UW’s New Artist-in-Residence Ted Poor

Bill Frisell and Ted Poor. Photo by Steve Korn.

Young, acclaimed drummer Ted Poor begins this academic year as artist-in-residence at the University of Washington. His arrival adds to a scene of progressive jazz that’s grown around UW’s School of Music since trumpeter Cuong Vu, now department chair, joined in 2007.

Seattle listeners are likely to recognize Poor’s playing with the Cuong Vu Trio, in which he utilizes jazz melodic phrasing with a rock rhythmic basis. His performances are remarkable for their metronomic time, unexpected melodic turns and subtle details – last year, on a double bill with the Vijay Iyer Trio at Benaroya Hall with Vu’s Triggerfish, including bassist Eric Revis, and this spring, at the Chapel Performance Space in the UW student-run Improvised Music Project Festival. Poor’s taste for surprising accents and dynamic jumps elicit dramatic gasps from his audience.

Well-versed in straight-ahead playing and established in the New York jazz community, Poor’s notable collaborators include Bill Frisell, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Ben Monder, Chris Potter and Donny McCaslin. He has held residencies as guest soloist and educator at his alma mater, the Eastman School of Music, and at the Berklee College of Music, Cal Arts, Lawrence University, the HR Big Band of Frankfurt and Colorado University at Denver. UW is his next residency stop, and local musicians Luke Bergman, UW faculty bassist, and Vu are excited for his input. 

Emphatic, by email, Vu writes that Poor’s impact will be huge: “His intent and drive will be a great catalyst of things to come.”

Bergman, who’s worked periodically with Poor since 2009, emails that playing with Poor is an opportunity for learning, with Poor’s responses to Bergman’s playing so deep and nuanced that they reveal aspects of his performance even he wasn’t aware of. “In master classes and rehearsals, he always has some inventive and practical way of improving the music,” Bergman writes.

I caught up with Poor, eager to discuss his coming contribution to students in the UW jazz program. 

Poor believes that tradition can be imposed in a stifling way, and he wants to foster individual creativity alongside jazz conventions. He values musicians whose “ears and their emotions and their intuitions and their spirit are meticulously dictating the sound that they make on their instrument.” Music of any genre, as a personal, even vulnerable act, in Poor’s view, requires one to “have that sound deep inside of you.”

Poor found that sound deep inside of him early on. His parents took him to the Horace Silver Quartet at two years old, and he was infatuated with the drummer, immediately impersonating with pots and oatmeal containers at home. His parents bought his first snare drum at four, and he jammed with his dad on guitar through childhood. Near Rochester, he studied with Rich Thompson, whose credentials include the Count Basie Orchestra and the President’s Inaugural Ball.

Poor continued drums while enjoying a few other hobbies and a largely “normal” upbringing … until music school. He calls Eastman School of Music “a very safe place to experiment,” and shares that the teachers were great, but “the real education was all the playing that I did, both in school and out of school, with my fellow students.”

He performed four to six gigs a week for nearly his whole college career. This has impacted his educational values; he continues to view performing as the greatest learning experience. He explains: “The music has to be brought from the classroom to the bandstand and the public, where we can all have a shared experience together in one room.” 

The experience rotation served Poor well, as he was recruited by Cuong Vu before graduation. He’s worked with Vu consistently since then, but his other progressive projects include the acclaimed Respect Sextet and the dark Mt. Varnum, Poor’s newest group, combining his loves for swing and synthesized rock. Nevertheless, Vu has been his most consistent partner, and their work together has continued over a decade.

Vu moved from New York to Seattle in 2007 to teach at the UW. Now, Poor follows suit. He detects “a real feeling of deep potential” in the UW jazz program and looks forward to playing with the students.

Energy and enthusiasm condense in conversation with or about Ted Poor. He calls music a continual process of learning: “Every time you master one pattern or concept, a dozen more paths are revealed. I’ll be working on it for the rest of my life,” he says, with pleasure. “There’s no end point.” That may be good news for all of us.