By Wendy Greenberg
When Caleb Eckstein’s Boptet jazz group plays on the stage at Princeton High School July 18, it will be a personal homecoming. The jazz trombonist, who graduated Princeton High School in 2016, spent a lot of time on the high school stage during his formative years in Studio Band. “It’s going to feel very weird,” he said, “and different. Because this time it’s my band.”
Eckstein’s band will perform as part of the Blue Curtain series this month, which is also bringing two additional performers on three Saturday nights at 8 p.m., all at the Princeton High School Performing Arts Center, 16 Walnut Lane. The free annual concert series, open to the public, showcases an eclectic mix of Afro-Brazilian sounds, jazz, and contemporary improvisation.
Eckstein, who went on to double major in neuroscience and jazz trombone performance at Northwestern University, graduating in 2020, credits the music program at Princeton High as a major contributor to his success. “I really wouldn’t be where I am today without it,” he said.
But the influence of Princeton mentors goes back farther. It was music educator Steve Kramer at Riverside Elementary School who handed him a trombone. “He is a great jazz pianist and mentor to students,” said Eckstein. “We would hang out, watching movies and eating lunch. He was getting 10-year-olds to watch great movies like Duck Soup and to listen to jazz.”
Eckstein’s father, Jonathan, a Distinguished Professor in Rutgers’ Business School, plays the tenor saxophone (his son deemed him “very good”). “I figured I should play music,” he said. His mother, Bonnie Schultz, is a writer.
At Riverside, Eckstein tried the saxophone. “It felt awful,” he said. “The trumpet was too tight around my lips. I saw a girl trying a trombone and I said, ‘I’ll try that.’ I felt that this makes more sense with my existence. I still remember the feeling.”
The first time Eckstein heard the renowned Princeton High School Studio Band play he was in sixth or seventh grade, he said. The band, under the direction of Joe Bongiovi, played “Caravan” (composed in 1936 by trombonist Juan Tizol and bandleader Duke Ellington), and Eckstein said to himself, “I have to play with them.”
And so he did. Playing in the Studio Band was an eye-opening experience. Jazz trombonist Wycliffe Gordon visited in 2009. “I heard sounds I didn’t know existed,” said Eckstein. Studio Band was “rigorous” but also fun, and introduced him to such jazz musicians as saxophonist Bob Mintzer, bassist Rufus Reid, and drummer Peter Erskine, among other guest artists, and took the students to festivals such as the New Jersey State High School Jazz Band Festival and the high school jazz festival at Berklee School of Music in Boston.
At Northwestern University, he could double major. “Unfortunately these days music doesn’t pay all the bills, so I have to branch out to other things” he said. There, he was mentored by Vincent Gardner (now lead trombonist for Jazz at Lincoln Center), and composer and trombonist Tom Garling, getting two different perspectives he said.
Upon graduating at the beginning of the pandemic, not only were music performances scarce, but neuroscience research jobs were scare as well, so he pivoted his focus and works for a flavors and fragrance company in Central New Jersey.
He recently started teaching private trombone lessons, and he has six students. One of his students is now in Studio Band, and he has gone to see him play. “It’s a blast from past, I feel that it is a reflection of myself from 10 years ago.”
And, keeping Eckstein busy, he leads the Constellation Big Band, plays freelance, including around Princeton, and is busy composing. He leads a monthly Jazz Jam at Salon 33, a house concert venue on the third Wednesday of the month, detailed on his Instagram (caleb_eckstein_music).
The Boptet, with six musicians, is named and inspired by hard bop, the era right after bebop, Eckstein explains. “Bebop is intellectual type of music, virtuosic. Jazz has a reputation of kind of overly complex. Hard bop is a return to roots, soul, blues and Afro-Cuban, mixing with more modern music. I love that era. I wanted to honor the era. And the name has a bit of zip to it.”
The group features what Eckstein calls some of his favorite young musicians in New Jersey, on piano, bass, drums, tenor sax/flute, trumpet and trombone. “The flute changes the whole dynamic,” he said.
This is also a return to Princeton High School for the bass player, Kai Gibson, a classmate of Eckstein’s. Other musicians are Tahj Walsh on trumpet, Jeremy Leon on sax/flute, Mike Bond on piano, and Jared Decker on drums.
He wants his Boptet to draw in the audience. “A jazz band has to present the music in a compelling way, to be accessible,” he said. “The audience has to feel it.”
For Eckstein’s Boptet, rich solos and inventive arrangements will help the audience feel the music. And the venue itself will offer Eckstein a stage on which to feel at home.
Other Blue Curtain performances are on July 11, with Brazilian-American singer, drummer, and percussionist Nanny Assis, who celebrates the often-overlooked African roots of bossa nova through his project Afro-Jobim; and on July 25, with composer, producer, and bandleader Sasha Berliner, a rock drummer turned vibraphonist.
For more information go to bluecurtain.org.