He loves and hates his instrument at the same time. “They’re just cold metal bars,” says Joel Ross of the vibraphone. And he adds that it’s hard to get any expression out of them. But that’s the challenge for him, the fuel for everything he does. And he’s damn good at it.
Perhaps Joel Ross should have been a bluesman, since he was born in 1995 on Chicago’s South Side, a former black ghetto that has been the place for which electric blues is most typical since the 1940s. His father was what was known in our milieu in centuries past as a regenschori, in the local church, the leader of the choir and its accompanying band. In it, along with his twin brother Josh, Joel had been playing drums since the age of three, and the gospel rhythm that is so central to all black music as far as the memory can see got deep under his skin. But alongside that, modern jazz from family-owned recordings came to him at a very early age. In addition to geniuses of the calibre of Davis, Monk and Coltrane, Milt Jackson, undoubtedly the most important vibraphonist of the fifties and sixties, a member of the famous Modern Jazz Quartet and a close collaborator of all three of the above and many, many others, did not escape his radar. An ideal idol for a young boy who, at ten, actually by sheer coincidence in the school band, moved from the drums (which were taken over by his brother) to the xylophone, the wooden predecessor of the vibraphone.
Ross’s serious immersion in jazz music began at an arts-oriented high school that had a partnership with the Jazz Institute of Chicago, the organization that organizes the famed Chicago Jazz Festival – and that shortcut brought Joel Ross into close proximity to both living classics like Herbie Hancock and younger artists like Gerald Clayton and Robert Glasper. And during further studies, this time at the Brubeck Institute in California, he was mentored by the excellent vibraphonist Stefon Harris.
Ross’s reputation has begun to spread through the jazz landscape, and this has allowed him to enter 2019 recording his debut album with a real swagger, namely with the prestigious Blue Note label at his back. The album KingMaker has been followed by three more, including this year’s nublues, hinting at what character Ross’s own compositions and a few reworked standards are likely to have. Well, we did get to the blues after all…
