Jazz saxophonist John Ellis has lived in New Orleans and New York City. He's been to Singapore, Germany, and seven countries in Africa.
On his new album, he makes reference to the first place that helped shape him as a musician — Cameron.
Ellis, son of the Rev. and Mrs. Stewart Ellis who now make their home in Clemmons, S.C., was born in Cameron and it was there he learned to play several different instruments. Also, he says, Cameron is where he fell in love with making music.
"I remember crying when my mom would try to make me practice," Ellis says. "I did get excited about it once I discovered ragtime, though."
Thanks to that excitement, the 28-year-old Ellis has become one of the nations top Jazz musicians.
He took second place this February at the Thelonious Monk Institute saxophone competition, and BET will televise the competition on June 30.
The album "Roots, Branches and Leaves" makes reference to Ellis' youth and family life in Cameron.
"The main concept of the record is to explore updated arrangements of folk songs that I heard from my family as a child,” Ellis says. “They are basically a part of the oral tradition of the American South, and as they are the first songs that I remember, they are a huge conscious and unconscious part of my musical identity."
His mother, Grace, encouraged him to play piano at about age 5. From there, he says he learned the clarinet at Cameron Elementary. Then, thinking the clarinet to be too feminine, he switched to the oboe.
"I thought it would be cool to play an instrument no one else played," Ellis says.
He started taking lessons from a bassoonist named Nancy Bondurant.
"She helped me to start to take the whole music thing seriously," he says. Once in high school, Ellis says he followed in his artist brother's footsteps went to the North Carolina School of the Arts.
There he convinced them to let him switch to saxophone; something he says is very rare in the conservatory environment.
"I had decided by that point that I really wanted to try to play jazz." Ellis says. "I saw no future in that world with the oboe."
He only began playing saxophone seriously as a junior in high school.
After school, Ellis left North Carolina to live in the epicenter of the jazz world — New Orleans.
He attended the University of New Orleans for a year and spent as much time as possible playing.
"I took a risk and quit school for a while in order to try to get more experience playing professionally,” he says.
After that he began traveling the world with different jazz musicians. He toured Africa as part of a program called the Jazz Ambassadors. Ellis returned to find he had become a semi-finalist in the 1996 Monk Institute competition. He says, at the time, the competition seemed irrelevant to him.
"I didn't really plan or practice much then and I think that kept me from doing as well as I could have,” he says.
Ellis came back this year and did much better, he says, thanks to planning and hard work. Though, he's still not too serious about it.
"My only hope was that I would represent myself adequately and not buckle under the pressure," he says. "Music is not really an activity to be judged like the Olympics or a sporting event. It implies some kind of standard, where there really can be none."
At the '96 Monk Institute Competition, Ellis took in saxophonists from New York City playing in ways he'd never heard before. "New York continues to have the highest concentration of great improvising musicians," Ellis says. "I felt that if I had New York as a part of my experience, I would improve rapidly."
Except, for a one-year teaching stint in New Orleans, Ellis has lived in New York ever since.
"I never feel bored or complacent," he says. “You have to arrive with a sense of adventure and with a willingness to adapt and accept what comes."
Now, Ellis has completed school and earned a bachelor of fine arts degree. He says he is staying busy and playing with Charlie Hunter's Band.
He says playing with Hunter is his first priority.
"He plays a hybrid instrument with eight-strings that allows him to play guitar and bass simultaneously,” Ellis says. “It's worth checking out, as it's completely unprecedented, and mind-numbing in its improbability."
Though the "Roots, Branches and Leaves" album is his second release, it's in many ways a beginning. Like the figurative tree in the title, Ellis is ready to set roots and branch out.
"I'm really hoping to boost my creative output in the next couple of years," Ellis says, "as I'm starting to feel more settled in myself as a player and a writer."
