EUGE GROOVE

True to the title of his upcoming album, The Phoenix (Shanachie, June 2026), veteran saxophonist Euge Groove is returning to cruise and festival stages across America this fall after four personally challenging, but ultimately empowering and life-affirming, years away due to life-threatening health issues. He will follow a half dozen dates in the fall of 2026 – including The Smooth Jazz Cruise 26.3 from Vancouver to L.A., the Catalina Island Jazz Trax Festival – with a full-on tour schedule starting in January 2027. 

Euge’s return in the fall coincides with the anniversary of the fraught moment when the music stopped. After decades on the road both as a solo artist and touring with greats like Tina Turner, Joe Cocker, and Tower of Power, he had been feeling fatigued for several years (dating back to before the pandemic) when he took the stage at Yoshi’s in Oakland on October 4, 2022. He experienced something that he had never had before. Twenty minutes into his set, he felt like he was falling and left the stage, lying down on a sofa backstage with the sax still around his neck. Fortunately, his band had his back and played R&B covers the rest of the show. His audience also had his back. No one in the packed house asked for a refund!

For the next few years, up until his aortic valve replacement surgery in December 2024, Euge led something of a double life. On the professional side, he tried to muscle through, working on his 2023 album Comfort Zone, writing and producing for other artists, and booking show dates which he kept having to cancel because of the health-related chaos going on in his personal life. He passed all the recovery milestones in due course – walking, driving after a few months, etc. – but the greatest contribution to his recovery has been the service dog he got two months after the surgery, a beloved 50 lb. Bernedoodle, he calls Odysseus (Ody), named after the legendary Greek king of Ithaca and the hero of Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey. Odysseus’s specific service is “cardiac alert,” and thus, he accompanies Euge everywhere and never lets the saxophonist out of his sight.

Although Euge didn’t have the strength to play the sax during these challenging years, in some ways he was as creative as ever, producing hits for fellow saxman Richard Elliot (including his #1 hit “Very Delicious” and pianist Carol Albert (“Sunshine Yellow”) and developing his home studio-based mixing and mastering work into a full-time endeavor thanks to his investment in highly coveted analog mastering gear. During this time, he mixed and mastered projects for many of his colleagues in the smooth jazz arena, including George Benson, Rick Braun, Peter White, Vincent Ingala, Norman Brown, and Mindi Abair. 

For Euge, all of this comes back to the story of the Rise of the Phoenix, the legendary immortal bird that originated in Greek mythology. A powerful, singular creature associated with the sun, the bird lives for over 500 years before building a cinnamon-spiced nest to incinerate itself, only to rise reborn from the ashes to live out eternity. He started the new album in January 2024 with the working title “Album 14”. He didn’t rename it The Phoenix until after he resumed recording late in 2025 with his own version of the symbolic story. 

He started recording “Album 14” in January 2024, but its tracks remained without the saxophone until recently, when he finally had the strength and inspiration to add his trademark horn. If history is any indication, he will likely add more #1 Billboard singles to an impressive discography that includes the chart toppers “Born 2 Groove,” “Religify,” “Sunday Morning,” and “House of Groove”, his anthem “Livin’ Large”, and the gold-standard slow jam, “Slow Jam” (over 100M streams). His 25 year album discography includes his landmark 2000 self-titleddebut, Livin’ Large, Born 2 Groove, Still Euge, House of Groove, and Sing My Song. Fourteen albums and just getting started.