Steve Rush

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This is an artistic personality that can move from opera to Cage, play a jazz concert, go fishing on the Huron River, and then fly to India, where for years he has been studying Carnatic singing. Closer to home, for years he has been leading a jazz mass with a small band at Canterbury House; he has written about his experiences there in the book Better Get It in Your Soul: What Liturgists Can Learn from Jazz, co-authored with Reid Hamilton.

In the jazz world, Rush is best known for his collaborations with the great woodwind player Roscoe Mitchell and for his performances and recordings with his own group, Yuganaut. Among his other working groups is a duo with his former student, percussionist and electronic music specialist Jeremy Edwards, joined on some pieces by multi-instrumentalist and composer Andrew Bishop, who sticks to clarinet in this context. Their first album is entitled Naked Dance, and the music can perhaps best be summarized as twenty-first-century dance music, sometimes funky, sometimes dissonant, mixing various rhythmic forms, but always instilled with a modern, eclectic sense of swing. They perform at the Kerrytown Concert House on Sunday, July 8.   

[Originally published in July, 2012.]