Brice Winston Celebrates Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers
($20-$30 tickets | 7pm & 9pm) Local saxophone legend Brice Winston leads his sextet in celebrating the music of Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers featuring Tucson’s finest musicians!
Max Goldschmid (trumpet) Rob Boone (trombone) Brice Winston (tenor sax) Angelo Versace (piano) Scott Black (bass) Arthur Vint (drums)
**Brice Winston**
Saxophonist and composer Brice Winston is a native of Tucson, AZ, but cut his teeth learning jazz in the city where jazz was created – New Orleans. For more than 16 years he lived in New Orleans performing with countless local musicians and several world-class figures including such notables as Brian Blade, Ellis Marsalis and Nicholas Payton. After touring with Nicholas Payton’s band for a year, an acquaintance with band leader and composer Terence Blanchard developed into a close musical relationship that continues to this day. Brice toured with Blanchard for over fifteen years, an association affording him the opportunity to perform all over the world with some of the greatest musicians alive including Herbie Hancock, Dianne Reeves, Lionel Loueke and Dave Holland. Brice has recorded 7 CD’s with Blanchard including the Grammy Award winning CD, “A Tale of God’s Will – A Requiem For Katrina” as well as more than 15 movie scores for film director Spike Lee among other directors. After returning to Tucson in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Brice found himself becoming increasingly involved in jazz education. Brice now leads the Tucson Jazz Institue for high school musicians, is on faculty at the University of Arizona and is a resident artist/educator at Northern Arizona University. He continues to perform in jazz clubs, concert halls and jazz festivals all over the world.
**Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers**
Drummer Art Blakey is one of teh most important figures in jazz history and made a name for himself in the 1940s in the big bands of Fletcher Henderson and Billy Eckstine. He then worked with bebop musicians Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie. In the mid-1950s, Horace Silver and Blakey formed the Jazz Messengers, a group that the drummer was associated with for the next 35 years. It was the archetypal hard bop group of the 1950s, playing a driving, aggressive extension of bop with pronounced blues roots. The group evolved into a proving ground for young jazz talent that included artists such as Lee Morgan, Benny Golson, Wayne Shorter, Freddie Hubbard, Bobby Timmons, Curtis Fuller, Chuck Mangione, Keith Jarrett, Joanne Brackeen, Woody Shaw, Wynton Marsalis, Branford Marsalis, Terence Blanchard, Donald Harrison and Mulgrew Miller. The music they made remains of the greatest recorded jazz of all time!