There is a sound that listeners learn to recognize and cannot quite explain: a particular quality of breath, of space, of the way a phrase lands just before you expect it to. It crosses whatever instrument Will Boyd has in his hands on a given night, saxophone or flute or clarinet or EWI, and it arrives with the same unmistakable signature. Technique without feeling, in Boyd's world, is expensive noise. The deepest jazz has always kept one foot in the church, and his playing never forgets it.
Boyd grew up in a house in Orangeburg, South Carolina, that was a frequency spectrum unto itself: the Isley Brothers, the Manhattan Transfer, Dolly Parton, Mozart, all of it moving through the same rooms. He was playing in professional R&B bands before he turned eighteen. He went on to study under three musicians who represented entirely different philosophies of what a horn could do: Jerry Coker, the legendary educator whose pedagogical texts had shaped generations of improvisers; Zim Ngqawana, the South African free jazz visionary; and Donald Brown, the pianist and composer who had held down the keys in Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. Coker eventually called Boyd a modern musician steeped in tradition. It remains the most precise summary anyone has managed.
The list of musicians who have called on Boyd reads less like a résumé and more like a map of modern American music: Leslie Odom Jr., Doc Severinsen, Wycliffe Gordon, Regina Carter, the Four Tops, John Beasley's Monk'estra. He has appeared on recordings with Nicholas Payton and Chris Potter. He directs the Contemporary Jazz Ensemble of Asheville, teaches at UNC Asheville and Warren Wilson College, and holds down a weekly residency at Little Jumbo in the Jay Sanders Quartet.
The Will Boyd Project brings that singular voice front and center, surrounded by some of the finest players this region has to offer. The instrumentation shifts. The personnel shifts. The sound does not.
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The house in Orangeburg, South Carolina, was a frequency spectrum unto itself. The Isley Brothers and the Manhattan Transfer and Dolly Parton and Mozart — all of it moving through the same rooms, all of it landing in the ears of a kid from Queens, New York, who had been transplanted to the Lowcountry and was trying to figure out which signal to lock onto. His mother had graduated from Jamaica High School of the Performing Arts, and she made sure Will and his siblings sang. Gospel was the...