Joel Ross interview: “I love the opportunity to play with other people and learn their perspectives of music and the world”

Joel Ross was 18, a student at Brubeck music college in California, when a favourite teacher took him to meet Bobby Hutcherson, then 72 and living by the coast. The iconic jazz vibraphone and marimba player welcomed the younger man – together with his reputation as a vibes player of precocious creativity – with characteristic grace. Several years on, the advice Hutcherson gave remains vivid.

“It was an overcast day,” remembers the Chicago-born, New York City-based Ross, now 28 and promoting Nublues, his fourth album for Blue Note. “Bobby took me outside, pointed to the sky and said, ‘You can write about that. You can play that. Express the colours of life through your music’.”

How to go about painting such a palette is an ongoing topic of discussion between Ross and the members of his Good Vibes quintet: pianist Jeremy Corren, bassist Kanoa Mendenhall, drummer Jeremy Dutton and fellow Blue Note luminary, saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins. Multi-instrumentalist Gabrielle Garo, Ross’s partner, is a frequent guest on flute.

“You have to get your instrument out of the way,” says Ross, measured and confident, Zooming from his home in NYC. “This requires a large mastery of your instrument so that you are not bound by technical difficulties, so you can truly connect and express ideas and make your interpretation of life come across as clearly as possible.” He pauses for a beat or two. “It is a never-ending process.”

While Ross’s (Musser) vibraphone is crucial to who he is right now - that is, a player lauded for his honest exchanges, spirited solos and instinctive lyricism, his penchant for hip-hop, post-bop, hard swing and rhythmic, almost dubby grooves - his other instruments of choice are piano and drums. What he plays, he tells me, matters little. What’s important is the sound that is coming through.

Ross and his crew displayed as much in April, when - sans Wilkins - they played a sold-out Vortex in Dalston, London. The free-flowing communication between the tall, rangy Ross and his crew was palpable. Ross opened alone, deploying a commanding pattern of arpeggios then riffing with Mendenhall on upright bass (“She and I are usually so locked in”). Then followed a cat’s cradle of tension-building-and-releasing runs, a long organic musical conversation involving following themes, intertwining roots, combining a wealth of tempos, honouring tradition while sharpening its edge. Ducking down behind his instrument to focus attention on the solos that weren’t his.

While the gig was hooked to Nublues, a 10-track project featuring seven originals and three covers (Monk’s ‘Evidence’, Coltrane’s ‘Equinox’ and ‘Central Park West’), the detailed improvisational sculpting of older tracks including the restive ‘Blued’ and the multi-layered ‘Yup’ underlined Ross’s commitment to betterment. Digging into the history of the blues, he says, came in tandem with developing the sound of the group, with connecting, swapping ideas, staying present on the ride.

Asked about transposing a track like ‘Equinox’ to vibraphone, he reiterates that his goal is to express himself musically and cites Kenny Garrett’s leftfield take on the Coltrane classic as a touchstone for his own harder-edged cover of the tune.

“I spent years listening to [Garrett’s] Pursuant album and love his version as much as Trane’s, so that was just in my heart,” says Ross, whose trademark two-mallets arguably offer a more distinct articulation of notes than four mallets.

“I think I started playing it because they played a C# minor, in the key E major, and I was not very good in that key. I decided to write things in that key to get better at it,” he continues, “and to do that we began playing it live. At one gig early on we set up a theme, a rubato melody, and just segued into ‘Equinox’. We let that develop until recording, when it felt right to go from ‘Early’ [the album’s laidback opener] into ‘Equinox’ then to play a blues [the 11-minute, four-section blues ballad ‘Mellowdee’].”

Ross and Wilkins had previously decided to increase their swing with chords and bass notes, interpreting and writing music so to “deal with every beat the way that we felt musicians were doing back in the day,” says Ross, whose work as a sideman with a host of older acts, including Chicago trumpet player Marquis Hill; 'beat scientist' Makaya McCraven; Grammy-winning New York vocalist Arooj Aftab; and Seattle-raised rapper/drummer Kassa Overall, serves to educate, uplift.

“I love the opportunity to play with other people and learn their perspectives of music and the world,” he says. “Going to many different ensembles means I am learning about the technical aspects of the music and the spiritual aspect of having to do my best to add to the music.”

Spirituality - in the form of his Christian faith - is in Ross’s DNA. It’s there in the titles of his original compositions: ‘Touched by An Angel’ on his head-turning 2019 debut album, Kingmaker. Or more obliquely, ‘Waiting on a Solemn Reminiscence’ on Who Are You?, an album featuring harpist Brandee Younger and released in 2020 - the year that Ross chose the 19th century hymn ‘Tis So Sweet To Trust In Jesus’ (itself based on Isaiah 12:2) as the weekly selection for Church of Christ.org, a website run by former Lincoln Center jazz producer Andre Kimo Stone Guess.

‘Prayer’ and ‘Benediction’ are two of the seven movements on 2022’s Parable of the Poet, an album-length suite-cum-church service bridging the scripted and spontaneous and recorded with his eight-piece Parables band (which includes Garo, who also guests on Nublues, on flute).

The son of two police officers, Ross and his twin brother Josh grew up in a Baptist (then non-denominational) church, where their father taught Sunday school and still teaches a Sunday class on ‘biblical relating’ (“To God, yourself and your circumstances according to the Old and New Testaments”). Both boys began learning drums at the age of three: “We were raised to use music as a tool to [encourage] fellowship of people, to give a setting for worship and praise.

“We played with the church band until we joined the band at elementary school, and learned about playing music that isn’t about us but for a higher purpose,” continues Ross, who attended the then new Chicago High School for the Arts, whose partnership with the Jazz Institute of Chicago allowed him to meet heroes including Herbie Hancock, Stefon Harris, Robert Glasper and Ambrose Akinmusire. Josh Ross was deemed the better drummer, so Joel moved over to playing glockenspiel and xylophone, switching to vibraphone on joining a city jazz band.

Ross would be supported at Brubeck by vibes player (and Blue Note signing) Stefon Harris, who he says helped him edit his technique to avoid harming himself on such a physical instrument and breathe in a way that would foster calm and allow him to interpret and incorporate the breath within a musical score. “We also talked a lot about being a black man, and a man of faith; he grew up in the church as well,” Ross told the online magazine jazzweekly.com. It was Harris who encouraged Ross to audition for (and win) a spot in the Brubeck Jazz Quintet: “Stefon was and is still an important mentor.”

Asked about the transcendent aspects of jazz, the feelings of elevation piqued by listening to A Love Supreme, say, or improvising an out-of-body solo, Ross says it comes, if it comes, through humbly serving the music: eschewing ego, leaving space, listening to understand.

“It’s about supporting my co-creators so that they can do their best, which means being clear on what we are doing and why we are doing it. When we are all flowing off each other so selflessly that I’m no longer focusing on the notes that I’m playing,” he says, “that is when I feel closer to God.”

Nublues was born during the pandemic, when lockdown got Ross returning, online, to complete his degree at the New School, which he’d first attended in 2015 before dropping out when the demands of touring - notably with the Marquis Hill Blacktet - became too much. This time he took a class, Improvisation, taught by saxophonist Darius Jones, which focused on the history of avant-garde jazz beginning with black music in America and the shaping of the blues.

“The blues were originally expressed by drums, field hollers, and the black church as well,” says Ross. “Darius would play us recordings, like [Delta blues singer] Son House. Field recordings by [musicologist] Alan Lomax. Not just the 12-bar-blues stuff. We would listen to musicians expressing such intense emotion about their real lives, a physical feeling, and a spirit or energy, that makes the blues sound so recognisable".

“I wanted to take what I had learned about why they were creating this music and apply it to the rhythmic ideas that we were creating then,” he continues. “There wasn’t a lot of time to rehearse as we were coming out of the pandemic, so I challenged myself to write material that we could then manipulate when we came together. That’s where a lot of the magic came from.”

The slow building, increasingly improvised ‘Bach (God the Father in Eternity)’ is a case in point: “That was an assignment from a New School class titled Monk and Bach, taught by [trumpeter] Dave Douglas. We were to rearrange eight bars of this specific chorale. It’s liturgical music so it already fitted with the gospel harmonies I’m accustomed to, and I kept the melody pretty straight, shortening the form so that we could express ourselves improvisationally with the music as it went on.”

Nublues’ title track sets out Ross’s stall, marrying jazz with blues and prizing accessibility over complexity – Ross has said that his previous three albums demanded too much of the listener.

A double CD and LP, Nublues is sequenced so that the three tracks featuring Garo make up the second side, while a lush, melodic take on ‘Central Park West’ sits by itself on Side Four on the vinyl version.

“It was the only place that made sense, and ‘Central Park West’ is such a nice conclusion anyway,” he explains.

Ross still wants to challenge, nevertheless: Nublues is dotted with entry points intended to invite the listener to make up their own mind about what is being expressed.

“I want people to listen to this multiple times, meditate on it almost, for the sake of understanding,” says Ross. “I want it to come across like a film with characters and scenes and identifiable themes with supporting worlds for the listener to explore so that they can choose what they pay attention to.

“The drums might be doing something here, the piano there. But hopefully we are also showing that we’re together, on the same page.” He pauses, breathes. “On the same page, painting the world.”

This article originally appeared in the August 2024 issue of Jazzwise. Never miss an issue – subscribe to Jazzwise today