St. Charles native jazzed up about music career
While a student at St. Charles North High School, jazz pianist Josh Moshier began to think seriously of playing music professionally.
Today, five years after graduating, he's living his dream.
"It feels great," Moshier said. "I'm so grateful for the opportunities I've gotten, and I hope I can make the most of them."
Moshier's debut record, "Joy Not Jaded," came out at the end of October, and it recently completed a three-week stint on the Top 200 Jazz Week national radio airplay charts.
The album is a collaboration between Moshier and saxophonist Mike Lebrun, a friend whom Moshier met while the two were at Northwestern University.
Moshier said he and Lebrun tried to compose music that displays the same songcraft you'd find on a good pop or rock record. He believes it will appeal even to those who don't normally dig jazz music.
"The idea is that we wanted to create tuneful, melodic music," Moshier said. "Sometimes people who are new to jazz will listen and say that it all sounds the same. We wanted each song to have its own identity. We didn't want any to be long-winded. In that sense, we took kind of a pop approach."
Moshier grew up loving jazz masters like Keith Jarrett, Bill Evans and Bud Powell, but he also loves groups from the pop end of things: the Beatles, Paul Simon, Radiohead.
"For me, it all comes down to liking good songwriting," he said.
Moshier met the other musicians who play on "Joy Not Jaded" at Northwestern, too. (Moshier graduated from there with a music degree in 2008.) The musicians started performing together as a group in 2007, and have spent countless hours on stage together.
Their record, recorded in April after a series of live gigs in the San Francisco Bay area, has been released on Seattle-based oa2 records, home to up-and-coming jazz talent from all over the country.
"It's so cool to get a chance on a label like that," Moshier said. "There is lots of Chicago-area talent on the label, so it feels like a second home."
Moshier, Lebrun and the band will play songs from "Joy Not Jaded" at 2 p.m. Dec. 13 at The Green Mill, a legendary jazz club in Chicago's Uptown neighborhood.
"It's such a fantastic room, and you can really tap into the history," Moshier said. "We love playing there."
Making a career in music is difficult, especially in a culture where so many consumers expect music to be free, Moshier said. He supplements his jazz composing and playing with a variety of pay-the-bills day jobs - all of them, fortunately for Moshier, music-related.
"We're just starting, obviously, but it's clear that it's a tough business," he said. "Still, we've had the opportunity to play music in a lot of different places with some incredible musicians. That's pretty amazing."