The 2024 Wichita Jazz Festival gets underway Tuesday, April 16, with a performance from The Mike Steinel Quintet featuring Rosana Eckert.
The 7 p.m. performance at the Wichita Art Museum is followed by a Wednesday, April 17, performance from Steinel and Eckert alongside The Delano Jazz Orchestra, also held at the Wichita Art Museum.
Steinel grew up in Marion, where his father was a band director and his mother a high school librarian. He retired from the Division of Jazz Studies at the University of North Texas in 2019 and has continued to write and perform new music since. He has issued two recordings with his quintet and authored two novels, including “Saving Charlie Parker,” which shares a title and concept with the second record from his band.
Eckert is currently on faculty at UNT and is a former student of Steinel’s. She has distinguished herself with a series of recordings under her own name, including “Sailing Home” and “Small Hotel.” Additionally, she is an author, composer/arranger and in-demand voice-over actor.
Steinel and Eckert recently spoke with KMUW about their upcoming Wichita performances, about the state of jazz in 2024, and their enduring friendship and professional relationship.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
Tell me a little bit about these two gigs you have coming up this week as part of the Wichita Jazz Festival.
MS: Rosana Eckert is the featured vocalist. She was a student of mine in the ’90s. We hired her here at North Texas to teach jazz voice. She’s a wonderful artist. We do a lot of stuff that features her. I’ve written a lot of songs with lyrics. We have two CDs out. The first one was “Song and Dance” on Origin Records; the second one is on Rosewood Audio. It’s called “Saving Charlie Parker.” That’s a suite of songs that I wrote to accompany a novel of the same name.
For the Tuesday gig, I also have Steve Barnes on drums, who is a great drummer here in Dallas and a former faculty member here at UNT. Pat Coil is coming in from Nashville. He’s toured for many years as the keyboardist in Michael McDonald’s band. He was musical director for Olivia Newton John and worked with Linda Carter. We have Chris Clark on bass and Chris McGuire, a multi-reedist who plays alto and tenor sax. I’ve very excited about this group.
You mentioned that Rosana was a student and now she’s a colleague and bandmate. It must be a good feeling, as an educator, when you see students succeed like that.
MS: I had a former teacher of mine and mentor of mine who recently passed away, named Dan Haerle. Everybody would ask him about students who came through and who had success. Dan would always say, “I take no credit, I accept not blame!”
[Laughs.]
MS: Rosana was a great student, and I hope I helped her, but she was going to be great no matter what. She was originally a French horn major. She got involved with the jazz singers program and decided to do a master’s in jazz voice. She ate it up.
Rosana Eckert: In my master’s studies, I took a couple of improv classes and Mike was my teacher. After that, I joined the faculty, and he was assigned as my faculty mentor. His office was right across the hall from mine for many years. We’ve gotten close over the years. When he retired, he started composing a lot of music, and he asked me if I would be in his quintet. So, we’ve been playing together a lot since he retired.
What appealed to you about his compositions?
RE: He really has the audience in mind all the time. I think his music is accessible. I think it has a lot of depth for those who feel like listening deeply and familiar with jazz and jazz harmony. But for anyone who just likes good music, maybe they don’t study music and don’t know all the ins and outs of the theory, they just say, “Oh, I like this,” that’s there, too. He’s gotten quite good at writing lyrics, and he writes a lot of great grooves. A lot of them are just funky and cool. I really like listening to his music, so I certainly love listening to it.
That’s something that’s sometimes forgotten. A lot of listeners identify with voice before they identify with the instruments.
RE: When he was at UNT, I started an event to have the jazz faculty sing. I wanted the instrumental faculty to sing for our students, to show that everyone’s instrument is their voice, even if they play saxophone or trumpet, their instrument is their voice. He participated every year in that. He had not really been singing before that. He went out of his comfort zone and fell in love with it. He started to really study it. He sings quite a bit himself and sometimes we sing together. It’s a neat thing that he’s gotten into later in his career.
Mike, I’m curious that you’ve not only written this music about Charlie Parker but a novel about him as well.
MS: If you play jazz, you can’t help but being influenced by Charlie Parker because he influenced everybody around him. He was not only an innovator but a lot of what he did retained the blues feeling and the music of the swing era.
Do you see the worlds of fiction writing and music composition as being similar?
MS: Absolutely. I had to do a lot of writing as an academic, but I hadn’t written fiction until COVID came along. Composing music has a lot of the same elements of writing fiction. If you’re a jazz improviser, you’re not always exactly sure what’s going to happen next, and you’re always looking for something novel. The construction of words and the construction of notes in a solo are similar. If you’re playing a solo, you want to keep people interested in what you’re doing.
I think that these two shows are a good reminder that jazz is one of those musics that you must go out and hear. So much of it exists right in the moment of performance.
MS: I love playing with the people that I’m bringing up. They feed me creative ideas. I haven’t written a lot of music where there’s total control over what’s being played. There’s input from other people in the group that determines where we go.
Jazz continues to find new audiences, but I think there’s some sense that the term jazz represents one specific style or sound but within it there is a full array of possibilities.
MS: Its popularity is not what it was. In the late ’30s, jazz was pop music. To some degree, the bebop revolution made it more of an art music. I think people respond to the fact that you don’t really know what’s going to happen. Some people don’t really like jazz because they want predictability. For something to be interesting, the listener needs to be surprised about 50 percent of the time. But, also, their expectations must be met. They’re expecting a certain thing and that must happen about 50 percent of the time, too. That surprise might be a rhythmic thing. It might be a funny note. It might be something unexpected harmonically or melodically. I think there’s always going to be an audience that appreciates that kind of possibility, to listen to something and to know that it’s going to be special.
RE: Jazz is this ginormous umbrella, and there are so many different types of jazz. The people who live and breathe jazz and who are composers and writers are always trying to take it to the next level and explore different things. That’s when you get into free jazz. That’s what bebop was: “How can we get away from just playing dance music?” All along the way, all those accessible subgenres didn’t go away. You’ll still hear people singing straight-ahead Great American Songbook material. You’ll still hear groovy hard bop that makes you want to dance. You still hear New Orleans jazz that has that zydeco beat that makes you feel like, “Oh, man, I’m in New Orleans, it’s a party!” It’s so exciting to see it live and see the musicians’ creating things on the spot. I encourage people to find their little niche in the umbrella of jazz. There is so much cool stuff to discover.
Editor's note: A previous version of this post's headline incorrectly spelled Rosana Eckert's name as Rachel Eckert.
