Correction: The original version of this article contained an error. Tim Daisy was misquoted. He said: “Any night of the week, you could go out and hear amazing stuff.”
In 1999, jazz musician Aram Shelton drove from Florida to Illinois in his brother’s orange Trans-Am, a bird with blazing wings adorning the hood. He came with a singular purpose: to seek jazz.
While he was there, he came to befriend several fellow artists who helped him develop and sharpen his talents. Even now, more than a decade later, he continues to play with the same friends that he made so many years ago, bringing the music they created in Chicago to cities all across the country.
On Friday, the Aram Shelton Quartet will perform at the seventh annual JazzPOP, a creative jazz series hosted by the Hammer Museum. The Quartet includes composer, alto saxophonist and clarinetist Shelton, tenor saxophonist Keefe Jackson, bassist Anton Hatwich and drummer Tim Daisy. Together, they will play free-form music influenced by notable jazz figures such as Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman and Eric Dolphy while audiences enjoy the night air of the Hammer courtyard.
The Aram Shelton Quartet’s performance will be this year’s third and final act in the JazzPOP series, which featured two other jazz groups: the Michael Dessen Trio and the Vinny Golia Sextet.
The Aram Shelton Quartet was asked to perform at JazzPOP by Lisa Mezzacappa, the San Francisco Bay-based independent founder and curator of the series. Seven years ago, her work attracted the attention of the Hammer Museum, and they eventually approached her to ask whether she would be interested in launching a summer jazz series in their courtyard. She accepted, and JazzPOP has been growing ever since, giving music lovers a chance to enjoy the tunes of rising jazz musicians for free.
Mezzacappa is also a bass player and composer, and has worked with Shelton several times in various performances around the Bay Area. Based on her past experiences, she said she believes his Quartet will offer not only great music to listeners, but also something new.
“Aram really has a distinctive and exciting voice as a composer,” Mezzacappa said. “I think the combination of the musicians and the music (Shelton) composed will be pretty much the most exciting stuff that’s happening in jazz now by younger musicians.”
For Shelton, a New York-born and Florida-raised musician, his upcoming act at JazzPOP is just one of many journeys he’s made across the country, and even the world, to improve his musical skills.
He spent a summer in Washington, D.C. after graduating from college in order to mingle with jazz artists like himself, and he later moved to Chicago, hearing great things about the Windy City and the music scene there. Throughout his career, he’s traveled to even more locations such as Montreal, Poland and Berlin, learning more about the various styles and people that make up jazz.
“There’s a ton of jazz music happening right now, all over the country, all over the world,” Shelton said. “We’re living in a time where there’s so many great jazz musicians that it’s impossible to listen to them all. Something like JazzPOP at the Hammer is a showcase of some of the musicians that are out there right now.”
He currently resides in Oakland, Calif. after moving there in 2005 to continue his education at Mills College.
However, despite all the traveling he’s done over the years, he said he still enjoys returning to his roots every once in a while and meeting old friends.
“I really like being out here in Oakland and being a part of the music, but I also really enjoy going back to Chicago now and again to continue the relations that I started when I lived there,” Shelton said. “I didn’t want to just stop playing with the people that I knew there. I still want to make music with them.”
Daisy, a Chicago-based composer and the drummer for the Aram Shelton Quartet, met Shelton when he first arrived in Chicago. The two have played in the jazz bands Arrive and Dragons 1976 together.
“(Shelton and I) really grew up learning together. … We were at a crucial point in how we felt about music. It was a really volatile time,” Daisy said.
“Any night of the week, you could go out and hear amazing stuff.”
Daisy said that, though the members of the Quartet pay tribute to past and present jazz music, people going to the Quartet’s performance at JazzPOP should expect a little experimentation in their act. After all, improvisation has always played a role in the Quartet’s works.
“It’s not a traditional jazz band in any sense of the word,” Daisy said. “It’s going to be challenging sometimes, it’s going to be loud sometimes, but … we’re all going to be playing what we feel, which is the most important thing: to be able to express how you feel with your instrument.”