“I was like, ‘What is all this crazy stuff? I’m not feeling that.’”
About an hour before he takes the stage alongside Charles Lloyd for a gig at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Reuben Rogers is reminiscing about the first time he heard the jazz legend: on tape, via a gift from a fellow Berklee student, saxophonist Teodross Avery. “You need to listen to some more music, man!” Avery told Rogers, as he shared cassettes with the young bassist whose love affair with jazz had begun only a few years prior. “Of course, I didn’t know then that I would wind up playing with him for 15 years,” Rogers says, laughing at the memory. “I revisited it as the years went on, and my ears opened up so much. I got it.”
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