UPDATE (April 27, 11:25 a.m.): Charles Mingus was not trained as the New York Philharmonic's principal bassist, but was trained by the orchestra's Herman Reinschagen.

True story: once, we were entertaining some people at home and my rat terrier, Mingus, got loose and began mingling with the guests. Because he's an insufferable attention-seeker and since people are nice and tend not to be threatened by terriers, a woman petted him and asked what his name was.

I told her and she said, "Oh, yeah, like the kid from Boy Meets World. Is there another one somewhere named Topanga?"

The woman was asked to leave my home immediately.

Okay, that last bit isn't true. But I did have to momentarily shelve my jazz snobbery and explain that 1) the fictional TV nerd's name was actually Minkus; and 2) my dog was named in honor of one of jazz's geniuses, Charles Mingus.

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Photos by Altamese Osborne

Bill Evans after Tuesday night's concert

"Jazz is a language," Grammy Award-winning jazz saxophonist Bill Evans said to a small crowd gathered inside the University of Houston's Moores School of Music Opera House green room Tuesday evening. He and Noe Marmolejo, the band director, were prefacing a night of music performed by the UH Jazz Ensemble and Jazz Orchestra, student ensembles Evans had spent the past eight days preparing.

A world-renowned jazz artist, Evans expressed his delight at waking up in the same place for the past week, a brief rest before he starts a world tour on April 26, including a much smaller trip to the Katy Jazz Festival on April 29.

Evans is at UH by way of the Moore's School of Music's Vacek Jazz Artist Residency Program, which brings veteran jazz educators and/or musicians to the UH music program's jazz students for a week of rehearsals, private lessons and master classes, culminating in a concert featuring the jazz ensemble and orchestra and the participating artist-in-residence.

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Photo courtesy of University of Houston

Bill Evans, the saxophonist who worked with Miles Davis and the Mahavishnu Orchestra in the '80s and has explored the intersection of jazz and hip-hop on solo albums like Escape, will be working with University of Houston jazz students all week and perform with them at a concert next Tuesday, the university announced this morning.

Noted for his improvisational skills, Evans has been on campus since yesterday as part of the Vacek Jazz Artist Residency program, which brings visiting artists to UH's Moores School of Music twice a year. Today he will be delivering a lecture on John Coltrane and holding rehearsals with the school's Jazz Orchestra and Jazz Combo; a full schedule is at this link.

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Columbia/Legacy

Fans of jazz giant Miles Davis were overjoyed in 2011 to hear that Columbia/Legacy had tapped the artist as the next subject of their Bootleg Series, offering rare live recordings of performances only available previously as, well... bootlegs, if at all. Though of course, these "official" releases come with incredible sound, detailed liner notes and essays, and a professional sheen.

Davis scholars are particularly excited about the second release, Miles Davis Quintet -- Live in Europe 1969, as the 3-CD/1-DVD document the famous "Lost Band" of '69-70: Davis (trumpet), Wayne Shorter (sax), Chick Corea (keyboards), Dave Holland (bass), and Jack DeJohnette (drums) --a lineup that never set foot in the studio

Rocks Off spoke via email with box set co-producer Richard Seidel about this "Lost Band," Miles' desire to reach rock audiences, and why we have European governments to thank for so much jazz documentation.

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Photos courtesy of White Ghost Shivers

Listen up, fellow ruckus lovers...we're goin' on a road trip.

Follow me back in time, to a place where acoustic instruments reigned supreme, and the kazoo was safe to harmonize alongside the jug, and skirt-lifting had little to do with video hos.

It is there, dear ruckus lovers, that you will find the rare creatures known as the White Ghost Shivers.

Approach cautiously, though...they've been known to throw whistles while barn-dancing.

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Photos by Marco Torres

B.B. King
House of Blues
January 11, 2013

"An abbreviated hour with a legend is still very magical, even if it doesn't live up to expectations."

There is no dispute, Mr. Riley B. King embodies the blues moreso than anyone has ever embodied anything, ever. He was born in Mississippi, cut his teeth in Memphis, has won countless Grammy Awards (including a Lifetime Achievement award), was inducted into both the Blues and Rock and Roll Hall of Fames, and is friendly with President Obama.

King is a man so respected and lauded for his talent, charm, and contributions to American music history, that when the last note rings out from his guitar Lucille, when he finally "packs my suitcase and move(s) on down the line," that's when the real blues will commence.

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Dave Brubeck, the professorial jazz pianist and composer whose No. 2 album Time Out was a standard of the Mad Men era, has died at age 91, the Associated Press reported Wednesday morning. Brubeck's manager, Russell Gloyd, told the AP that Brubeck died of heart failure on his way to a cardiologist appointment near his home near Hartford, Conn. He would have been 92 on Thursday.

Brubeck was born on Dec. 6, 1920 in Concord, California, the son of a cattle rancher and mother who taught piano lessons. In college, where he intended to study veteranary science, the head of the zoology department told him, "Brubeck, your mind's across the lawn in the conservatory." His inability to read music caused a minor scandal at the school, now known as the University of the Pacific.

In WWII, Brubeck served in Gen. George S. Patton's 3rd Army, and escaped the Battle of the Bulge by volunteering to play at a Red Cross-organized show. The regular jazz group group he formed shortly thereafter, known as the "Wolfpack," was one of the first examples of racial integration in the U.S. military.

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Welcome to the Rocks Off 100, our portrait gallery of the most compelling profiles and personalities in the far-flung Houston music community -- a lot more than just musicians, but of course they're in there too.

Photos by Deborah Smail

Who? You could argue that Tianna Hall is the best jazz singer in all of Houston. I mean, you could argue against it too, but it's like arguing that the moon landing was faked.

Her smoky voice is a fine mix of skill and improvised magic, and it's landed her on the Grammy nomination ballot three times. Name any high-class Houston gathering that could use a set of pipes on loan from an angel, and Hall has been there owning every inch of the stage.

By day she's a full-time mom who freelances graphic design for local recording studios, and works on providing other musicians with high-quality Web sites.

Home Base: Hall and her band don't rehearse anywhere but on the stage, unless a particularly demanding arrangement calls for some kind of special session. Since jazz is mostly based on dancing around the chord progressions, she gets all the practice she needs while performing. Hall has regular gigs at Sambuca, Solea, and the MKT bar at Phoenicia, but her absolute favorite spot is Cezanne.

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Photos by Mike Schreiber/courtesy of EMI North America

The Robert Glasper Experiment

If you're looking for homegrown musical success stories of 2012, you could do a lot worse than Robert Glasper. True, technically he lives in New York, where he became such an in-demand session player he called his 2009 album Double Booked, but now the Missouri City native and HSPVA grad is on the verge of becoming a full-fledged star.

In February, he released Black Radio (Blue Note), a dense, collaborator-heavy album that plays more like a mixtape and seamlessly fuses hip-hop, jazz and R&B until Glasper throws one final curveball with a ruminative, seven-minute cover of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Circling Glasper's quartet the Experiment (Casey Benjamin, Derrick Hodge and Mark Colenburg) is a constellation of stars including Erykah Badu, Chrisette Michele, Lupe Fiasco and his old friend Bilal.

Critics immediately adored the record, including in a lengthy Sunday New York Times article, and it was also a hit at the cash register, spending most of the spring lodged near the top of iTunes' Jazz and R&B charts. More recently came the Black Radio Recovered EP, which opens a few Black Radio songs to producers like Pete Rock and the Roots' Questlove, but Glasper concludes it himself by producing a nine-minute tribute to the late J. Dilla that earns a congratulatory voicemail message from Dilla's mom.

Rocks Off spoke with Glasper, who brings the Experiment to a special free HSPVA concert at Discovery Green Friday night, by phone last week as the group was crossing into Canada, dreaming of a vacation.

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Photo by Paul Natkin

While survivorship is a constant theme of the genre, Curtis Salgado might be pushing it even for a bluesman. The singer/harp player has survived a liver transplant and then two operations to remove cancerous tumors from his lungs -- the most recent of which occurred in July. And while he's happy about that, he was pretty pissed about having to cancel four weeks of a tour in support of his new CD, Soul Shot (Alligator). He's back on the road and play's Dan Electro's in the Heights Friday night, though.

Featuring four originals and seven covers of songs made famous and/or written by artists like Bobby Womack, O.V. Wright, George, Clinton, Otis Redding, and Johnny "Guitar" Watson, the record finds Salgado in fine vocal and playing form. But he has another niche in pop culture history. In 1977 while living in Eugene, Oregon and fronting a band called the Nighthawks, he befriended an actor in town for a few months to film a movie.

The actor was John Belushi, the movie was Animal House, and it wasn't so long after that the actor and his buddy Dan debuted a skit called "The Blues Brothers." The bit went on to have a pretty decent afterlife.

Rocks Off spoke with Salgado about the record, his relationship with Joliet Jake, and what Texas bluesman Floyd Dixon told him he blew $78,000 on.

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