Home » Jazz Musicians » Ian Buss
Ian Buss
Saxophonist/Composer/Educator Ian Buss is a collaborative musician rooted in jazz and blues. He toured the United States with Grammy-nominated singer Sugaray Rayford, including headliner performances at festivals such as Bluesapalooza, Columbia Pike Blues Festival, and Big Bull Falls Blues Fest. The Sugaray Rayford Band was nominated for Band of the Year at the 2019 Blues Music Awards. Ian has also shared the stage with jazz trumpeters Gilbert Castellanos and Jon Faddis, Blues legend Buddy Guy, Afro-Cuban percussionist Bobby Sanabria, and Brazilian vocalist/composer Luciana Souza.
In 2019, he founded the band Blue Morpho and formally joined contemporary chamber ensemble SWARMIUS. Both groups’ music addresses human rights and other contemporary social issues.
Passionate about music education, Ian has run his own private lesson studio since 2009 and has 4 years of online education experience. He taught individual lessons at Palomar College, directed ensembles at the Young Lions Jazz Conservatory, and conducted jazz theory and woodwinds masterclasses at the UCSD Jazz Camp. He also served as Artist-In-Residence at Torrey Pines High School, where he taught improvisation and big band ensemble skills, and has coached beginners at public elementary schools.
Ian is currently a graduate student at New England Conservatory in Boston. He earned his BFA from The New School for Jazz & Contemporary Music and participated in the prestigious Banff Centre’s Workshop for Jazz & Contemporary Music directed Vijay Iyer and Tyshawn Sorey.
Tags
Mike Thompson: 6th Avenue
by Jack Bowers
Composer and arranger Mike Thompson was in his mid-twenties when 6th Avenue, his debut album as leader of a big band, was recorded (in the mid-2020s) at Q Division Studios in Cambridge, Massachusetts, enlisting for the most part veteran Boston-area musicians whom Thompson had met and befriended while studying at the Berklee School of Music, from which he was graduated in 2021. Although Thompson names Bob Brookmeyer, Maria Schneider and Igor Stravinsky as role models, you would be ...
Continue ReadingSeulah Noh Jazz Orchestra: NOhMAD
by Jack Bowers
On her debut album, NohMAD, South Korea-born, New England-educated Seulah Noh is listed as composer, arranger and conductor. She could be described as “painter" too, as she uses her seventeen-piece orchestra (enlarged to twenty-one by strings on three numbers) as a palette on which to render sophisticated--and sometimes daring--portraits in sound that are generally progessive but seldom boring. Several impart an East Asian flavor, especially the three-movement Traveler's Suite, which presumably depicts Noh's long journey from Korea ...
Continue ReadingHenry Godfrey Jazz Orchestra: Attitude & Gratitude
by Jack Bowers
There are five songs on Attitude & Gratitude, drummer Henry Godfrey's Boston-based Jazz Orchestra's second album, and each one is a tribute to people, places or circumstances that have helped Godfrey grow as a musician and as a person. In order, they are “For McCoy" (honoring pianist McCoy Tyner and other jazz legends who have passed on); “Mad Max" (for the city [Washington, DC] in which Godfrey grew up); “Forgetting What Will Never Be" (for lost love and ...
Continue Reading
