2009 Tentative JazzFest Line-up
- Arlene McDaniel Trio
- Barons of Brass
- Ginny Dusseau with The Truth In Jazz Orchestra
- Greg Howe
- Happendance 2
- Happendance's Community Dance Project
- Hot Club of Detroit
- John Douglas Quintet
- Lansing All Star Jazz Band
- Larry Gabriel
- Linda Dachtyl Trio
- Michael Sailors Quintet
- organissimo
- Sheila Landis and Brazilian Love Affair
- The Cooper, Hay, Van Lente Group
- The Timmy Stark Quartet
- Tim Cunningham
- Tracy Kash Thomas Quartet
Arlene McDaniel Trio
http://pws.cablespeed.com/arlenemcdaniel
Arlene McDaniel, a pianist, composer, and educator, has been an active mid-Michigan musician for nearly three decades. She has performed as a solo pianist, side woman, or bandleader at various clubs and festivals, and makes regular appearances at The Cappuccino Café. McDaniel earned her bachelor’s degree in Music Theory and Composition from Michigan State University, and she now teaches jazz piano at the Michigan State University Community Music School.
Her traditional piano trio encompasses all styles of jazz, including many original compositions, with influences ranging from Bill Evans to Chick Corea. The Trio also features Gene Rebeck on bass and drummer Ian LeVine. These three recently released their first CD, entitled Timeless, which showcases McDaniel’s original compositions.
Barons of Brass
http://www.baronsofbrass.com
Inspired and modeled after quintet heavyweights such as Canadian Brass and Dallas Brass, Barons of Brass have created a genre-busting style of music that ranges from the sublime to the ridiculous.
Todd Young (tuba), John Endahl (horn), Dick Borden (trombone), Scott Toaz and Jim Kasprzak (trumpets) formed the group in 2002. Armed with a handful of experimental, meticulously crafted compositions, Barons of Brass focused on performing in non-traditional venues, exposing unsuspecting audiences to brass music. Today, the group's playlist features over 200 arrangements spanning four centuries and a range of styles. All five members, however, were formally trained in classical music and continue playing in this style with the Lansing Concert Band and Capital City Brass Band.
The quintet often donates its time and talent to benefit non-profit organizations and community development efforts, including fundraisers for the new Williamston Band Shell and the Haslett Food Bank. Barons of Brass also gives an annual holiday concert for the Eaton Community Hospice House, now in its fourth year.
Ginny Dusseau with The Truth In Jazz Orchestra
http://www.ginnydusseau.com
Smooth, classic, and always engaging, vocalist Ginny Dusseau brings her unique stylings, beautiful tone, and great sense of rhythm to a diverse set of jazz arrangements. Classically trained, she began her professional career at the age of 17. She has toured both nationally and internationally, appeared on seven CDs, and performed in a variety of venues, including Carnegie Hall.
Joining Dusseau on the stage is the highly acclaimed Truth In Jazz Orchestra. Composed of 16 of the area’s best musicians and led by west Michigan's own Tim Froncek, the Truth in Jazz Orchestra plays big band hits along with arrangements from today’s most popular artists. Members have shared the stage with the likes of Woody Herman, Bobby Shew, John Clayton, Clark Terry, the Glenn Miller Orchestra, and the Gene Krupa Orchestra - to name just a few.
Greg Howe
http://www.greghowemusic.com
Greg Howe studied jazz guitar at the Guitar Institute of Technology in southern California with prominent guitarists, including Joe Diorio and the late Ted Green. He has performed with several bands and played in a variety of venues including coffee shops, bookstores, restaurants and bars, private parties, and benefits. In addition to performing, Greg currently teaches students in his home studio.
Happendance 2
http://www.happendance.org
Happendance, a cultural treasure in the Lansing area and Michigan's longest-running professional modern dance company, continues to find ways to ensure the future of dance in our community.
One of those projects is Happendance 2, a pre-professional junior company. The dancers, age 12 to 18, are selected by audition and commit to pre-professional training and rehearsal in a variety of dance styles. They have the opportunity to work with various choreographers and to perform both with the Happendance professional company and on their own.
The JazzFest performance will see four members of the junior company performing a trio of works from their repertoire, including a piece performed at the professional company's 2008 concert, "Rise: The Up Side of Down."
Experience the beauty of Happendance on the River Stage Saturday afternoon.
Photo by David Grist.
Happendance's Community Dance Project
http://www.happendance.org
Community Dance Project returns to Lansing JazzFest this year with a great new performance. This year, choreographers in the project are partnered with local visual artists to create new and innovative dance works that bridge art forms. These dances combine exciting media elements and imaginative costuming. Featured choreographers include Andrew Amos and Matt Bebermeyer. Collaborating artists include sequential artist Jay Jacot and fiber artist Candace Farmer.
Community Dance Project has its roots in choreographer showcases presented in-house by Happendance, Lansing's long-running professional modern dance company. It is sponsored by Happendance in partnership with Lansing Community College, with partial funding from the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs.
For more information on the Project, and details on additional performances July 30-31 and August 1, visit happendance.org. Photo by David Grist.
Hot Club of Detroit
http://www.hotclubofdetroit.com
More than seven decades after the innovations of the Quintette du Hot Club de France, featuring guitar virtuoso Django Reinhardt, combos called Hot Clubs carry on the gypsy jazz sound around the globe — in Tokyo, San Francisco, Seattle, Sweden, Norway, Austria, and many other locales. None, however, offers a fresher take on the tradition than does the Hot Club of Detroit, led by fast-fingered Reinhardt disciple Evan Perri.
Hot Club of Detroit has headlined nearly every jazz festival, club and concert hall in Southeast Michigan as well as various venues throughout the Midwest. The current ensemble includes guitarist Perri, accordionist Julien Labro, soprano and tenor saxophonist Carl Cafagna, rhythm guitarist Paul Brady and bassist Dave Rosin. The fibrous accordion tones of Labro, a native of Marseilles, France, links the Detroit quintet to the French musette style from which gypsy jazz partially sprung, while Cafagna’s robust saxophone work introduces bop and post-bop elements to gypsy jazz.
Perri formed the Hot Club of Detroit in 2003 while attending Wayne State University. The group took first place in the 2004 Detroit International Jazz Festival competition and won the 2006 Detroit Music Awards as Outstanding Traditional Jazz Group. In 2007, the band swept the Detroit Music Awards, winning in the Outstanding Traditional Jazz Artist, Best Independent Label Recording, Outstanding National Small Independent Label Recording, and Outstanding Video on a Limited Budget categories; Perri himself was named Best Jazz Instrumentalist.
John Douglas Quintet
http://www.myspace.com/johndouglasquartet
John Douglas' performance career began while studying at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Between his studies, Douglas helped form The Tracy Science Quartet, and since then has collaborated with several other jazz musicians. In 1996 he and five other players formed Jazzhead — arguably one the most influential modern jazz bands from the Midwest in recent times. The monstrous success of Jazzhead's self-entitled debut recording, co-produced by ex-Parliament sideman Larry Fratangelo, earned the group 1999's Detroit Music Award for Best Jazz Recording, among other awards.
Douglas' dynamic range of sound and space is documented on a variety of television, news magazine, and radio programs, and witnessed at renowned venues across the globe. John performed with Francisco Mora, Marshall Allen (Sun Ra Arkestra), and Carl Craig (Planet-E), at the 2003 North Sea Jazz Festival in Holland. In 2004, he toured with Theo Parrish and the Rotating Assembly for the Import Music Festival and a ParaDisco appearance in Amsterdam. Television appearances include the Ground Zero Blues Divas Festival with host Morgan Freeman and Bettye LaVette in 2004, and a Greektown Casino commercial in 2005. In 2007, Douglas filmed a commercial for Adidas with Theo Parish as a part of the company’s worldwide advertising campaign Sounds of the City.
The present-day version of the John Douglas Quintet consists of TaJuan "Butter" Hawkins on drums, Ibrahim Jones on bass, Roger Jones on keyboards, and Kris Kurzawa and Jerome Clark on guitar. Just as the group's powerful sounds, skills, and stamina indulge the senses, Douglas provides an insinuating energy that both lights up the stage and minds of audiences everywhere.
Lansing All Star Jazz Band
Directing this band of talented high school jazz musicians is accomplished alto and soprano saxophonist Wes Anderson.
Wessell Anderson began his musical career with classical piano in his hometown of Brooklyn, New York. However, his father soon introduced him to jazz and inspired the junior Anderson to take up alto saxophone. Anderson took private lessons, began attending jazz clubs and met Wynton and Branford Marsalis, who have become instrumental in his professional success. After touring with vocal great Betty Carter for two months, Anderson joined The Wynton Marsalis Sextet and helped create some of the most defining jazz of the late 80s and early 90s. Although the group disbanded in 1994, Anderson became the lead alto saxophonist with Marsalis’ Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, a position he held until 2005. In 2001, he joined the Julliard School of Music Jazz Studies program as a professor of saxophone.
Anderson currently performs and teaches around the world, including Michigan State University, where he is an associate professor of jazz studies. He continues to encourage students to learn the history as well as the techniques of jazz saxophone and improvisation.
Larry Gabriel
http://www.gumbospot.com
Writer and musician Larry Gabriel is a columnist for Detroit’s Metro Times weekly newspaper. He’s the former editor of Metro Times and the UAW’s Solidarity magazine, and was a features writer and editor for the Detroit Free Press. Gabriel has won awards for column writing, editorial writing, feature story writing and editing from the Michigan Press Association, and studied poetry with Anselm Hollo and Diane Wakoski at Michigan State University. He holds a bachelor’s degree in human communication from MSU and a master’s degree in speech communication from Pennsylvania State University. Gabriel is proud to be part of the fourth generation of family musicians in the United States and a member of American Federation of Musicians Local Number 22.
Linda Dachtyl Trio
http://www.dachtyl.com
Linda Dachtyl is a performer of jazz, blues, rock, and classical music. She also composes, and has extensive experience teaching music — most recently as a percussion and jazz piano instructor at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. Dachtyl holds a Bachelor of Music in Jazz Performance from Capital University in Columbus, Ohio, and a Master of Arts in Percussion Pedagogy from Ohio State University.
Her 2006 release Blue Bop has received very favorable local and national reviews, and earned a spot on Jazzweek.com’s Jazz Chart for six weeks in the summer of 2006. Her second album, For Hep Cats, released in January 2008, earned position No. 45 on the Jazzweek.com Top 100.
Dachtyl also leads the QED Jazz Piano Trio, which performs frequently in central Ohio. She has performed with Trudy Pitts, Gloria Coleman, Gene Walker, the Benny Goodman Big Band and the Central Ohio Symphony Orchestra. Joining her onstage are drummer Cary Dachtyl and guitarist Joe Gloss.
Michael Sailors Quintet
http://www.mikesailorsmusic.com
Trumpeter, arranger, and composer, Michael Sailors is a 2005 graduate of the prestigious Miles Davis Jazz Studies Program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where he received a Bachelor of Music degree in Jazz Studies. While at UNCG, Sailors worked as a full-time student, full-time musician, and played lead trumpet in the Jazz Ensemble, the flagship of the school's jazz program. He also played piano in UNCG’s Jazz Band, and was asked to write several compositions and arrangements for the Ensemble. In 2004, he won second place at the National Trumpet Competition’s Trumpet Ensemble Division, and was one of eight finalists in the Jazz Division of the same competition in 2005.
Sailors has had the opportunity to work with Ellis Marsalis, Branford Marsalis, Rodney Whitaker, Diego Rivera, and Regent Cruise Lines as lead trumpet in their featured Big Band. Since his graduation, he has been hired to arrange and/or compose for the North Carolina Jazz Repertory Orchestra, the Michigan State Jazz Orchestra, the Piedmont Jazz Collective, and the Brevard Music Festival.
organissimo
http://www.organissimo.org
organissimo formed in late 2000 as a performance vehicle for guitarist Joe Gloss and organist Jim Alfredson's growing collection of original tunes. When they first met at Michigan State University in the late 90s, the two recognized they had a rare musical chemistry and began a search for a complimentary drummer. Randy Marsh fit the puzzle perfectly.
From the beginning, organissimo has focused on original material and extending the tradition of the classic organ-based trio. organissimo's sound is instantly identifiable yet constantly evolving, incorporating elements of funk, gospel, blues, progressive rock, and fusion into a solid foundation of jazz. Shifting meters, deep grooves, melodic finesse and tight ensemble interplay are hallmarks of the organissimo sound.
This group has performed at venues and festivals across the US and internationally including the famous Baker's Keyboard Lounge in Detroit, Chris' Jazz Cafe in Philadelphia, The Green Mill, The Hot House, and Andy's Jazz in Chicago, the 2006 Chicago Jazz Festival, the 2006 and 2007 Detroit International Jazz Festival, the 2006 Syracuse Jazz Festival, and the 2007 Tel-Aviv Jazz Festival in Israel, among many others.
Sheila Landis and Brazilian Love Affair
http://www.sheilalandis.com
Sheila Landis and Brazilian Love Affair is a spirited six-piece, percussion-driven ensemble offering up an appealing amalgam of modern sounds. Landis, who was born and raised in Detroit, is a seven-time Outstanding Jazz Vocalist award winner, as bestowed by the Detroit Music Awards. After meeting guitarist Rick Matle in 1990, the pair has worked together in a variety of combinations: as a duo, trio, and in their six-member band Brazilian Love Affair. Joining Landis and Matle will be percussionist Dennis Sheridan, drummer Dave Taylor, keyboardist Duncan McMillan, and electric bassist John Barron.
Brazilian Love Affair careens through the gamut of Latin-influenced styles including bossa nova, samba and soca, with rock and R&B tones as well. Listen for favorites by well-loved composers Antonio Carlos Jobim, Carlos Santana, Chick Corea, and Stevie Wonder, as well as Latin-charged jazz standards, and originals penned by Landis and Matle. Their best-selling album Colors of Brazil is available on Landis' record label SheLan.
The Cooper, Hay, Van Lente Group
http://www.myspace.com/chvgroup
Jim Cooper, Dave Hay, and Mike Van Lente formed this West Michigan-based jazz trio in 2005. Since then, their “marvelous, creative, modern music,” as described by Linda Yohn of WEMU-FM, has been heard on stages all over Michigan. Influenced by swing, fusion, Latin, and world music, CHV has performed lively versions of jazz standards and original compositions in places such as Cliff Bells, Saugatuck Center for the Arts, Sutton’s Bay Jazz Festival, and the Thornapple Jazz Festival.
Jazz Times once called Jim Cooper “a warm vibrist who goes for the heart.” He grew up in Chicago and began playing vibes in 1971, but he also plays the marimba with CHV. Dave Hay plays piano, organ, and keyboard bass. As one of the most in-demand pianists in the state of Michigan, Hay studied at the Interlochen Arts Academy, the Berklee College of Music in Boston, and Michigan State University. Playing in many styles of music, Mike Van Lente has performed in clubs and concerts throughout Michigan. He has also taught jazz percussion at Hope College for 20 years, and also performs with the Faculty Jazz Quintet.
Cooper, Hay, Van Lente Group’s latest album, Trio Musik, has just been released on Big-O Records.
The Timmy Stark Quartet
As one of the brightest young composers of our time, Timmy Stark has performed with the Boston Symphony and legends of jazz such as John Scofield, Gary Burton, and Airtos. His compositions, falling under the "fusion jazz" category, have an almost otherworldly fingerprint. Guitarist Steve Roth, drummer Bobby Gardner, and bassist James Williams have all enjoyed remarkable careers themselves, and complement Stark's pieces with precision and style. Evolving from sideman to bandleader, Timmy Stark is certainly a rising star on the jazz scene in this newly formed quartet!
Tim Cunningham
http://www.timcunningham.com
Contemporary jazz artist Tim Cunningham has played the saxophone for over half his life. Cunningham has headlined nightclubs and opened countless concerts for many high-profile artists such as Luther Vandross, Patty Labelle, and Earth Wind & Fire, to name a few.
Cunningham has also performed in Las Vegas casinos and jazz festivals spanning the U.S. and the Caribbean. He appeared at the inaugural St. Lucia Jazz Festival in 1992, received rave reviews from the crowd and local paper and returned to St. Lucia in 2006. He also opened the Cincinnati Jazz Festival for six years straight. Music critic Larry Nager of The Cincinnati Inquirer reviewed the festival and declared Cunningham “a soulful, hard-edged player, he gave a 35-minute show that posed the question, how can somebody this good remain relatively unknown?”
Tim Cunningham’s latest project, Manchester Road, is receiving rave reviews for its title track. The album was recorded and produced with Daron Steward, featuring a collection of exciting, mellow and sensuous melodies.
Tracy Kash Thomas Quartet
http://www.tracykash.com
Tracy Kash Thomas began her musical life with the classics. Having earned her bachelor’s degree from University of North Texas and a master’s from the venerable Boston Conservatory, Thomas is certainly an accomplished flutist. She performed on flute and piccolo regularly with the Cape Cod Symphony, New England Philharmonic, and Irving (Texas) Symphony Orchestras, among others. Add her impeccable songwriting, arranging, and production talents to the mix and it is easy to see why she is an established musician’s musician in her hometown of Detroit as well as in New York City, where she has lived previously. Thomas' music represents a variety of genres, including swing, Latin jazz, R&B/smooth jazz, and roots rock. This unique combination thrills live audiences as well as her growing radio following. Joining her onstage at the JazzFest will be Kris Kurzawa on guitar, Keith Malinowski on bass, and Dave Marcaccio on drums.
Tracy Kash Thomas won the 2009 Detroit Music Award for Outstanding Jazz Vocalist and has been nominated for numerous others. Ian Anderson, of Jethro Tull fame, invited her on stage as a guest flutist in 2003. Her original compositions “Make Me Blue” and “One More Day” made the semi-finals in the prestigious 2005 UK Songwriting Contest. Thomas’ extensive media exposure in New York and Detroit includes the nationally broadcast Mitch Albom Show, and she has done considerable radio jingle work nationwide. Her third compilation, Sound Truth, will be released in the summer of 2009.
In addition to performing with her quartet, Tracy Kash Thomas will be conducting a performance and songwriting workshop on August 8.
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