We have to be able to do something musically that speaks to people that don’t speak the same language. –Jason Eckl
Every year, the San Jose Jazz Summer Fest pushes musical boundaries by booking diverse acts that break the mold of what listeners know as jazz music. The 2016 lineup is no exception. Soul, blues, and hip-hop artists add variety to a lengthy list of heavyweight jazz performers and rising stars. In spite of the seemingly vast genre gap between some of the artists, the San Francisco Bay Area’s own Dirty Cello is proof that all performers at the Summer Fest share a common respect for the jazz tradition.
Founding members Rebecca Roudman, cello, and Jason Eckl, guitar, have both established themselves as accomplished classical musicians in the Bay Area, playing and writing for the Santa Rosa and Oakland symphonies. As proficient as they are with classical music, the couple’s true passion lies in American folk and blues traditions. In 2011, they decided to channel their creative unrest into an experimental collaboration.
“We played around with all sorts of ideas,” Eckl recalls, “but now we’ve happened upon this whole mix of blues, jazz, a little bit of bluegrass—all featuring lead cello. Hence the name Dirty Cello.”
In addition to cello and guitar, Dirty Cello features Colin Williams on bass and Anthony Petrocchi on drums. The band, however, isn’t always limited to the quartet. Following the jazz and blues tradition, the couple believes in handpicking local players to supplement the quartet’s live shows. Whether these musical mercenaries consist of a few horn players or an entire orchestra, the couple makes sure they find people who “aren’t only great players, but nice people.”
Five years after Dirty Cello’s inception, the band has traveled as far as Europe and China. After experiencing a language barrier between the audience and the stage in other countries, Eckl learned, “We have to be able to do something musically that speaks to people that don’t speak the same language.” The band members’ expressive body language and the universality of the blues help them connect with both international and American audiences.
As Bay Area natives, the band has already graced multiple San Jose music hubs, including Café Stritch and the SoFA Festival. “We feel like we owe a lot to the Bay Area,” Eckl reflects. “There are still new horizons and new things to do.”
One way Dirty Cello gives back to their audience is their sensitive approach to their set list. At the drop of a dime, they can change their set based on audience response. “It’s not about us; it’s about sharing [the experience] with the audience,” says Roudman, who recognizes the need to adapt on the fly. This concept of a “flexible set list” will be put to the test during their August 14 performance at the Jade Leaf Lounge.
Their set promises to embrace the familiar sounds of blues and folk with an unfamiliar instrumentation. Listeners will leave saying, “I didn’t know a cello could do that!”
Jon Dryden is a pianist, composer, professor of Jazz Studies at SJSU, and one of the 2025 Jazz Aid Fund grantees, performing at the San Jose Jazz New Works Fest on March 7 in the SJZ Break Room. We had the chance to pick his artistic brain on topics from what inspires him, how he balances the demands of teaching with composing while still earning enough to live, and his hopes and dreams for the Bay Area jazz scene.
Producer Jesse Harris describes Dryden’s playing as “somewhere between Vince Guaraldi and Paul Bley.” Others have called it “melancholy with a touch of hope,” says Jon Dryden. We think it’s dreamy, emotional, and layered–like crying while sitting under a grand piano when you’re a kid but still feeling comforted by it.
Dryden says for the Break Room show, “I’m bringing in a few amazing musicians whom I love to work with from New York and Los Angeles. The performance will open with a new piece called “Circada” and will include the SJZ grant-commissioned piece, “That Would Be Telling,”
The ensemble features Dryden on piano, Ben Flocks on tenor saxophone, Scott Colberg on bass, and Benjamin Ring on drums.
Dryden says the title, ”That Would Be Telling,” is “from a key phrase in the British Classic Spy-Fi seriesThe Prisoner, a show I watched with my students. It’s one of the most amazing and influential TV shows ever made. The music in the show is excellent too.”
When describing his inspiration and process, he shares, “I love metaphors, especially when they are used in subtle ways that cross artistic and psychological disciplines. Concepts like these give me an unwritten emotional framework I can draw from musically.”
The television show presents an argument between the individual and the collective. “It asks, how much of each mode of thinking–collectivity and individuality– should exist in a society? Does a collective society lead to homogenization and surveillance states?”
Whether collective societies lead to homogenization remains to be seen. However, Dryden acknowledges that it’s nearly impossible to have a thriving jazz scene without one strong type of collective: community.
”I love what the SJZ Break Room isdoing, which is establishing a place to play, listen and mingle, he says.”
However, he admits that it can be tough to maintain the sense of community he experienced in New York, where most venues are located in a smaller geographic area.
“The Bay Area Jazz scene has many amazing musicians, but is so spread out that there’s no center where people can congregate.”
Community means so much, says Dryden, because “we need each other, and we need to be around people who are better musicians than us. What I would like to see much more of is more friendly competition–people kindly challenging one another to grow musically and to share ideas.” Without friendly competition, he says, creativity can falter.
A robust community not only provides a center of gravity where jazz-lovers and performers can congregate, commune, and compete, but it creates a place to network and radically imagine new possibilities. New possibilities inspire not only new works of art but also new music students, new venues, and new job opportunities–something sorely needed to sustain Bay Area musicians.
“The hyphenated life is a common career for most musicians,” says Dryden, referring to the multiple streams of income that he depends on in order to afford the cost of living in Aptos, to which he returned in 2010 to care for his dad after living and working for 19 years in New York City.
The way Dryden describes the New York City Jazz scene conjures up complex feelings, much like his compositions do. His words bring up feelings and images, like the melancholy yet intensely alive takes he gives to popular songs he covers, like Nirvana’s All Apologies. He mentions venues, all close to one another, in a relatively condensed space. Images of happy, dreamy couples and groups of people weaving their way into and out of vibrant jazz clubs all close together–“that’s hard to beat, even when you have small hubs like those in San Francisco and the East Bay,” Dryden explains.
Prior to returning to his native California, Dryden was “solely making a living as a performing musician/composer/arranger/producer. Since I moved back home to Aptos, I’ve added instructor and lecturer to those skills.”
Some working musicians, says Dryden, have their hands in a lot of pots because “many of us love a lot of different kinds of music.” No exception, he cites musical influences as diverse as Shostakovich, Scriabin, and Smith–Elliot Smith, that is. He also loves Prince. Dryden himself has collaborated with an impressive group of musicians–Michael Urbaniak, Patrice Rushen, and the Brecker Brothers, to name a few. He has recorded with several stratospheric megastars–Questlove, Norah Jones, David Byrne, Dave Chappelle, and John Mayer. And if those accomplishments weren’t remarkable enough, he has also composed for both Michael Moore and David Byrne–both heroes’ heroes.
He finds inspiration both in the incredible musicians he loves playing with and in his students. “They know a lot of things I don’t, and they have new music they’re listening to that I’m not aware of. I like to hear what they are into musically. Some of my students write pieces that aren’t anything like what I would come up with. I love to see that. Semi-consciously, I pick up their concepts and sometimes I work bits–no stealing, mind you. Just bits–into my compositions.“
While he wishes he could devote more time to composing, “teaching earns me more than half my income and consumes less time.” And still, he admits that he could not afford living in Santa Cruz County without his family house, where he lives. So, the multi-hyphenate grindlife continues, and while he doesn’t know the answer to the economic woes that drives musicians out of urban areas they can no longer afford, he does hope that “scenes will start to percolate in unexpected places.”
Dryden started piano lessons at five and began composing not long after. ”The compositions weren’t very good then, of course; but I have always associated performing and composing as one thing,” he says.
While he has strong ideas about composition and excellence, his view on interpreting music is more open-ended: “I like music to be whatever the listener wants it to be. One role a composer/songwriter can take on is making the personal universal.”
Check out the Jon Dryden Quartet at SJZ Break Room for New Works Fest, Friday, March 7 at 8p (Doors open at 7:30p). Tickets. Livestream.
