Catching Up

James Zollar, “The Original JZ”

A couple of years ago I picked up a new CD called Sketch, by David Schnitter, the tenor saxophonist who was part of the Art Blakey group in the 1970s that included Bobby Watson, Valery Ponomarev, James Williams, and Dennis Irwin. There was a distinctive trumpeter on the date, a musician I did not recall hearing of before, named James Zollar.
In May, Charlton Price and I were at the Village Vanguard talking with someone about Kansas City, when a man turned and says, “You from Kansas City? I’m from Kansas City, too!” It turns out to be James Zollar.
James started on bugle, then moved to trumpet while growing up in Kansas City, where he was born in 1959. James recalls, “I got my first trumpet at Jenkins Music in downtown KC.” After high school he moved to San Diego, where he studied at San Diego City College and the University of California at San Diego. He then moved to San Francisco in 1972, studying with the late Woody Shaw and Bishop Norman Williams.
Since 1984 he has been in New York City. “I’ve been free lancing in New York since 1985 in a lot of different settings from David Murray, Don Byron, the Count Basie Orchestra, the Kansas City All-Star Band put together by Robert Altman for the movie Kansas City to very very avant-garde bands such as the violinist Billy Bang and his Aftermath project.”
He has also been a part of some of three great institutions in New York – the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, the Carnegie Hall Jazz Orchestra, and the Duke Ellington Orchestra. “This week I’m playing at the Blue Note here in NY with the Duke Ellington Orchestra. I’ve been with the band since 1983. Mercer Ellington (the son of Duke Ellington) had the band then now it is ran by Barrie Lee Hall. I just finished a major work with Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra called Congo Square. It came out on CD and DVD.”
The recording credits include his Soaring With Bird from 1998, as well as CDs with Cecil McBee, Sam Rivers, Tom Harrell, Don Byron, and Charles Tolliver’s outstanding With Love. And there are several dozen more; he’s clearly been one of the most in-demand trumpeters on the scene.
Though he moved from Kansas City thirty years ago, he has had the opportunity to get to know and play with some old friends. “I first met Will Matthews with Lonnie and Ronnie McFadden around 1973 or 1974. I use to sit in with them when I was in Kansas City visiting my parents.
“I don’t get back to KC much, but Bobby Watson and Gerald Dunn are trying to work on something to get me back. I’ve played with Don Byron there about five years ago. I have very fond memories of hanging out at Swope Park when I was a kid with my family on outings.”
“I would also like to pass along that my sister, Jawole
Willa Jo Zollar, is a well know choreographer. She studied modern dance at KU. She has a very well know dance troupe called the Urban Bush Women, based in NY.”
James has a MySpace page, www.myspace.com/jameszollartrumpet, and his discography can be found on AllMusic.com.

—Roger Atkinson