TICKETS are $15 General/$5 Student. Concert end time is only an estimate.

​

Concerts and events made possible, in part, with support from The Esther and George Jaruga Charitable Foundation (2020-2021 and 2021-2022 season). The Student and Home Grown Series concerts made possible, in part, with support from the ArtsEverywhere Grant from the Community Foundation of St. Joseph County, and the Arts Project Support Grant and the Arts Recovery Grant through the Indiana Arts Commission.

Our Student Jazz Performance Series presents Ryan Devlin touring with some of the greatest heavy hitters in jazz!

Gene Perla - bass

Adam Nussbaum - drums

Steve Kortyka - saxophone 

Mike Bond - piano

Ryan Devlin - saxophone

SOUND LINKS:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4AaNzEScNU

https://youtu.be/ltGcZKjAT80

https://youtu.be/XSlq8gQumyI

https://youtu.be/pgc5ruXs-Lg

https://youtu.be/U5pT2Gp_9wo

https://youtu.be/Tto1-S0G7N4

The Ryan Devlin Quintet features Gene Perla on bass, Adam Nussbaum on drums, Steve Kortyka on saxophone and Mike Bond on piano, with Ryan Devlin on saxophone. One of the most electrifying young saxophonists on the scene today, Ryan Devlin, and his band take aim at the 70s jazz genres, influenced by artists like Steve Grossman, John Coltrane, Joe Henderson and Michael Brecker. Devlin and his quartet put their own modern spin on some of the classic tenor giants' arsenal of tunes and vocabulary. Coming off of his previous electric album Devlin is now touring with his new quartet up and down the east side of the USA premiering his new record "A Series or Circumstances".

Ryan Devlin is a 25 year old saxophonist and private woodwind instructor living in Boston, MA, currently attending the New England Conservatory for his Master's Degree. Devlin started his musical journey with his father Scott Devlin who was the leader of the Walt Disney World Sax Quartet. Music was always in the house when Ryan was a child. Scott was always teaching lessons or practicing for his next gig. Ryan was immediately interested and asked his Dad to teach him saxophone around age 9, after playing piano for 3 years. Since then Ryan has been practicing, gigging and teaching everyday!

Ryan has been a member and featured soloist in ensembles such as The Florida All State Jazz band, The Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra, The Orlando Jazz Orchestra, The Seaworld Saxophone Quartet and the UCF Flying Horse Big Band just to name a few. Ryan is also the 2017 winner of the Central Florida Jazz Society and was runner up in 2017 Bob Washington Jazz scholarship competition.

Ryan also has also taken lessons with world class musicians Jerry Bergonzi, Chad Lefkowitz Brown, Alain Bradette, Lucas Pino and Airmen of Note saxophonist Tedd Baker. Ryan has also performed with world class musicians like trumpeter Terell Stafford. Noted saxophonists Dick Oatts, Jerry Bergonzi, Chad Lefkowitz Brown, Jerry Weldon, bassist Gene Perla and drummer Adam Nussbaum just to name a few!

"Bassist Gene Perla made his recording debut a little under sixty years ago. When he was at the Berklee School of Music he recorded with their student big band in 1962 and 1963. In ’63, the revered teacher/bandleader Herb Pomeroy was in charge: the personnel included upcoming stars such as Michael Mantler, Jimmy Mosher, and Sadao Watanable. Six years later Perla made A Very Rare Evening, backing up Nina Simone on PM Records release After that, he became Woody Herman’s bass man. He recorded a session with Miles Davis in 1970: it’s Perla who plays the powerful electric bass line on the two takes of Ali which were only released on The Complete Jack Johnson Sessions. He’s very much front and center. On the second take, you can hear Miles advise Perla: “Play it loud.” I consider that a compliment.

To many of us, Perla became known as the bassist in the early and mid-’70s with Elvin Jones: his generally piano-less Jazz Machine, which featured Dave Liebman and Steve Grossman on saxophones. (Both were also with Miles Davis in that period.) He played in the oddball Sonny Rollins band that also featured bagpipe player Rufus Harley and with the Art Pepper Quartet. Now, at 81 years old, he’s back with another intriguing album that documents (on PM Records) a live concert given in Allentown, Pennsylvania on November 20, 2020. The idea… it seems a little extravagant... was to play trio music with three different pianists, all lesser known than their leader: Davis Whitfield, Leo Genovese, and Oscar Williams II. The pianists chose the repertoire: the concert and the recording should be seen as a generous opportunity for these vibrant musicans show off. The veteran Adam Nussbaum was the drummer...."

— Michael Ullman, March 9, 2021

www.ryandevlinmusic.com

Adam Nussbaum grew up in Norwalk, Connecticut and started to play drums at age 12 after studying piano for 5 years, also playing bass and saxophone as a teenager. He moved to New York City in 1975 to attend The Davis Center for Performing Arts at City College. While there he began working with Albert Dailey, Monty Waters, Joe Lee Wilson, Sheila Jordan and he played with Sonny Rollins in 1977 in Milwaukee.

In 1978 he joined Dave Liebman’s quintet and did his first European tour with John Scofield. During the early eighties he continued working with John Scofield in a celebrated trio with Steve Swallow. In 1983 he become a member of Gil Evans Orchestra and played with Stan Getz as well. He later joined Eliane Elias/Randy Brecker Quartet, Gary Burton, and Toots Thielemans. In 1987 he began touring with the Michael Brecker Quintet. In 1988 they recorded the Grammy winning “Don’t Try This At Home”. During 1992 he was part of the Carla Bley Big Band and that same year John Abercrombie hired him to complete his organ trio.

Since then he has kept active in a wide variety of groups. Among them a recently formed quartet ‘BANN’ with Seamus Blake, Jay Anderson & Oz Noy, A co-op quartet “NUTTREE” with Abercrombie, Jerry Bergonzi & Gary Versace, The James Moody Quartet, ‘We Three’ w/ Dave Liebman & Steve Swallow, Eliane Elias Trio, ‘Playing in Traffic’ w/ Steve Swallow & Ohad Talmor and also busy maintaining an active freelance schedule. Adam has taught as an Adjunct professor at New York University, the New School and State University of New York at Purchase. He also does clinics and master classes around the world.

One of the most striking qualities of Mike Bond’s superb debut recording, The Honorable Ones, is the understated, sophisticated way in which the 30-year-old pianist-composer subsumes his abundant technique for imperatives of beauty and self-expression. His sophisticated, restrained, nuanced jazz aesthetics — grounded in exhaustive study of antecedent master practitioners of his instrument and animated by his devotion to the freedom principle — spring directly from his personal history.

​The son of a Caucasian physics professor and a first-generation Chinese-American stay-at-home-mom whose parents migrated to the U.S. after the Cultural Revolution, Bond started playing piano at age 4. Two years later, he won his first classical piano competition at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, launching a long period during which he participated in contests at which he and his peers played repertoire by Beethoven, Bach, Mendelssohn, and Haydn. Burned out by the pressure of performing, he withdrew from that world at 11.

​“When I was 5, my focus was on not messing up in front of my parents and all these people I didn’t know,” Bond recalls. “I wasn’t enthralled with the creative aspect of music. I had a strict teacher who directed us to interpret a piece of music exactly as he felt it should be interpreted – ‘Get loud here, get soft here, watch the phrasing here.’ I didn’t get what interpretation was until I quit and discovered Chopin’s music on my own, and learned what the word ‘rubato’ was. Then I felt I had more autonomy when faced with written music — I can flex tempo, create my own dynamics.”

​His jazz education began soon thereafter, as a saxophonist in middle school and high school jazz band near Princeton, N.J., where his parents had moved from Old Bridge, N.J., where he spent his first ten years. “I played saxophone, clarinet and sang in various ensembles — the orchestra, the studio jazz band, wind ensemble, concert choir and marching band,” Bond says. “But when I was 14, my freshman year of high school, the band director needed a jazz piano player for his ensemble, and I was struggling with the chord changes.”

​To rectify the issue, Bond was sent to study with pianist Jim Ridl (best known for his long association with Pat Martino), who lived in a neighboring town. “I was mesmerized by Jim’s playing,” Bond says. “I wondered how he could just improvise. He introduced me to my first jazz records. Jim gave me the basic tools — the forms, the basic tools of improvisation, the building blocks.”

​After high school, Bond matriculated at Rutgers University, where he studied with Stanley Cowell. “Stanley taught me to embrace music as ‘a mirror of the mind, and the piano as an extension of myself.” “He helped me see the piano as the whole orchestra and shared with me his innovative methods for approaching counterpoint and harmony” he says.

​“I also would go to New York to study with Mike LeDonne, because I wanted to actually learn how to play in the be-bop and hard-bop styles.   As a sophomore, I realized I wasn’t swinging and I had to figure out how. Then I realized that I had to check out the history; I couldn’t understand what Herbie Hancock does until I understood what Red Garland and Wynton Kelly were doing. With Mike, I really studied, the older cats and the newer cats who embodied the bebop and hard-bop language;  those who created it and those who wielded it at the highest level: Bud Powell, Hank Jones’, Barry Harris, Ahmad Jamal, and Kenny Barron, Mulgrew Miller. They embody to me what it means to play this music at the highest level.”

​During his time at Rutgers, where he received the Excellence in Jazz Performance Award and the Arthur G. Humphrey award for Music Education, Bond met Orrin Evans, who serves as Artistic Producer of The Honorable Ones. Evans took the younger pianist under his wing, and sustained their mentoring relationship when Bond moved to the East Harlem neighborhood of New York City after graduating in May 2012 with a Bachelor's of Music Degree in both Jazz Performance and Music Education. In addition to periodically hiring Bond to play piano in his Captain Black Big Band, Evans recommended him to bass maestro Curtis Lundy, who hired Bond for his first New York engagement. Meanwhile, Bond spent two years working for SmallsLIVE, the imprint of Smalls Jazz Club, where he learned to produce albums and video-edit, while meeting numerous musicians, promoters and producers.

​These days, Bond — who moved back to Central New Jersey in North Brunswick — boasts a c.v. that includes shows with the magisterial tap dancer Savion Glover, Latin projects led by trombone giant Conrad Herwig, and hardcore jazz gigs with masters like saxophonists Mark Gross, Joe Ford and Bruce Williams and trumpeters Joe Magnarelli and Duane Eubanks. He is a featured sideman on guitarist Jean Chaumont’s debut album “The Beauty Of Differences” which received a 4 star review in Downbeat Magazine.

​As a leader, Bond has performed at Smalls and Mezzrow, as well as the Central Jersey Jazz Festival, the Canadian Music Festival in Toronto, and the New York City Winter Jazz Festival. He’s music director at the non-denominational Jacob’s Well Church in New Brunswick, N.J., and is a Community Advisory Board member for the award winning jazz station 88.3 WBGO.

​He’s also conducted and music-directed shows for a variety of New Jersey-based theater companies including the Mighty Oak Players, Livingston Avenue Theater Company, McCarter Theater's Summer Program, ReThink Theatrical and Pinnworth Productions. He won a state wide NJACT Perry Award in Outstanding Musical Direction in 2017.

​Ancillary to his activity in the musical theater world, in which he became involved while at Rutgers, Bond also works several days a week playing for singers at their lessons and providing vocal coaching. “I talk about the character, the phrasing, making organic choices, bridging the gap between music and acting, and I reinforce what their teachers have taught them technique-wise,” Bond says. ​

​“One thing I haven’t liked about these audition situations, where the singer puts the music in front of you and the piano player plays, is that it’s not a collaboration. It’s about sight-reading. So my challenge is: How musical can I be with a piece that I’ve never seen before? How quickly can I hear and embrace melodies I’ve never played before and how much more musical do I need to be with a piece that I’m familiar with? I think my tendency — and a lot of piano players — sometimes is to show your chops, especially when you’re being recorded. For my first record, I instead decided I wanted to create emotion within melody. That was an intentional desire — to create emotion within melody.” - Ted Panken

​

Based out of Astoria, NY, Steve Kortyka is an accomplished mulit-instrumentalist, composer, educator and full time performer. He is a main member of the Brian Newman Quintet/Quartet, one of NYC's modern working bands holding multiple residencies throughout the city. Since graduating from the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music in 2004, he has been a full time performer and musical director in a wide variety of different settings including small group, big band and show band acts.

The Grammy Award Winning albums 'Cheek to Cheek' (2014) and 'Tony Bennett Celebrates 90' (2016) feature Steve's arranging work on 'Firefly', 'I Can't Give You Anything But Love', 'Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered' and 'La Vie En Rose'. Steve is also featured performing an improvised solo on Irving Berlin's classic "Let's Face the Music and Dance." The superstar duo will be releasing a tribute album to Cole Porter entitled 'Love for Sale' in the Fall of 2021 that will also feature the Brian Newman Quartet on 4 of the tracks as well as improvised solos throughout the record.

Under his own name, Steve has released several albums as a band leader and continues to perform in a variety of groups throughout the NYC area and beyond. Although primarily a saxophonist, he is versatile on many different instruments and uses this knowledge to bring something truly unique to every collaboration. Be on the lookout for new recorded material in the near future as there are always projects in the works.

In 2019 the Brian Newman Band began an ongoing seasonal residency at the Nomad Hotel in Las Vegas. Being in the heart of the Las Vegas Strip, this has drawn the opportunity to share the stage with not only some of Las Vegas' finest performers, but touring titans like Lady Gaga, Ashanti, Robbie Krieger, Emily King, Tennessee Jet, Tim Stewart, Michael Lington (to name a few) and many more to come.

​

In addition to being a full time performer, Steve is also an avid teacher of improvisation and composition. As a teacher in the Better Sax Studio alongside brilliant saxophonist and YouTuber Jay Metcalf, he has had the opportunity to reach hundreds of students monthly and share his musical expertise first hand on this new and innovative platform designed by Jay. In addition to the BetterSax Studio, Steve has reached thousands by providing educational content on YouTube, Downloadable PDFs, as well as in person and online Masterclasses.

​

Steve exclusively plays Boston Sax Shop Reeds, SYOS (Shape Your Own Sound) mouthpieces and is endorsed by Yamaha, Applied Microphone Technologies, Earthquaker Devices and Keyleaves.