The proliferation of world-class female jazz instrumentalists has led, rather predictably, to a rise in relationships in which both musicians are elite players. But there’s no power couple quite like drummer Darrell Green and Camille Thurman, a sensational vocalist and a glass-ceiling shattering saxophonist.
Of course every marriage is its own world, but the Oakland-reared Green, who’s thrived on the New York scene for more than two decades, and Thurman, a native New Yorker who grew up in Queens, have met the challenges that come with the peripatetic jazz lifestyle with particular grace and style.
The Darrell Green Trio with special guest Camille Thurman plays a series of gigs this weekend, including Oct. 25 at the SJZ Break Room and Oct. 26 as part of the Adventures In Jazz at the San Ramon Library series. They finish the run with an afternoon concert at Piedmont Company Oct. 27, and all three shows feature “two of my favorite players in the Bay Area, bassist Ron Belcher and pianist Matt Clark,” Green said.
“We’ve got a lot of material to draw from because we have multiple projects out,” he added. “There’s a Burt Bacharach project, a Horace Silver project, originals, arrangements of standards, and a Max Roach/Abbey Lincoln tribute” that draws from the legendary drummer’s civil-rights-movement supporting work with his vocalist wife.
Thurman’s billing as a special guest with Green’s trio reflects the fact that she’s back in the Bay Area Feb. 15-16 to perform four shows solely under her own name at the SFJAZZ Center’s Joe Henderson Lab. For that engagement she’s working with a quintet featuring Green and rising trumpet star Wallace Roney Jr. (son of the late trumpet great Wallace Roney and the late piano genius Geri Allen).
Sitting side-by-side at home in New York City on a recent video call, the couple talked about how their relationship flowed almost imperceptibly out of a friendship forged via late-night hangs at jam sessions and clubs around the city. He made a powerful first impression on and off the bandstand in 2012 when Thurman and her best friend, saxophonist Yunie Mojica, ventured into the West Village club Smalls “and the session was kind of OK,” she said. “We hung around and saw this well-dressed guy get on the drums and it went from so-so to whoa! He flipped that sucker.”
Used to being ignored by the guys or mistaken for singers despite carrying their saxophones with them, the women were further impressed when Green stopped by their table.
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“He said he was so happy to see us with our horns, and that if you needed anything let him know,” Thurman said. “We were trying to be hard, like we had to keep our guard up, and he was really nice to us. That was weird.”
They bumped into each other again and again on the scene, and became close friends. Far more established than Thurman when they met — Green was already working with guitar maestro Russell Malone — he helped her find her path, which was sometimes tricky given her expansive skill set. Eventually, the friendship segued into a romance, and they started planning most of their gigs together.
They were on a State Department-sponsored tour in West Africa in early 2018 when she got a call from saxophonist Walter Blanding Jr., a 25-year member of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. He was thinking of taking a year off, and in talks with Wynton Marsalis about a replacement “we thought you’d be the best person to ask,” she recalled him saying.
“Oh man. I’m thinking we’ve got all this stuff booked through the end of the year. I went to Darrell and said, ‘We need to talk. I just got asked to join Lincoln Center, starting in the fall season for about a year or so.’ His first answer was, ‘You should do it. We can work this out.’”
She took the gig, and a one-year engagement turned into two, making her the first women to join the orchestra as a full-time member. She didn’t have much big band experience, let alone in a “well-oiled engine that moves and breathes together, with ears on guard for every little detail” after 30 years of playing together, she said.
She expected and embraced the challenge. “I love situations that put me on my toes as a player,” Thurman said. What she hadn’t anticipated was “the impact it would make. Young women from all over the world messaging me, pouring their hearts out. I realized this is so much bigger than me trying to play the music.”
Contact Andrew Gilbert at jazzscribe@aol.com.
DARRELL GREEN TRIO
Performing with Camille Thurman
When & where: 8 p.m. Oct. 25 at SJZ Break Room in San José; $27; sanjosejazz.org; 7:30 p.m. Oct. 26 at San Ramon Library, $33-$36; sanramonjazz.org; 5 p.m. Oct. 27 at Piedmont Piano Company in Oakland; $30-$35; piedmontpiano.com