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Friday October 31st, 2003

Orrin Evans honored with SESAC award, guests on 'Piano Jazz'

Internationally known composer and jazz pianist Orrin Evans, 28, was honored with a 2002 SESAC award for Performance Activity for his album Meant to Shine at SESAC's 7th Annual Music Awards ceremony in Manhattan. SESAC is one of three performing rights organizations (along with ASCAP and BMI) that represent songwriters and publishers and their right to be compensated for having their music performed in public.

A Performance Activity award recognizes that the artist's work has had a significant number of performances in the previous year, including those from radio, film and television. Evans, a Philadelphia native, received the award with seven other jazz artists including Cassandra Wilson and Greg Osby.

"Music has become such a marketing scheme lately, and it crosses over the genres of music - it's not just jazz, it's not just rock. There are a lot of people listening to jazz - we're told there aren't, but there are. What I think isn't happening, it isn't being marketed to those people. Jazz is only marketed in jazz magazines," Evans says. "So when I do receive an award like the SESAC award, it means a lot to me because in my view that award says to me, we are listening, and we're playing the record, and there are people checking out the music."

Evans also recently taped an appearance on "Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz," the nationally syndicated radio show on NPR. The program will air in Spring 2004. The first time he heard the venerable McPartland, he was driving around Cleveland, Ohio, with his father. It was the early 1980s, and his father tuned into McPartland's show on the radio. Though he can't recall who the guest artist was, Orrin remembers sitting in the hot car with the windows rolled down listening to the show, and he was hooked. "From that day, I fell in love with 'Piano Jazz,' he says.

To play with McPartland has been the realization of a career milestone for him - he began contacting the show's producers and sending his CDs five years ago. "My father's the reason I really got into jazz, and the connection to Marian basically comes from my father. Both my father and my mother said, 'You're going to get on that show someday.' I guess it's bittersweet."

At the time Evans was taping the show, his father - Donald T. Evans, a well-known educator and arts leader - was in the hospital and he passed away October 16 before he got to hear his son's performance.

Evans has had a band since 1990. Meant to Shine, his debut for the Palmetto Records label, features nine original compositions with Gene Jackson on drums, Eric Revis on bass, Sam Newsome on soprano sax and Ralph Bowen on bass clarinet, soprano sax, tenor sax and flute. Downbeat gave the album four stars and said it "reveals two sides - one shyly straightforward, the other boldly experimental..."

The New York Times has called Evans "one of the best developments in jazz in the late '90s." He has performed with Donald Byrd, Robin Eubanks, Charles Fambrough, Roy Hargrove, Branford Marsalis, Christian McBride, Grover Washington Jr., Buster Williams and the Mingus Big Band, among others, and toured the world playing festivals including Seixal Jazz Festival in Portugal and Ochos Rios Jazz Festival in Jamaica.

The album was also named a "2002 Top 10 Jazz CD" by the The Philadelphia Inquirer and the newspaper called him one of the "Top 10 Movers & Shakers Under 30." Evans teaches middle school at the Germantown Friends School in Philadelphia and leads the school's jazz ensembles. He founded his own independent record label, Imani Records, and management company, 88 Keys Productions that he operates with his wife, Dawn Warren Evans.

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