(John and J.C. playing saxophones) >>You know, I've been lucky in the sense that I've always done what I wanted to do, and it worked out for me pretty much.

I'm trying to figure out how to do music in a meaningful way now, and I realize I'm so lucky because I have this Thursday night gig at Miller's, for example, that people who are... People actually, to be quite honest, who I feel like I'm not even as nearly as good as they are as musicians, as developed as artistic, somebody like Pete Spaar, who I've had in my band for years and years and years.

Or somebody like Devonne, who feels like he just joined us, but I guess he's been playing with us for a bunch of years now.

I think of myself as the Robin Hood of jazz, because if you read the Robin Hood tale, every guy that joined his band kicked his butt at some point before he joined, and then Robin Hood would laugh and invite them in.

To telegraph the whole story with Robert Jospe, my dear best friend from high school.

We met in high school one day, and at the end of that day we played together and we basically played together ever since.

He moved to New York to go to NYU and I'd go down to visit him, and Jos is a very, very genius person at bringing people together socially, you know, and musically and come over and play.

So all these awesome people were coming.

So I quit school and moved to New York because of that, 'cause of Jos, really 'cause of what I heard there.

For years, for several years, Jos's loft in the meat market, that place was called The Clubhouse.

The Brecker Brothers came there, you know, Richy Beirach played there, Dave Leibman, all kinds of very important jazz musicians from the '70s really were at that loft.

We were good friends with Bob Moses and Bob Moses went... Was gonna come down and play in Charlottesville with a friend of his Reid Watson in a band called Cosmology, and he couldn't do it.

He called Jos and said, "will you sub for me on this gig?"

Jos came down and he met my future wife, Don Thompson, the vocalist, and she moved back to New York.

We had this band Cosmology.

We had so many great people in that band through the years in New York.

John Abercrombie played guitar.

It was always some great guitar player.

And then we moved to Charlottesville and we couldn't find a guitar player like that.

We were trying to import people.

And then we met Tim Reynolds and it was like the same thing again, having somebody at that level.

Part of me wishes I had done a lot more gigging and a lot more touring, but I've always made choices that kind of got in the way of that.

And that's why.

So it's all due to my own choices.

And one of those choices was to have a band and be committed to that and not want to go on the road and break that up and just become a side man.

Later I had a family, that prevents you from touring, although at a certain point I got the best gig I've ever had, which is Bruce Hornsby's gig, which was just a unbelievable gig to have and to work with people of that caliber, so classy and cool.

But then later, you know, people know the story of Dawn and I.

We had our bands Free Cosmology and then the Thompson D'earth Band, and she got sick with cancer.

I wasn't leaving much during those 10 years because we were just very involved with that.

(mellow jazz music) Well, I'm proud of the fact that I made vinyl records at one point in my life and I have no idea how many recordings I've done.

As a leader, I could count 'em up and they're not that many.

My favorite one that I made with Dawn was the one called "When the Serpent Flies."

That's some of Dawn's best work on a record, I think.

♪ In the early morning ♪ ♪ Just before the light comes in ♪ But we did a bunch of records, we did "Mercury," we did "Word from the Underground," which is just a tape, it's very iconic of Charlottesville.

It's Dawn, myself, Tim Reynolds.

Ron Pruitt was our bass player and Robert Jospe on drums.

And we were in our Police stage.

We loved the Police, the group.

We were so fusioned out on this, "Word from the Underground" and it's really cool.

I am very proud of one thing, since you asked about recordings, so I'll tell you about this.

You know, I made some records with the great Emily Remler, the guitarist, Emily Remler, who lived in Charlottesville for time.

But we made those records because we met in New York.

Somebody wrote the 10 best jazz records you've never heard, and the guy just raved on the record and, you know, it was in that list.

I'm proud of that.

The recent record that I made, "Coin of the Realm" is my favorite record I ever made.

J.C. Kuhl on tenor sax, myself, Daniel Clark on the piano, Devonne Harris on drums and Pete Spaar on bass.

And basically we went in the studio and idiotically on my part had 14 songs to try to record in two days that we didn't know.

And we recorded, I believe 49 Takes in two days.

And out of that we got that record.

It's really a good record because it doesn't have the contrivance of a record to me.

It's much more like old jazz records, which were like, "let's go in the studio and make a record."

Okay, bam, this is us today.

It's like a snapshot of us today.

But the us, the people in the band, I don't know, I can't say enough about how those four people orchestrated my music without really any word for me about much about it except 'cause they can read music.

So we still start playing the tune.

It says medium swing.

So you end up feeling like something is really happening here.

And that's what I want.

I want something to really happen without having to think about it too much or prepare it, just come upon it.

(upbeat jazz music) I had never thought of myself as composing.

I was in a small town high school in the '60s and did not do well in that high school.

And my mother, she found this other school and one of the big things that happened in that school was I met Joe Schaff, who was the music director there, who was a violist, a classical player.

He got us listening to Bartok and modern stuff and I was like, this is ridiculous.

I gotta write like this.

So he would allow us to write, we wrote chamber music, we just write, write, write.

And so that was the start of it.

And then honestly, I'll tell you, a big milestone for me in terms of embracing it was when Ornette Coleman won the Pulitzer Prize for his orchestral piece.

It gave me permission to think that I could write for the orchestra.

And then I did get a gig writing for orchestra through the Dave Matthews Band right in front of the Richmond Symphony.

And I wrote that... That project, and I learned a lot.

Ben Rous at UVA, who is ecumenical in his musical mind, did a concert with the orchestra with all the improvising musicians at UVA of which we have a ton at this point 'cause we got all the Free Bridge people and we have Nicole Mitchell, who's one of the greatest jazz players on the planet on flute and composition, and JoVia Armstrong, an amazing composer and percussionist, and we're all there.

And so he presented all of us and it turned out we had written pieces, so he put on our pieces.

So that was really thrilling, just amazing.

Right now, Free Bridge consists of Jeff Decker on tenor, Robert Jospe on drums, Pete Spaar on bass, and Calvin Brown on the piano.

We've had multiple pianists since our long-term pianist Bob Hallahan move to JMU, started teaching JMU full-time, so he couldn't really be in the faculty band at UVA.

We've had Wells Hanley, we guested Cyrus Chestnut a couple of times, and we had Hod O'Brien, Scott DeVore played with us one time and Butch Taylor played with us for a while.

Well, okay, how does music... How can music impact a community?

Well, first of all, music is a communal art.

So by definition it impacts a community, right?

But this is jazz music and, you know, in part, this is black music in America.

If you start to appreciate what black culture in this country has produced and how healthful it is to anybody who absorbs the message, the neurological message of jazz, the neurological message of groove, the neurological message of harmony, it's all one.

It just becomes a kind of oneness that we all share.

(upbeat jazz music) I had been feeling like I was very isolated as a music teacher 'cause I was only seeing a certain demographic.

And I was helped to understand where I could go to make a difference to Walker School, fifth and sixth grade in Charlottesville.

Every kid in Charlottesville starts music at Walker in the fifth or sixth grade.

So I volunteer there.

And that has allowed me to feel like I'm really in the community more with music.

And then of course, you know, Miller's, I feel like that helps the community a little bit to see the excitement of people on the bandstand playing that music.

It's not like a show, it's like something's unfolding.

It's always a drama.

It is a sort of workshop and cauldron over the years for lots and lots of people to come through and develop and find a voice, go out and do their own thing.

But music is a social art, you know?

So yeah, that's community for sure.

(John and J.C. playing sax) (audience applauding) (upbeat jazz music) (upbeat piano music)