All right, now to our fabulous KUVO Jazz,
at the Phyllis A. Greer Studio.
- Where we meet the Walter Gorra Quartet.
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- [Announcer] Walter Gorra on Piano,
it's the Walter Gorra Quartet.
Plus four horns.
(audience applauds)
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- I grew up in Gorman Springs, Colorado.
Came out here to CU Boulder, actually,
and did my undergrad there.
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I did three degrees there.
I did engineering, a structural engineering masters,
and a jazz piano performance undergrad degree at CU.
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I'm in the middle of my masters program
right now at William Patterson University in New Jersey,
a hop, skip and a jump away from New York.
I'm starting to sub a little bit for different bands,
and starting to get my feet wet in the city.
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It's usually a quartet, the record is a quartet.
But we actually did something a little different,
which is the four horns, which is just really exciting.
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It was inspired by a class I took in college,
and a professor was talking about how we experience emotion.
And to allow ourselves to essentially
have an open bandwidth.
In other words, allow yourself to feel highs and lows.
And you can't feel the extreme highs
without feeling the extreme lows
at the same time in your life.
So I was trying to capture that in the music.
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That one has an interesting story.
I was actually watching the Clark Terry documentary,
Keep on Keeping on.
I finished watching that and I was just really moved by it,
Clark Terry's spirit, I just felt like
I had to write something basically out of gratitude
for everything that I have and all the great
experiences that I've had in my life.
And so this piece came out of it.
Really just lucky to have such a band to play it.
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Right now, I'm just working on just getting
an even bigger library of music of my own compositions.
Keep doing what I'm doing, more recordings.
Hopefully some touring in the future, doing the music life.
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Thank you to PBS and to KUVO and everybody for having us,
this really is family for us.
We've done a lot here with those entities.
And I'm just really proud
to be from Denver area, and Colorado.
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