Audio By Carbonatix
After a four-year stint with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers that included being the band’s musical director, alto saxophonist Bobby Watson went on to play on nearly thirty albums as a leader and close to a hundred recordings as a sideman with jazz heavies like Max Roach, George Coleman, and Wynton and Branford Marsalis. From the mid-’80s through the mid-’90s, Watson toured and recorded regularly with his hard-bop group Horizon, and in 2004 he reunited with the 1990s-era version of Horizon to release the excellent Horizon Reassembled. In addition to being a first-rate player, Watson started teaching music on the East Coast in the mid-’80s before taking a full-time post as conservator of music and dance at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where he eventually became director of jazz studies. This week, Watson performs at Dazzle with Convergence, one of Denver’s most exciting jazz collectives.
