Members of the 5tet, from left: Jack Kilkelly-Schmidt, Eloi Pascual Nogué, Tobias Tammearu, Matteo Mazzu and Jake Victor.
Most college students who spend a semester studying abroad come home with warm memories and travel photos. Jazz pianist and percussionist Jake Victor came home with a career.
Victor, a native of Palatine, Illinois, was studying jazz performance and composition at Lawrence University in Appleton in 2017 when he and roommate Jack Kilkelly-Schmidt, a guitarist from Brooklyn, New York, had the chance to study at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam, part of Amsterdam University of the Arts and one of Europe’s leading jazz schools.
“On the second day after we arrived, the school hosted a student jam session at Brasserie Nel,” Victor says. “Jack and I arrived early, so we were picked to play first.”
Joining the two Americans on stage were Eloi Pascual Nogué, a drummer from Galicia, Spain, and Matteo Mazzu, an electric bassist from Brussels, Belgium. Something immediately clicked among the four of them, Victor says.
“We loved each other’s playing so much and had such a connection that we all immediately left the session to drink beer and get to know each other,” he says. “A few days later I met Estonian tenor saxophonist Tobias Tammearu at a school-organized small group session. I knew he was the type of player I needed when he brought a chair over and sat right next to the piano so he could hear my harmony clearly and [we could] listen and develop something together.”
The five young men became the Jake Victor 5tet and currently are playing gigs around the U.S., including a Sept. 6 date at the Arts + Literature Lab on Madison’s east side.
If building a group from scratch weren’t enough, two days before leaving Amsterdam the ensemble recorded an album, Twisted Heads, at K.E.M. Studios, tapping into Victor’s extensive library of original songs.
“When I was at Lawrence I was asked to compose something, so I wrote a piece,” says Victor, who graduated with Kilkelly-Schmidt from the school in 2018. “Then I wrote a song a day for 30 days, trying different things. I ended up with a lot of tunes I liked.”
Two of the album’s songs — “Salem” and “Call to Prayer” — helped the band win Best Undergraduate Small Jazz Group honors during Downbeat magazine’s 41st annual Student Music Awards.
Victor, who started out playing classical music, credits a host of diverse influences: trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire, Minneapolis trio The Bad Plus, pianists Keith Jarrett and Brad Mehldau, guitarist Bill Frisell and composers Steve Reich and Johann Sebastian Bach. Victor also serves as music director for Chicago hip-hop and soul artist B. Lilly, which adds those influences to the group’s music.
The group also leans heavily in the direction of South Indian Carnatic music, a subgenre of Indian classical music most often written for the voice, and especially makes use of konnakol, the art of performing percussion syllables vocally, as a way to alter Western musical time signatures.
“In the last project we took a lot of risks harmonically and melodically,” he says. “This time we’re bringing a ton of crazy rhythms to the table with beautiful harmonies over the top.”
With such wide and varied influences, is the Jake Victor 5tet really a jazz combo? Sometimes its creator is unsure.
“I waffle back and forth on what we play,” he says. “Jazz is a facet of what goes into it, but it’s not strictly ‘trad’ jazz. There’s bebop in it, but that’s not the primary emphasis.
“I guess we call it ‘modern jazz,’ but that’s the whole question, man.”
