Harboring the Beauty of Jazz
By Kyle MacMillan
Although he is just 25 years old, pianist Luca Mendoza has already accumulated more honors than some musical artists do in an entire lifetime, including multiple ASCAP awards and being named one of two all-time Monterey Next Generation Jazz Festival “triple crown winners.”
Chicago native Harish Raghavan moved to New York in 2007, and the bassist has become a fixture on the jazz scene there, fronting two recordings so far—his debut, Calls for Action, and his latest release, In Tense, which came out in 2022.
The two burgeoning stars are based on opposite coasts, but they have a common thread that brings them together at Ravinia on February 27 as part of the ongoing concert series in Bennett Gordon Hall. Completing a quintet with saxophonist Veronica Leahy, trumpeter Jason Palmer, and drummer Mark Whitfield Jr., the musicians have alighted to that stage before, though not at the same time. They’re all alumni of the Ravinia Steans Music Institute (RSMI) Jazz Program from the past two decades, and that evening they will also be joined by the illustrious saxophonist Steve Wilson, one of the program’s co-Artistic Directors.
Saxophonist and RSMI Jazz co-Artistic Director Steve Wilson joins a quintet of alumni on tour in February and March.
The following day, the performers will embark to continue the first-ever RSMI Jazz alumni tour, traveling to New Orleans for March 1 and 2 concerts at the well-respected jazz club Snug Harbor Jazz Bistro. They will be joined there by Wilson’s fellow co-Artistic Director bassist Rufus Reid, who has been a leading light of the Jazz Program since its creation, as well as Grammy Award-winning jazz vocalist Kurt Elling, recently named Ravinia’s Jazz Advisor through 2026, who will also be heard May 3 in another Bennett Gordon Hall program.
Mendoza has never performed with any of the other artists on the lineup, but he is sure they will bond quickly. “We all know who each other is,” he said. “That’s sort of the beauty of jazz being a small world at a certain level. We all know each other’s music and playing, and there is a certain caliber of respect that we’re bringing to the table. So, there is no concern at all—just excitement.”
In keeping with the spontaneity that is a hallmark of the jazz genre, the six musicians will arrive at Ravinia a day two or early to work out a program and run through it. “Everybody is submitting some music, and we’re going to see how it goes at rehearsal,” Raghavan said.
Ravinia on Tour 2024 ensemble members saxophonist Veronica Leahy (2020, 2021), trumpeter Jason Palmer (2003), pianist Luca Mendoza (2018), bassist Harish Raghavan (2006), and drummer Mark Whitfield Jr. (2006)
The Ravinia-administered Steans Music Institute draws top young artists who are typically finishing their schooling and advancing their professional careers. It encompasses three different programs at successive times each summer, the Jazz Program having been added alongside the classically oriented Piano & Strings and Singers Programs in 2000.
During the coming Ravinia Festival season, 15 fellows, who are selected by invitation only, will take part in the 2024 Jazz Program during June 9–19, performing in small combos and workshopping new music. In addition to Wilson, a saxophonist who tours with Maria Schneider and has been featured with Dave Holland and Chick Corea, and Reid, a bassist who has been a Guggenheim Fellow in composition and appears on more than 500 albums in addition to 25 as bandleader, a third jazz luminary rounds out the current co-Artistic Directors: pianist Billy Childs, who recently won his sixth Grammy Award with his instrumental album The Winds of Change.
Mendoza was named a Los Angeles Philharmonic Composer Fellow, a program for budding high-school-age music students, and has continued to write music in the classical genre, but he is solidly anchored in the jazz world. “I’ve had the good fortune to work with a lot of people who are of that lineage,” he said. “So, I see that very much as my cultural and spiritual heritage. That’s the framework through which I see everything.”
In addition to moving easily between jazz and classical music, genres with a long history of such cross-pollination, his works draw on hip-hop, pop, and electronic music, blurring boundaries much like those of pianist Robert Glasper and rapper and multi-instrumentalist Terrace Martin. “I think the idea of pulling from other genres is very core to what jazz is,” he said.
Mendoza believes that such cross-genre ventures are easier in his native Los Angeles, where there aren’t the kind of musical cliques that he perceives in New York. “In LA,” he said, “you see people who play metal, jazz, classical, and avant-garde contemporary music, and they are all in the same room. There is something about LA where you have the freedom and the relaxation to do that, because you are not as concerned with the rat race of New York.”
Mendoza attended the RSMI Jazz Program in 2018, three years before he graduated from the University of Southern California. He praised its focus on young professionals, unlike the many high-school jazz fellowships, and its comfortable relationship with the classical facets of the music institute.
The pianist has written a couple of new works for the Ravinia alumni tour with the other five participants in mind. One is a series of interludes, each featuring a different member of the ensemble and each with a variation on the playful title Growing, Growing, Gone. “That will act as a through-line for the set, so we’re not playing just song after song after song,” he said. “It becomes, then, more of a complete composition across the entire set with these signposts as motifs that are recurring, but different each time and featuring a different musician.”
Growing up in Chicago’s north suburbs, Raghavan, 40, switched from percussion—including the mridangam, a South Indian drum—to the string bass when he was 16. He considered himself only an “okay drummer,” and there was an opening for bass in the top school ensemble. So he worked overtime to get it.
He discovered jazz through a middle-school program. One of his classmates was Andy Margolis, whom Raghavan describes as a child prodigy, a “monster piano and trumpet player” who was profiled in the Chicago Tribune when he was 18. “I was able to see a very high level of playing at a very young age,” the bassist said.
Raghavan never made a conscious decision to pursue jazz as his career. “It was just what I knew I was going to do,” he said. “I don’t know if there was a particular moment when, I was like, ‘Okay, I’m going to play music.’ It was just something that I always expected that I was going to do.”
In 2006, during his music studies—also at USC, like Mendoza—one of his teachers, noted bassist Robert Hurst, recommended that he take part in the RSMI Jazz Program. Because Raghavan came to the bass relatively late, he did not have a chance to participate in high-school jazz camps and honor bands, so this was one of his first experiences with a summer intensive of this kind.
At the time, Reid and famed saxophonists James Moody and Nathan Davis were serving as faculty mentors alongside the program’s then-director, composer and trombonist-turned-cellist David Baker. “To see the highest level of playing with the historical connection to the origins of the music, of the improvised language that I was working with, and then to see them as incredible educators, it was a great experience,” he said.
Ragavan is looking forward to returning to his hometown for the February 27 concert and connecting with other RSMI alumni. “My mother is there, so it’s fun to come back,” he said, “and it will be fun to dig into some music for a couple days with everybody and see how everybody’s doing.” ■
Kyle MacMillan served as classical music critic for the Denver Post from 2000 through 2011. He currently freelances in Chicago, writing for such publications and websites as the Chicago Sun-Times, Early Music America, Opera News, and Classical Voice of North America.