TAKING A MUSICAL BITE OF THE BIG APPLE
Calgary native and jazz musician Jeff McGregor finds inspiration and top players in New York City
Call it a hidden benefit of his higher education.
Calgary native and jazz saxophonist Jeff McGregor has no doubt received many from his time at New York University, but when his master’s degree required a recording component for his thesis, he saw it as a unique opportunity.
Recording his debut album, Leap, as part of his thesis not only benefited from his formal training in composition and performance but allowed him to recruit two of his more high-profile instructors. That would be Grammy-nominated trombonist and arranger Alan Ferber and drummer Billy Drummond, who has played with everyone from Sonny Rollins to Nat Adderly. He also enlisted talented classmates Santiago Leibson on piano and bassist John Snow to play on the recording.
“I knew I was going to make a recording and knew I was going to work with those great guys,” says McGregor, who lives in New York City. “It was a real luxury to have that much time and space to work on the music and develop the music with those guys. A lot of time with recording dates, everyone has busy schedules and you don’t always have the opportunity yourself to focus on just that, let alone work on it with other musicians. I was able to work my schedule so everything was directed toward that recording. By the end of the
semester we had made the record and that was the end of my degree but also the beginning of (a recording career).”
Not surprisingly, Leap finds a balance between formal composition and giving some phenomenal players the room to improvise. It also showcases McGregor’s grounding in various jazz styles, highlighting his love of Charlie Parker and John Coltrane and offering new arrangements of standards such as Rodgers and Hart’s I Could Write a Book and My Ideal, an American Songbook classic by Richard A. Whiting.
McGregor’s musical education is ongoing, but it also stretches back years. He began taking clarinet and saxophone lessons from his father, Matt Lemay, as a preteen. That led to a teenage stint in Calgary’s longrunning dance orchestra Southern Stardust Big Band, where he was immersed Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman and the golden era of swing tunes.
Concentrating on saxophone, he began exploring the work of Parker and Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley as a teenager. “The music of the late ’40s and ’50s and into the late ’60s,” says McGregor, who returns to Calgary for a CD release party at the Ironwood Stage and Grill.
“And the one thing about New York is that I’m around a lot of music. The current scene here has a big influence on what I do and think about and listen to. I’m always checking out the older guys but there’s a lot of modern guys I get to hear and in some cases know a little bit that are an influence because I see them live.”
McGregor runs an educational transcription blog for the Smalls, a jazz club in Greenwich Village. The club has an audio archive of every performance of the past decade, boasting 2,000 live performances of some of the Big Apples new generation of players.
“I transcribe solos from their archives,” he says. “I’ve gotten to know a lot of guys and am directly studying their music. That has had a big impact on the sounds that are in my head.”
At the Ironwood on Sunday, McGregor will be playing with a local ensemble that includes Carsten Rubeling on trombone, Mark Limacher on piano, Steve Shepard on bass and Jon McCaslin on drums.
“Good musicians will always play things a little differently,” says McGregor.
“Everybody has their own musical composition. When they play your tunes, they’ll bring something different than somebody else would have. There’s a different vibe that comes with different guys. All these musicians I’m playing with in Calgary are guys I’ve been playing with for years. I still play with them when I come back through town.
“They are friends and I’ve had the chance to work with them a lot, but I’ll be bringing all this new music to them.”