Beats having a day job

In 1992, aerospace engineer and moonlighting musician Dana Hall was driving home from a gig in Seattle’s Pioneer Square. After long hours designing aircraft, the Brooklyn native picked up blues gigs on the side. Hall was listening to Miles Davis’s Four & More when he had an epiphany. The drummer/Boeing worker realized, “The only way that I would be able to achieve that high level of musicianship was if I didn’t do it part-time. And so I didn’t.” That might be the biggest understatement of our conversation with Hall when we reach him on a rare break at home in downstate Savoy, Illinois. His eureka moment set the dapper drummer on an ambitious trajectory that’s seen him play behind everyone from Joshua Redman to Ray Charles.

Soon after arriving on the local scene in 1994, the Iowa State grad (a double major in aerospace engineering and percussion, of course) joined the esteemed Chicago Jazz Ensemble, where he’s served as music director for the past two years, and threw himself into a dizzying array of projects. The 40-year-old is currently completing a doctorate at the University of Chicago and working as a music faculty member at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he’s taught since 2004.

On top of academia, the multitasker has popped up quite a bit lately with the two groups he leads: spring and an eponymous quintet. This weekend, Hall makes the familiar two-and-a-half-hour drive north to play behind the Dana Hall Quintet’s debut on local imprint Origin Records, Into the Light.

“Yeah, I’m on the go a fair amount,” the soft-spoken academic says with a laugh. “There’s no downtime, but that’s good. It keeps your mind nimble.” Hall speaks carefully, in measured tones, yet behind the drums he’s fast and loose, dabbing at his palette of drums and cymbals with movements and gestures too fast for the eye to catch.

For Hall, a typical week includes a few days of instruction and a faculty meeting, followed by a quick jaunt to Chicago for a gig at Andy’s or the Velvet Lounge before heading home in the wee hours. Weekends are usually consumed with gigs or clinics; Hall often flies out of U of I’s Willard Airport to catch a connecting flight to a gig on one of the coasts. “It makes me tired just saying it,” he says.

Into the Light was recorded in just one day last winter, but it hardly sounds dashed off. The disc boasts fluid performances, impeccable chops and tasteful restraint from each player: trumpeter Terell Stafford, saxist Tim Warfield Jr., pianist Bruce Barth and bassist Rodney Whitaker. The group had enough material left over from the session for a follow-up recording later this year. This month, Hall plans to enter the studio with spring.

Despite all the hard work, Hall considers himself lucky: “A lot of times musicians, or artists in general, have to suffer a little bit to determine if this is really something they want to do.” Maybe that’s why Hall finds it exasperating to revisit his long-gone career in aerospace engineering. After all, he’s been working as a full-time musician for half his life now. (The driven drummer also declined to answer any questions about his personal life, insisting on a division between “professional” and “private.”)

Still, he’s savvy enough to understand that every artist’s story needs a hook: “[My publicist] is always talking about Sonny Rollins’s tale about practicing on the Williamsburg Bridge. That’s 50 years old and he’s still telling this story.” Hall pauses to reflect. “So if I have to talk about something that happened at my half-life point, I’m okay. I’ve still got another 40 years to talk about it, I guess.”

Dana Hall Quintet plays the Green Mill Friday 5 and Saturday 6.

• More Music articles