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Michael
Freeman, trumpet player for Furniture, blows
his horn during last Saturday’s “Jazz
Today” at the Abbey Theatre. The band plans
to host monthly jazz gigs at the Abbey in the
hopes of promoting local jazz bands and attracting
national acts as well./Photo by Todd Thompson
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If jazz is a hallmark of cultural sophistication,
then Durango in the early ’90s could have been
considered a worldly town. Several clubs, an annual
jazz festival, regularly touring bands and local groups
all contributed to a lively jazz scene. However, despite
the persistent popularity of live jazz in cities around
the country, the scene in Durango slowly diminished
with the loss of venues.
But local “jazz freaks” Paul Karmazyn
and Michael Lofton are hoping to check that trend and
revitalize the scene in Durango with the formation
of Jazz Freqs, a music promotion company. Their first
project is “Jazz Today,” an ongoing monthly
series of Saturday afternoon shows at the Abbey Theater,
which premiered Oct. 16, with their quartet, Furniture.
Karmazyn has been playing violin since he was 6. He
has a degree in music and has played in a symphony,
a string quartet, a blues band, a rock and roll band
and several jazz combos in addition to teaching music
in Durango for five years. The real estate agent who
plays fiddle for Furniture, Karmazyn said the goal
of Jazz Today is to change common misconceptions of
jazz.
“We really want to cultivate a scene in the
local community,” he says. “Our biggest
obstacle is that most people in their 20s and 30s think
it’s going to be sleepy elevator music, or easy-listening
radio, or Kenny G. We have to educate and change the
idea of what jazz is. You can pack a lot of sound in.”
He said the beauty of jazz is in its improvisational
nature.
“When it’s played live, jazz gives you
the freedom to really go outside of the structure  of
the music and explore,” he said.
Lofton, a marketing consultant and Furniture’s
drummer, said the goal of the monthly gatherings is
to provide the ambience of a “Manhattan type” jazz
club venue while appealing to a broad audience.
“It will be a great place for the whole family
to go on a Saturday afternoon and hear pure jazz content,” he
said.
Saturday afternoon may seem like a strange time to
have a concert, but in jazz there is a longstanding
tradition of Saturday matinees, from conservatory recitals
to concerts in the park. It’s when jazz emerges
from the smoky, late-night underworld to be presentable
to kids and families and normal people.
Indeed, walking into the Abbey Theatre for the inaugural
Jazz Today was like entering a portal to a big city.
The sound was big, the lights were big, the sofas were
big. People lounged and listened, chatting and cuddling.
Cocktails were served. Some kids played; some paid
attention to the music.
Furniture played two long sets, a mix of jazz standards,
original compositions, and bizarre covers. When the
quartet started into its interpretation of Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir,” there
was audible laughter. But as the song progressed, the
audience was riveted by a masterful series of improvisations
on the familiar theme.
Karmazyn explains: “We’re like a jazz
jam band. We like taking some pop tunes and just twisting
them up and modifying the chord progressions into a
richer sound `85 people may not even realize it’s
the same tune until we bring it back again.”
Furniture’s trumpet player, Michael Freeman,
a professor of art history at Fort Lewis College, said
original works also play a part in this improvisational
spirit. “When we come up with an original piece,
we try to set the parameters in a freeing way,” he
said. “We all take our own roles in defining
the direction of these pieces. Basically we’re
a band that enjoys improvising and playing originals
but we use the standards as bookends to hold it all
together.”
Freeman integrates the latest digital technology into
his sound by sending his trumpet feed through a laptop. “You
can do everything with a computer that you used to
do through a stack of effects boxes,” he says. “Playing
with the technology makes it really fun.”
The newest member of Furniture is keyboard player,
Brant Leeper. Born and raised in Farmington, Leeper “left
town as soon as I possibly could” and moved to
Austin, Texas. He then hit the road at 21, spending
10 years touring the circuit, playing with such jazz
and blues greats as W.C. Clark, Bo Diddley and James
Cotton. “After traveling to every state in the
country, I began to realize how great this area is,” he
says. “I was thinking about a change and looking
for something to get me back to the Four Corners.” He
quit the road and moved to Durango five months ago
to take over the management of The Hydration Station. “I
miss focusing on music 100 percent of the time, but
it’s great playing with these guys. They’re
all really talented.”
For Leeper, the allure of jazz is also in the improvisation. “Improvising
on an instrument is like any type of art form where
you’re communicating something to the audience,
an emotion, an experience, a feeling,” he says. “Sometimes
it’s almost like acting, like putting on an air.”
When Leeper takes a solo in “Freddy the Freeloader,” it’s
hard to believe he is self-taught. His arpeggios glisten
and sparkle, then devolve into a series of intentional
wrong turns that finally resolve themselves into making
sense within the peculiar logic of jazz.
Leeper remembers some of his first experiences with
jazz music. “Growing up in Farmington, we would
visit Durango and it was like going to the city, going
metro,” he says. “I remember seeing Maynard
Ferguson in ’94. I remember during the old Trimble
Jazz Festival when there were jazz bands in every bar
in town.”
In comparing Durango to his experience on tour, he
points to the Cyprus Caf`E9 patio as an example of
what has become popular nationally. “Sit-down
patio dining is a hot scene in jazz, even if it’s
low profile,” he says. “And of course the
Abbey Theatre is first class, a beautiful place. It’s
historic but with top-of-the-line sound and lighting
equipment. It’s what we would call an ‘A-Room’ on
the road.”
Jazz Freqs hopes to attract national jazz acts to
the Abbey Theatre and promote more local jazz, but
more importantly, the pair hopes to attract a local
audience to support jazz music.
Furniture will perform again at the next “Jazz
Today” on Nov. 20, a Saturday afternoon, of course
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