Some musicians assembling for a showcase at the Music at the Intersection festival this weekend have a message: The story of jazz on the east side of the Mississippi River does not begin and end with Miles Davis.
The late jazz legend and native of Alton, Illinois certainly tops the list of influential jazz musicians who got their start in the region. But the history of east side jazz has more colors to it than just Davis’ particular kind of blue.
“There is no St. Louis jazz without East St. Louis,” musician and educator Adaron Jackson said. “The region, in a lot of ways, is what it is because of what has happened in East St. Louis and how it contributed to the larger ecosystem.”
Jackson is organizing a Sunday set at the festival dubbed “Jazz from the East Side,” on behalf of Jazz St. Louis, where he is the director of education and community engagement. The performance also is a tribute to the influential jazz-education programs offered at the Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and East St. Louis Lincoln High School.
The Sunday band includes Lincoln High School alumni Carlos Brown, Jr. on saxophone, Anthony Wiggins on trumpet, Terreon Gulley on drums and pianist Reggie Thomas. Bassist Zeb Briskovich, a graduate of the SIUE jazz program, rounds out the group.
Their set will feature selections from the performance repertoires of east side greats.
The late Ronald Carter, longtime band director at East St. Louis Lincoln High School; Big Band leader George Hudson; and saxophonist Roland Clark; and trumpeter Russell Gunn are among the musicians who have made big impressions on Illinois audiences and music students across the decades.
One strength of the east side jazz scene is a tradition of apprenticeship, said Thomas, the musical director of Sunday’s program. As a student in Carter’s band program in East St. Louis,Thomas had the chance to work in professional settings and learn from elders.
“You have the experience of playing in the clubs and meeting the musicians who were on the scene back in the day, and they carry on the lineage and the history. So who we're learning from is not just the greats that are on recording,” Thomas said, “but we're learning from the greats that were within our own community. It's that type of connection to local history that we get to maintain that doesn't come through the textbooks.”
East St. Louis Lincoln High School, a historic school that originally served Black students exclusively, closed in 1998.
Thomas recently left Northern Illinois University after 10 years at the head of its jazz studies program. He also led the NIU Jazz Orchestra, which played Lincoln Center in New York last year as part of a national band competition.
As a young musician playing East St. Louis clubs, Thomas learned the importance of focusing on the audience experience.
“One of the things that we really learned coming up in the tradition that we did, through East St Louis, Lincoln High School and getting to play in venues on the east side, was how to project feeling and emotion and make people dance through the music, no matter what music you were playing,” Thomas said.
“That was a part of our heritage and tradition. It was not just learning the theory that's relevant to the music and how to play certain tunes,” he added, “but it was learning about how to make people feel something and how to make people move. That was a part of the legacy. “
“Jazz from the East Side” will likely give Music at the Intersection audiences plenty to dance about, but Jackson hopes it will broaden attendees’ perspective of local jazz history and underscore the importance of music education.
“We have all these wonderful people onstage who are doing great things, in town and away from here. I want people to take away from this that there's a broader world that we need to invest in — all the communities in the St Louis region,” Jackson said.
