About to rock: Rivkah Ross and her jazz quartet
Portland jazz drummer first inspired by heavy metal drummers plays Wilf's tonight
The Rivkah Ross Quartet plays tonight at Wilf’s at Union Station from 5-7 p.m. Ross is a jazz drummer whose sound has lately been influenced by jazz greats such as Wayne Shorter, John Coltrane and Roy Haynes.
Ross was born in Beaverton. After her parents split up, her mom moved them to Florida, where she lived until she started college, later graduating from the Musician’s Institute in Los Angeles.
An instructor there encouraged what Ross calls her “hyper focus on the drums,” a love that emerged in high school.
“I was a real metal head then,” she recalled. “I loved the band Sevendust and In Flames, a Swedish metal group.” It was at a Sevendust concert in Miami that Ross decided that she would become a drummer.
“Their sound was just so powerful,” she said. “So then I got an old kit a friend was giving away, and I taught myself how to play from books until I started taking lessons. I taught myself as much as I could and then went to college in Florida to study music, and they asked, ‘jazz or classical?’ Jazz just sounded like more fun.”
Ross came back to Portland in 2016 after living in L.A. and touring Europe with a rock band. Now she has an 8-month-old son and a packed calendar of local appearances.
Female drummers are not that hard to find if you know where to look, she says. “It’s not that rare, it’s just the visibility. But we are out there in force.”
Ross’s mom encouraged her early passion for drumming, she said. “So did my elderly grandmother who lived with us. They both helped carry my drums down the stairs from our apartment to the parking lot.”
In South Florida, she was greeted “as an element of surprise. But I was in a lot of projects there, and it was sort of ‘Oh, there’s that drummer girl.’”
For the Thursday series at Wilf's, performers are asked to share their influences. Tonight she’ll play some of her original material as well as Pat Metheny’s “Three Flights Up,” the song that made her fall in love with jazz music.
In her free time she tunes in to Roy Haynes. “I’ve been digging more deeply into Roy Haynes. There’s so much to study there, so I’ve been going through his catalogue and trying to channel him.”