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Bert Seager Quartet

  • The Lilypad 1353 Cambridge Street Cambridge, MA, 02139 (map)

$10 Cover @ the Door / Start 6:30pm / Doors 6pm / Seated Show

It will be a deep joy to play a set of quartet music with my dear friends, Daniel Blake, Richie Barshay and Max Ridley.  They are some of the most playful, musical, and thoughtful people I know.

They are also phenomenal musicians who listen with a relaxed,

affectionate awareness allowing them to respond to the music with what seems like supernatural powers. I learn so much from them when we play and talk, and am inspired by their lives, music and dedication.

And I think it is worth mentioning that we will show up unrehearsed, only meeting in the space of the new sounds we are creating together. In this way we have the unobstructed territory to listen and respond.   We will use as our forms jazz standards and of course a Monk tune.

-Bert Seager

Bert Seager

Bert Seager is an internationally recognized jazz performer and composer. His seventeen compact discs have won him unanimous critical acclaim from the New York Times, Keyboard Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, The Boston Globe and many other publications.

Bert’s compositions, improvisations and teaching reflect both an inward and outward-looking view of life and music. He plays a varied program of originals, jazz classics and spontaneous music: always striving for transparency – framing each song’s improvised narrative in a playful conversation.

Bert has performed and recorded with jazz numerous luminaries. He has toured with his band extensively both in the United States and internationally in China, Hungary, Bulgaria, Ecuador, Peru, Canada, Israel, Jordan, and Japan.

Bert is on the faculty of the New England Conservatory of Music, and has been a recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts grant for jazz.

Richie Barshay 

Richie Barshay began drumming inside kitchen cabinets at an early age, and continues banging on things worldwide to this day. Noted for his work with the Herbie Hancock Quartet in the 2000s, he's been dubbed "a major rhythm voice on the rise" by Downbeat magazine, and The Guardian (UK) praises "the arrival of a major innovator who also knows how to have fun." Find him on stage and recordings with Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Esperanza Spalding, The Klezmatics, Fred Hersch, Kenny Werner, Lee Konitz, Natalie Merchant, Bobby McFerrin, and Pete Seeger among others. Since 2004 he has led outreach projects across 5 continents as an American Musical Envoy with the U.S. State Department. He can be heard on over 80 recordings as a sideman, and his two self-produced albums: Homework featuring Herbie Hancock (2004), and Sanctuary featuring Chick Corea (2014). Based in New York City and Northampton, MA, he is an AmSAT certified Alexander Technique teacher and maintains a private practice for performing artists and others to regain better mind-body coordination and ease of movement.

Dan Blake 

Saxophonist Dan Blake has developed a wide-ranging career as a contemporary composer, performer and educator that “regards tradition as a welcoming playground best approached with a sense of wonder and adventure” (The Boston Globe). Blake’s music has been called “stunning” (All About Jazz), and his most recent release “The Digging” was described as “a creative essay on what can be done in the trio format” (Ottawa Citizen). In addition to his work as a leader, he has toured and recorded with three-time Grammy winner Esperanza Spalding, NEA Jazz Master Anthony Braxton, and Velvet Underground founding member John Cale, among many others. In his extended multi-disciplinary compositions, Blake weaves together his interests in world music, contemporary improvisation, animation, and performance art. This genre-bending catalog of works has earned him support from the Jerome Fund for New Music, ASCAP, and New Music USA. A musician keenly interested in bringing music together with social justice causes, Dan Blake produces the annual Concert To Feed The Hungry, a fundraising event celebrating the struggle to end hunger and malnutrition in poor communities around the world. He holds a Ph.D. in composition from the City University of New York and is currently on faculty at the New School for Social Research, and at the Conservatory at Brooklyn College.

Max Ridley

Max Ridley is a bass player from and based in Boston. He started playing bass through a love of punk rock and fell in love with jazz in high school at the Boston Arts Academy. He was awarded full-tuition scholarships to study at Berklee College of Music for both an undergraduate and graduate degree. He earned his graduate degree from Berklee’s Global Jazz Institute under the direction of master pianist and educator Danilo Perez. He has shared the stage with renown musicians such as Kenny Werner, Jeff Coffin, Terri Lyne Carrington, Donny McCaslin, Tia Fuller, and Jerry Bergoniz. He has performed in venues such as the Blue Note, Boston Symphony Hall, the Kennedy Center and the Umbria Jazz Festival. He has toured all around the US and a little bit outside of it, both by van and by plane and has slept on gross floors and fancy beds (and vice versa). He also spent some time living in Valencia, Spain and considers that a second home and musical community.

Earlier Event: November 30
Voices Unheard: Real Adoptee Stories
Later Event: December 1
Gill Aharon Trio