August 2006

Buddy Mak Quartet

Ladies Night Jazz

Fridays

            They play standards and pop with jazz twists.  They’re the Friday band for August.  We recently caught a set with Over the Rainbow in an easy romantic swing.  They did a softly pulsing Green Dolphin Street and something cool called the Blues.

            “As a band, three of us each have more than 50 years playing music for a living.  We’re just two brothers from Lahaina who left home, played all over the mainland, from the best to the worst, I remember playing in Elko, Nevada, in winter, in a casino, that’s the worse, and now we’re home, retired basically, and just playing what we love.”

            And what they love is sweet and melodic.

            The new fourth man is tenor saxophonist and flute man Larry Cook, who’s well known around town.  Cook is one of the few jazz horn men who I would say is melodic in the vein of Stan Getz.  He’s tuned into melody and harmony, he says.

            Actually, he’s just like the rest of the Mak Quartet, except younger.  Cook is a classically trained musician from England.  He still carries his English accent and classical technical prowess.  But to make a living, he’s played it all, including being a rock and roll man in the band that brought him to Hawai‘i.  He learned his jazz licks from the best, mostly picking it up by ear from CD’s.

           The band’s other fourth used to be trumpet player Don Smith, who also had 50 years in the business including time with Stan Kenton.  But bad health forced him to Seattle.  Now the band includes Cook, Mak on piano, his brother Darryl Mackay on bass and Lew Maddox on drums.

           [At October 2006, Don Smith returned to Hawaii and the band, and Cook has returned to England.]

            Mak, Mackay and Maddox each have 50 years plus in the business, playing house bands, backing up a few top names, doing Las Vegas, but never becoming a household name.  So they’ve kicked back and play for themselves and the people who like their sort of thing.  If it’s you, drop on in.

Thursdays

Cool or hot

DeShannon is the man

            Whether you want 144 fast, ultra bebop jazz trumpet or something haunting and touching and sweet on flugelhorn, or maybe a derivative—everything’s a derivative in jazz-- using MP3 files and live horns, there is only one man on trumpet in Hawai‘i, and his name is DeShannon Higa.

            Higa is the quintessential musician.

            He’ll play straight ahead or he’ll play weird.  He knows the 30’s standards, and his taste runs to the 90’s and beyond.  You could call his genre millennium jazz.  He’s in his mid-30’s—as near as one can tell—and his range reflects the times.

            Currently working on two albums, he’s one of those kinds of musician-artists who knows he’s good and is going for it.

            Starting at age 9, Higa played band music.  First chair.  Always first chair.  In high school, he won the Blue/Gold medal, the highest award, for his performance of Carnival of Venice.  That’s the one that sounds like a bumblebee gone mad.

            He played his first professional gig at 15 and won the “jazz chair” for the Disney All-American Orchestra while in college.  In 1993, that band backed up Carol Channing, Joe Williams, Marvin Hamlisch, Hal Linden, and Kenny Werner, among others.

            His credits are a Who’s Who in show business: Al Jarreau, Diana Krall, Wayne Newton, the Temptations, Donny & Marie Osmond, Johnny Mathis, the Drifters,

Wynton Marsalis, Burt Bacharach, Arturo Sandoval, Dionne Warwick, and the original Elvis Presley band.

            In 1995, he joined the Royal Hawaiian Band, but four years later he resigned to dedicate himself to a full-time jazz career.  In 2001, he went to New York to win over the Big Apple.  He played Carnegie Hall, Radio City Music Hall and Lincoln Center before coming home.

October 2006

Monday Night

The Nu Swing Project

Avant Garde Jazz Starts with Hip Hop

             If musical creativity were like the mother lode, Jazz Minds Art & Café would be the deepest tunnel in Honolulu – where the likes of The Nu Swing Project has been mining every old note and funky rhythm looking for the next different, hot new sound. 

            And if you like experimental, hyper creative jazz, this is for you.  The first eclectic sound you hear comes from a clunky, old Fender Rhodes electric piano, which sounds like a 59^th Street tune from the 70’s sitcom Taxi. 

            There’s a lilt and a New York drive to Dave Mergens on of this great classic instrument.

            Then comes Waimanalo Maria Remos, who sounds nothing Hawaiian but more Haight Ashbury, kind of moaning, crooning, improvising words and tune in her own special Jewel way.

            Bassist “Beek” Venderbeek is not playing rhythm but is adding low down commentary in counterpoint to Patrick Armitage’s Beasty Boys drums.  He’s the one smiling and having fun.

            The band members individually have trekked various paths to their love of jazz.

            But they all came through the hip hop hoop. 

            “Hip hop and jazz have the same soul behind it, the intent to create.  It offers the ability to grow as a musician and to fully express yourself,” says bandleader Mergens.

            Mergens is just a few years past 20.  His parents made him learn piano at age 6.  He started sax at 13.  Tenor at 20.  He heard Charlie Parker and Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue” one day.  And rock  was history.

            Remos has never had any music or voice lessons.  She was an open mic groupie.  She won her first open mic singing a cappella at Indie Café in Kapahulu.  She got into hip hop free styling at poetry slams and met Honolulu’s Mr. Trumpetman Deshannon Higa at an open mic.  She’s been with him 2-1/2 years.  She met Mergens at an open mic at Jazz Minds 10 months ago.  She’s been with him since.  Both.

            “Beek” hails from Hyannis and has been living the musicians life, playing whatever pays, in and out of bands, including hip hop, until he found the Nu Project.  Then he decided being creative was more important than…

            Armitage is the only real pro in the group.  He has toured all over the world, most recently with the Beasty Boys.  On a stop in Hawai‘i, he fell in love with the islands.  And decided to take a break.  Our gain.

            The four of them together?  Just haunting and real low down.