Every regional area across the U.S. has its own inherent musical riches. From Biloxi to Boston, from Memphis to Monterey, from St. Louis to San Louis Obispo and all points in between, there are cats who can play. They are inspired emissaries for jazz, upholding age old traditions while raising the bar on expectations by daring to express themselves in personal, undiluted terms. And jazz fans everywhere are all the richer for their efforts.

Bassist Drew Phelps is one such musician. In the niche of northern Texas, around the area surrounding the University of North Texas in his hometown of Denton, Phelps is widely regarded as one of THE cats. A solid, seasoned player with a wealth of impressive credits over the past two decades, he demonstrates an unerring sense of time and intonation that is particularly reminiscent of his biggest bass influence and musical mentor, Dave Holland. Phelps is also an accomplished composer and bandleader with a mature, fully realized aesthetic, as he reveals on his debut release as a leader, Round To It.

While Drew Phelps has been the bassist of choice for a number of jazz artists traveling through the Denton area, the release of Round To It is bound to bring him greater acclaim as a composer.

Born in Dallas in 1956, Drew was initiated into the world of music at an early age when his father brought home instruments for him and his twin brother. "I got a bass guitar and David got a guitar," he recalls. (Brother David has been successfully plying his trade in New York in various blues and jazz bands).

Their early excursions in ear training led to the great American tradition of garage jam bands. "There was a guy in the neighborhood who taught us how to play songs, and that's what started us playing improvised music," says Drew. "He turned us onto the Allman Brothers and Freddie King when we were in junior high. So me and David used to take stuff off of their records and then get guys to play it with us in the garage."

Although Drew had played tuba in junior high, he got more into playing rock & roll and blues in high school and naturally let the tuba go. After graduating from high school, he enrolled at North Texas State University, where he was introduced to the string bass. "I was an electric bass player up to that point," he says. "I had never really heard much string bass before that. Occasionally I'd go over the University to hear lab band concerts. At that time the electric bass wasn't considered an instrument in university jazz circles so I started playing string bass: and now I've got a little bit of a niche being one of the guys around town who's a good string bass player."

Drew's recording credits to date include sessions with Texas-based groups like Little Jack Melody and MC 900-Foot Jesus as well as breakout artists like Sarah Hickman (1988's Take it Like a Man) and the Dixie Chicks (1990's Thank Heavens for Dale Evans). But some of his most rewarding sideman work came under the tutelage of veteran Texas jazz musicians like saxophonists James Clay and Nuradeen Fameen during the early '80s.

"Doing that really turned my head around because the only thing I knew about jazz up to that point was what I had learned at North Texas State," says Drew. "What they were talking about was totally different that what they were talking about at North Texas. It had nothing to do with reading music. It was just about playing what you were hearing."

His two-year stint with Fameen at a small club on the south Dallas border called The Professionals Club was especially rough. "It was one of those situations where he would yell at you every time you time you made a mistake. And I used to think, 'If I can get to where this guy's not yelling at me, I'll probably have something."

It was on that gig that Drew met saxophonist James Clay, an associate of Ornette Coleman's in the 1950s. Their collaboration led to a regular gig at The Recovery Room from 1981 to 1983, near the end of the saxophonist's life. "Clay was another one of these old school guys who was totally into this idea of 'Play what you hear.' And he wouldn't hesitate to yell that at you on the bandstand. He was mysterious, an eccentric kind of guy, but a great player with a charismatic sound. And the funny thing about him was, when you'd get on the gig with him he would not play his ass off unless everybody else was playing their ass off too. It's like he had an 'on' switch for that. He could either be just another guy up there holding a saxophone or he could be the baddest saxophone player on the planet. But unless everybody else was playing to the best of their ability and really being on their game, he'd just coast. With James, you didn't get the $500 show for $75 unless everybody else was really throwing down."

Following his bit of dues paying with James Clay, Phelps received a full tuition scholarship in the summer of 1984 to attend the School of Fine Arts at the Banff Centre in Canada. It was there that he met bassist Dave Holland. In 1987, Drew received a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Fellowship to study privately with Holland. In retrospect, he says of the intensive period of study, "I learned more from him in three months than the whole North Texas experience. It was a lot about really getting into playing what you're hearing, being instantaneous with it…like snapping your fingers or talking. It was a zen kind of thing."

More recently, Drew had been rehearsing and playing with the great avant garde jazz drummer Roland Shannon Jackson, a Fort Worth native who has recently returned to his Texas roots after a lengthy stay in New York City.

"I was going over to his house once a week for well over a year and playing with him, and that was pretty much all electric bass," say Drew. "It was a real cool experience, learning about that whole harmelodic thing, which was a whole new way of playing for me."

In putting together The Drew Phelps Group, the bassist has culled from all of his rich musical experiences and come up with a unique statement that is at once connected to the jazz tradition while extending it. That personal expression can be heard on Round To It.

Bill Milkowski, February 2000