As it turns out, it was a great place to start a band. That band started out playing in Portland, Oregon, which was great because there were a lot of really great places to play. Jeff Lorber: Well, I should give you a little background to that. He even tells a great joke!Īll About Jazz: Although we all know you as an instrumental artist, I was just thinking back this morning of you being on American Bandstand with Dick Clark many years ago with a vocalist. In the following recent conversation, we talked about the variances and commonalties of his fusion endeavors, the ups and downs of his career, his fun and musical childhood, his life-threatening medical condition, his new and exciting project with Mike Stern, and much more. His band, Jeff Lorber Fusion, embraces an amalgamation of jazz and bebop genres that take the word fusion well beyond the standard perception of jazz/rock connectivity. Thus charting a course that has now spanned some forty years on the music scene. It would be too obvious to make a periodic element table pun here, so, of course, I won't do that.įortunately for music listeners, Lorber's love of music, coupled with his innate musical skills, won out over his pre-med courses. Seriously now, the chemistry that the Grammy winning multi-talented keyboardist, composer, and producer captures with his bandmates brings another element to the table. Perhaps more on his mother's side (that's a joke).
However, if the art of music can be further developed and shaped by scientific measures then Lorber resembles Albert Einstein. Lorber is far from mad, so okay, let's take that out of the equation. I don't know that anyone would confuse Jeff Lorber with a mad scientist, but you know, as they say, if the shoe fits.