Drummer to open jazz season

Fall is a great time of year for jazz fans — the music, not the basketball.

Leaves falling and school buses returning mean that it's time to get the Jazz in Salt Lake City concert season under way.

And as jazz fans have come to expect, this year's lineup looks like a good one, balancing a mix of returning favorites, new faces, big names and up-and-comers.

Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra is a promising season highlight, as well as the Pat Metheny Group. The John Pizzarelli Jazz Trio, the Eddie Palmieri Latin Jazz Band and the Joey DeFrancesco Trio.

Jazz violinist Regina Carter will return for an encore performance on the series, as will Michel Camilo.

Other performers include the Jeff Hamilton Trio, John Clayton and Dee Daniels, Stacey Kent, and the Lewis Nash Quintet.

Drummer Lewis Nash will open the season Monday in a concert that he says will feature a mix of jazz standards and his own original charts. "These are things which have been in the repertoire, some as recently as a month and some going back maybe three or four years,' he said by phone from his home in New York.

The quintet, he added, will feature trumpet, saxophone, piano, bass and drums. "All the musicians have played with me for quite some time now and are all great recording artists in their own right."

Nash said he had an early interest in music. "My beginnings as a drummer started when I was maybe a toddler or kindergarten age. My mother said I would always find sticks of some sort, whether it be something from outside, or anything which resembled a drum set

"I'd always put cardboard boxes of different sizes together or get some pots and pans out of the kitchen."

Although he learned to read and play music in school, by the time he got to college, Lewis had shifted his sights elsewhere — majoring in broadcast journalism.

One of his college professors turned things around for him, however. "(He) stopped me in the hallway one day at the university — I went to Arizona State — and he said, 'Lewis, you're not a music major, are you?' And I said 'No.' He said 'You don't plan on pursing music as a career?' And I said 'No.' He said, 'I think you're making a mistake.'

"That was really one of the first times I thought about doing it professionally. I never thought about it."