Diego Rivera has come a long way since getting booed off stage at the Evergreen Grill.
The saxophonist now gets decked out in a black suit and tie as he leads the Diego Rivera Quartet, which performs Tuesday nights at Harper's Restaurant & Brewpub, 131 Albert Ave. in East Lansing.
Rivera, now 25, remembers one of his earliest gigs at Evergreen Grill, 327 Abbott Road, during jazz night when he was an East Lansing High School student looking for some play time.
"I walked in there and I asked if I could play a tune," he said. "The guy hosting it was going to show me the ropes. He said I could pick the key or pick the tempo. So, I picked the key.
"So he said 'I'll pick the tempo.' I got lost. It was like this thing where I didn't want to stop in the middle of the chorus, but I didn't want to keep playing because I got lost. The drummer put down his sticks after awhile and the piano player stopped playing. People were saying 'Diego, sit down!'"
But Rivera, now an MSU jazz instructor, was invited back the next night. In the past several years, he's been honing his skill by practicing with many musicians and performing gigs on his own or with his group.
When the East Lansing native came to MSU as a student, he started playing jazz. One of his group's goals is to make the East Lansing jazz scene more prominent.
The solution, Rivera said, is by playing more gigs.
Rivera hopes to release a CD within the next year with his bandmates. Jazz studies junior Andrew Klein is the bassist, Lawrence Leathers is on drums and John Nam plays the piano while Rivera alternates between different kinds of saxes.
The jazz scene in the Lansing area isn't as vibrant or recognizable as in other cities, Rivera said.
"Jazz nationally has its own niche," Rivera said. "Everywhere you go, you'll find some jazz musicians, but at the same time, if you don't have an established scene, there's never really a niche. You have to make a niche for yourself. East Lansing doesn't have a jazz scene like Chicago or New York.
"Every once in awhile, you'll get a couple of musicians coming to town. It's not like a constant thing. They don't say, 'We'll hit Chicago, we're going to hit Detroit, East Lansing, Cleveland and then New York' - it's not the way it is."
Harper's Assistant General Manager Ian Swope has been working on creating a jazz scene in East Lansing for months. He helped launch jazz nights every Tuesday night, and Rivera has been the house artist since March.
"I was just trying to hit on a different niche, something the city hasn't seen," said Swope, an MSU alumnus. "He's so versatile. He'll bring in an alto sax, his bass sax - he plays soprano and, not to mention, he's extremely good at what he does.
"I think we got kind of lucky and keyed in on finding one of the acts that has a pretty big following."
Rivera writes the group's original music, but he said jazz is also about starting with other people's music and expanding on it. For example, Rivera might take the work of jazz great John Coltrane but eventually change the song's tones or instruments altogether while improvising.
"A rock band can do a cover and it's going to be the same way," he said. "Jazz music you do that
