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Jazz musicians Roy Hargrove and Mulgrew Miller take the stage Nov. 9
As part of the College’s Jazz Masters series, keyboardist Mulgrew Miller and two-time Grammy Award-winning trumpeter Roy Hargrove will perform at 8 p.m. Friday, Nov. 9 in the Williams Center for the Arts. Miller will also give a free talk about the evening’s program at 7 p.m. in the Williams Center room 108.
Tickets are free for students, $4 for faculty and staff, and $20 for the public. They can be obtained by calling the William Center box office at (610) 330-5009.
The theme for this season’s Jazz Masters series is “Intimate Dialogues.” This special concert format will consist of pairs of renowned performers. Future performers in this year’s series are Lewis Nash and Steve Wilson, Feb. 1, $18 and Gary Burton and Chick Corea, March 11, $25.
Hargrove and Miller step aside from leading their own bands for this concert to reprise the duo improvisation program that was cited as one of the musical highlights of the 2005-2006 New York jazz season. Both have performed at the Williams Center before. Miller has performed several times, twice with his own quintet Wingspan and twice as guest pianist for the late James Williams Contemporary Piano Quartet and for the Faddis-Hampton-Heath Sextet. Hargrove brought his original quintet to the Williams Center in 2000 and returned two years later with his augmented Cuban-inspired “Crisol.”
Hargrove won a Grammy Award in 2002 for “Best Jazz Instrumental Album” for his work with Herbie Hancock and Michael Brecker. He also won a Grammy in 1997 for “Best Latin Jazz Performance” with Crisol.
Hargrove was born in 1969. A trumpeter, flugelhorn player, and band leader, he picked up the horn at age nine. His musical career was shaped when he met Wynton Marsalis at the Booker T. Washington School for the Visual and Performing Arts in Dallas, which he attended. In 1989, he went to the Berklee College of Music, but later transferred to the New School for Social Research in New York. Hargrove’s professional career was well underway before he left college, and while still at Berklee he worked with numerous leading players.
In the 1990s, he recorded several bop-style albums under his own name and toured widely with a quintet. In April 1994, he played at a concert sponsored by Verve which was recorded on the video Carnegie Hall Salutes the Jazz Masters (1994). A performance in Italy late in 1996 as a member of the ten-piece New York/Havana/San Juan Super-band and a subsequent recording made there under Hargrove’s leadership in January 1997, led to his founding an 11-piece band, Crisol, which utilized Afro-Cuban rhythms, modal patterns, and sometimes electric bass guitar rather than double bass.
Hargrove’s approachable m�lange of bop and post-bop trumpet playing has been soundly marketed to give the idiom a new lease on life without radically refashioning it. Hargrove is a leading exponent of the 1980s and 1990s neo-classical movement inspired by Marsalis. Like many of his peers, he believes his music to be an extension rather than a reiteration of earlier traditions.
Born in 1955, Miller started playing piano by ear at the age of six. Miller became interested in jazz when he was 14 after watching Oscar Peterson play on television. After winning a scholarship to study music at Memphis State University and studying there for two years, Miller moved to Boston, where he had lessons for three months with Margaret Chaloff (Serge Chaloff’s mother). In 1976, he moved to Los Angeles in an attempt to establish himself there as a jazz musician.
Miller first came to prominence as a member of Mercer Ellington’s band from 1977-1980. After leaving this group he worked alongside double bassist Curtis Lundy and the drummer Greg Bandy in a trio accompanying Betty Carter and played hard bop with Woody Shaw, Johnny Griffin, and Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. While with Blakey, he began to record prolifically as a sideman.
Miller became a member of Tony Williams’ quintet, where he collaborated with Reggie Workman and Freddie Waits in the cooperative group Trio Transition. He also performed and recorded with Benny Golson and with his own trio. Miller continued to lead a trio after Williams disbanded his group. Although he began to cut back somewhat on his rigorous commitment to studio work, he still performed as a sideman on a number of recordings. As a result, Miller has an extensive recording history.
The 2007-2008 Performance Series at Lafayette College is supported in part by gifts from Friends of the Williams Center for the Arts; by provisions of the Josephine Chidsey Williams Endowment, J. Mahlon and Grace Buck Fund, the Croasdale Fund, the Class of ’73 Fund, 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; the F.M. Kirby Foundation, the Dexter and Dorothy Baker Foundation, and the New England Foundation for the Arts.