ORANGE BEACH, Ala. — The Coastal Arts Center of Orange Beach and Friends of the Arts will present “A Smooth Jazz Evening Under the Stars” on Thursday, Oct. 1, under the tent at the Coastal Arts Center, 26389 Canal Road.
The evening features Gino Rosaria on piano with special guest David Jones on trumpet.
Tickets
General admission is $20. VIP admission is $25 and includes one drink ticket.
Tickets can be purchased by calling 251-981-ARTS (2787) or by stopping by the Coastal Arts Center.
Gino Rosaria
Rosaria, who is based in Mobile, is equally at home with jazz standards, smooth jazz and Latin jazz.
His band, Groove Symphony, features top-tier jazz artists drawn from the Gulf Coast, Los Angeles, Atlanta and New York City — a roster that reflects how the jazz world actually operates. Working players move between markets, and a bandleader with a long career assembles musicians from wherever the right players happen to be.
Rosaria also operates G Sharp Studio in Mobile, which puts him on both sides of the music: performing and recording.
David Jones
Jones’s path to the trumpet stand runs through a Birmingham band, a middle school gym and a church sanctuary.
A Fairfield native, Jones attended college on a music scholarship and played with the Birmingham-based Cornerstone Band before moving to Gulf Shores in 1999. There he taught physical education and coached middle school football while also serving as worship leader at First Baptist Church of Loxley.
Rosaria played on Jones’s album “Beautiful Music,” which was partly recorded at Rosaria’s G Sharp Studio in Mobile — which means Thursday’s pairing is not a first meeting but a continuation of an existing collaboration.
The soul jazz trumpeter and vocalist now lives in Jacksons Gap.
A Working Musician’s Career
Jones’s résumé is a useful portrait of how most professional musicians in the South actually make a life in music.
The full-time touring career is the exception, not the rule. The far more common arrangement is the one visible here: a day job that uses the same skills or the same schedule — teaching, coaching, church music direction — combined with performance work that continues across decades. Church worship leadership in particular has functioned as a training ground and a steady platform for generations of Southern musicians, and the musical literacy it demands is considerable.
The result is a regional scene sustained by people who are neither amateurs nor full-time performers, but working musicians with a broad set of commitments.
Smooth Jazz as a Format
Smooth jazz occupies a particular place in the American music landscape. It emerged as a radio format in the 1980s, built around melodic, groove-oriented instrumental music that drew on jazz harmony while emphasizing accessibility over improvisational complexity.
Purists have long debated its relationship to the broader jazz tradition. What is less debatable is that it has sustained a durable audience and a circuit of performance opportunities, particularly for outdoor and festival settings where the music functions well in the open air.
A piano-and-trumpet configuration under a tent on an October evening on the Gulf Coast is close to the ideal setting for it.
The Coastal Arts Center
The Coastal Arts Center of Orange Beach sits on Canal Road along Wolf Bay. The facility houses working studios — including clay and hot glass — a gallery, and event space, and it serves as a hub for visual arts programming in the southern end of Baldwin County.
Friends of the Arts, the center’s supporting organization, partners on programming of this kind. Concerts and performance events broaden the center’s role beyond the visual arts and bring audiences onto the grounds who might not otherwise visit a gallery.
October on the Gulf Coast
The timing is well chosen. October along the Alabama coast brings the first reliable relief from summer heat and humidity, and outdoor evening events become comfortable in a way they simply are not in July or August.
It is also the beginning of the shoulder season, when the summer crowds have gone and the coastal communities return to something closer to their year-round rhythm — a period local arts organizations regularly use for programming aimed at residents rather than visitors.
If You Go
What: A Smooth Jazz Evening Under the Stars
Who: Gino Rosaria on piano, with special guest David Jones on trumpet
When: Thursday, Oct. 1
Where: Under the tent at the Coastal Arts Center, 26389 Canal Road, Orange Beach
Tickets: $20 general admission; $25 VIP, including one drink ticket
Information: 251-981-ARTS (2787), or in person at the Coastal Arts Center