John Farrar and the Park Avenue Trio will hold forth for what's now a regular weekly gig at Evangeline's.

For more jazz-related events in and around St. Louis, please visit the St. Louis Jazz Notes Calendar, which can be found on the left sidebar of the site or by clicking here. You also can keep up with all the latest news by following St. Louis Jazz Notes on Twitter at http://twitter.com/StLJazzNotes or clicking the "Like" icon on the StLJN Facebook page.

(If you have calendar items, band schedule information, news tips, links, or anything else you think may be of interest to StLJN's readers, please email the information to stljazznotes (at) yahoo (dot) com. If you have photos, MP3s or other digital files, please send links, not attachments.)