Stanley Sagov & Remembering The Future Jazz Band at Regattabar

Stanley Sagov is a dazzling jazz pianist, composer, and multi-instrumentalist who is also skilled with surgical instruments, as he simultaneously has a full time career as a medical doctor. He constantly amazes his colleagues in both music and in medicine with his ability to lead such an intense dual life.

Born in Cape Town, South Africa in 1944 to a Jewish family that had immigrated there to escape the chaos and anti-Semitism that followed the Russian Revolution, the young Sagov grew up in the midst of the horrid South African regime of Apartheid and its resulting police state.
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Stanley Sagov is a dazzling jazz pianist, composer, and multi-instrumentalist who is also skilled with surgical instruments, as he simultaneously has a full time career as a medical doctor. He constantly amazes his colleagues in both music and in medicine with his ability to lead such an intense dual life.

Born in Cape Town, South Africa in 1944 to a Jewish family that had immigrated there to escape the chaos and anti-Semitism that followed the Russian Revolution, the young Sagov grew up in the midst of the horrid South African regime of Apartheid and its resulting police state.

Sagov was born with Gordon's Syndrome, an extremely rare genetic disorder which can cause club feet, cleft palate, dysplasia of the hip and also thumb in palm deformity. He was the white, Jewish teenager growing up in Cape Town, learning to play rock 'n' roll (and then jazz) in illegal, racially integrated jam sessions. He was the sickly youth in leg braces, repeatedly traveling to London, New York, and Boston for a series of 16 complicated surgeries to correct skeletal deformities. He was the medical student who worked in the black townships of South Africa by day and played in the clubs by night.

Upon landing in the United States in the late 1960s, he worked in New York City's Bellevue Hospital and also sat in with musical luminaries like Ornette Coleman before moving to Boston to study jazz at the New England Conservatory of Music. He graduated with dual specialties in piano and oboe, and being making his way as a bandleader.

Offered the chance to go on the road with his band, Sagov declined, choosing a career practicing medicine instead of a life of ceaseless touring. It's now been about seven years since Sagov formed a new band and returned to gigging.

Since re-emerging musically, Sagov has released 11 albums with his new outfit, the Remembering the Future Jazz Band, which is stocked with well-credentialed members of the region's jazz scene. Mostly culled from live recordings cut at the Regattabar, this body of work represents a blizzard of activity after decades of relative quiet.

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