7th Solo Piano Festival

Saturday Feature Concert

The Solo Jazz Piano Festival, now in its seventh year, is one of the cornerstones of the VJC’s programming. The festival has presented some of the world’s top pianists and most important musical innovators of this generation including NEA Jazz Masters Toshiko Akiyoshi and Joanne Brackeen, acknowledged luminaries Stanley Cowell, Benny Green, Sullivan Fortner, Kenny Werner, and many others.

Set I
Myra Melford
“Pianist-composer Myra Melford has often placed her music at the fulcrum between gleaming beauty and turbulent unrest. This is music with an endless capacity for elasticity and surprise, along with an affirming spirit of coherence.” – NPR
The Bay Area pianist Myra Melford—whom the New Yorker called “a stalwart of the new-jazz movement”—has spent the last three decades making brilliant original music that is equally challenging and engaging. Inspired by extra-musical sources like literature, history and spirituality, she has explored an array of formats, from ruminative solo-piano recitals to deeply interactive small groups, ambitious multidisciplinary programs and even the swinging grandeur of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. Her most recent release, The Other Side of Air (Firehouse 12), by her quintet Snowy Egret, is an ideal place to begin digging into her dynamic catalog. Here Melford is joined by cornetist Ron Miles, guitarist Liberty Ellman, bass guitarist Stomu Takeishi and drummer (and MacArthur Fellow) Tyshawn Sorey, performing hard-angled counterpoint, potent grooves, free exploration, intuitive interplay, chamber-music elements over smart, engaging compositions. That sort of idiom-bending ingenuity—which has garnered Melford fans from the worlds of jazz, contemporary classical and the avant-garde—has been a through line in her musical life.

Set II
Orrin Evans
“…a poised artist with an impressive template of ideas at his command.” – New York Times
During his quarter-century as a professional jazz musician, pianist Orrin Evans has become the model of a fiercely independent artist who pushes the envelope in all directions. Evans bedrocks his aptitude for exploration with virtuoso command of the piano and deep assimilation of the fundamentals. A deft tune deconstructor, he commands vocabulary across a broad timeline of swinging, blues-infused, straight-ahead jazz and avant-garde jazz dialects, and conveys his stories with the intuitive spontaneity of an ear player. Evans projects an instantly recognizable sound, sometimes creating flowing rubato tone poems, sometimes embodying the notion that the piano comprises 88 tuned drums. He also swings like crazy. Evans’ stylistically polyglot compositions are influenced by the individuality-first Black Music culture of his native Philadelphia, by a decade of playing with the Mingus Big Band, and by his tenures with other leaders like Bobby Watson, David Murray, Sean Jones and Donny McCaslin. But what really sets Evans aside are the projects he creates as a leader, including his own Captain Black Big Band. His engaging compositions are simultaneously energetic and meticulous.