In a career that spans two decades and encompasses a broad array of musical ventures, saxophonist Mark Turner has emerged as a towering presence in the jazz community. With a distinctive, personal tone, singular improvisational skills and an innovative, challenging compositional approach, he’s earned a far-reaching reputation as one of jazz’s most original and influential musical forces. Born in 1965 in Ohio and raised in Southern California, Turner grew up surrounded by music. “There always was a lot of R&B, jazz, soul and gospel playing in the house,” he recalls. “This was in the early ’70s, when the whole integration and civil rights thing had begun to go mainstream, and my mother and stepfather were in the first wave of young black professionals and intellectuals who moved to upper-middle-class white neighborhoods. They and their friends were always going out to see live jazz. I was intrigued by that, and I was intrigued by the whole history of jazz music and African-American culture, as well as the music itself. Turner, firmly now part of this jazz tradition/culture, has not only released more than a dozen albums as leader, but he is quite prolific as a sideman as well. He has recorded and toured with musicians as diverse as Jakob Bro, Tom Harrell, Billy Hart, Ed Simon, Enrico Rava, Kurt Rosenwinkel, David Virreles, Ethan Iverson, Baptiste Trotignon and The SFJazz Collective. His lastest recording, 2022’s critically acclaimed “Return from the Stars” (titled after Stanislav Lem’s science fiction novel) gives his quartet plenty of space in which to move, on an album both exhilarating and thoughtful in its arc of expression. Solos flow organically out of the arrangements and, beneath the often-dazzling interplay of Turner’s tenor and Jason Palmer’s trumpet, the rhythm section of Joe Martin (bass) and Jonathan Pinson (drums) roams freely. In the spring of 2023 Turner will be releasing an album recorded live— with this same quartet — at the Village Vanguard.
