A Joyful Thing

Renee Rosnes and ARTEMIS capture the heart of jazz

BY STEVE HOCHMAN

As Renee Rosnes describes the various attributes of members of ARTEMIS, the all-star jazz sextet that the pianistcomposer-arranger leads, certain words and phrases seem to come out in boldface.

Trumpeter Ingrid Jensen, she says, is a “leader” who has “a beautiful kind of abandonment” and “inspires all of us.” Bassist Noriko Ueda “can just really fly.” Alexa Tarantino, who plays alto and soprano saxophones as well as flute, “has a great lyrical gift” and “knows how to take her time” developing solos. Drummer Allison Miller is “a bright light…. always listening, always inspiring” and “very uplifting, like she’s always a joy to play with.” Tenor sax player Nicole Glover “has this raw energy” and is “very sharp, like witty” and “she likes to kind of jump in the deep end of the pool.”

After that last one about Glover, she pauses for a second and then adds, “I mean that literally, too.” She continues: “This is an example of Nicole.

We were performing in Bodø, Norway, last February. It’s cold up there. We’re talking about the North Sea. And there was a floating spa.”

Glover, she says, couldn’t resist.

“She decided she was going to jump in the ocean! Well, she did. Numerous times while we watched in amazement. I mean, February in the North Sea, you know? So, she’s very brave. That comes through in her playing.”

Maybe only Glover dove into the icy sea, but all of them take those leaps musically, individually with brilliant solos throughout the album’s vivid modern jazz panorama, but even more so with some stunning ensemble work, all which will be on display on Thursday of Jazz Fest’s second weekend.

Take the song “Empress Afternoon,” a highlight from ARTEMIS’ new, second album, In Real Time, released by venerable Blue Note. In the piece, written by Rosnes, the players swirl around each other in modal interplay, dynamics shifting passage to passage, one or another stepping forward to solo in turn. But then, with seeming collective spontaneity, they snap together for an incredibly fast, impossibly intricate bit. The effect is like galactic dust coalescing into a bright star, or lights shining into a lens and uniting in a sharp beam to pierce the sky. It’s thrilling.

That bit is a modal run drawing on Indian music, the kind of thing that musicians study for years to be able to pull off. She’d originally recorded it more than 20 years ago for her album Life on Earth, with explorations of rhythms from various cultures. This one meant extra to her. Raised in British Columbia by adoptive parents, she met her birth family in her 30s and learned that her biological mother is Punjabi. She’d already loved Indian music, but to help pull of this piece back she then brought in a ringer, tabla maestro Zakir Hussain. For the new album, having learned that Miller had studied tabla, she wanted to give it another go. As for the rest of her ARTEMIS colleagues…

“I did get some looks when I brought it in,” she says, laughing again, from her New York home. “But we were having a ball.”

It’s a great encapsulation of ARTEMIS itself, the coming together of these various elements and personalities into something of true wonder.

“You put all the ingredients together and you hear it on the album,” she says. “All the things I was just saying.”

Rosnes certainly had high hopes when she put together the first edition of the group after being asked in 2016 to assemble a band for some European festival dates around International Women’s Day celebrations. She called a few of the top figures in modern jazz, both veteran leaders and emerging stars. Teri Lyne Carrington was on drums, Linda Oh on bass and Anat Cohen on clarinet. Up-and-coming saxophonist Melissa Aldana and trumpeter Jensen were in front, with Grammy-winning singer Cécile McLorin Salvant on board as well. It went over great.

“The concerts were very successful, and I felt that there was a real chemistry there,” she says. “And so, we decided kind of collectively that we’d like to do more together.”

Carrington and Oh had other commitments and had to decline, and Miller and Ueda stepped in. The next year they did some touring together and were signed by Blue Note, got to work on the first album, and released it in 2020. As the world reemerged from the pandemic, Salvant and Cohen couldn’t carve out time for more ARTEMIS work, so Glover and Tarantino were recruited, solidifying an all-instrumental lineup that fully realizes the potential of these collective talents.

At core, though, is Rosnes and her craving of jazz’s collaborative spark. Growing up in Canada she and her two sisters—also adopted—were guided by their mother’s love of classical music (and their father’s passion for folk songs of his native Norway). All three played piano, and Renee (pronounced Ree-nee, coming from Irene) also played violin in the Vancouver Youth Orchestra. In high school, though, she was recruited by the school jazz band director, and that was that.

“Throughout my years in high school he would lend me records and I’d go home and listen to them,” she says.

Count Basie, Horace Silver, Herbie Hancock, Bud Powell, Thad Jones and Mel Lewis were among the artists to which he exposed her, as well as the great jazz singers. She went on to study at the University of Toronto’s classical performance program, but it wasn’t the path for her.

“I realized my heart is in jazz,” she says. “That’s where my passion is and that’s where I feel most comfortable. That’s what I really, really love.”

That love has led her to an incredible career, recording and touring with J.J. Johnson, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter, Bobby Hutcherson, Gerald Wilson, Jon Faddis and far too many others to name here, as well as releasing 20 albums as leader or co-leader herself, one of those being Double Portraits, a 2010 set of piano duets with Bill Charlap, a.k.a. her husband.

She also co-founded both the always-superb SF Jazz Collective and the Canadian Jazz Master Awards and is artistic director of the Oscar Peterson International Jazz Festival held in Ontario.

The passion has only increased over the years, a deep love of exploration of sounds and styles, of collaborations and directions, from the world music of Life on Earth to Brazilian jazz, from straight-ahead classics to heady fusion. The new album opens with “Slink,” written by the late keyboardist Lyle Mays, Pat Metheny’s longtime collaborator. It closes with “Penelope,” by Shorter, who she notes forced her to be daring by having her play synthesizers in concerts with little experience beforehand. Between those are originals by various ARTEMIS members, collectively covering that full range, including Jensen’s “Timber” and a couple of others on which Rosnes moves from acoustic piano to electric Fender Rhodes. It’s not fusion, per se, but the sense of adventure, the willingness to take chances, comes through sharply.

It’s all open territory for her and for this group, along the frozen North Sea or by the humid Mississippi Delta.

“We’re so lucky,” she says. “To be able to do this music, to play for people for a living, what a joyful thing!” O

Thursday May 4 at 4:20 p.m.

Lagniappe Stage