THE JAZZ PASSENGERS

ROY NATHANSON sax alto and soprano
SAM BARDFELD violin
BILL WARE vibraphone
JOHN MENEGON double bass
E.J. RODRIGUEZ drums
TERI ROIGER voice

Returning to Europe is a collective that has earned such definitions as «the musical equivalent of a cubist painting» and «a perverse mainstream hard-bop group... the child of Frank Zappa»'s imagination. In fact, the Jazz Passengers are anything but a simple jazz band, although inspired in name by Art Blakey's legendary Jazz Messengers. Over the course of their career, they lit up the New York scene from the late 1980s onwards with a mixture of avant-jazz, post-rock and more, attracting high-profile pop and rock names such as Blondie's Debbie Harry, Elvis Costello, Mavis Staples, Jeff Buckley and others to their orbit. Laying the foundations were saxophonist Roy Nathanson and trombonist Curtis Fowlkes, both from the ranks of John Lurie's Lounge Lizards. The two co-leaders were joined by Bill Ware on vibraphone, E.J. Rodriguez on drums, Brad Jones on bass, Jim Nolet on violin, now replaced by Sem Bardfeld, and Marc Ribot on guitar, who has since fled to other adventures. Also no longer in the group is Curtis Fowlkes, whose sudden death has caused an inevitable shake-up for the Jazz Passengers. Hence, in 2024 Big Large: In Memory of Curtis Fowlkes, Roy Nathanson and co. patched up the wounds and got back on track in their cross-genre vein. Admittedly, these are no longer the iconoclastic days of the Knitting Factory, the temple of new wave jazz of the 1980s in which the Jazz Passengers themselves recorded an album that is now considered historic, but something has certainly remained of the spirit that indelibly marked the jazz of the last fifty years.