Baltimore Jazz Collective - DL Media Music

Cast of Top Shelf Artists Assemble Baltimore Jazz Collective,

Funded by the Peabody Conservatory

at the Johns Hopkins University

Sean Jones, Brinae Ali, Todd Marcus, Alex Brown, Kris Funn,

and Quincy Phillips Honor Local Arts Legacy with Release

of Eponymous Debut Album

Coming September 12 on Stricker Street Records

The way the members of the Baltimore Jazz Collective describe their hometown could just as easily apply to themselves — and to their striking self-titled debut album.

“Musically, Baltimore is one of the most soulful cities, and you can’t really put the scene in a box,” says BJC founder Sean Jones, who ranks among the most revered jazz trumpeters of his generation. Jones is the Richard and Elizabeth Case Chair of Jazz Studies at the Peabody Conservatory of Music and Dance at Johns Hopkins University, which has supported the Collective since its founding in 2019. “Musicians here perform at the highest level,” he continues. “It’s really a one-of-a-kind place.”

Overflowing with swing and spirit, Baltimore Jazz Collective features original compositions and arrangements by each member of the band: Jones, bass clarinetist Todd Marcus, pianist Alex Brown, bassist Kris Funn, drummer Quincy Phillips and Brinae Ali, a singer, tap dancer and interdisciplinary artist. All are nationally renowned figures who make their musical home in Baltimore. Their music here portrays the city’s challenges, triumphs and cherished icons, from Eubie Blake and Baby Laurence to Gary Bartz and Baltimore Club architect Rod Lee.

The Collective comprises artists of varied backgrounds, allowing for divergent perspectives on the city. Funn and Phillips are native Baltimoreans, while Brown hails from nearby Columbia, Maryland. Jones, Marcus and Ali are transplants, raised in Ohio, northern New Jersey and Michigan, respectively. Over the years, through regular gigs at beloved area venues like the club Keystone Korner, they’ve developed shared instincts as improvisers — the kind of extrasensory rapport that only a fully committed jazz band can obtain.

The main concept for the group, influenced deeply by Jones’ four years in the SFJAZZ Collective, is strong and simple: Every member contributes original music to be performed by the ensemble, and the music should reflect on and pay tribute to the city of Baltimore.

Ultimately, Baltimore Jazz Collective feels like a celebration of city life and community, even when the music is investigating hard truths. As Funn explains, “Baltimore’s jazz scene has always been steeped in the blues, a groove and feeling. Performances are interactive experiences, where the artist and the audience are equally essential.”

Community also defines Peabody’s jazz studies department, where local engagement, academic rigor and musical heritage combine to mold performers who are powerful, thoughtful and generous. Track by track, Baltimore Jazz Collective delivers that ethos.

The album kicks off with Phillips’ arrangement of “Minor Swing,” a tune by pianist Cyrus Chestnut, one of the most profound and respected jazz talents to come from Baltimore. “It’s a tune that embodies Baltimore,” Phillips says. “It’s slick, it’s charming, it’s got a great pocket and it’s filled with the blues, gospel and funk.” The drummer’s “Intercession” imagines a lost treasure from Blue Note’s golden age, unearthed.

Brown wrote and arranged a highlight and centerpiece of the album with the three-part “Red-Lined,” a masterwork of spiritually charged hard bop. “I’m very interested in and passionate about how we can improve our cities,” Brown says when asked about the piece’s title. “Baltimore, like so many other cities, is a victim of redlining. The piece also references the Red Line — the east-west light-rail system that, after years of planning, was canceled. Effective public transportation is the lifeblood of any city.”

Funn’s “Watermelon” is a swinging evocation of the West Baltimore street vendors he recalls from his youth — men who sold the fruit he loved to share with his father, even as it carried a painful legacy as a racial stereotype targeting Black Americans. “I decided not to let the hate and derision make me ashamed of my childhood memory any longer,” he says. “This song I hope translates that feeling.” The bassist’s arrangement of “Dance My Pain Away,” Rod Lee’s incisive Baltimore Club anthem, is a kind of master class in adapting the rhythms and hooks of electronic music to the humanity of an extraordinary jazz band.

Marcus’ “Link to Lateef” pays homage to a musical hero, the Detroit visionary Yusef Lateef. Taking a snippet from Lateef’s method book Repository of Scales and Melodic Patterns, Marcus expanded a handful of notes into this hard-swinging tour de force. Marcus — a rare bass-clarinet specialist in jazz, and one of the instrument’s finest practitioners — salutes a Baltimore jazz royal with his medley of tunes by Gary Bartz. The venerated saxophonist and bandleader studied clarinet at Peabody in the early ’60s before going on to important work with McCoy Tyner, Miles Davis and other jazz greats. “It’s very special that he’s not just from Baltimore but the community I’ve lived in for 30 years,” Marcus says.

Ali and Brown collaborated on a pointed reimagining of “Thong Song,” the 2000 mega-hit recorded by Baltimore-born R&B star Sisqó. Atop Brown’s anxiety-tinged arrangement, Ali sings her original lyrics that transform a brazen salute to booty into a cautionary tale, shedding light on Baltimore’s tragic history of sex trafficking. “It is time to flip the narrative and speak up about the things that are destroying our community,” Ali says. “And sexual exploitation is one of them.”

With virtuosic tap immersed in delightful swing, Ali’s “For Baby” celebrates Baby Laurence, the groundbreaking tap dancer, bebop pioneer and Peabody dance lecturer — and the subject of Ali’s continuing live multi-faceted tribute, the Baby Laurence Legacy Project. Within Laurence’s masterful performances, Ali explains, there was a revolutionary reclamation of Black pride: “He was committed to educating people about the culture of the dance by defying the white gaze, and dispelling the negative stereotypes that have been associated with the dance.”

Fittingly, some of the album’s most moving tributes are reserved for pianist Eubie Blake, a trailblazer of early jazz, American musical theater and the Harlem Renaissance, and an icon for both Baltimore and American culture. In 1980, Blake received an inaugural George Peabody Medal, the conservatory’s highest bestowed honor.

Ali’s “Sundays at Eubie’s” is a life-affirming paean to the Eubie Blake Cultural Center, the enduring institution located in Baltimore’s Mount Vernon neighborhood. Jones, a member of the Cultural Center’s Advisory Board, offers a gorgeous arrangement of Blake’s ballad “Memories of You,” on which his soft, sweet tone evokes Louis Armstrong’s 1930 recording. The Jones original “Fleeting Stillness” is similarly affecting, and under Phillips’ guidance, the ensemble proves that controlled power and vigor is essential to superb ballad playing.

In the end, the Baltimore Jazz Collective has served many purposes at once for its members. It has been an opportunity to spotlight the remarkably talented Peabody jazz faculty; a chance for dedicated educators to pursue their passions as artists; and, most importantly, an occasion to elevate a great and fascinating city. As Ali puts it, “Baltimore is one of America’s epicenters for creativity and culture — without a doubt.”