Quentin Baxter helps bring together ensemble, CSO members

Quentin Baxter is a different breed of cat. He's a percussionist, composer/arranger and producer who operates at the highest level of pursuit and accomplishment.

On Friday and Saturday, many of his attributes will come into play at Memminger Auditorium, site of the Charleston Symphony Orchestra's McCrady's Pops concert.

Baxter is leonine in appearance and essence. His long, flowing dreads can distract from the array of skills he possesses. On the performance level, he plays all the forms, mostly jazz. He started playing music at home, in church, then school. By his own account, he can't remember a time he wasn't a musician.

On Friday, he's poised to unleash with his partners in time a torrent of European classical music and American classical music: symphonic and jazz, sometimes separately, sometimes together.

This is the brainchild of Baxter, guest conductor Edwin Outwater and Tony Pierce, CSO artistic operations director. Baxter has put together a quintet with four of his favorite colleagues to form for the occasion Quentin Baxter and Friends, a jazz ensemble that will perform with various configurations from the CSO.

The group includes trumpeter Charlton Singleton, saxophonist Mark Sterbank, pianist Tommy Gill and acoustic bassist Kevin Hamilton.

Significant players and soloists from the CSO include Yuriy Bekker (concertmaster), Alan Molina, Norbert Lewandowski, Michael Smith, Brandon Nichols, Tom Joyce, Charlie Messersmith, Jessica Hull-Dambaugh, Ryan Leveille, Beth Albert,

Michael Halderman and Tom Bresnick, who also plays jazz bass around town.

Composers whose works will be showcased include J.S. Bach, Duke Ellington, Maurice Ravel, Max Roach/M'Boom and Thelonious Monk.

By all accounts, Baxter is up to the task.

"Q seems to me a very solid musician. In our conversations, he seems knowledgeable about anything in the classical world that I know enough to bring up," says John Dinkelspiel, a former CSO director and friend and colleague of Baxter's. "I was much impressed to find a book of piano etudes by Scriabin on his piano at his home -- not your everyday stuff, and certainly no easy thing to play."

Baxter composes on the drum kit and the piano.

Dinkelspiel and his wife, Barbara Burgess, executive produced the CD "Seeking" in 2008 that was inspired by a painting by Jonathan Green and engineered and co-produced by Baxter.

Baxter has performed with the CSO before, but he said this show is different. He was the featured artist in 2007 in CSO's Out of the Box Series with then-Conductor Scott Terrell.

Outside of performance, his musical aesthetic and ideas play a large part in this program.

"Tony Pierce and I, along with San Francisco-based guest conductor Edwin Outwater, have combed through quite a number of major works, and we came up with what we consider to be favorites in both jazz and symphonic hemispheres of this 'music world,' " Baxter said. "As a matter of fact, one of Edwin's major concerns was the 'flow/feel' of the concert."

Says Outwater: "It was fun in this case because I really haven't done anything like this before. It's a new kind of feel for a jazz-orchestra program."

Interestingly, Baxter and Outwater knew each other before this project. "I met Quentin in San Francisco through a mutual friend, former CSO bassist and now SFS principal bassist Scott Pingel," Outwater said. "When the CSO contacted me for the concert, I don't think they knew that we had already met!"

Baxter also has a historical perspective on the project. He's motivated, too.

"Charleston has always attracted and cultivated great musicians and deserves to have a chance to appreciate them in many different ways. However, she (Charleston) needs to be made aware of its potential experiences, artistically speaking, and proud of it. We, as artists, should continue finding ways to collaborate and present wonderful experiences that would make this an undeniable fact."

Dinkelspiel shares Baxter's belief that this concert is good for the local arts scene.

"Quentin is certainly as fine a musician as we have in town, it seems to me," Dinkelspiel says, "and I think that he will be a revelation to much of the CSO audience, many of whom I am suspect have never heard him play.

"But I think we are all going to have a treat because this is something new for us in Charleston. I think the significance of this event is that, up to now, two separate musical worlds in Charleston are beginning to explore the artistic possibilities of collaboration."

Jack McCray is a freelance writer in Charleston. Contact him at jackjmccray@aol.com.