Picture a belly dancer and a pair of Latin dancers on the stage at the same time, dancing to the same music, and you’ve got some of what native musician Roger Ebacher is all about.
“I’m very excited about what we’re doing now,” Ebacher says. “I think it’s the best music I’ve ever created.”
It’s “kinetic” (to use his word); it can be “sensuous”, “even erotic” and “ever so mellow”, all at the same time.
Ebacher has taken cues from his jazz roots, Latin music from different countries, East Indian music, and Middle Eastern music “if you can name it, you’ll probably hear it in the music”. Ebacher composes and performs as one half of The Air Department.
Fresh off a weekend of performing at The Dance Place in The Tannery the “live” launch of The Air Department – Ebacher is tired but excited by the response he and drummer Dennis Pelletier received.
“People got it”, he said, “They got it”.
They were in the “Black Box” studio, but the music was outside of the box, he added.
Best known in town for his flute, Ebacher plays an impressive list of instruments as well as being a singer and composer. He has also done some community theater, but that’s another story.
“I started singing less and less and playing more and more”, he says of his musical journey that really took root here in Newburyport in the late 1970′s and which continues to evolve and grow.
Here”s a blast from the past “Timestream”, his first local band after he broke away from local jazz artist Charlie Bechler. “There is no one who is from town who doesn’t remember that band”, he says about Timestream. Both he and Pelletier “feel The Air Department” is the most powerful thing we’ve done together since Timestream. It’s all over the map
literally”.
And maybe there is also no one who is from town who doesn’t remember his father’s barber shop, City Hall Barbers, which was on Pleasant Street for about 40 years.
“My family was kind of impossible to ignore”, he says with a laugh. He had six sisters and adds that the family was “kind of an event”.
When he left town heading for college after high school, he says Newburyport looked like a scene from World War II, “a scene of the aftermath of a bombing”.
“But I have a lot of fond memories”, he says. He, like so many natives, remembers the corner stores – being set up on the butcher block at the deli run by the Pappas family and being called “Rogers” by the Lithuanian cobblers.
He left to go to college and he came back when Newburyport was a happening spot for artists of all ilk. He lives here still.
“No matter the changes, good or bad, I still love this town. It’s a very special town”.
