Renee Rosnes, The BlueShore at CapU - Birch Building, Friday, March 6, 8 p.m. For more information and to reserve tickets visit tickets.capilanou.ca/TheatreManager/1/online?performance=1889.
Pianist Bill Evans, sounding off on art’s capacity for enriching the soul, once said: “When you play music you discover a part of yourself that you never knew existed.”
Renee Rosnes learned classical piano as a child, but that didn’t necessarily open her up to a higher plane of being – that part came later, as a teenager. When her high school music teacher eventually brought her into the sizzling world of jazz music, she found that the guiding light of musical self-discovery had been lit.
“For me, I was just intrigued with the idea of improvisation,” Rosnes tells the North Shore News from her home in New York City, the day after returning from playing in Europe. “I had an ear for it, and I kind of fell in love with it.”
That influential educator was retired Handsworth Secondary music teacher Bob Rebagliati.
“He was the one who first introduced me to the music and recruited me for the jazz band. I really knew nothing about the music prior to that,” says Rosnes, who grew up in North Vancouver before heading east. “We called him Mr. Reb.”
Mr. Reb gave her records by Oscar Peterson, Count Basie, and Herbie Hancock he hoped would aid in inspiring the young musician. But perhaps his greatest gift was giving her the encouragement to keep going.
Rosnes went to Toronto to study music further after high school, eventually coming to the realization that jazz music was where she wanted to end up. After a brief stint back in Vancouver where she sharpened her teeth playing with many great jazz bands and musicians, she made the move to New York at the end of 1985.
She had only planned to stay a year, but ended up catching her big break soon after landing in the Big Apple after she was hired by legendary jazz saxophonist Joe Henderson to play in his quartet. She later landed jobs with other masters of the genre such as Wayne Shorter and J.J. Johnson, as well as toured internationally. She decided to stay.
“It was wonderful. I was in my mid-20s and it was exciting and I was growing a lot playing with musicians who I felt like were better than me – and it raised my game,” says Rosnes, who also remains a member of Ron Carter’s jazz quartet, who at 82 years old is regarded as the most-recorded jazz bassist of all time.
“I feel so fortunate and I also feel like a lot of the younger musicians coming up now can’t have that same experience because those icons and masters just aren’t around anymore. Most of them are gone.”
While this may be the case, Rosnes, who has made numerous appearances on other artists’ projects, remains an accomplished bandleader – and jazz icon – in her own right.
Her 17th album as a bandleader harkens back to her B.C. roots. On the recent Beloved of the Sky, Rosnes drew inspiration for the music and the album’s title from an Emily Carr painting.
“I loved her work and it was pretty familiar growing up with it in Vancouver. Especially being away from that landscape and geography, when I look at her paintings in the deep woods with the cedars and the way the sky is – it really brings home a lot of sentimental feelings about the West Coast,’ she says.
She’s excited to be back here. Friday night, Rosnes, a five-time Juno Award winner, will perform alongside Capilano University’s jazz ensembles. She’ll perform some of her own compositions with the big band, as well as the choir, and she’ll be do some numbers in smaller groups of students as well.
“I haven’t heard any of them play yet so I’m just looking forward to coming in and meeting all the students and spending some time with them,” she says. “I just feel good to be in my old stomping ground.”
