If you want to play for jazz fans, you play jazz clubs. If you want to play for everyone, you’ve got to play everywhere. That is the lesson that Room3 has learned.
“We would play intimate venues like Indeed Brewing for three hours straight just to get our chops together,” pianist Eli Awada says on the jazz fusion quartet’s early dates.
Yet maybe even more formative for Room3 were the 90-minute sets played in front of 100 or so college kids at the Chop Shop, a house in Como where Awada incidentally happened to live.
“People would go nuts for it, and we would feed off that energy and pay attention to what was making them excited about purely instrumental music,” Awada says. “Their reaction shaped the way we continue to write.”
Awada and bassist Beck Madson played together at the U, where their jazz combo was an unlikely Battle of the Bands winner in 2021. They met drummer Colin Mitchell (aka RAWTWHYLAH—sound it out) while backing local singer Jada Lynn, where “we immediately clicked,” according to Awada.
Soon the trio was working through the standards together and bonding over their love for modern jazz innovators like Robert Glasper, Thundercat, and Kamasi Washington. They even got a chance to hang with Glasper at Bunker’s after one of his Dakota shows. “He was talking most of the time, telling stories from his time playing with the greats, how we should approach our musicianship,” Awada recalls.
Room3’s knack for acknowledging jazz tradition while seeking out innovation is apparent on Bill’s Garden, the debut album that the band released in April. “Of course the standards lay the groundwork,” he adds. “But hearing how modern players were taking that language and doing something different with it, we appreciated that.”
Though a trio, Room3 often works with other musicians— saxophonist Jovon Williams is all over Bill’s Garden, and they’ve been performing recently as a quartet with percussionist Evan Espinosa. But for their next album (which is “pretty much done compositionally,” according to the pianist) their sound will go down what Awada calls an "entirely new path."
With the addition of Mike Green on guitar, Room3 is likely to pursue more “classic jazz fusion with Allan Holdsworth vibes," Awada predicts, though he admits, "I really don’t know what it’s gonna sound like yet.” And that's how it's supposed to be with jazz.
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