Candice McMahon
Special to The Morning Star
The Vernon Jazz Club hosts a special weekday Wednesday night of jazz with the spectacular saxophonist Cory Weeds and the pro jazz pianist David Hazeltine.
These two have teamed up to produce their first album together labelled It’s Easy to Remember and are currently on tour.
Hazeltine is one of a handful of contemporary pianists who has mastered all of the major musical skills, from improvisation and technique to accompaniment, arranging, and composition. Even more impressive, he is a rare artist who is able to innovate in each category. It is no surprise that he’s the most recorded contemporary jazz pianist of our time, having recorded 35 CDs as a leader and hundreds more as a sideman on various major labels globally. A Milwaukee native, Hazeltie was playing the clubs as a preteen and, before he’d even come of age, he was already grabbing the attention and respect of jazz legends like Sonny Stitt and Chet Baker.
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The mark of a true artist, Hazeltine’s style appeals to a wide range of musical tastes and levels of sophistication. His melodies and harmonies are beautifully complex and memorable. Hazeltine is known for taking a familiar or unexpected song and making it new, making it his own.
Hazeltine has worked with some of the world’s respected jazz legends including James Moody, Eddie Harris, Jon Faddis, Joe Henderson, Pepper Adams, Jon Hendricks and Marlena Shaw.
Weeds is a leading Canadian jazz saxophonist with extensive connections to New York City, who has recorded 12 chart-trending albums as a leader with a who’s who of North American jazz. When he released his very first recording on Cellar Live in 2001, featuring the late great Vancouver jazz saxophonist and pianist Ross Taggart, Weeds couldn’t have predicted how far the record label would go. At that time, having opened his Cellar Jazz Club the year before, Weeds was just rolling the tape at his club and trying his hand at releasing albums in the tradition of the great jazz labels.
Fast forward more than 17 years later and Cellar Live has gone on to release more than 120 dynamic recordings, which have primarily been captured live but also in the studio. While the label has showcased Vancouver’s finest jazz players, such as Oliver Gannon, Brad Turner, Jesse Cahill, Bruno Hubert, Miles Black and Weeds himself, it has also featured master musicians from New York and elsewhere.
Ken Lister has been a professional jazz bassist since 1983, winning accolades and Juno awards along the way. He currently performs and teaches in Vancouver and on Vancouver Island and has toured across Canada and internationally to Australia, the British Isles, Cuba and South America.
As a member of the Phil Dwyer Orchestra, Lister won a Juno Award for Contemporary Jazz Album of the Year, 2012, and with the Hugh Fraser Quintet, the Juno Award for the Best Mainstream Jazz Album of 1997.
Jesse Cahill started playing the drums at a young age and worked his first professional gigs at 16 in restaurants and clubs in his hometown of Victoria. In 1993 he moved to Montreal to study music at McGill University, graduating in 1999 with a bachelor’s degree in jazz performance (with distinction).
Cahill is an in-demand session player and has appeared on dozens of recordings including Jodi Proznick’s Juno Award-nominated recording Foundations and Jerrold Dubyk’s WCMA Jazz Album of the Year The Maverick. His playing can be heard regularly on CBC Radio One and Two, and he has been a featured guest and performer on Jazz Beat, Hot Air, and Canada Live.
Cory Weeds Quartet featuring David Hazeltine will be onstage at the Vernon Jazz Club Sept. 19 at 8 p.m. Doors open at 7:15 p.m. A cash-only bar is on site. Tickets are $20 online at vernonjazz.com and at Expressions of Time (2901-30 Ave. We are a volunteer-run organization. Please consider joining us.
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