The Monterey Jazz Festival On Tour - 55th Anniversary Celebration
The Monterey Jazz Festival is the longest consecutively running jazz festival in the world. This exclusive presentation, MONTEREY JAZZ FESTIVAL ON TOUR, 55TH ANNIVERSARY, sponsored in part by SouthArts, celebrates the Festival's legacy expanding the boundaries of live jazz presentation. The dream of founder Jimmy Lyons became reality in 1958, when the first Monterey Jazz Festival featured artists like Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, John Lewis, Sonny Rollins, Gerry Mulligan, Art Farmer, Ernestine Anderson, Harry James, Max Roach, and Billie Holiday. This 55th Anniversary Tour reflects Monterey's "traditional-untraditionalist" attitude, jazz-with-a-purpose exuberance, and joyful fun that is the hallmark of the festival to this day. The tour features:
Dee Dee Bridgewater Over the course of a multifaceted career that has spanned four decades, she has risen to the top tier of today's jazz vocalists, putting her own unique spin on standards as well as taking intrepid leaps of faith in re-envisioning jazz classics.
Christian McBride, bassist, bandleader, educator, artistic director, and Grammy Award-winner,is regarded as a virtuoso double bassist and is one of the most recorded musicians of his generation, having appeared on close to 300 recordings as a sideman before the age of 40. After studying at the Juilliard School, he has performed and recorded with a huge number of jazz legends and ensembles, including Freddie Hubbard, Joe Henderson, McCoy Tyner, Herbie Hancock, Pat Metheny, Diana Krall, Roy Haynes, Chick Corea, John McLaughlin, Wynton Marsalis, Hank Jones, Joshua Redman, and Ray Brown's "Superbass" with John Clayton, as well as with hip-hop, pop, soul, and classical musicians like The Roots, soprano Kathleen Battle, Carly Simon, Sting, Bruce Hornsby, and James Brown. In 2006, McBride was named to the position of "Creative Chair for Jazz" with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, taking over from Dianne Reeves, serving two terms, and succeeded by Herbie Hancock in 2010. He is also co-director of the new National Jazz Museum in Harlem. He released his first big band album, titled The Good Feeling in 2011 for which he won the Grammy for Large Jazz Ensemble Performance.
Benny Green possesses the history of jazz at his fingertips. Combine his mastery of keyboard technique with decades of real world experience playing with some of the most celebrated artists of the last half century, and it's no wonder Green has been hailed as perhaps the most exciting, hard swinging, hard-bop, pianist to ever emerge from Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers.
Lewis Nash is an American jazz drummer from Phoenix, Arizona, where he was encouraged into jazz by his high school band teacher. By the age of 18, Nash was a first call sideman for visiting musicians to Phoenix, and received the call to move to New York and join Betty Carter's band at the age of 22. Nash became an in-demand sideman during this period, and since his tenure with Ms. Carter, has gone on to record and tour with some of the most important and highly regarded musicians of all time, among them Tommy Flanagan, Oscar Peterson, Sonny Rollins, Ray Brown, Gerald Wilson, Horace Silver, Ron Carter, Hank Jones, Benny Carter, Milt Jackson, Art Farmer, McCoy Tyner, Joe Lovano, Christian McBride, Branford Marsalis, Wynton Marsalis, Pat Martino, Clark Terry, Diana Krall, Joe Williams, Nancy Wilson and many others.
Chris Potter, a world-class saxophone soloist, accomplished composer and formidable bandleader, has emerged as a leading light of his generation. DownBeat called him "One of the most studied saxophonists on the planet" while Jazz Times identified him as "a figure of international renown." Jazz sax elder statesman Dave Liebman called him simply, "one of the best musicians around," a sentiment shared by the readers ofDownBeat in voting him second only to tenor sax great Sonny Rollins in the magazine's 2008 Readers Poll.
Ambrose Akinmusire, a startlingly fresh young trumpeter and composer of extraordinary clarity and vision, started in the Berkeley High School Jazz Ensemble and studied at the Manhattan School of Music. In 2007, Akinmusire was the winner of the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition and the Carmine Caruso International Jazz Trumpet Solo Competition, two of the most prestigious jazz competitions in the world. Akinmusire made his debut on the Blue Note label in 2011 with the album, When the Heart Emerges Glistening,featuring his quintet.
Sunday, March 24, 2013 at 5pm & 7pm in the Manship Theatre
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