Notes on Dave Koz

Words by Shelton Hull

It’s Jacksonville, and it is the holiday season, and that means Dave Koz & Friends are bringing their Christmas Tour back to the Florida Theatre. It’s the Koz’s 15th appearance there since 2014, making him one of the venue’s most popular acts over the past decade. That Tuesday night show, on Dec. 3 at 8 p.m., comes just five nights into his 27th annual Christmas Tour, which even Koz finds mildly shocking. “I can’t even believe it,” he said. “I look at the number and just scratch my head and wonder, how did we get to 27 years?”

Koz calls in on his day off. “I have a little hideaway house in a place called Sausalito, California, which is right across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. It’s very, very quiet up here, and I’ve got a beautiful view of the water, so it’s quite serene. I’m here for two weeks before I go back to Los Angeles to start the rehearsal process. While I’m up here, my music director and I, and the other musicians on the tour, we’re talking daily about our set-list and getting that out to the musicians and the other artists, and just getting the show together. We always rehearse more music than we actually use, so we hone the set-list down to something more manageable. You can’t be out there for four hours.”

At 61, Dave Koz’s career dates back over 40 years. He began playing saxophones — all of them — in high school, started sideman work with Bobby Caldwell mere weeks out of UCLA (class of 1986), and he’s worked non-stop ever since, save for his sojourns to Sausalito.

While this music certainly meets every criteria for mainstream jazz, it would be impressive to label the artists or the material as pedestrian in any way. In fact, the music of the holidays has made for fertile creative ground since the earliest days of jazz, which makes perfect sense to Koz. “The meat on the bones of these songs — not necessarily the more religious songs, some of which go back hundreds of years — but the more modern Christmas songs, like ‘The Christmas Song,’ those songs were written by some of the greatest songwriters of all-time, mostly in the Great American Songbook era of the ’30s, ’40s, ’50s. So these are just amazing compositions and amazing melodies that you can really wrap your emotions around.”

Koz continued: “So, take a song like ‘White Christmas.’ Irving Berlin. Great melody — of course you can sing it. But that’s probably my favorite Christmas song, because I love playing the melody, and it’s such a rich, textured melody that you can still play it on a saxophone and imbue it with the emotion of the song, and telegraph that to the audience without having to sing the lyric. And that’s the case with a lot of these pieces of music. One of the things that makes doing a Christmas tour every year, all these years, musically enriching, creatively, is that we can do these songs every year and it’s still the song. You can have fresh interpretations for the audience, as well.”

For all its inherent joy, the holidays can be a very stressful time for anyone, especially when you’re working, and especially if your job puts you on the road during the holidays every year, as theirs does. This is certainly not the kind of music you want to be playing every night when you’re in a bad mood, so state of mind is crucial, and that starts with the people around you. “The thing that’s really most important to me, with our touring personnel, is creating that family vibe,” he said. “Because the holidays are that. It’s a time when you want to be with your family, and we are not — we’re on the road, and we’re away from our families.” 

Koz is a creature of habit, at least on the road, and he puts a premium on loyalty, in business and in life. “The band is the same,” he says. “These are the guys who have been touring with me for — gosh, I lose track of how many years. But every year we change the band a bit. This year we’ve got Jonathan Butler, who’s really like my brother. He’s probably done 15 of the 27 that we’ve done.” This year’s tour also features vocalist Rebecca Jade, a rising star and veteran of this group, guitarist Adam Holley, as well as saxophonist Vincent Ingala, who’s making his first run with the Koz crew. Koz and Hawley collaborated on the track “Automatic,” which the latter wrote and produced.

“The Florida Theatre, Kevin Stone and his whole team, they’ve been incredibly supportive of us,” says Koz, “and the audience in Jacksonville has been so supportive of us. Since we first took the tour to Jacksonville, 10 years ago, it’s just gotten stronger and stronger, and it means so much to us. Our show last year was the first time I’d seen everything; the year before, I think it had been started, but they hadn’t done the really big renovations. It’s pretty jaw-dropping; it’s gorgeous! Those old theaters … we’re lucky enough in the United States to have a variety of them. Many have fallen into disrepair, so it’s great when places like this get the care they need.”

As fans, our passion for the space is shared by the artists, but our perspectives are very different, a fact not lost on Koz and his colleagues. “The guts of that building, the sound, the way you feel on stage–that really has not changed,” he says. “Because the old buildings have a soul. It’s hard to put it into words, actually, but it has a sound and a soul. It’s kinda like when you walk into someone’s house, and the house has a vibe, no matter who’s living there. And when you walk into these old theaters, every one of them has their own unique energy. And I don’t think that part has changed, thankfully, because that’s why these buildings are still around. If you think about all the people, all the hundreds, if not thousands that have graced that stage and put their own unique energy into the DNA of the building. So for us, it’s the same experience, but we’re just really happy to see how much the experience is greatly improved for the patrons of the theater.” 

You can be sure that Koz will be back for the holidays during the Florida Theatre’s centennial year in 2027 — and probably a couple of times before that.