Ryan Keberle, Frank Woeste, Vincent Courtois
Biography Ryan Keberle, Frank Woeste, Vincent Courtois
Reverso
a trans-oceanic chamber jazz ensemble co-led by trombonist Ryan Keberle and pianist Frank Woeste, presents their original chamber jazz in concert. Reverso looks to bridge the divide between jazz and chamber music realized by an outstanding trio which also includes the acclaimed French cellist Vincent Courtois.
Keberle and Woeste show us that jazz and “classical” music have become even more intertwined in today’s music world, since they began to intersect amongst Ravel and his contemporaries such as Satie, Stravinsky and Milhaud over 100 years earlier, mutually inspiring the other’s practitioners.
Reverso’s repertoire features original compositions by Keberle and Woeste that draw particular inspiration from Ravel’s “Le Tombeau de Couperin”, a suite for solo piano by Maurice Ravel and from the music of Les Six, a group of early 20th Century French composers whose members included Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, Arthur Honneger, and the sole female member of the group, Germaine Tailleferre.
“that Ravelian line between jazz and classical has never been more symbiotic” – Downbeat
“pulsating motifs. long painterly lines, open fields and pointillist statements into a fascinating whole… captivating chamber quartet.” – Jazz Times
“a decidedly contemporary take on Maurice Ravel’s musical ideas… launching from Ravel but reaching its own heights.” – Rochester City Newspaper
Ryan Keberle
Hailed in the Jazz Times International Critics Poll as the #1 Trombonist, a player “of vision and composure” according to The New York Times, Ryan Keberle has developed a one-of-a-kind voice both on his instrument and as a composer, earning distinction among jazz’s most adventurous new voices.
Keberle’s outlets include the celebrated indie jazz ensemble, Catharsis; the Big Band Living Legacy Project, carrying on the rich musical language of big band jazz featuring top veteran players in the idiom; the All Ears Orchestra, featuring Ryan’s original compositions and arrangements for Jazz Orchestra, and Reverso, a chamber-jazz collaboration with French pianist Frank Woeste featuring cellist Vincent Courtois and drummer Jeff Ballard.
Keberle’s music integrates his wide-ranging experiences into a highly personal vernacular — immersed in jazz tradition, drawing on world music, indie rock and other influences, seeking fresh and original pathways. His earliest work as a leader, on Double Quartet and Heavy Dreaming, featured an ensemble thick with brass textures and a malleable little-big-band aesthetic. Catharsis, with its invigorating trombone-trumpet frontline, agile rhythm section and the voice and guitar of Camila Meza, debuted in 2012 with Music is Emotion, followed by Into the Zone in 2014 and Azul Infinito in 2016 (the latter two released on Dave Douglas’s Greenleaf label). Billboard picked Azul Infinito as one of “five jazz albums you need to hear.”
In 2017 Catharsis turned its attention to political turmoil in the U.S. with the protest album Find the Common, Shine a Light, praised by The Nation as “unpretentiously intelligent and profoundly moving.” Find the Common also saw Keberle emerging as a solid performing keyboardist (his first instrument) and as a vocalist. In 2019 Keberle and Catharsis released their latest album, The Hope I Hold, with lyrics and inspiration drawn from the Langston Hughes’ poem, “Let America be America Again”. The album received critical praise from the NY Times saying “all those tones give the lovely, splayed-out energy, turning his sighing compositions, into big, open canvases” and the Wall Street Journal said the “wordless vocals, lyrics and solos emerge from gorgeous weaves of musical textures.”
Keberle has toured internationally as a bandleader with both Catharsis & Reverso for years, engaging audiences at the Toronto, Ottawa, Rochester, Iowa City, Antony, Katowice and Bergamo International Jazz Festivals, and at premier jazz clubs including Pizza Express (London), Le Duc des Lombards (Paris), Stadtgarten (Cologne), Unterfahrt (Munich), Jazz Standard and Jazz at Lincoln Center (New York) and the Blue Whale (Los Angeles) among many others. Keberle’s music has been featured in NPR’s prestigious Tiny Desk Concert series and on the French TV channel Mezzo.
Keberle has also worked in endlessly varied settings with musicians ranging from superstars to up-and-coming innovators, in jazz, indie rock, R&B and classical music. As a featured soloist with the Maria Schneider Orchestra, he collaborated with David Bowie on his 2015 single “Sue (Or in a Season of Crime).” He has performed extensively with the acclaimed songwriter Sufjan Stevens and with Darcy James Argue’s groundbreaking big band Secret Society. He has also played in the big bands of Pedro Giraudo and MacArthur Fellow Miguel Zenón, with Brazilian superstar Ivan Lins, and with the Saturday Night Live house band. He has accompanied soul hit-makers Alicia Keys and Justin Timberlake as well as jazz legends Rufus Reid and Wynton Marsalis.
Keberle has received a New Jazz Works grant from Chamber Music America, funded by the Doris Duke Foundation. He has also been recognized with the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation’s French American Exchange and Tour Support grants and its Special Presenter Initiative, as well as the South Arts Jazz Road and USArtists International Grant.
Born and raised in Spokane, Washington, Keberle was surrounded by music from an early age. His father was a jazz trumpeter and professor at Whitworth University, his mother a piano teacher and longtime church music director. Keberle studied classical violin and piano before adopting trombone as his primary instrument. He moved east in 1999 to study at the Manhattan School of Music, where he came under the tutelage of renowned trombonist Steve Turre, as well as composers Michael Abene and Manny Albam. He was the sole member of his graduating class to receive the William H. Borden Award for musical excellence in jazz. In May 2003 he was among Juilliard’s first graduating Jazz Studies class, learning under trombonist Wycliffe Gordon and big-band leader/arranger David Berger, with whom he has worked ever since. Since 2004 Keberle has served as the Director of Jazz and Brass Studies at CUNY’s Hunter College in Manhattan.
Frank Woeste
is a pianist, composer, arranger and producer.
Born in Hanover in 1976 to a music-loving family, he explored numerous instruments during his childhood (drums, guitar, bass, accordion, clarinet…) before devoting himself to the piano, whose harmonic, melodic and rhythmic richness he quickly embraced. Very early on, he was already improvising with his family and a jazz-playing neighbor, thus developing a double background in both classical music and jazz.
After studying at the Bremen Conservatory, he spent his nights in local clubs improvising with jazz musicians, affirming an open vision where musical boundaries are anything but rigid. In 1997, he moved to Paris to join the jazz class of the Conservatoire, and quickly made it his home base. He soon distinguished himself not only as a pianist but also as an arranger and innovator on the Fender Rhodes, using effects and textures to create new soundscapes.
A regular collaborator of Ibrahim Maalouf and Youn Sun Nah, he has shared the stage or recorded with Dave Douglas, Mark Turner, Larry Grenadier, Médéric Collignon, Clarence Penn, Michel Portal, Ben Monder, Justin Brown, Flavio Boltro, Magic Malik, Gretchen Parlato, Ira Coleman, among many others. His path has also led him to work with artists from pop, chanson and classical music. He has occasionally performed with Oxmo Puccino, Juliette Gréco, Mathieu Chedid, the Orchestre National de Bretagne, and took part in a series of duo concerts with Jean-François Zygel.
Frank Woeste has released 13 albums as a leader and taken part in many more recordings as a sideman or arranger, several of which received Victoires du Jazz awards. Winner of prestigious competitions (Steinway Prize at the Montreux Piano Competition, Jazz Hoeilaart International Competition, Getxo European Jazz Contest), he was named “Revelation of the Year” at the Victoires du Jazz 2011. He was also twice awarded the French-American Jazz Exchange grant (2014 with Dave Douglas, 2015 with Ryan Keberle).
As a committed educator, he launched a series of masterclasses at his Studio Libretto, bringing together leading international jazz musicians, and he develops projects through his own label Phonoart.
