Jon Irabagon Searches the Saxophone for the New and the Now, Alone and Together

Jon Irabagon, who performed with Mary Halvorson's Octet at the 2017 Chicago Jazz Festival, has also been featured with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, and with fellow saxophonist John Zorn. (Photograph by Stephanie Matthews)

Consumed with curiosity, the child’s eyes and mind absorbed his aunt’s hand movements as she played Chopin on the piano. How, he wondered, did she play different tempos at the same time? This fascination led him to play piano, before the alto saxophone attracted his attention in the fifth grade.

Three-plus decades later, this child, Jon Irabagon, has grown into an accomplished saxophonist, bandleader, and recording artist who has won the 2008 Thelonious Monk Saxophone Competition, performed in ensembles led by Mary Halvorson and Wynton Marsalis, and composed songs honoring Charles Barkley, the postal service, and one that brought 50-something cats together to create in the moment.

Irabagon, whose quartet performed at the 2024 Jazz Institute of Chicago’s Winter Jazz Fair, recently talked about every single thing from growing up three blocks from Great America in Gurnee, Illinois, to studying with Roscoe Mitchell, to having a song he wrote interpreted into a claymation video.

But before these issues came up, Irabagon acknowledged that his Filipino heritage on the creative music scene is uncommon and elicits numerous comments from observers.

“I have had students and fans come up to me after sets and say, ‘I wanted to play saxophone when I was growing up, but I’m Asian…and there was no one in high school I could look up to who was Asian or Filipino. I want to thank you for doing this, because you have given us a chance to say, ‘Yeah, I belong in this music, too,’” said Irabagon, who cited pianist Bobby Enriquez and drummer Danny Barcelona, who played with Louis Armstrong, as countrymen who influenced him. “I feel like it’s an uphill battle for all minorities in this culture. At this point in my career, I feel like there is a mission to be fulfilled to embrace the history of my family and try helping others that might benefit from my journey.”

Irabagon’s accomplishments resulted in him receiving a  Pamana ng Pilipino Award (Philippine Presidential Award) in 2014. According to a statement from the awards program, “…the President (Benigno S. Aquino III) recognizes his successful transformation of his musical talent into phenomenal successes in the recording industry, concert tours and jazz performances alongside the best of jazz professionals on the music scene and his generosity in guiding aspiring musicians to also become the best they can be.”

Irabagon B.C. (Before Cannonball)

Pre-journey priorities for Irabagon included video games and regular visits to Great America, where the Spinning Octopus, Iron Wolf, and the Shockwave became his worthy constituents. Then, one day, the band director at Warren Township High School, after noticing Irabagon’s talent/dedication deficit, hipped him to this album: The Cannonball Adderley Quintet in San Francisco.

“I put it on,” Irabagon recalled, “and I said, ‘Oh! This is what the alto saxophone is supposed to sound like! He made that thing sing!”

Upon hearing Cannonball Adderley live recording in San Francisco, Jon Irabagon realized: "This is what the alto saxophone is supposed to sound like!” (Photo by Stephanie Matthews)

Irabagon A.D. (After DePaul)

One week before 9/11, Irabagon, a DePaul University graduate, moved to New York for further studies at the Manhattan School of Music. His name and profile would eventually go national when he won the Monk Competition. Before a three-judge panel – saxophonists Jane Ira Bloom, Jimmy Heath, and Wayne Shorter – Irabagon performed “Blues to Bechet,” “The Night Has a Thousand Eyes,” and “If You Could See Me Now.” For the deciding round, the judges gave all three finalists a new challenge.

“We had to pick one song and play it with the rhythm section (pianist Geoff Keezer, bassist Rodney Whitaker, and drummer Carl Allen) and (vocalist) Dee Dee Bridgewater,” Irabagon recalled. “We played this crazy version of ‘Just Friends.’ The interaction we got into was the most fun and pure and not planned. It’s her fault I won!”

An unnamed reporter from asianamericans.net, who witnessed Irabagon at the competition, wrote: “(Irabagon’s presentation) provided evidence of his creative maturity by utilizing a rarely used musical quality and grasp of all innovative options not typically known to young and upcoming artists -- silence, while not losing the essence of the song's melody.”

This first-place finish came with a $20,000 payment and a recording opportunity with the Concord Music Group. While Irabagon appreciated playing with a rhythm section anchored by bassist Rufus Reid, the business realities that came with it tarnished the experience.

Irabagon’s upbeat nature during this conversation returned when discussing his debut album, Outright!, especially the songs “Charles Barkley” and “Outright! Theme.” He described the first song as capturing the Hall of Fame basketball player’s brashness.

“It sounds like a highlight reel. It could accompany his slam dunks and blocks. I could see him sliding up and down the court with it,” Irabagon said. “There is a medium, bluesy section at the end. That’s him fading out with the sunset, having conquered everything.”

“Outright! Theme” began as a quintet improvisation with Irabagon, trumpeter Russ Johnson, and a rhythm section featuring pianist Kris Davis. Later, Irabagon invited countless cats to improvise with the track. Fifty-plus people later, he had a completed recording.

“The song is based off the changes of a standard called ‘Make Believe,’ a New Orleans-influenced tune,” he explained. “There was this glorious wall of sound echoing through the studio. It was a sound I had not necessarily heard before, combining the AACM with early jazz. I have listened to that track at least a thousand times.”

And then there is “Hoodootoo,” from Irabagon’s 2022 album, Rising Sun. For this song, he asked Stefan Zeniuk, a claymation video specialist, to listen to it and add his artistry. “I was just floored. He really nailed it. The video goes along great with the song,” said Irabagon about the imagery, which may be viewed on youtube.com.

Rising Sun’s seven songs were composed when Irabagon, his family, and in-laws toured various national parks in the western United States. This road trip happened in the summer of 2020. His family had relocated to South Dakota from New York, once the city had been shut down due to the pandemic. The original plan included a two-week stay with his in-laws. Well, two weeks became eight months, but Irabagon did find a canyon five minutes from the in-laws’ house for his use.

“I wound up practicing there for five hours a day for seven months. There were no gigs, no touring, and no recording sessions,” he recalled. “So the practicing I was doing then had nothing to do with prepping for a recording. It was just, ‘I have all this time, so how can I get better at music, my instrument, composing, and improving my sound and time?’ It was life-changing for me.”

Irabagon also incorporated his reverence for Charlie Parker into his explorations. To honor Bird’s centennial, he recorded a solo saxophone project, Bird with Streams.

“I brought out my own portable rig to a couple of different sections of the canyon and recorded all these Charlie Parker tunes,” he said about the project, which also included natural sounds from deer and slackliners and trucks and such. “I used some Charlie Parker heads to work on sound, time, and feel, and just mess around with different concepts.”

Recording solo albums on different size saxophones is an ongoing goal for Irabagon. Another solo saxophone album, Inaction is an Action, features him on sopranino only.

“(Sopranino) is an octave higher than soprano. It’s really difficult to play and even more difficult to listen to,” he said about the 2015 release. “I’m four solo (saxophone) records in, and I have eight more to go.”

Irabagon’s solo saxophone searches, further documented on the film, Legacy Jon Irabagon: A Solo Tenor Odyssey, continue a tradition explored by Roscoe Mitchell, who has also instructed him privately. In 2023, Irabagon and the PMP Orchestra premiered Mitchell’s composition, “Wha Wha,” in Prague. “Roscoe Mitchell,” Irabagon said, “has been a great mentor and philosopher for me.”

Nearly all Irabagon recordings can be found on Irabbagast, a label he owns. The word irabbagast, he learned, while hanging out in Norway after a European tour, almost duplicates his last name. It is also a Norwegian word that means jokester, which, his friends said, describes his personality.

“Fair” Feelings

Irabagon’s Chicago-based quartet – pianist Vijay Tellis-Niyak, bassist Clark Sommers, and drummer Neil Hemphill – performed at the most recent Winter Jazz Fair held at the Chicago Cultural Center. Performing with these dudes, he said, proved quite fulfilling.

“I gravitate toward musicians that are willing to go for it,” Irabagon said about his Chicago crew. (He also has a New York-based quartet.) “They have all done their homework about the history of the music and are willing to take chances and willing to screw up.”

Before an attentive audience, the quartet played Irabagon’s originals that included “USPSBS” and “Prayer.”

“USPSBS,” he said, “is a 1970s CTI-era Freddie Hubbard-inspired original dedicated to everyone's favorite place, the post office. I've spent a lot of frustrating hours there waiting in line to mail out CDs and LPs. One day, instead of fuming about terrible service, I decided to try to write a song without my instrument or piano with me, and this is the result.”

“Prayer,” he added, “is a tune I wrote for my youngest daughter. She was a terrible sleeper in the early months, so I tried improvising this lullaby for her, and I liked it enough to flesh it out and recently started performing it.”