Jeremy was thrown out of the school band. Now he’s got an ARIA

Jeremy Rose, saxophonist, jazz wrangler, entrepreneur, is squeezed in the corner of the stage at Lazybones Lounge in Sydney’s Marrickville. He’s handling all of this: the audience, the composition he’s just finished, playing his sax and conducting the Earshift Orchestra – maybe 16 musicians. Juggling. Like his life.

That was May. Since then, he and his glorious band, the Vampires, have returned from a lauded tour of Europe and are now a year out from winning an ARIA for Nightjar. The Vampires are about to tour Australia, from Busselton to Byron Bay. There are few, if any, 10-minute solos. It’s about interplay (when Rose and his best mate, trumpeter Nick Garbett, play together, it soars and winds, tender, muscular).

All the while, Rose, just 40, is building on jazz in Australia. Not from the ground up – generations have come before, from John Pochee and Czech-born Miroslav Bukovsky, now 80; through to bassist Lloyd Swanton, pianist Alister Spence and saxophonist Sandy Evans, all in their 60s. In comparison, Rose is a beginner with a wild desire to make change.

Except he’s no beginner. His first band was in primary school. Then multiple competing priorities: the Jeremy Rose Quartet, the Vampires, the Earshift projects (the music label and the orchestra); the Vazesh trio’s new CD Tapestry, out next month and set to be jazz album of the month in Britain’s Mojo Magazine; the Winter Jazz Fest in New York. He’s also the primary carer for his two children, Li-Shan, 6, and Kian, 4. He and his partner, Mei Ling Yap, a radiation oncologist, share a Google calendar. She goes to conferences and presentations and treats patients (plus is an associate professor at the University of NSW). They both travel.

“He overcommits himself. It’s not uncommon for me to find he’s booked a gig in a week where I’m on call,” she says. I ask: “And that’s clearly marked on the calendar?” “Yes,” she says crisply. Plus, she had to explain who Wham! was when they first dated. Small hurdles, really.

“We have got the same personality trait, wanting to do the next best thing. It’s a good thing that he is very driven, but it makes for a very busy relationship when one of us is travelling all the time,” she says.

“But he’s better at looking after the kids than me. He will remind me to pack the snacks, or ‘do this when you go to piano’.”

Speaking of piano, he wishes his parents had pushed him on that one – piano is, ahem, key for jazz musicians.

Of all his projects, Earshift Orchestra is my favourite, a never-ending parade of musicians, mostly young and often, surprisingly for jazz, women. This may not be where gun guitarist Hilary Geddes got her start, but she features. Or Chloe Kim, the drummer we would all want to be. Or saxophonist Tessie Overmyer, with her own quartet. The composition (and the compositions they play) changes nearly every time.

Earlier this year, when Earshift played at Lazybones, there were so many women, I kept count. That’s not a useful way to immerse yourself in music, but I’ve been to so many gigs where it’s all blokes. Kim, prodigious drummer of her generation, says that when she first played with Rose in a performance of Disruption!, she pointed out that she and Geddes were the only women.

After completing a European tour, the Vampires are in Australia. Credit:

“He listened. That’s the thing about Jeremy – he really listens,” she says.

Underpinning Earshift Orchestra is the Earshift Music label (now 15 years old), of which Rose is both founder and director. It’s an incubator for Australian contemporary jazz and since 2009 it’s released 100 albums with a huge web of musicians who love each other (mostly) and support each other.

Ignoring the fact his parents didn’t nag him to do music of any kind – and that he was better at playing trumpet than his father while still in primary school – it became obvious to anyone paying any attention that Rose had a mind and style of his own. He’s kind about his dad, Philip, though, with whom he played trumpet duets in early primary.

“Trumpet is a challenging instrument. You have to play it every day; otherwise, you do lose the technical facility,” says Rose, diplomatically.

It was in year 5 at his new school, the opportunity class at Neutral Bay Public, he realised he wanted to be a band leader. Sure, yes, a musician. But he actually wanted to run the band.

“I was really discontented with the music we were playing in the concert band,” he says. He made his displeasure known, and he was booted for improvising.

“I decided to form my own band. We played some Miles Davis tunes, but some of the other players couldn’t improvise, so I composed solos for them.”

From a young age, Jeremy Rose knew he wanted to lead a band as well as play in one. Credit:

And just because he’d played up in the band, that didn’t mean the school stopped him from doing his own thing. The band performed for school assembly and then he and the others played in a bush band with the then principal, Geoff Williams. And of course, he had his own sax teacher, Chris Trotman. Rose’s mother, Barbara, approached the navy band musician and asked for lessons for her son, then 10.

“He was such a great little kid. He listened to everything I said, really attentive, willing to learn. He practised what I taught him and that’s amazing. Most kids don’t. He had a smile on his face the whole time, he was really digging it,” says Trotman, who is still a music teacher and performer, now in Port Macquarie on the NSW mid-coast.

That’s in the past. But Sandy Evans, Australia’s most respected saxophone player, also has a list of superlatives when she talks about Rose. Brilliant. Extraordinary. Naturally talented. Imaginative.

“He is at the top of the creative world in Australia in terms of his musical expression,” she says. But that’s not the extent of it.

Evans was recently struggling to find a particular new mouthpiece, and Rose went out of his way to help her. He posted her a bunch of custom-made mouthpieces he had on a shelf. “He’s got a very big and generous heart and a vision to make the world a better place through what he does,” she says.

‘He is at the top of the creative world in Australia in terms of his musical expression.’

Sandy Evans, composer and saxophonist

Sure, it’s not world peace, but generosity to others in the same field is under-rated. Rose recognised that for many women it was hard to get a gig. “And he provides opportunities in a way which is not tokenistic. He collaborates in meaningful ways. He’s never made a point of [publicising] what he does, he just does it.

“I’m in awe of the way he runs a record label, and in the midst of such a busy life, he has made a huge difference to so many people. He keeps progressing what is the best way for contemporary musicians to release their music.”

Nick Garbett, Rose’s long-time friend and fellow Vampire, could tell some stories about being on the road with his mate. Like the night Jem, as Garbett calls him, insisted they eat at a particular restaurant in a tiny town in northern Germany. Everyone else was unconvinced. They all ended up with food poisoning, but Rose was the worst. He played the most important gig of the tour, sitting on a stool, shivering and green.

How did it go? “He’s so stubborn,” Garbett says. “I could see he was sick, but he played well anyway. Only I could tell.”

James Valentine, host of ABC’s UpBeat (among so many other things), describes Rose as unique. It’s not just his playing but also because he’s prepared to invest his time in projects that are “entirely unfinancial ... there’s a small but dedicated audience and there is no rational reason whatsoever to do what he does. It is completely opposite to most music industry things.”

He describes Rose as one of those musicians who walks the walk, the most adventurous, an improviser. Valentine says: “I’m completely derivative and I love doing it, whereas Jeremy, Phil Slater, Sandy Evans are committed to only original music, challenging themselves in areas which are really difficult.”

Mind you, Valentine has booked himself in for a lesson with Rose – maybe he’s branching out, too.

The Vampires’ Australian tour includes shows at the Music Lounge in Wollongong on November 29, and the Camelot Lounge in Sydney on December 12. Full dates here.

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