Women's History Month Kicks Off With a Night of Jazz at LTV

In 2023, Iris Ornig had an idea. The accomplished bassist had spent decades traveling the world playing jazz for those looking to be inspired by slick sounds of a sharp drummer and a smooth horn section. She wanted to bring the opportunity to hear (and play) those sounds to the East End, to get the feeling she has every time she steps onto a stage.

“It speaks to me in the sense of freedom to do what you feel and express yourself and be creative and improvise,” Ornig said in a February interview. “Having the band join you when you play improvisations, all of those movements really inspired me. It’s dark, it’s moody, it’s vibrant, it’s fabulous, it’s exciting.”

Since then, Ornig has been turning her passion for jazz into a means of education for the community. As the founder and director of East End Jazz, she’s spent the past year connecting with other local jazz musicians and sharing the inspiring energy with locals young and old. Ornig will be continuing that goal by ringing in Women’s History Month with a performance from the Women in Jazz All-Star Band at LTV Studios on Saturday, March 8. The band will feature seven musicians, some of whom live on the East End, performing pieces from iconic female jazz musicians and singers including Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, Mary Lou Williams, Carla Bley, Alice Coltrane, Irene Higginbotham and many others.

Ornig started East End Jazz in February 2024 after making a living for many years as a professional musician. She said that her decision to found the organization was a heavy one given that the world hasn’t been in the mood for singing in recent years.

“The pandemic hit and I reconsidered my life and was out here in East Quogue and realized that there was not a lot of jazz education,” she explained. “The fun part about jazz education is it’s basically improvisation, being creative, being a team leader, listening to other musicians and respecting other musicians. I really liked that kind of education and decided that I really wanted to do it.”

Since establishing East End Jazz, Ornig has connected with numerous jazz musicians in the area and in New York City to perform in a variety of locations. East End Jazz bands have performed at the Hampton Library in Bridgehampton, the Southampton Cultural Center, Southold Elementary School and even the Queens Public Library in Ridgewood.

Ornig added that East End Jazz is a nonprofit organization and was financially supported in its first year by generous donations from friends. Now with that debut year under its belt, Ornig said she’s looking for grant opportunities to continue funding the project. She’s also on the lookout for more local musicians, or as she calls them, “educators.”

“At this point, the audience are the students and the [educators] need to see what their needs are,” Ornig added. “[Educators] need to encourage people that they can do this and they can have fun. A jazz educator has to have the ability to communicate the importance of what they have to do and the importance of where a person is standing to make them evolve and grow.”

So far, Ornig has found enough jazz musicians to play shows in trio and quartet formations. She appreciated how “creative and open-minded” these musicians are to playing not just jazz standards, but also big band music, selections from the Great American Songbook and even songs by Michael Jackson rearranged in a jazz format.

One of those musicians is Ada Rovatti, an East Hampton resident who’s been playing the saxophone since the end of her high school days in Italy. Like Ornig, she too had a spur-of-the-moment encounter with jazz that changed her life.

“I started as a pianist when I was four years old,” Rovatti said. “My brother was into a lot of R&B and blues and had the idea of putting a band together with a horn section. He kinda told me that I would be really popular with boys if I played saxophone, so I said, ‘Ok I’m in!’ I started taking lessons and then I found a teacher who studied at Berklee College of Music in Boston, so that directed me right away to a really good way of starting.”

Singer Lauren Kinhan of Hampton Bays has sung in a variety of styles and enjoyed different genres over the years, but jazz has been in her life for quite some time. That started her journey to not only become a professional solo singer, but also a member of the acclaimed vocal ensemble New York Voices. She’s also a faculty member of the jazz voice adjunct faculty at NYU and teaches the Jazz Voice Master’s program at Queens College.

“As a hobby, my father was a saxophonist and played in some big bands, so as a family, we would go and listen to him play,” Kinhan said. “Early on, I started to sit in and call tunes. It was really my first entrance into jazz. We had a very vibrant album collection so I still really feel like, when I was young and listened to music, I gravitated toward things that inspired me and excited me.”

Rovatti said that she met Ornig while she was still living in the city and appreciated how she was a “great advocate for women in music.” Rovatti heard about East End Jazz through social media, also acknowledging the connection she has with other jazz musicians in the area.

“It’s kinda like a small family, with not so many places to play you run into the same musicians,” Rovatti added. “There are a lot of talented musicians that live here, so locally the level is really high and it’s good that there is something going on here that’s not so reclusive.”

Kinhan also praised Ornig, calling her a “wonderful force of nature” on the East End and acknowledging her efforts to create more local jazz programs.

“It is a very small network out here and when it’s off-season, there is less opportunity for people to play,” Kinhan added. “I think Iris has the right idea to try to connect all of us so we can tell our story to generate possibilities to perform and use our careers to help create shows that sound interesting for this community to show up for.”

“There are passionate jazz players scattered around the East End, no doubt,” Ornig said. “I definitely also have musicians coming from the city who are also teachers. I can’t really say how I pick those musicians, I just know what works. I told all of the musicians from the city that I want to do this and they encouraged me and said, ‘We’ll come out and play with you.’”

The Women in Jazz All-Star Band will actually be playing two concerts: the first on Saturday, March 8, on the South Fork at LTV Studios in Wainscott and a second on the North Fork on Friday, March 28, at the Jamesport Meeting House. Ornig said the band will feature two vocalists, a saxophonist, a trumpet player, a pianist, a bassist and a drummer. Those who see the show can expect covers of Billie Holiday’s “God Bless the Child” and other pieces from female jazz players that are a rarity in the field.

“So many times when I do teaching or when I play, I always have some young women coming up to me and saying, ‘It’s so nice to see somebody up there. I play saxophone and we still don’t have many role models,’” Rovatti said. “There are still a lot of fields of work where we are seen as, kind of, The Bearded Woman in the circles, the anomalies. That’s not the kind of attention we wanted to have, we do the job. We want to take the opportunity to show we are here and we’re doing our job and if you close your eyes, you don’t see the gender difference.”

Kinhan noted how other people are also trying to highlight the accomplishments of women in jazz. She specifically cited drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, the founder and artistic director of the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice, who authored the book “New Standards: 101 Lead Sheets by Women Composers.”

“I feel like we have better representation with women composers now,” Kinhan added. “Back in the day, a woman might even be a ghostwriter, a male name might’ve taken the copyright credit because all of those kinds of things happen too. The story of the woman composer is still something that is being gathered.”

Ornig said she hopes East End Jazz will continue to present performances for the community and make them more interactive for guests. There’s the “Music Around the Globe” program to teach kids and adults about international music played through the style of jazz. For those who’ve never heard a note of Duke Ellington and others, Ornig looks to offer “Curious About Jazz” to the community. It’s all in service of a genre that speaks to more than just a musician’s skills.

“My medium is music,” Ornig said. “Some other people have painting or pottery, but my thing is to bring the community together and do something they don’t normally do together and just have fun. In my previous year, I’ve heard a lot of people say, ‘I don’t like jazz.’ They don’t really experience jazz, and I want to make people open and feel different things and not have the stigma of ‘I don’t like jazz.’ It’s to make people more aware and be a team player, but also try to be a leader and become a better person and be open, creative and have fun.”

“I think it fits well with my personality,” Rovatti added. “The fact that jazz has so much improvisation, it kinda captures your state of mind and feelings on the spot. It translates the way I am perfectly.”

“I think the spirit of jazz is a very prominent way in which I connect myself not just in the musical world but also in the way I carry myself through the world,” Kinhan said. “Jazz allows for you to play and play creatively. Yes, there’s the foundation and we should absolutely understand the rules and freedoms and traditions and great people whose shoulders we stand on. But the spirit of jazz is to play and be creative and stretch out.”

Tickets for the Women in Jazz All-Star Band on Saturday, March 8, at 7:30 p.m. are $20 for general admission, $25 at the door, and $50 for a VIP café table reserved seating and are available at eastendjazz.org or at ltveh.org. LTV Studios is at 75 Industrial Road in Wainscott.