Renee Rosnes late-80s early-90s YouTube dive
It starts in 1989 and it's all before I was born
As promised in a previous 10 Things, I had a YouTube session watching performances by the young Renee Rosnes. Here are the videos I checked out from when she was roughly my age. Take some of the dates and information provided in each video upload with a grain of salt, of course:
"Joe Henderson Quartet - Ya La Quiero - Burghausen 1987"
"Irene Rosnes" flashes on the screen; she's in her mid-twenties and gets to take a solo after Joe Henderson. I've also found this JoeHen tune titled "Y Ya La Quiero" (on State of the Tenor) and "Y todavia la quiero". She plays into the vampy rock-and-roll chord progression and doesn't use any of the language you'll hear in the next few videos, it's all motifs – more of those too later – and scales and such. I don't know anything about the bassist or drummer.
"Renee Rosnes Trio / I Hear Rhapsody (1989)"
Another mis-title haha. The most watched of the videos I found. "A great musician then and now," says Ron Carter's YouTube account in the comments. Wonderful playing on the standard with a nice changeup in the middle. She's only two years older, but the body language and general confidence with this trio is light-years ahead of the Joe Henderson example.
Another one from the same performance...
"Renee Rosnes Trio +1 / Bright Mississippi (1989)"
Big Thelonious energy and motifs on Monk's tune written over "Sweet Georgia Brown". Rosnes and her first husband Billy Drummond have a crazy piano-drums timefeel going that gets Manhattan Jazz Quartet saxophonist George Young grinning during her solo. The comments are all about how the young Ira Coleman looks like Obama. (Coleman, to connect Canadian jazz generations through an American, is the musical and mentorship lynchpin of Jacob Wutzke's album that came out this year.)
Here's a deeper cut, again the same concert but also definitely not...
