Scheduled to Appear: John Nastos - sax, Greg Goebel - piano, Garrett Baxter - bass

Christopher Brown is an acclaimed musician, composer, bandleader, and educator who seeks to be a voice within the advocacy of Jazz music and American culture. And through the expansive range of groups that he has assembled and/or performed with—which span from duos to Jazz big bands to military marching bands and orchestras—his musical and personal experiences have led him towards an interest in synthesizing the principles of Jazz with the day-to-day practicalities of life.

However, given that businesses shape the global market economy that everyone lives and participates in, is why he has found it useful to integrate business philosophies with that of music to help develop himself and his band. Which as he likes to say, “we’re all in the same business…the people-trusting-people business. No people, no business.”

https://the1905.turntabletickets.com/

Transformative may not be an urgent enough word to describe the multi-hyphenate creative Arooj Aftab. Rooted to a constellation of unmappable margins and elegant refusals, she lithely moves against the weight of time and convention, honoring multiple traditions while being owned by none. She eludes categorical capture through an expansive repertoire of study, including the techniques of music production and engineering as well a sprawling vocal practice that moves with cunning intention through and alongside jazz, South Asian classical music, pop, and blues. With and from these living, mercurial forms Aftab labors in design of something that she adoringly refers to as “global soul.” She is its erudite scribe and dark chanteuse, successfully convincing audiences all over the world that genres are a lie but she should be believed.
 
The scale of Aftab’s musical inheritances are on brilliant display in her two most recent albums: the Grammy-nominated “masterclass in space” Love in Exile (Verve, 2023), co-created with Vijay Iyer and Shahzad Ismaily, and her fourth solo project, the incandescent Night Reign (Verve, 2024). Both are spectacles in skill and Aftab tenderly, expertly holds all of their supple elements like priceless heirlooms. Her seeking, from Sufi poets to iconic jazz vocalists, proved to her that “there was no blueprint for this thing I wanted to do,” and it’s for her embrace of risk and nonconformity that Aftab earned her position at the vanguard of creative music. Since 2021, she has delivered “rapturous performances” at major venues and international festivals such as the Newport Jazz Festival, Coachella, Roskilde Festival, Montreal Jazz Festival, Glastonbury, and twice on NPR’s Tiny Desk series; received critical praise from The New York Times, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, and Time Magazine; and been awarded a Grammy for “Mohabbat” in the Best Global Music Performance category and a Best New Artist nomination for her standout third album, Vulture Prince (Verve/New Amsterdam, 2021), two nominations for Love in Exile, as well as her selection as a 2023 United States Artists Fellow and recipient of the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Music.
 
Before and beyond Aftab’s many accolades is the instrument itself, her craveable voice, which she describes as an alchemy of “displacement, reinvention, exile, chaos, feminism and the maddening fabric of love and loss and tragedy in the world.” The calm in her vocal delivery is not comfort or consent but a persistent and expectant intensity that sears the text to countless lifetimes in as many lands. Herself the subject of various migrations, Aftab spent her adolescent years in Lahore, Pakistan, a garden-dense city and the birthplace of her music-loving parents. Her viral cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” at age eighteen aided in her passage to study jazz at Berklee College of Music in Boston, while Brooklyn, New York would be her next and most fertile workshop for creation of her “world-building” music. Night Reign is both a vivid reflection of and future for that music held by the trace figurations of the city. There Aftab works with some of the most stunning musicians of our time, raising diverse concentric circles of collaboration that reflect back to her a cosmic level of musical craft and invention.
 
https://www.etix.com/ticket/p/46959139/arooj-aftab-portland-aladdin-theater?_gl=1*7yiga3*_gcl_au*MjEwODI0NDEyMC4xNzMwMzAzNjU2*_ga*MTk1MDkyOTc2MS4xNzMwMzAzNjU2*_ga_PL0N2H17N6*MTczMjMwMzQzOS4yLjAuMTczMjMwMzQzOS42MC4wLjA.&_ga=2.263372300.1873848536.1732303439-1950929761.1730303656

The year was 2015.

In anticipation of some delicious curry stew, a 3-hour jam occurred on the porch of reggae/afrobeat singer Simba Tirima in Moscow, Idaho, the proggy jazzy, folksy 3-piece “@tlas,” was formed by Ben Walden, Machado Mijiga, and Ben Swanson— an off-shoot of the then-popular local reggae/afrobeat band: Simba and the Exception Africans (where Mijiga and Swanson played sax and trombone respectively)

Fast-forward nine years, three bassists, and two albums later, and @tlas has since relocated to Portland and gained the eclectic and wildly talented Matthew Holmes on bass and vocals.

@tlas is an opportunity to explore the sonic possibilities of a “garage band”— DIY collaborative songwriting covering a wide range of genres, modes of expressivity, and varying degrees of improvisation/structure across all songs.

@tlas is named thusly because they take the listener many places; @tlas is a collection of musical souls, waiting to be picked up off of the listener’s bookshelf, discovering uncharted territory, and putting language and meaning to the abstract and unknown.

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Live Jazz Friday Nights Salty’s on the Columbia is thrilled to have live jazz performed by the magnificent Mel Brown Trio in our café dining room. This trio of world-class jazz players features Jof Lee on piano, Tim Gilson on bass, and Mel Brown on drums. Drummer Mel Brown is known as Portland’s ultimate timekeeper and ‘Mister Groove.’ An Oregon icon in jazz, Mel Brown has been labeled the ‘Gentleman of Jazz’, with a career spanning over 40 years. Mel first made his mark as a Motown staff drummer, recording and touring with Martha Reeves, The Temptations, Smokey Robinson, and others. He subsequently spent ten years working with Diana Ross and other pop acts before giving up the road in 1991 and returning home to his first love – jazz. This fabulous trio is a treasured part of the Salty’s family.