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Owen McNally writes about jazz and other music events in Connecticut's Jazz Corridor, stretching from the tip of Fairfield County, right through New Haven and Hartford, and on up beyond the state into the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts. Keep up with the best our area has to offer in music.

Connecticut Saxophonist’s New Album Could Be His Bridge to Greater Things

Jovan Alexandre plays with lots of feeling, a vital sense of swing, and a relaxed assurance.

At just over six-foot-five, the modest but immodestly talented musician JovanAlexandre speaks softly but carries a big-toned tenor saxophone that speaks with a deeply expressive personal sound full of towering promise.

Alexandre, 26, a Wallingford native and distinguished graduate of The Hartt School’s renowned Jackie McLean Institute of Jazz at the University of Hartford, expresses himself with much skill through his music on his fine new release, Collective Consciousness(XippiPhonorecords).

Right from its opening title track, the album lights up with promise. Alexandre’s never less than serious artistry is complemented by his tight-knit yet individualistic collaborators, all of whom come with the imprimatur of degrees from the McLean Institute of Jazz-- a nationally-recognized learning and nurturing hothouse for blooming young jazz talent.

Alexandre’s sleek, smooth-running band features the in-depth and ascending, young talents of Andrew Renfroe, guitar; Taber Gable, piano and Fender Rhodes; Matt Dwonszyk, bass; and Jonathan Barber, drums.

Credit Liron Joseph
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Liron Joseph
Alexandre and band members Matt Dwonszyk, Taber Gable, Andrew Renfroe, and Jonathan Barber.
"We're like brothers, really," Jovan Alexandre said of his quintet.

One element that helps make his working band so successful, Alexandre explains, is that all five members have become very close, working together often and sharing similar standards of excellence. A most profound shared experience is the knowledge they all absorbed at the McLean Institute of Jazz, with its staff of demanding but empathetic educators.

Much like McLean (1931-2006), the legendary alto saxophonist and founder of the jazz program at The Hartt School, staff members at the Institute are master practitioners who, in the classic manner of medieval guild craftsmen, want to pass on their lifetime’s worth of knowledge, skills and pragmatic hands-on experience to the next generation of aspiring craftsmen.

“We’re like brothers, really,” Alexandre said of his quintet, pointing to a kind of collective consciousness that unites the uniquely distinct players in a cooperative artistic venture with no sacrifice of individuality. “We count on each other. We’re very honest with each other. So when we play together, it’s very natural, just like we’re one sound,” he said.

Obviously, it’s a team ready for the majors as shown by its recent two-month run in Greenwich Village at Carroll Place, located on Bleecker Street right across from Le Poisson Rouge, which occupies the space that was once home to the legendary Village Gate.

An early bite of the Big Apple, this high-profile gig has also been a kind of beachhead for future out-of-state incursions by Alexandre and his band of brothers. Later this spring, Alexandre’s residency for the group will be moving uptown to Harlem, which is regaining its luster as a fitting home for jazz. Details will be announced soon.

Credit Liron Joseph
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Liron Joseph
Jovan Alexandre.

Alexandre is a serious reader of non-fiction, and a foreign film buff with wide-ranging curiosity about world cultures. He applies the same sort of mind-expanding, intellectual inquisitiveness and reflection to his studious and total commitment to music.

Although he started out in middle school as an alto saxophonist deeply inspired by Charlie Parker, he’s since absorbed the canon of the modern tenor tradition -- Trane, Rollins, Shorter, Henderson and the entire litany of tenor titans.

At the same time, Alexandre has managed to forge a personal sound all his own, remaining historically conscious of the achievements of the past while continuously developing in what he calls his own “organic” way in his artistic growth. He plays with lots of feeling, a vital sense of swing, and a relaxed assurance that never gets swallowed up in technique.

Jazz is a path -- some might say a calling – Alexandre has been on since eighth grade. “I decided then that I wanted to do this,” he said with the enviable self-awareness of someone who knew early on exactly what he wanted do with his life. “So there is really nothing else that I would want to do. This is really the best thing for me to do.”

The inspiration, which has guided his life, didn’t necessarily start with lots of musical talent with his family back home in the Yalesville section of Wallingford where he’s lived all his life.

Jovan’s parents, his mom, Rene, and his dad, Yvon, who were college sweethearts as undergrads at the University of Connecticut, are not musicians. Nonetheless, they’ve been in Jovan’s corner right from the day he decided to devote his energies and creativity to jazz.

His passion for the music then and now has been super abundant.

Credit Liron Joseph
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Liron Joseph
Jovan Alexandre.

As an ultra-diligent student at Wallingford’s Sheehan High School, for example, he was so dedicated to mastering the saxophone that a sympathetic band director would stand watch outside the practice room so that Jovan could sneak out of some regular academic classes to hone his sound without interruption.

To get even better in high school, he began studying in Hartford at the Artists Collective, the celebrated community arts and education center, which was also founded by McLean, one of the great catalytic forces that helped bring about the jazz renaissance in Hartford that has flourished for decades.

Before Alexandre got his driver’s license, his parents divided the driving duties, transporting him back-and-forth from Yalesville to the Collective in Hartford’s North End.

But if you’re looking for a genetic source of Jovan’s musical talent, you’d have to skip back a whole generation to his famous maternal grandfather, Fred Parris, the legendary doo-wop singer, founder of the fabled vocal group, The Five Satins (launched in New Haven) and the writer of the Satins’ mammoth, immortal classic, “In the Still of the Night.”

Parris wrote the 1950s mega-hit at just 19 when he was in the Army pulling guard duty one night at a military post outside of Philadelphia. Literally written in the still of the night, the song was inspired by a beautiful young woman Parris had met while hanging out in his pre-Army days with his buddies at the old Savin Rock Amusement Park in West Haven.

Besides not having any jazz progenitors in his immediate family circle, Jovan’s love for music didn’t even begin with jazz, which might seem a bit surprising because he speaks the music’s language as if it were his native tongue.

“Even before jazz,” he said by phone, “I began with R&B music, soul, and doo-wop. Jazz came later when I discovered a CD at the house that had big band music. I was in middle school at the time. I just really liked the sound, and figured the best way to learn about it was to join the big band at school. I began on alto, but decided I liked the look and the sound of tenor much better. And it just sort of went from there.”

While sweeping up a bunch of music prizes in high school, including being named Superior Musician in the Berklee High School Jazz Festival in 2005, 2006, and 2007, he broadened his horizon with his studies at the Artists Collective -- an early, crucially formative step in his development.

McLean, the Collective founder and an NEA jazz master who recorded with Miles, Mingus, and Blakey, had died in 2006 before Jovan arrived at the Collective. But in one of those strokes of good fortune, one of Alexandre’s premier mentors at the Collective and later at The Hartt School was none other than McLean’s son Rene, a celebrated tenor saxophonist/composer, scholar and first-class academician with that rare inspirational gift of motivating students to excel even beyond their own expectations.

“The first time I heard Rene play,” Alexandre said, “I was blown away -- just the sound of the history in his horn. And there was the compelling way Rene ran rehearsals, and the way he could explain things, no matter how complex.”

Similarly, Alexandre has lasting gratitude for the host of other invaluable mentors who were to teach him so much at Hartt School, from which he graduated in 2011.

Even as an undergrad at Hartt, Alexandre was seizing attention locally, not just because of his height and stage presence, but because of the expressive depth and breadth of his playing. His name has been a draw and guarantee of compelling music in clubs and venues of all kinds everywhere from Hartford’s Black-eyed Sally’s to New Haven’s Café 9, from the Bushnell Park Pump House Gallery to proprietor Ed Krech’s free Saturday matinee series at Integrity 'n Music in Wethersfield.

Alexandre's legion of Hartford fans and beyond—a core base he has built up through his virtual omnipresence in Connecticut venues-- believes Collective Consciousness will be a breakthrough album, the humble, yet totally self-assured young man’s rite of passage to something really big. Some fans prefer a more concrete metaphor, believing Collective Consciousness will be a bridge leading Alexandre to wide-spread recognition. Maybe even leading him to a long career graced with stepping-stone national and international tours and a discography studded with memorable recordings serving as milestones to greatness.

Collective Consciousness is getting marvelous airplay in Europe and Stateside. This is generating a sense that Jovan is going to be somebody in the music,” said the CD’s producer Thomas Rome, a Hartford and New York-based attorney. A prolific record producer and impresario, Rome, who grew up in Bloomfield, has an international reputation in the music business for his work as a producer or manager of celebrated world music and jazz musicians.

Among his many key roles in the music world, Rome served as the longtime personal manager for the legendary South African pianist/composer Abdullah Ibrahim, formerly known as Dollar Brand.

“My most intense musical relationship was with Abdullah. I was his manager during his years of exile from South Africa until he returned home in 1994, after the fall of apartheid,” Rome said by phone. “He was my first mentor in jazz, and I traveled the world with him and met many great jazz figures. I got my start there, my foundation in jazz music,” he said.

Rome has served as personal manager, record producer, concert producer and even a sometime songwriter primarily in world music projects. Locally, he’s a member of the City of Hartford’s Commission on Cultural Affairs, appointed by Mayor Pedro Segarra in 2010.

Credit Liron Joseph
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Liron Joseph
Jovan Alexandre.

His efforts on the international music scene have facilitated the careers of such world-famous figures as Senegal’s Youssou N’Dour, one of Africa’s most famous contemporary performers. A Grammy Award winning pop singer, N’Dour may perhaps be best known to pop fans in the States for his associations with Peter Gabriel, including tours and recordings. In 2005, Rome was inducted into the Afropop Hall of Fame, alongside N'Dour.

While the world has been Rome’s pop global village for many years, he’s also very much a jazz insider with a longtime interest in the Hartford scene, lately as an adviser to Jackie McLean's widow, Dollie McLean, who co-founded the Artists Collective with her late husband, and has been a formidable shaker-and-doer in the capital city's arts scene for four decades.

His son Karim Rome, a tenor saxophonist and another product of Hartford’s Artists Collective, is a senior at the McLean Institute of Jazz at The Hartt School and graduates this year.

For all his world travels, Rome’s roots as a native son of Connecticut are still deep. His father, the Hartford-based attorney Lewis B. Rome, has served as a councilman and mayor of Bloomfield, was an influential State Senator, and was later chairman of the Board of Trustees for the University of Connecticut during a dramatic period of great expansion in UConn’s rise to national prominence. A respected liberal Republican political figure, he ran as the GOP’s gubernatorial candidate in 1982, losing in a tight race to William A. O’Neill.

Much like many observers and patrons of the Hartford jazz scene, Thomas Rome has kept eye on Alexandre as the tenor saxophonist has emerged on the Hartford and statewide scene as one of the next big Connecticut prospects to break into national prominence.

“I’m allergic to hype,” said Rome, 59, a Hartford resident whose career has blended his love for law and music. “I don’t want to go too far in that direction, but Jovan is really something special. Everyone knows that here in Connecticut, but we’d like to give an opportunity for the rest of the world to find out about him.”

Collective Consciousness just might be the way, Rome believes, to get the word out to the wider world.

Both Alexandre and Rome said the next step will be to take the classy Collective Consciousness band on the road, ultimately expanding to national and international tours. “We expect that by the summer of 2016 Jovan and the band will be touring productively in Europe and, possibly, Japan as well,” Rome said.

Alexandre seconded the idea of taking his well-honed act on the road to more venues in the outer reaches of the state and region, eventually expanding his nascent musical empire with national and international tours. But in a characteristically modest way -- sounding a bit like the lanky, laid-back Gary Cooper -- he said, “I think my goals are just to get paid to play and have people want to hear me -- but also, to have things at the end of year be more successful than the year before. That’s been happening for me the last couple of years. If that continues to happen, that will be good.” 

Please submit press releases on upcoming jazz events at least two weeks before the publication date to omac28@gmail.com. Comments left below are also most welcome.

Owen McNally writes the weekly Jazz Corridor column for WNPR.org as well as periodic freelance pieces for The Hartford Courant and other publications.

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