""The only real jazz in Portland was in the ghetto," Gefroh says. "It was totally underground. So if you wanted to be a jazz player, you had to go to the after hours clubs. Pepper and I used to go to all these joints, and the cats were really nice to us.""
""My top jazz years were the late 1950s," Gefroh recalls. "I was playing with everybody aro"
On August 31 at the Caldera Amphitheater in Mt. Tabor Park, Nick Gefroh performed timbales for the last time with Pa'lante, the band he formed in 1986. The event marked a symbolic passing of leadership to Carmelo Torres and included the Nick Fish Community Service Award from the Montavilla Jazz Festival for keeping Latin music alive in Portland for nearly fifty years. Gefroh began as a jazz drummer in the late 1950s and returned to Portland in 1975; it took nearly twenty years for him to embrace the Latin groove. He started performing as a teenager, joined a touring youth band sponsored by the Oregon Journal, collaborated frequently with Jim Pepper, played in a coffeehouse near Portland State, and honed his craft in afternoon jam sessions and after-hours clubs such as the Cotton Club with mentorship from older Black artists like Cleve Williams and Bobby Bradford, later assuming the Cotton Club drum chair after Mel Brown went on the road.
Read at Oregon ArtsWatch * Arts & Culture News
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]