“Is it true that all of you, except me, have never played there?” Rosnes asked her bandmates when they gathered for a video interview in late January.
Excited chatter ensued. Several have taken the stage as side players or with the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra at the 90-year-old club. “One thing I’m excited for you all to feel there is the sound,” said Rosnes, who has played there since the late 1980s, as a member of bands led by Shorter and Joe Henderson, and eventually as a headliner herself. “You can just hear each other so well.”
Close listening is always crucial to jazz, especially in an ensemble that offers individual players such freedom. Rosnes praised how Ueda keeps audiences and musicians alike “glued to her joyousness, to the logic of her line and how she tells a story.” Miller, she said, is “the center of our gravity, always uplifting us.”
Rosnes brings to Artemis the skills and focus that made her the first-call pianist for top bandleaders as soon as she arrived in New York from Vancouver, in late 1985. By 1990, she was releasing Blue Note albums herself; she’s recorded 10 for the label aside from her work with Artemis, including a duo album with her husband, the pianist Bill Charlap.
The saxophonist Chris Potter, who has played with Rosnes since the 1990s, said her compositions and arrangements always bear her hallmark. “It’s not exactly straight ahead, it’s not avant-garde, it’s not fusion, it’s Renee music,” he said in an email. “You hear the jazz tradition, you hear classical influences, you hear the music she grew up listening to, you hear the music she’s studying now, but most importantly you hear a sound that only a woman who grew up in western Canada and got carried away by jazz music could create.”
But no one artist’s identity defines Artemis. “Sometimes I feel more myself in this band than my own bands,” said Miller, an in-demand drummer. “In Artemis, I feel all of the things that I fell in love with when I first heard jazz and discovered the ways that I wanted to approach music.”
