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The legendary Joe Lovano Nonet kicks off the Jazz Masters Series Friday, Sept. 1 at 8 p.m. with the sounds of his most recent recording Streams of Expression, a loving tribute to Miles Davis’ Birth of the Cool.
Tickets for the performance are free for Lafayette students, $4 for faculty and staff, and $25 for the public, and may be obtained by calling the Williams Center box office at (610) 330-5009.
Other performers in the Jazz Masters Series include the Jim Hall/Geoffrey Keezer Duo Friday, Nov. 10, $20; the Maria Schneider Jazz Orchestra Saturday, Feb. 10, $22; the Bill Charlap Trio Wednesday, March 7, $18; and Uri Caine’s Goldbergs Project Wednesday, April 4, $18. A subscription to the Jazz Masters Series costs $79, a savings of 19 percent off the single ticket price.
Born into a musical household, Joe Lovano picked up a saxophone at the age of five and has been playing ever since. Hailed as “one of the greatest musicians in jazz history” by The New York Times, Lovano combines soulful sounds and fresh contemporary textures to create one of the finest sounds in the world of jazz today. Lovano spent his high school years playing in clubs around his hometown of Cleveland, inspired by his tenor saxophonist father, Tony “Big T” Lovano.
While attending Berklee College of Music, Lovano continued to play and soon became well known throughout Boston, where he continued to find his sound and met many musicians he would collaborate with in the future. After college, he moved to New York City, where the music scene was on fire with the sounds of jazz. In 1990, Lovano signed with Blue Note Records, for which he has recorded 20 albums.
Streams of Expression, released in August, is Lovano’s tribute to Miles Davis’s groundbreaking 1949 recording, Birth of the Cool. Lovano collaborated with compose/arranger Gunther Schuller, who played trumpet on the original Davis recording, to revisit the work, bringing fresh contemporary textures to the jazz classic.
The 2006–2007 Lafayette College Performance Series is supported in part by gifts from Friends of the Williams Center for the Arts; by provisions of the Josephine Chidsey Williams Endowment, 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, Dexter and Dorothy Baker Foundation, and New England Foundation for the Arts.