“Chilli, Chilli, Chilli…Wack, Wack, Wack.” Bria Skonberg gleefully chants the onomatopoeia-like cheer from her hometown high school in Chilliwack, British Columbia. As a member of the school band, she has an indelible memory of the cheer. The trumpeter/vocalist even wrote and recorded a song “Chilliwack Cheer” on her So Is the Day album in 2012. That pure sonic ebullience is in full display on Skonberg’s latest album What It Means, which mashes traditional jazz sounds and tunes with more modern jazz and even pop styles. Skonberg will be showcasing the music from that album in a series of shows at Dizzy's on September 20-22.
The album, a virtual love letter to New Orleans, features a mix of classic standards, modern pop tunes and original compositions. Skonberg is featured with a band comprised by Crescent City drum legend Herlin Riley, bassist Grayson Brockamp, pianist Chris Pattishall, and horn players Aurora Nealand, Rex Gregory, Ethan Santos and Ben Jaffe (of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band). Vocalist Gabrielle Cavassa guests on one track, Van Morrison’s “Days Like This.” The album manages to combine traditional jazz with contemporary pop or rock.
Those two sides of Skonberg’s musical approach could even be said to have begun during her high school years, when she played in fiddle competitions with her family and in and bands with her friends, while learning to play the trumpet, starting in the seventh grade. “In high school, we had a traditional jazz combo that opened up, which gave me a lot more chances to solo and try new things,” she explains. “That's where I ultimately fell in love with playing jazz and in smaller combo styles of traditional jazz.”
In addition, Chilliwack hosted a traditional jazz festival called the Happy Times Jazz Festival. “The festival did a really good job of incorporating the youth into it. On Fridays, we'd have workshops and master classes with the musicians that were performing,” she says. “They'd often come and just ask us to sit in long before I was ready to play those tunes such as ‘When the Saints Go Marching In.’ There would be a big old second line through the venues. I always equated making music with just being very open, being inviting and ultimately performing for people. I enjoy having the audience be a part of the process.”
It seems that the New York City jazz scene was not in the front of her mind back then. “I wasn't even aware of that whole scene, but it was good because the local scene was just the right size for me at that time,” Skonberg explains. “The people that I saw and really looked up to were from Victoria, British Columbia. They were from Washington State such as a group called the Uptown Lowdown Jazz Band that could play Jelly Roll Morton songs note for note and then improvise. A lot of local heroes, which I think is a beautiful thing because I was supported into that scene.”
Indeed, there would be several stops before her eventual landing in NYC. First, she moved from Chilliwack to Vancouver and got her degree at Capilano University there. After graduation, she joined the big band of Dal Richards, who she describes as Canada’s King of Swing. “He was a big band leader all through many, many decades, in the same era as Benny Goodman, but just in Canada,” she says. “I was part of his performing show band for four years and it was just phenomenal. That was really like cutting my teeth.”
At the same time, she was leading two bands of her own—one called the Big Bang Jazz Band and the other an all-female band called the Mighty Aphrodite Jazz Band. “I sunk into this band manager, entrepreneur role, and I learned how to tailor quintets and quartets for different gigs,” Skonberg says. “I spent a lot of time going down from Vancouver to Victoria to the Western corridor of Seattle, Portland, Sacramento mostly playing in swing dance circles or traditional jazz festivals.” After all, the sheer size of Canada made going West-East a logistical challenge.
Skonberg would end up spending a few years in Europe, performing with various groups, mostly in the traditional jazz vein. It was through that network that she met fellow trumpeters such as Jon Erik Kelso and Warren Vache, as well as other stellar players in that genre, which served as the necessary motivation to move to NYC in 2010. “I got to see them and I thought, ‘I guess New York is the place where I have the most contacts,’” she recalls. “One of my great friends had already moved there so that just seemed like the right next step and ultimately the biggest challenge. I wanted to get uncomfortable at that time. I wanted to get stretched. I wanted to learn and grow. As a result, I’ve been uncomfortable for 14 years!”
Skonberg recorded her first album as a leader, Fresh, in 2009. Her ability to combine traditional jazz with contemporary rock is readily apparent in the final track “Mercedes Benz,” the whimsical song made famous by Janis Joplin, which Skonberg turned into a rollicking New Orleans second line romp, with the help of pianist Michael Kaeshammer. On So Is the Day, she performed Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” and on Into Your Own in 2014, she recorded the Lennon-McCartney chestnut “Julia” and did a mash-up of the Great American Songbook standard “Three Little Words” (which Duke Ellington had recorded in 1972) and Stevie Wonder’s “Sir Duke.”
In 2012, she made her first trip to the Louis Armstrong House where she met Armstrong curators and scholars Michael Cogswell and Ricky Riccardi, as well as the rest of the staff. She found herself inspired to contribute somehow. “I said, ‘I would love to be more involved with this, however you want me to be,’” she says. “They hadn’t totally developed their educational programs yet. I would go in about once a week and when they had school groups come in, I would just volunteer. I would talk to them about the trumpet while they waited because they were sectioned into groups to go up into the house. I talked to them about Louis and ultimately I put together sort of a little flash program for kids to talk about those things. It was very wonderful.”
Since that first involvement, she’s been invited to perform in the House’s backyard a few times. “There's nothing like playing in Louis Armstrong's backyard,” she says. “It still gives me chills.” She’s impressed with how the organization has developed its educational programs over the years. “From their trumpet discovery program to more master classes, they're doing more outreach and getting the accolades they truly deserve.”
Skonberg also got involved with Jazz at Lincoln Center and its Jazz for Young People program. Developed by Justin Poindexter, the program deployed band leaders to schools throughout New York City. “You teach jazz and democracy with three presentations,” she explains. “The first time you visit a school, the focus is on the early roots of jazz. The second time the focus is on jazz and The Harlem Renaissance and the Great Migration. The third in the spring would be jazz and the civil rights era.” She describes them as a hybrid of a concert and a lecture.
For Skonberg the program enabled her to develop a relationship with the schools and students, as well as develop a trust as they addressed these topics. “As somebody who immigrated here from another country, it was just so humbling and yet wonderfully educational to get to learn and share the music that way,” she says. “There were a lot of wonderful players who were brought in for these programs.”
When asked if it was challenging to reach students with the music and the message, Skonberg says that ultimately the music speaks for itself. “Just state the facts. These are the Black pioneers of this music that have created these songs with these messages. In order to reach these kids, you have to remember they're just young people who are smart. They can feel all the human emotions. I have found if you can talk about complexities, and can play the music in a way that legitimately addresses those complexities as well, they will understand.”
Jazz at Lincoln Center also partnered with the IMG agency to organize a 45-date tour this past spring featuring Skonberg along with fellow trumpeter and vocalist Benny Benack III in a show called “Sing and Swing.” The two have a ready rapport not only with each other but with their audiences. “It was so much fun to be with another trumpet player and then sing these songs together,” Skonberg says. “He's a monster musician and he's a third-generation musician [his father and grandfather were noted jazz players in Pittsburgh]. He’s just a musical guy who truly wants to get people together. He likes being around people all the time which is evident by his schedule and the charisma that you get from him on stage.”
Benack is just as effusive in his praise of her after their tour together. “Bria lives up to her billing as a quintessential Canadian, which is to say that she always has a cheery smile on her face, never lets the rigors of the road get to her, and prepares tediously to make sure she puts on a professional performance every single night, no matter the travel schedule or sleep the day before,” he explains. “She's an inspiring, tireless artist and I learned a lot from seeing her maintain her productivity day after day, even working on e-mails or scheduling while in the band van driving to another gig all afternoon. Her work ethic is second to none. She always is gracious with audiences after concerts, and she loves to work with students when there are master class and lesson opportunities. Simply put, it was a joy to travel the country with her, and I hope we can do it again sometime soon.”
As someone who loves to perform for live audiences, the pandemic presented a real challenge to Skonberg and in some ways, inspired the music for the latest album. “For many of us as artists, it's been hard to put it into words and into sounds about this experience,” she explains. “I reconnected with the producer Matt Pierson, who I've worked with on two different albums before. We've known each other for over a decade now, and I trust him. We got together and had coffee one day at lunch and just started riffing as we do on ideas. One of the ideas that came up was that this time has been about simplifying and asking, ‘What do you care about? How do you spend your time? Where do you put your energy? Where do you put your heart and your feelings at this time?’ It was clear that this time I focused a lot on family, not just the family that was my new family since I now have a son. But also the musical family that I was missing so much over those many, many months and just the idea of making music with other people.”
She decided to go back to the music that made her first fall in love with New Orleans jazz, sounds that, she says, “are built from the bottom up with great grooves.” Pierson suggested they go to New Orleans and find people who inspire her and speak to her body and her heart. “The idea kind of swirled together and just came together pretty organically. Even the tracks that we decided to choose are songs that I've enjoyed, songs that I've always loved, songs that I thought might sound kind of cool but with a killer street beat under it.” She credits the legendary New Orleans drummer Herlin Riley as pivotal in providing those beats.
The album’s title is adapted from the standard “Do you Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?” a tune seemingly played or sung in every club and bar in that city. “If you go to three or four bars with performers, someone's probably going to do that tune,” she says, laughing. The New Orleans influence throughout the album is enhanced by the presence of guitarist Don Vappie, trombonist Ethan Santos, and sousaphonist Ben Jaffe, all regulars on the Crescent City music scene.
Skonberg’s knack for combining musically different, but thematically similar, tunes is evident with her mashup of Billy Joel’s “Lullaby (Goodnight My Angel)” with the standard “A Child is Born,” originally written by Thad Jones, with lyrics later added by Alec Wilder. “That one comes directly from my family,” she explains. “We had Billy Joel’s River of Dreams album on repeat a lot. It's just so beautiful. That was one that I loved puzzling together. I realized that something I like to do is to create mashups of songs. And I just thought of ‘A Child is Born.’ I don't know, it just kind of came together.”
The music of Van Morrison was also in heavy rotation in the Skonberg Canadian household, and she found that “Days Like This,” the title track of his 1995 album, addressed some of the issues she was wrestling with coming out of the pandemic. “Matt brought that song up,” she says. “It just seemed to hit this message that there's going to be brighter days and to just keep going. It has that lift to it. And then thankfully Gabrielle Cavassa came in to do it. That was another one of Matt's brilliant ideas because she's just got such a gorgeous unique voice and delivery.”
Skonberg was driven to write “Elbow Bump” because of the way that it too meshed with the album’s theme. She loved the way the phrase representing the new post-pandemic greeting sounded. “It reminded me of one of those great old songs like “The New Orleans Bump,’” she says. “It felt like it should be a stomp or a shimmy or a shake or something. That one has a feel like a ‘Lil Liza Jane’ sort of thing. My hope is that I'm going to provide lead sheets for that, plus with a couple of horn harmonies, to send out to middle schools and high school as a way for this to be the sort of song that is approachable for beginning improvisers to get. It's got a catchy melody, a couple of key centers. It's about playing together and just ultimately trying some things and jamming on it.” Her colleague Wycliffe Gordon wrote a chart for the song, which incorporated call and response and different pieces singing back and forth. “I got to play it at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival this year with the Loyola University Big Band and it was really fun.”
Another original on the album, “In the House,” reflects Skonberg’s composing process. “My favorite way to compose is to have a chance where I can clear space mentally, physically sit at a piano or have my horn in my hand and just kind of see what comes out,” she explains. “I think the evolution at this point is just to get out of my own way and let those things come out organically. Don't overthink it. I think ‘In the House’ is a great little tune in that it unfolds in ways that are all logical and musical, and it's always really fun to play. That song is a wonderful vehicle because it can be treated like we did as kind of a medium swing thing. It can also have a really hard grooving, like a Blakey’s Jazz Messengers vibe to it. There are songs on the album that depending on who I'm with or what scenario I'm playing in live, we can kind of push it faster or slower and put more energy behind it. I like having those sorts of songs that can be molded to fit the mood of the venue we're playing.”
As someone who managed her own career for many years, Skonberg clearly takes care of business on stage and off, even though she now has a team of a manager (Matt Pierson) and booking agency (International Music Network) working with her. “We've got a good system going now and I've got music that is easy for them to go out that everybody's proud of,” she says. “I'm working a little more in terms of projects. I’m trying to set up my life so that it's segmented, to allow time for breaks in between as well.” But she believes that having that earlier experience as a self-managed artist pays dividends now. “I think it's important that when you are established, you know what the people who work for you are supposed to be doing. So my advice to any young artists is: ‘Do it. Book your own gigs, fail, pay the band out of your pocket.’ You have to do it all.”
Her friend Benny Benack III believes that she does indeed do it all and as a trumpeter and vocalist himself he feels qualified to speak on the subject. “Stating the obvious, the fact that she is such a high-level trumpeter and vocalist is certainly rare,” he told WBGO in an email. “She has clearly spent time honing both crafts and it shows when she performs, because both aspects of her musicality shine, not one brighter than the other. I try to be the same in my music. Perhaps that's why we complement each other so well on stage. I also love the ease and genuine nature she has on stage and in talking with audiences. It feels very sincere, and she connects with her audiences effortlessly.”
Those connections—with audiences, colleagues, friends and family—loom large for Skonberg. “I am affirming ‘what it means’ to me,” she says. “I care about family, I care about getting to make music that brings joy with other people, from a place that reveres its roots, and that looks forward to brighter days.”
Listen to our conversation, above.
