The KASE Quartet recorded their upcoming album in the Dave Myers Performance Studio here at Blue Lake! The jazz quartet is comprised of Riley Kramer on drums, Miles Anderson on guitar, Tumaini Sango on organ, and Will Edwards on tenor and soprano sax. Sango has been with us a few times before, playing our piano and his keyboard, but he was especially interested in recording this album here because of our vintage Hammond C3, provided to the studio by Blue Lake’s longtime friend and faculty member (and phenomenal drummer) Tim Froncek, which was then carefully restored by our engineer Don Hoogeboom. There were some struggles with the unit during the session (it’s a lot of really old and somewhat fussy electronics), but Tumaini found the necessary work-arounds as we went.
Sango grew up in West Michigan and is now at Bowling Green State University, where he met the other players in the school’s Jazz Studies program. They came to our area in May and spent two days in the studio, with a lot of that time spent on getting acquainted with the Hammond, and some of the time enjoying the Manistee National Forest. Members of the band composed all but two of the eight tracks.
The group is releasing “The KASE Quartet” October 10 on major streaming platforms. You can see a video from that session here: https://youtu.be/mQmO5QDzh7Y
