Tonight, drummer Sylvia Cuenca & bassist Essiet Essiet bring us their NYC-based colleague Jerome Sabbagh for two sets of trio music.  Expect them to propel Jerome to fresh heights of jazz creativity! BYOB and a twenty for the trio. For a reservation, call the shop at 415-586-3733.

 

 

Saxophonist and composer Jerome Sabbagh was born in Paris in 1973 and has been living in Brooklyn since 1995. A prolific forward-thinking composer, as well as a musician with a deep connection to the well of the jazz tradition, he has recorded nine albums as a leader.  Much more on Jerome further down this page. But first a note on his hosts.

Essiet Okon Essiet’s career has included a berth in Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers in the time leading up to the great drummer’s death in 1990, documented in two albums recorded and released in that year–Chippin’ In and One for All–as well as another 1990 date with Bluesiana Triangle, a project of Blakey’s with Dr. John and  David Fathead Newman.

Sylvia Cuenca, San Jose born and raised, got her professional start at the age of about 17 when guitarist Eddie Duran hired her for a date at Pearl Wong’s  afterhours basement club in San Francisco’s Chinatown. By age 21, she was in New York. She anchored saxophonist Joe Henderson’s quartet for four years and trumpeter Clark Terry’s quintet for seventeen years. Her recording, The Crossing was made in 1998, while she was still with Clark Terry.

Both Essie and Sylvia have long been based in New York, although they have a home in the Bay Area as well, leading bi-coastal and international lives in the jazz world. We’re lucky to have them frequently bring New York talent to the Bird & Beckett stage, as will be the case tonight and on March 11th when pianist Matt Clark joins them in a quartet led by saxophonist Rico Jones.

Jerome Sabbagh’s latest recordings are Heart (Analog Tone Factory, 2024), a trio record with Joe Martin and master drummer Al Foster, and Vintage (Sunnyside, 2023), an album of original compositions and standards which features legendary pianist and NEA jazz master Kenny Barron in intimate duets, as well as in a quartet setting with Joe Martin and Johnathan Blake.

Jerome Sabbagh’s longstanding group with Ben Monder, Joe Martin and Ted Poor, a band which has been together since 2004, has released three albums, the critically acclaimed North, Pogo and The Turn, which was listed as one of the best albums of 2014 by the Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, DownBeat, Ottawa Citizen and France Musique. Jerome has also recorded an album exclusively devoted to standards, One Two Three, in a saxophone trio setting with Ben Street and Rodney Green. I Will Follow You is a freer project featuring European drum legend Daniel Humair and Ben Monder. Plugged In, sparked by a CMA/FACE grant, is an electric project co-led with Jozef Dumoulin, with Patrice Blanchard and Rudy Royston.

 

Jerome Sabbagh also co-leads the Jerome Sabbagh/Greg Tuohey Group, which recorded No Filter with Joe Martin on bass and Kush Abadey on drums, and performs as part of the collective trio Lean with Simon Jermyn and Allison Miller.

As a sideman, Jerome Sabbagh was one of Paul Motian’s last saxophone players. After one gig together, the legendary drummer asked him to play for a week at the Village Vanguard, in his “New Trio” with guitarist Ben Monder, in September 2011. He also has been involved with pianist Laurent Coq’s quartet, Guillermo Klein’s Los Guachos and the Marta Sanchez Quintet.

Jerome Sabbagh has shared the stage with Al Foster, Victor Lewis, Bill Stewart, Jeff Ballard, Greg Hutchinson, Billy Drummond, Nasheet Waits, Eric McPherson, Justin Brown, Eliot Zigmund, Andrew Cyrille, Damion Reid, Mark Turner, Melissa Aldana, Reggie Workman, Vicente Archer, Matt Penman, Matt Brewer, Joe Sanders, Steve Cardenas, Lage Lund, Mike Moreno, Gilad Hekselman, Dan Tepfer, Pete Rende and Jean-Michel Pilc, among others.

He has played in some of the world’s most famous festivals, including Newport, San Francisco, Paris, Tokyo and Medellin. In 2011, 2017, 2018 and 2019, DownBeat selected him as a rising star. He was one of the only European-born musicians on the list.

Owing to the success of his albums The Turn and No Filter on vinyl, Jerome Sabbagh has also become sought after as a producer, having overseen the vinyl versions of Matt Slocum’s With Love and Sadness and Michael Weiss’ Soul Journey, as well as worked on several other releases, including the Dan Tepfer/Lee Konitz duet album Decade, and Dan Tepfer’s Eleven Cages. He recently founded the all analog label Analog Tone Factory with Pete Rende, and aims to produce more records for the label.

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A note on Sylvia Cuenca:

Based in New York City but originally from northern California, Sylvia Cuenca is a skillful, hard-swinging post-bop/hard bop drummer who is best known for her associations with veteran trumpeter/flügelhornist Clark Terry (who she played with extensively in the ’90s and early 2000s) and the late tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson (who she toured Europe and the United States with on more than one occasion). Cuenca has been employed on several of Terry’s CDs (including The Hymn on Candid, Top and Bottom Brass on Chiaroscuro, and Herr Ober: Live at Birdland Neuburg on Nagel-Heyer), and the other major artists who have used her on their albums range from veteran tenor saxophonist/Count Basie alumni Frank Foster (as in “Shiny Stockings”) to trumpeter Eddie Henderson. Cuenca has also played with the Vienna Art Orchestra, a big band based in Vienna, Austria.

Cuenca was born and raised in San Jose, CA, where the Mexican-American drummer’s interest in music was enthusiastically encouraged by her parents — especially her father, a guitarist/singer who had a huge collection of jazz and Latin LPs. One of the records in her dad’s collection was Max Roach and Clifford Brown’s Live at Basin Street; she fell in love with Roach’s drumming, and he became an early influence on Cuenca (whose other influences have included, among others, Art Blakey, Billy Higgins, and Philly Joe Jones). After graduating from high school in the mid-’80s, Cuenca attended San Jose City College, where she performed with the City College Big Band under the direction of Dave Eshelman. Cuenca was still living in northern California when she studied with drummer Victor Lewis, who encouraged her to move to New York City — and at the age of 21, Cuenca followed his advice.

Not long after her arrival in the Big Apple, Cuenca saw Joe Henderson performing at the famous Village Vanguard and said hi to the post-bop tenor man; he remembered Cuenca from a visit to San Jose (where he had been a featured guest of the City College Big Band) and ended up hiring her to tour with him. Cuenca (who became a semi-finalist in the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Drum Competition in 1992) went on to play with many other well-known improvisers, who have ranged from tenor man Michael Brecker (who she toured Japan with) to pianist Marian McPartland to violinist Regina Carter. New York City was also where Cuenca met Clark Terry — an association that lasted more than a decade. As a leader or co-leader, Cuenca has released some CDs on her own label, Etoile Records; the first was The Crossing (1998), which boasted Eddie Henderson on trumpet. That album was followed by the 2003 release Exit 13, a trio date with organist Kyle Koehler and guitarist Dave Stryker. ~ Alex Henderson, Amazon Music

And with regard to Essiet Okon Essiet:

There’s so much to say!
We suggest you visit his website for his own account of his life in jazz, a sample itinerary of dates for 2019 and 2020, and a discography. You’ll learn plenty!