The Chris Greene Quartet makes its Bloomington-Normal debut next weekend, headlining an evening at Jazz UpFront.
Greene is a saxophonist and band leader from the northern Chicago suburb of Evanston. The quartet is currently touring with Greene's 2024 album Conversance. The Feb. 13 stop in Bloomington-Normal is paired with a visit to the Krannert Center in Urbana the day before.
It’s not Greene’s first time playing in the Twin Cities. More than two decades ago, Greene played saxophone with a long running Dave Matthews Band tribute called Trippin Billies.
“We did a lot of college towns,” Greene said in an interview for WGLT’s Sound Ideas. “Macomb, Carbondale, Madison—and we would occasionally swing through Bloomington-Normal. But this is the first time I’ve ever brought my band, and this is the first time we’ve ever played Jazz UpFront.”
Gen X jazz
Conversance dropped around the same time Greene turned 50. As someone squarely in the middle of Generation X, he said growing up, he spent more time watching MTV than listening to jazz standards.
“I didn’t really like jazz until I was about 16,” he said. “I played in jazz band up to that point; it was always fun, but I didn’t have much command of jazz vocabulary or language. It was always just kind of like ‘old man music’ at the beginning.”
At some point, he said, it clicked. Greene studied jazz at Indiana University, but never fully abandoned his interests in hip hop and R&B of the '80s and '90s, or his love for the soul, funk and disco music of his parents’ generation.
Bandmates Mark Piane (bass), Damian Espinosa (keys) and Steve Corley (drums) bring a similar potpourri of influences to the group, which honors jazz’s past while acknowledging none of them lived through it.
“As much as I pride myself on studying the tradition—everything from Louis Armstrong all the way up to Robert Galsper and everything in between—I’m always interested in, what if we put a gospel spin on this type of song? What if we put a classic soul spin on this song? What if we took a cover of this song and fused it with this classic standard?”
Conversance was released by Pravda Records, one of Chicago’s longest running independent labels best known for rock and power-pop artists like The Flat Five, Josh Caterer [of the Smoking Popes], and the Handcuffs, plus singer-songwriter Steve Dawson and the late R&B legend Andre Williams.
It was the label’s first jazz album.
“Shout out to Kenn Goodman of Pravda,” Greene said. “Honestly, this is probably the one label-type situation that I’ve ever been with where the person in charge was like, ‘Do what you do, and we’ll make a good record.’
“Kenn Goodman was just like, ‘I like what you do, I like your approach, I like the way that you think, I like the way that your band sounds, you don’t sound like anybody else, thankfully. Just do what you do, and we’ll put it out.' That’s really the only instruction he ever gave me.”
The Chris Greene Quartet plays Friday, Feb. 13 at Jazz Up Front, 107 W. Front St., Bloomington. Tickets are $20-$25 at jazzupfront.com.
