ROSS

COVENTRY — Peter Daniel Ross has a unique talent.

He’s not a star athlete, nor can he juggle fire.

What Ross, 17, does really well, besides being ranked number one in his Coventry High School graduating class, is talk jazz and physics. He has a knack of making them seem obviously linked.

“Jazz is always changing and it’s open to interpretation, especially when you doing an improv solo. You have to do a lot of studying to know what note sounds good on the chord and then decide what you are going to play leading into the next chord,” Ross said. “Sonny Rollins has a very big sound that has technically more base tones. If you listen to John Coltrane, versus Dexter Gordon, you can tell which has the brighter sound and also the thinner sound. And also, you can tell which sound was darker or fatter.”

As for physics, Ross says, “I like tinkering with gadgets. I just like learning things and physics is all about learning new things and learning new discoveries. I like learning how things work.

“We’ve been learning about heat transfer and optics and sound. I have done a paper on dark matter. It’s matter that doesn’t reflect or emit any light. We know galaxies are spinning and there has been more gravity, or dark matter, actual matter, and that’s what we know of it so far.”

He is hoping to find a career that will meld physics and music.

In the near term, this fall, that quest will take him to Carnegie-Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, where he will study music and physics toward a bachelor of science and arts degree.

He has a great foundation to work from. Ross has a weighted 5.0 grade point average. He has known since last year that he would be the valedictorian.

“It was never something I was aiming for, it just kind of fell into my lap. I just wanted to do well in school. I just made sure I understood all the material. I always understood it,” Ross said.

While acquiring grades in the stratosphere was something Ross happened upon, learning the saxophone was something he was drawn to.

When Ross was in the fifth grade, he heard his cousin Matthew Janiszewski play tenor saxophone. At the time his cousin played a classical piece.

“I fell in love with the saxophone sound. I just loved it and ran with it,” Ross said, who began lessons shortly after that time. “You can make the sound different. You could have a very dark tone. In the next measure you could make it very bright. There was a lot of feeling. I just heard my cousin’s sound and I started listening to other sax players.”

Ross turned to jazz, eventually focusing more on tenor saxophone styles, and he realized that music was an equal opportunity activity.

“I love music because it gives me a chance to be creative. There is always something else to learn and there is always someone better than you. It’s really an endless course of study. If there is someone that says they know everything there is to know about jazz then they don’t anything about it,” Ross said. “Those classes are geared toward everyone, so whether you are an advance player or more a beginning player, there always something to learn.”

lsparks@projo.com