Tonight (Sept. 24), the Gulf Coast Jazz Collective will perform jazz standards inspired by the music of Gershwin and Porter, Berlin and Kern, Rodgers and Hart – composers who wrote melodies so perfectly constructed that jazz musicians have been reinventing them for nearly a century.
“Jazz musicians would take the chord progressions and the melodies from these Broadway tunes and make it swing if it didn't swing before, reharmonize it and transform it into something that's entirely different,” Collective founder Paul Gavin noted.
“We started the Gulf Coast Jazz Collective in 2021 with the intention of bringing the entire history of jazz to a concert setting,” he continued. “We play all the way from Duke Ellington and Count Basie, the Oscar Peterson Trio, Miles Davis, all the way up to right now.”
The Collective doesn’t just play top 10 hits. It conducts a deep dive to find each jazz musician’s less played gems.
“We bring our own energy. We bring our own arrangements,” said Gavin. “We're not going to be doing them the same way that we've always heard them …. When you come and listen to the Gulf Coast Jazz Collective, you really are listening to a unique experience that only this group of people will ever have.”
The concert is called ““The Standard Bearer: An Evening of the Great American Songbook.” The performance starts at 7:30 p.m. in the Music & Arts Community Center off Daniels Parkway on Shire Lane.
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The "Great American Songbook" refers to pop songs and jazz standards written by such esteemed composers Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Rodgers & Hammerstein and Jerome Kern between the 1920s and the 1960s for Broadway, Hollywood and Tin Pan Alley. The music of the Great American Songbook offered hope of better days during the Great Depression, built morale during two world wars, helped build social bridges within our culture. There’s no set song list, and artists ranging from Ringo Starr and Linda Ronstadt to Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga have come up with their own takes on the genre.
“There are songs that are in the Great American Songbook whose Broadway shows were not actually popular, but the songs became popular in part because jazz musicians were playing them,” Gavin remarked. “And so, the Great American Songbook is just a key part of the history of jazz.”
To help tell the story of that epoch in jazz, the Collective has invited vocalist Argarita Johnson. She is an internationally acclaimed flutist, vocalist, author, composer, and pedagogue who has performed in Italy, Poland, Barbados, Finland, Melbourne, Australia and most recently, Accra, Ghana. She holds a bachelor of music degree in classical flute performance from Stetson University as well as a master of music degree in jazz studies from Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. In addition, Argarita earned a doctor of musical arts degree in studio & vocal jazz performance from the University of Miami Frost School of Music.
“Even though we're playing the Great American Songbook, we're not going to be playing the songs like you just hear on a CD,” Gavin promised. “I mean, if we were just playing what you could hear on a CD, you should just listen to the CD.”
Collective dives deep to create unique listening experiences
“I love jazz,” Gavin proclaimed. “I love what the music can do and how it affects people. I love that it's a part of our country's history, and the way that it just brings people together. Seeing people interact and have a good time and enjoying themselves does so much for me.”
Gavin realizes that music lovers can find jazz in plenty of places in Southwest Florida.
Good jazz. So the Collective strives to provide a listening experience people just can’t find anyplace else.
“There's not anywhere in Fort Myers where you can hear it in a concert setting, where the purpose is a listening room, where the whole point is everyone sitting together having the same experience and that just creates a shared energy that you can't get in the bar or in the restaurant.”
That begins with song selection. They go beyond a jazz artist’s best-known hits.
“If we're just playing the top 10 songs on the Spotify playlist, you can find that anywhere in the country,” Gavin observed. “But with my role as the artistic director, I want to bring a unique experience. So, I look for music that they're not going to hear everywhere else that's still emblematic of the artist's work, but it's still a unique experience that these people in this room get to have.”
It’s a daunting quest that compels Gavin to take a deep dive into each jazz icon’s canon of work. In its latest concert, the Collective featured the music of Wayne Shorter, whose Grammy-studded career spanned six decades.
“Choosing the music is always a challenge. It's a challenge for any musician because if someone has earned the kind of name in jazz where I'm interested in doing a show of their music, they've got a lengthy catalog,” Gavin explained. “They've played with incredible musicians and done incredible things in music."
Gavin designs the set list around the experience he wants the audience to derive. In aid of that objective, Gavin ensures that each song is different from the one that preceded and the one that follows it.
Gavin, and bandmates Zach Bartholomew and Brandon Robertson, also create original music in the style of the featured musician.
“That is another inherently necessary part of the history of jazz,” Gavin continued. “And it's a part of the history of jazz that I think is neglected. But we don't neglect it here. Just about every time that you come and hear a concert with the Gulf Coast Jazz Collective, you will hear original music, and I think that adds to the experience of music and a music experience that you cannot find anywhere else.”
Gavin was mentored by the late local jazz phenom Dan Miller, who always lavished praise and attention on the musicians with whom he performed.
“He was much better at that than I am now,” Gavin conceded. “He did homework. I would learn things when he would introduce the people that I was playing with on the stage with him and I'd be like, ‘Oh!’ He would introduce me and I'd be like, ‘Oh yeah, I did do that.’”
To develop and perfect his own interactions with the Collective’s audiences, Gavin also logged hours watching YouTube concerts.
“I would watch live concerts on YouTube and pay attention to the way a band leader would communicate with the audience,” Gavin explained. “I spent a lot of time watching Art Blakey, who is kind of my hero in a lot of different ways. I would watch him do concerts and the way that he would communicate. I would listen to the way [five-time Grammy Award-winning, five-time nominated producer and musician] Michael League, the bass player and composer and leader of Snarky Puppy would communicate with an audience. I just spent a lot of time studying what is a good way to do that."
The boys in the band
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, Robertson 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, Robertson is also an advocate in jazz/music education. Robertson 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.
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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.
