Nearly two years ago, when the COVID-19 pandemic began, pianist Laura Dubin, along with her husband, drummer Antonio Guerrero, opened her own Virtual Jazz Club on Facebook and YouTube. Now that there has been a return to live performances, they are bringing along bass player Nick Parker to the Fine Arts Series at SUNY Brockport on Friday, February 4, at 7:30 p.m. Their concert will take place at the Tower Fine Arts Center, 180 Holley Street, Brockport. Tickets are $17/general, $12/senior citizens, Brockport alumni, faculty and staff, and $9/students, and are available online at http://fineartstix.brockport.edu, by phone at 395-2787, or in person. SUNY Brockport’s COVID-19 prevention guidelines can be found at the ticketing website, the Fine Arts Series Facebook page, and at brockport.edu/coronavirus/spring_2022. Compliance with campus protocols is required in order to attend any performances or events.
According to City Newspaper, Dubin “trades in straight-ahead jazz, playing with a bouncy synergy that emphasizes the rhythmic vitality of the arrangements.” The trio’s appearances at the Rochester International Jazz Festival have garnered all sorts of accolades, and they are quite happy to be performing live again, though the Virtual Jazz Club is not going away anytime soon. She admits that “at this point, we’re not doing [it] solely because of the pandemic, but rather simply because we love it and because it’s become a wonderful and integral part of our life!”
One of the things that most fascinates Dubin about jazz is that “you can literally hear its entire history; since jazz is only a little over 100 years old, it’s essentially all been documented on recordings. Sadly, we’ll never get to hear a recording of Beethoven playing his own music, but you can hear recordings of so many of the great musicians who actually created jazz.”
Catching the jazz bug from her jazz pianist uncle, Dubin cites jazz legends such as Oscar Peterson, Chick Corea, Marian McPartland, and Nina Simone as influences. With a century of jazz as a base, Dubin also revels in what she calls “mashups,” in which she imbues “Mozart steeped in the history of jazz piano; Beethoven welded with American songbook gems; Ellington with Chopin; Debussy with Gershwin; Ravel with Rodgers and Hammerstein tinged with Latin; Cole Porter with Bill Evans – all reinvented, re-imagined, and forged into very personal statements.”
Having met Guerrero while they were both performing on Holland America Line cruise ships, lucky to “play music every night and see the world during the day,” Dubin feels “there’s no other musician in the world that I feel more comfortable and confident playing with, or feel more trusting with, than Antonio… We’ve been playing together for over 10 years now, so we know each other’s musical personalities like a book…We both feel that our musical concept together has gotten more solid with each passing year. Antonio really gets ‘inside’ each piece of music that we play and puts so much of his own unique vision into them, especially when it comes to our own compositions and arrangements.”
On the subject of jazz in general, Dubin wants to “encourage everyone to listen to as much jazz music as possible, and to take a little time to really sit and listen intentionally, rather than just having it on in the background. You’ll make many amazing discoveries along the way, and I think you’ll find a lot to love!”
Provided information
