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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Spokane’s Ryan Keberle and Reverso plan night of chamber jazz at the Bing

Reverso, featuring pianist Frank Woeste, left, Ryan Keberle on trombone, center, and Vincent Courtois on cello, will perform at the Bing Crosby Theater in Spokane on Thursday and at the Kembrough Concert Hall at WSU in Pullman on Oct. 28.  (GEORGE B WELLS)

Reverso is a trio that is equally at home in the world of chamber music as it is in the world of jazz.

Featuring Spokane native Ryan Keberle on trombone, German-born pianist Frank Woeste, now based in Paris, and French cellist Vincent Courtois, Reverso is coming to the Inland Northwest for shows in Spokane and Pullman next week.

The New York-based Keberle last performed in Spokane in 2019 with his jazz group Catharsis.

“The two couldn’t be more different,” Keberle said of Catharsis and Reverso. “Both are jazz. … When audiences listen to Reverso, they more often than not feel like they’re listening to a classical chamber music program, but the music is absolutely jazz because the three of us are jazz musicians. We were trained to make music using improvisation as a framework, the focal point.

“Reverso is chamber music played by jazz musicians, whereas Catharsis is kind of indie rock played by jazz musicians.”

The group began with a grant from to the French Embassy with the idea to explore the classical music of turn-of-20th-century Paris in the language of jazz. Reverso’s first record, 2018’s “Suite Ravel,” explored the music of Maurice Ravel, followed by “The Melodic Line,” featuring music of “Les Six,” an early 20th century collective of French composers, including Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, Arthur Honegger, and Germaine Tailleferre. Reverso put out a live record last year, recorded in Paris in 2020, the night before the world shut down, Keberle said.

Their new album, “Harmonic Alchemy,” comes out next week and features new compositions by all three band members inspired by the music of Gabriel Faure.

The combination of jazz and classical is not as odd a pairing as it might sound. While he comes from a jazz family – his father, Dan Keberle, ran the jazz program at Whitworth University until he retired earlier this year – Keberle’s own history with the trombone is firmly rooted in the classical world, dating back to his time in the Mead High School Wind Ensemble, the Spokane Youth Symphony and regional competitions.

“My background as a trombonist draws just as much from classical music as it does from jazz, maybe even more so when it comes to my education and upbringing,” he said. “I went to school to study jazz, but since I graduated, many gigs that I’ve done have centered around the classical music tradition, whether it was recordings for movie soundtracks or television shows with orchestras, whether it was Broadway shows that were more classically leaning, whether it was playing an Easter gig with a brass quintet at a church, there are so many examples. For me as a bandleader Reverso is the first group that I’ve co-lead … that allows me as a performer to draw from my classical musical language on the trombone.”

This tour with Reverso, which includes stops in Seattle and Bellingham as well as a swing through California and, later, Europe, will include a lot of music from the new record, Keberle said. The band’s stop in Spokane will also include a workshop Thursday afternoon at Music City.

It’s all part of a busy post-pandemic life for Keberle.

“Things really re-opened with a bang this past winter, and basically gigs from the past couple of years that had been canceled were rescheduled, between February and now, basically,” he said. “It was like making up for lost time. I’m not complaining.”

Looking ahead, he has a full slate, with teaching and running the jazz program at Hunter College in New York City, and working with trombone students at the Manhattan School of Music, his alma mater. He also has a big band that plays in New York that he’s hoping to record with, and possibly more music from Catharsis. He’ll be sitting in with the “Saturday Night Live” band a couple times in November, and he hopes to record more music with Reverso in the spring.

He’s staying quite busy, and live audiences are coming back, albeit slowly.

“I would say that’s maybe the one component that has yet to really fully return,” he said. “It depends on the event and the region and the venue. We just did a show with Maria Schneider’s orchestra up in Harvard and it was packed. So that was a really nice thing to see.”