Don Byron Ivey-Divey Quartet
Don Byron brings the Ivey-Divey Quartet to the Annex for two nights this November, the live return of the project he recorded for Blue Note in 2004 with Jason Moran on piano and Jack DeJohnette on drums, Ralph Alessi and Lonnie Plaxico joining on select tracks — a record keyed to Lester Young's 1946 trio session with Nat King Cole and Buddy Rich, three players and no bassist, which Byron took as a working frame, insisting at the time that it was not a repertory record and pointing to how the Young trio held avant-garde and straightahead impulses in the same breath, people really playing into the sound. Ivey-divey was Pres's own term, permanent sadness, living in the world through the blues, and Byron set Young material beside originals of his own like Abie the Fishman, drawn from a Marx Brothers routine, and took home a 2005 Grammy nomination for the bass clarinet solo on I Want to Be Happy — JazzTimes called it outrageous and sublime, his first major album. The 2026 edition reworks the chemistry, Luis Perdomo on piano, Drew Gress on bass, Dru Heller on drums, Byron moving between clarinet, bass clarinet, and tenor sax — bass now in the middle of a frame the 1946 session left empty, and the internal lines already run deep, Gress and Perdomo on record together since Perdomo's Universal Mind date with DeJohnette in 2012, Heller a Byron veteran from the road and from the Lorraine Hansberry score for PBS American Masters. Two nights for a working band to reopen a twenty-year-old framework — Friday November 20 and Saturday November 21, 2026, LOOVE ANNEX / N12, 238 North 12th Street, Brooklyn.
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Don Byron (clarinets, bass clarinet, tenor sax) has spent three decades refusing to let any single genre hold him — classical clarinet under Joe Allard, Third Stream study with George Russell at New England Conservatory, a 1990s Downtown emergence with Plays the Music of Mickey Katz and Bug Music, the Raymond Scott and John Kirby project — moving since through salsa, hip-hop, funk, klezmer, German lieder, hard rock, and swing-to-downtown jazz, a sound above genre by the long-standing tag, each idiom reworked from inside its own craft. Grammy-nominated for the Ivey-Divey bass clarinet solo on I Want to Be Happy, Pulitzer finalist in 2009 for Seven Etudes for solo piano, Rome Prize Fellow the same year, MIT MLK Visiting Professor 2007–08, Black Rock Coalition member, composer, arranger, social critic.
Drew Gress is one of the defining bassists of contemporary improvised music's working core — the call for Tim Berne, Ralph Alessi, Uri Caine, Ravi Coltrane, Fred Hersch, John Hollenbeck, Tony Malaby, Marc Copland, Bill Carrothers, Mat Maneri, Simon Nabatov — while leading his own bands from Joint Venture on Enja in the early 90s through Jagged Sky, Spin & Drift, and 7 Black Butterflies, the Spin & Drift quartet earning the Guardian's pick for London's best jazz concert of 2002, with residencies at the St. Petersburg Conservatory and University of Colorado-Boulder and support from SESAC, the NEA, and Meet the Composer. He lives in New York.
Luis Perdomo, born in Caracas in 1971, holds a Grammy, ten years in Ravi Coltrane's quartet, a founding chair in Miguel Zenón's, nine records as a leader, and a sideman count past 250 that includes the Grammy-nominated Influx, Esta Plena, and Alma Adentro — trained by Harold Danko at Manhattan School of Music and Sir Roland Hanna at Queens College, now on faculty at Queens College, Berklee, and Oberlin. The New York Times noted his deep sonority, rhythmic aplomb, and ear for useful dissonance, the Village Voice called him a rather amazing improviser, and his 2012 Universal Mind session with Jack DeJohnette and Drew Gress is the connective tissue already inside this band.
Dru Heller has logged two decades as an expressive, interactive drummer, composer, and bandleader — touring and recording with Byron, Ron Miles, Greg Osby, Art Lande, and John Ellis, featured on Byron's original score for the PBS American Masters documentary Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes Feeling Heart — Denver-based since 2013, first-call across the region, known among musicians as an active listener and an engaged, empathetic teacher, on faculty at Metropolitan State University of Denver and the University of Colorado-Denver.
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Byron is the curatorial brief in one career — an artist who redefines every genre he touches while staying rooted in craft and lineage, which is the posture LOOVE exists to platform. Ivey-Divey is the method at its clearest, a Lester Young tribute Byron insisted was not a repertory record, the past carried forward as working material for a living band, and two nights at the Annex give that band room to be a band, capital as medium, the support arriving as time and a room. The relationship predates this booking — Byron last appeared at LOOVE in Dean Bowman's Blue I project alongside Kevin Ray, Kelvyn Bell, Bobby Zankel, and Tony Lewis.
