$10 Cover @ the Door / Start 10:30pm / Doors 10pm
Amanda Ekery celebrates the release of her album "Keys With No Purpose." Keys With No Purpose was made possible thanks to the St. Botolph Foundation and has received some love from Downbeat, WRBB, and Divide and Conquer. Joining the festivities is Minidap making their debut at this event, and the Margaux Vranken Group who is releasing an album later this fall.
Amanda Ekery
Multi-instrumentalist and composer Amanda Ekery weaves her experience in underground rock, improvisatory creative music, research, and jazz into her compositions, workshops, and community-based performances. She’s been a featured artist at the Panama Jazz Festival performing with jazz legend Ran Blake, Blue Note Amsterdam, and the Amalfi Coast Music Festival. Dedicated to education equity, Amanda founded El Paso Jazz Girls, the first cost-free program for teenage females to learn jazz from professional female musicians in Texas. Her newest album, Keys With No Purpose is a reaction to the sexist culture women continue to face. As a sought after presenter and researcher, Amanda has been invited to speak at the International Vocal Jazz Conference in Helsinki, International Women in Music Leadership Conference in London, Jazz Congress at Lincoln Center, and the Chamber Music America Conference. She’s the Assistant Director of Academic Affairs at New School of Jazz and Contemporary Music, a teaching artist for the Metropolitan Opera Guild, and education coordinator for Jazz at Lincoln Center.
Minidap
Minidap is Jolee Gordon and Rubin Hohlbein. They are musical collaborators that met studying in the Jazz and CI departments at New England Conservatory. They are currently in a experimental/genre-hopping rock band together called Queen Crony, and they have been working on honing in their sound as a duo. Minidap features mostly co-written music, and highlights some more electronic/computerized sounds as well.
Margaux Vranken
Margaux Vranken (born in Brussels, Belgium) is a pianist, a composer and a singer. The Monnaie, piano jazz at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels, is one of the most popular and most successful orchestras in the world.
She founds the quartet PINTO in 2012 and offers a bitter-sweet, delicate, bright and appealing jazz. The band wins the Audience Prize in the scope of the Brussels Jazz Marathon contest in 2014. The final score of the Jazz Jazz Festival with a critical and public success at the Mithra Jazz Festival in Liège in 2015.
Margaux also writes the music of the long-feature "The Liberterres" (released in Brussels in August 2015). The film is being regularly broadcasted in France, Canada, Switzerland and Belgium. In 2016, she receives a grant from the Siena Foundation Jazz to take part in the Siena International Jazz Summer Workshop with teachers such as David Binney, Stefano Battaglia, Jeff Ballard, Penman Matt, Ben Wendel, Aaron Parks and many more.
She graduated from a MM in Contemporary Performance at the Berklee Global Jazz Institute (Boston, USA) in June 2018. The impressive array of faculty includes Danilo Perez, John Patitucci, Adam Cruz, Dave Liebman, Lovano Joe, Terri Lyne Carrington, and George Garzone among others. The Global Jazz Institute is an intensive program which awards full tuition to all participants who in turn must complete a degree in just one year. Margaux just recorded her first album as a leader at the Bunker Studio (Brooklyn, NY) in November 2018.