The Gulf Coast Jazz Collective opens its season with “A Tribute to Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong.” Music Director Andrew Kurtz says the Gulf Coast Jazz Collective plays the best professionally curated jazz in Southwest Florida. On Nov. 13, it will be playing all of Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong’s classic hits.
“The Jazz Collective is made up of Paul Gavin, who's its drummer and artistic director; Zach Bartholomew, who is an East Coast-based artist, pianist, director of jazz studies at one of the universities on the east coast, a brilliant jazz performer and composer; and Brandon Robertson, who's the bassist of the trio, who is the professor of jazz studies at FGCU,” Kurtz noted.
The collective is modeled after the one at Lincoln Center.
“There's an in-house resident ensemble and then they invite guests to come and play with them,” Kurtz explained. “And so that's the model. We have our jazz collective, which are the three primary artists that are pretty much always there, and then they bring in different guests to be a part of these shows depending on what we're trying to do.”
For the Fitzgerald/Armstrong tribute, the collective is bringing in two guest artists, a trumpet player and a sax player.
The concert is one night only. It is at the 273-seat Music & Arts Community Center off Daniels Parkway in Fort Myers.
“It is a church space, probably the most comfortable pews I've ever been in,” said Kurtz. “They're fully padded. Only [10] rows of seats, kind of a big wide horseshoe. So, you don't ever feel like you're far away. There're no columns in front of you. It's acoustically quite good, but we've made improvements for amplified sound, so it's even better. When artists come through, and we have different guests over the years, they always remark both how good the space sounds and what a pleasure it is to perform in a space that's so responsive.”
As educators, the musicians tell stories about the artists who created the music they’re playing.
“So, you really come out of the performance not just blown away by great music and great jazz, but you've learned a little something too about the artists that they're deciding to focus,” Kurtz added.
The performance begins at 7 p.m.
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Gulf Coast Jazz Collective is beginning its sixth season.
“They just completed their first summer residency with us,” Kurtz noted. “They did concerts July, August, September, and October. It was thrilling because there were so many new people that walked through the door this summer, which is shocking to me sometimes, but we had 200 people in the July concert and 80% of those people had never been to the MACC and had never heard of the Gulf Coast Jazz Collective. So, it just shows that there are people in this listening audience that probably still haven't heard the Gulf Coast Jazz Collective."
Ella Fitzgerald
Ella Fitzgerald is considered by most people to be the quintessential jazz singer. She recorded with numerous greats, including Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Oscar Peterson along with recording songs by Ellington, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, Richard Rodgers & Lorenz Hart, Harold Arlen, Johnny Mercer, and Ira and George Gershwin. In 1987, she received the National Medal of Arts. In her lifetime, she won 13 Grammy Awards and sold more than 40 million albums.
Fitzgerald was admired for her superb intonation, crystal clear voice, purity of range, peerless sense of pitch and scat singing. She was additionally blessed with a rhythmic flexibility that empowered her to effortlessly swing. Though she came up in the swing era, Fitzgerald also could hang with the best of the beboppers. Her ability to scat with the most skilled instrumentalists served her well on such notable voice-as-instrument hits as "Lady Be Good," "Flying Home," and "How High the Moon." Each became enduring parts of her repertoire.
Louis Armstrong
Though Louis Armstrong was a memorable presence in films, on radio and on television, it was the recording studio where he made his most lasting and influential art. Louis Armstrong made thousands of recordings, and most have been reissued and repackaged many times over the years.
Any survey of Armstrong’s discography must start with his innovative Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings of the 1920s, music that changed the course of American popular music for good. Armstrong’s 1928 recordings with Earl “Fatha” Hines – including “West End Blues,” “Weather Bird” and many others are classics.
He began fronting big bands in 1929, making standards out of songs such as “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love,” “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” “When You’re Smiling,” and countless others. In 1935, he began recording for Decca, a wonderful, underappreciated run of music that lasted until 1946.
In 1947, Armstrong began fronting a sextet, the All Stars, but he continued challenging himself in the recording studio. The final 24 years of his career found him recording with the All Stars, with big bands, with strings, with vocalists such as Ella Fitzgerald and jazz legends such as Oscar Peterson, Duke Ellington and Dave Brubeck. These were also the years of his biggest hits – ”Hello, Dolly!,” “Mack the Knife,” “What a Wonderful World” and more.
Source: The Louis Armstrong House Museum.
Paul Gavin
Paul Gavin is a drummer, teacher, composer and arranger in Tampa. Since graduating from the University of South Florida in 2015, Gavin has made his living exclusively as a freelance musician. He maintains an active schedule playing music around Florida, teaching privately and in schools, and writing for school programs and his own original music.
Read the rest of his resume here.
“I brought him aboard specifically to develop the Jazz Collective,” Kurtz said. “Paul actually grew up in Fort Myers. I've known Paul since he was a 15-year-old kid. He started in middle school, believe it or not, playing the oboe. He was not a great oboe player, and someone introduced him to the drums, I believe, in high school and he found his perfect medium. He went off to Tampa for more education and has made that his home. But he's a brilliant educator, brilliant composer, amazing musician.”
Zach Bartholemew
Dr. Zach Bartholomew is an award-winning jazz pianist, composer, and music educator. He is currently based in Miami, where he maintains an active performance career as one of the most heavily sought-after pianists, accompanists, and sidemen in the area. In both 2016 and 2017, he placed as one of the top three finalists in the highly acclaimed Jacksonville Jazz Piano Competition and more recently has been featured as a performer, composer, and bandleader at various national and international jazz festivals, including the Jacksonville Jazz Festival, Monterey Jazz Festival, Jalisco Jazz Festival, and Festival Miami, among others. He and his band have been featured on radio broadcasts, concert series, and regionally promoted events at music venues all over Florida. He has performed with professional organizations such as the Sarasota Pops Orchestra and the Naples Philharmonic.
In addition to his active performance career, Bartholomew is a music professor at the University of Miami Frost School of Music, Broward College, and Tiffin University and has been featured as a presenter and performer at national and regional music conferences.
As a bandleader, Bartholomew has taken his band on multiple national tours, headlining at some of the top jazz venues in the country. He has performed as a sideman with artists such as Sean Jones, Victor Goines, Brian Lynch, Dafnis Prieto, Dave Holland, David Liebman, Ira Sullivan, Carmen Bradford, Byron Stripling, Dan Miller, Scotty Barnhart, Cyrille Aimee, John Beasley, Charles Calello, and Kevin Mahogany. He is currently involved in numerous musical projects as both a leader and a sideman. One current project is his Florida “Jazz Access Tour,” a grant-funded outreach program that aims to provide communities and schools in Florida with world-class public performances and educational programs.
Brandon Robertson
Brandon L. Robertson is an Emmy-nominated director and notable upright/Electric bassist originally from Tampa.
In 2009, he graduated from Florida State University with a bachelor of arts in music with a focus on jazz studies. In the same year, Robertson became a member of the popular Florida-based jazz trio The Zach Bartholomew Trio. In 2012, the trio released its first album titled “Out of This Town.” It received notable reviews from jazz critics.
In 2015, Brandon performed at the world-famous Dizzy’s Coca Cola Club in New York City with the nationally recognized FSU Jazz Sextet joining members of the JALC Orchestra.
Aside from being an active musician, Brandon is also an advocate in jazz/music education. Brandon has presented jazz clinics, workshops, master classes, and guest performances in schools K-12 throughout Florida and taught at the Florida State University summer jazz camps for middle school and high school students. In the spring of 2016, he earned his master of music in jazz performance at Florida State University. During this two-year period, he directed jazz ensembles, small jazz combos, taught various music-related courses at the university each semester, and performed with traveling national acts visiting the campus. He was also a faculty member of Abraham Baldwin Agriculture College School of Music in Tifton, Georgia, where he taught applied bass and helped assist with the jazz ensemble.
Read the rest of his resume here.
Support for WGCU’s arts & culture reporting comes from the Estate of Myra Janco Daniels, the Charles M. and Joan R. Taylor Foundation, and Naomi Bloom in loving memory of her husband, Ron Wallace.
