Jazz drummer Leon Joyce Jr. and his trio will be featured with special guest vocalist Dee Alexander at the third-Sunday jazz workshop and matinée concert at the River Music Experience's Redstone Room on March 18.
Joyce will conduct a workshop on drum performance starting at 3 p.m., with admission $3 for students and $5 for adults. The matinée performance begins at 6 p.m., with admission $10 per person. The trio also includes Chuck Webb on bass and Curtis Robinson on guitar.
Joyce got his initial musical training in high school, when he toured Connecticut and Massachusetts with the Greater Hartford Community College Theatre Group performing Hair. But his real musical education came during the 21 years he spent in the Marine Corps, in which he practiced and performed in Marine bands, graduated from the Intermediate Course at the Armed Forces School of Music, and reached the rank of gunnery sergeant and the title of drum major before retiring in 1997.
Joyce has worked with a variety of top artists, from Patti LaBelle to Ellis Marsalis. In recent years, he has performed regularly with the Ramsey Lewis Trio, Malachi Thompson's Freebop and Africa Brass bands, and Alexander's Evolution Ensemble. (Joyce performed with Thompson's Africa Brass at the 2001 Mississippi Valley Blues Festival and with Ramsey Lewis at the John Deere Commons in Moline in June 2002.)
Alexander is an up-and-coming jazz vocalist. In the February issue of Jazzgram - the Jazz Institute of Chicago's newsletter - she was called "one of Chicago's hidden treasures. Known as a 'musicians musician,' she's capable of tuning her instrument in myriad ways."
Her singing style includes all types of music related to the blues - including gospel, R&B, and soul - but she claims that jazz is her love.
The first Alexander performance I caught was as a Jackson Stage headliner with her quartet at the 2003 Chicago Jazz Festival. She showed off her original, polished bluesy-jazz style performing jazz standards and popular ballads backed by a swinging rhythm section of pianist Miguel de la Cerna, bassist Harrison Bankhead, and Joyce. A year later she was a headliner at the Petrillo Music Shell at the Chicago Jazz Festival, where she sang songs related to Ella Fitzgerald accompanied by the 50-member-plus Chicago Jazz Philharmonic Orchestra.
She performed with Douglas Ewart's Inventions at the 2005 Mississippi Valley Blues Festival. On the first number, she was featured on an Ewart blues composition dedicated to Charlie Parker, and her rendition was so original and exciting that not only the audience but Ewart's musicians expressed their appreciation.
At the 2005 Chicago Jazz Festival, Alexander performed with Mwata Bowden's Great Black Music Ensemble as a headliner at the Petrillo Music Shell. And at the 2006 event, she sang with the Africa Brass tribute for the late trumpeter Thompson. Alexander was featured on the Thompson composition "Blues for a Saint Called Louis" (dedicated to Louis Armstrong), which can be heard on the Delmark Records CD Blue Jazz, by Malachi Thompson & Africa Brass.
