music
BY BRETT CAMPBELL
PHOTO: MANCHUL KIM
BETA COLLIDE DIRECTORS
MOLLY BARTH
AND BRIAN MCWHORTER
Bringin’ It Back Home
Eugene-bred jazzers return to roost
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ike swallows to Capistrano, the
prodigal jazzers are flying back to
Eugene. Over the past decade or so,
the UO music school has regularly cranked
out attention-getting young musicians who
combine promising technique with creative
ambition. Unfortunately, it’s all too common
for most of these students to leave town —
and Oregon — as they seek out new
challenges and opportunities.
Many Eugene-trained musicians who
focused primarily on jazz and contemporary
postclassical music wound up in New York
City, where it’s at least theoretically possible
for a promising young performer to find
mentors, grab the attention of music business
types who can advance their careers, soak up
ideas and inspiration from the world’s jazz
and new music capital, and maybe eventually
cobble together a living through teaching
and the occasional paying gig.
Next week, thanks in part to this month’s
UO jazz camp, several of those prodigal
Ducks are coming back to Eugene to visit
old haunts and old friends and show us what
they’ve learned in the ensuing years. On
Friday, July 27, sweet-toned trumpeter Josh
Deutsch returns to play his original music
— with a quintet featuring fellow UO alums
Jason Palmer on drums and the excellent
Portland pianist Greg Goebel — for this
season’s final concert in the Broadway
Avenue House Concert series at 911 W.
Broadway. Now living in Queens, the
Seattle-born Deutsch earned his master’s
degree at the UO in 2009; he’s performed at
major jazz festivals and won some attention
as a category-defying composer, with
commissions of jazz, contemporary classical
and areas in between, from the Seattle
Symphony and others.
While living in Eugene a few years back,
Deutsch led an ensemble called Poisonous
Birds that featured an extremely promising
composer and saxophonist, Hashem
Assadullahi, who moved to New York
City a year or so ago. The night after
Deutsch’s concert, Saturday, July 28,
Assadullahi returns to play a concert at the
& Locally Owned!
Jazz Station with a quartet of longtime
colleagues, including Portland guitarist
Justin Morell, bassist Tyler Abbott and
drummer Ryan Biesack. They’ll play
some of the striking, guitar-enhanced new
works featured on Assadullahi’s upcoming
CD. It’ll also be a bachelor party —
Assadullahi gets married the next day.
A few years before Deutsch and
Assadullahi roamed the UO scene, other
ambitious UO music students were somehow
able to find time between classes, recitals,
practice sessions and the rest to create original
soundtracks to classic films (much more
common these days hereabouts than it was
then) and stage other events somewhat afield
of standard academic settings. One of them
was Brian McWhorter, a phenomenal
trumpeter who went on to become one of
New York’s first-call new music horn men,
revivifying the Meridian Arts Ensemble and
earning a national reputation.
McWhorter returned to Eugene a few
years ago as a member of the UO music
faculty, and he also leads the adventurous
new music ensemble Beta Collide. That
sextet plays Aug. 1 at Sam Bond’s in a show
that features a sterling cast of fellow UO
faculty members, including saxophonist
Steve Owen, keyboard whiz Toby
Koenigsberg, percussionist Pius Cheung
and several other fine players. Beta Collide
will perform arrangements of music by the
late, great Montreal-based world music singer
Lhasa de Sela, an early Lilith Fair star who
sang lovely, haunting originals in Spanish,
English and French before succumbing in
2010 to breast cancer at age 37.
Beta Collide will open for McWhorter’s
old UO colleague, Kyle Sanna, who
composed and played guitar in new silent
film scores and other projects. He’s lived in
— where else? — New York for more than a
decade and is now based in the new music
hot spot of Brooklyn. Sanna is returning with
fiddler Dana Lynn. Together, they’ll play a
wide selection of eclectic music ranging
from traditional Irish tunes to originals to
improvisations. ew
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28 JULY 26, 2012 EUGENE WEEKLY
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