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Fresh on the heels of a heralded recording, Live from the Village Vanguard, brilliant trumpeter and composer Tom Harrell will bring his quintet to Lafayette’s Williams Center for the Arts 8 p.m. Friday, Nov. 8.
Tickets cost $18 and may be ordered by calling the box office at 610-330-5009.
In addition to Harrell, the concert features saxophonist Jimmy Greene, bassist Ugonna Okegwo, pianist Xavier Davis, and drummer Quincy Davis. Harrell played at the Williams Center in 1995 as a guest musician with pianist David Leonhart, the Alan and Wendy Pesky Artist-in-Residence in 1994-95.
Also an arranger and flugelhornist, Harrell’s work has been called “pure melodic genius” by Newsweek. He has consistently dominated the critics’ and readers’ polls in Down Beat and JazzTimes magazines over the last two decades. Entertainment Weekly called him “the premier trumpeter of his generation, ” and JazzTimes stated, “There is no one in jazz today writing with more intelligence, depth, and heart than Tom Harrell.”
Harrell took up the trumpet when he was eight and began improvising almost immediately. He was playing gigs around the San Francisco peninsula, on both trumpet and piano, by the time he was 13, and he studied as a teenager with John Handy and Lee Konitz, among others. After graduating from Stanford in 1969 with a degree in music composition, he joined the Stan Kenton orchestra and played in Woody Herman’s trumpet section in 1970-71. He spent the next year in the Latin-jazz fusion band Azteca, then began a four-year stint with the Horace Silver Quintet.
The Silver gig led Harrell to move to New York, where he was soon making records with Konitz, Bill Evans, Phil Woods and other jazz greats. He spent much of the 1980s touring with Woods, who once called him “the best musician I’ve encountered in 40 years of music,” and has been leading his own groups since 1989. His already high profile received an additional boost when he signed with RCA Victor in 1996.
Jimmy Greene won the Most Outstanding Soloist award at the 1993 Berklee College of Music High School Jazz Ensemble Festival and was selected to the 1993 Grammy All-American High School Jazz Band, conducted by Branford Marsalis. Soon after moving to New York in 1997, he became a member of the Horace Silver Quintet. In addition to the legendary pianist’s group, Greene performs regularly with the small groups of Harrell, Steve Turre, Lewis Nash, Avishai Cohen, Ralph Peterson, Kenny Barron, and Tana Reid, as well as the Carnegie Hall Jazz Band, New Jazz Composers’ Octet, and the big bands of Harry Connick, Jr. and Jason Lindner. The June 1999 issue of Down Beat magazine recognized Greene as one of “25 Young Rising Stars in Jazz.”
Ugonna Okegwo has won a place on stage with master musicians as diverse as Clark Terry, Benny Golson, and Joseph Jarman. Early in his career, he played three years in the Berlin club scene as a sideman and a leader, catching the attention of Dizzy Reece, with whom he gigged in local clubs, and Charles Tolliver, who hired the young player to perform and record with him in 1988. During that same year, trombonist and Charles Mingus alum Lou Blackburn invited Okegwo to tour Germany and Europe with Blackburn’s Afro-Jazz group Mombasa. He moved to Manhattan in 1989 and immediately began playing with older musicians, among them Big Nick Nicholas, Junior Cook, and James Spaulding. In 1992, a call from vocalist Jon Hendricks led to steady work as a sideman on stage and in recording studios, most notably with French pianist Jacky Terrasson.
An accomplished musician, composer, and arranger, Xavier Davis received a grant from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation to compose an extended work for his group, the New Jazz Composer’s Octet. His debut recording, Dance of Life, was released on Metropolitan Records in 1999. Down Beat magazine awarded the CD four stars in its January 2000 issue and said, “Davis steps out with an accomplished debut.” He has served as musical director of Boy’s Choir of Harlem and performed with many of today’s great jazz musicians, including a two-year stint with legendary vocalist Betty Carter.
Xavier’s brother, Quincy Davis, joined the Tom Harrell Quintet last year. He “adds a lot of spark to the group,” says Harrell. “He makes it swing and gives us a groove all the time. It always feels good to play with him. He’s a great soloist, too — very creative. You can hear his roots in the jazz tradition.”
The nationally recognized Performance Series attracts more than 10,000 people each season. It has been cited for performing excellence by the National Endowment for the Arts, National Dance Project, Chamber Music America, Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund, Pennsylvania Arts and Humanities Councils, and Association of Performing Arts Presenters.
The 2002-03 Performance Series at Lafayette is supported in part by gifts from Friends of the Williams Center for the Arts; by the F.M. Kirby Foundation; by provisions of the Alan and Wendy Pesky Artist-in-Residence Program, the James Bradley Fund, and the Ed Brunswick Jazz Fund; and by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, Pennsylvania Performing Arts on Tour, and New England Foundation for the Arts.