A Jacob William Project:
Jacob William (bass).
Forbes Graham (trumpet);
Steve Lantner (piano);
Luther Gray (drums);
Special Guest, Jason Robinson, (tenor, flute)
For the unfamiliar, uninitiated, these are some of the Who’s Who of Boston’s creative Jazz scene, internationally acclaimed and travelled, for years, and not slowing down making musical waves at every performance…
The July 14th date at the Lily Pad is a special one for many reasons. After a long hiatus, bassist Jacob William, Drummer Luther Gray, pianist Steve Lantner, trumpeter Forbes Graham, and tenor saxophonist Jason Robinson are coming together. This event will also be a musical announcement of the release of two long awaited Quintet and Trio recordings that Luther, Forbes, Steve and Jacob are part of.
The music will be a celebration of life and improvisation. No deliberate stylistic crafting, but the sources of experimentation as tradition will be explored. Swinging and deeply grooving.
Please come and join in!
Free Jazz, Improv, Contemporary Ensemble,
https://www.creativemusicseries.com
https://www.facebook.com/events/265233245953134
Bios:
William Jacob (bass):
Born and raised in India, Jacob arrived via rare routes to play on the vast fields of Jazz and other creatively improvised and composed music. Jacob grew-up in a syncretic milieu.
In his teens, Jacob started playing the bass guitar and soon began playing concerts and festivals all over India in the company of many forward-looking elder musicians who had a particularly deep interest in Jazz. Jacob moved to the U.S. in 1991 after receiving a scholarship to study music.
In 2001, Jacob received a Master of Arts in Music degree from Wesleyan University, where his studies and work combined ethnomusicology, world-music and experimental composition under Anthony Braxton, Neely Bruce and Alvin Lucier. He also studied South-Indian Carnatic vocal music with T. Viswanathan and percussion music with Ramanad Raghavan and David Nelson. During 1998-1999, he attended the New England Conservatory of Music and studied in the department of Third Stream Music / Contemporary Improvisation under Ran Blake and studied the bass with Cecil McBee and John Lockwood. In 1997 he earned a Bachelor of music degree from Berklee College of music, completing his studies focused on Jazz Bass performance under Bruce Gertz, Whit Browne and Rich Appleman while studying Theory, Composition and Arranging
Jacob has worked with a diverse range of renowned personalities in Jazz and World-Music arenas.
Jacob has contributed to over 20 recordings.
Forbes Graham (trumpet):
Forbes Graham (b. 1977) is a composer, musician, sound artist, and visual artist whose work explores themes of simultaneity, perceptibility, transformation and collage. In 2020, he was selected to work with the JACK Quartet as a part of JACK Studio. His work "Encounters I" for trumpet, electronics, and voices premiered at Roulette in 2019. He performed with Michael Pisaro at (the) co-incidence festival in 2017 and has appeared at other music festivals including High Zero, Vision, and The Thing In The Spring. He currently studies composition with Chaya Czernowin.
"Miles Beyond:The New Sounds Of Trumpet", NPR August, 2010: "There are hidden secrets in the horn and a host of musical linguists uncovering new languages...FORBES GRAHAM doesn't ignore it. He embraces the blue note and turns it "magenta haze." The Boston-area improviser sputters and attacks the trumpet with shark-attack notes before letting out a haunting whistled horn like a meditative Don Cherry, or a gruffled stutter like a duck being strangled". Born in 1977 graduating from American Univ in 1999. Philosophically, he improvises integrating electronics creatively. He's still on the local scene, quietly, but even more poignant!
Steve Lantner (piano):
Pianist Steve Lantner brings the disparate natures of a wide range of musical styles - free improvisation, jazz, and contemporary chamber - together to create an all-encompassing voice that is uniquely his. He is known for his originality, virtuosity, versatility and a style that places melody and harmony back on the improviser's palette alongside texture, velocity and abstraction. Part of his pursuit is to find a new language that embraces the deep traditions of Jazz without picking one side or the other in its dichotomy - to establish a style that embraces the breadth of all the developments at our disposal.
He has performed/recorded with Fred Anderson, Ken Vandermark, Joe McPhee, Joe Morris, Rashid Bakr, Sabir Mateen, Roy Campbell Jr., Dave Rempis, Kent Kessler, Michael Zerang, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Allan Chase, Joe Giardullo, Laurence Cook, Joe Maneri, Mat Maneri, Taylor Ho Bynum, Nate McBride, Bill Lowe, and many others. Venues in which he has performed include Münster Jazz Festival (Germany), Peripheries Festival (Spain), The Vision Festival (NYC), The Knitting Factory (NYC), Tonic (NYC), CBGB's Gallery (NYC), The Empty Bottle (Chicago), The Hungry Brain (Chicago).
Drummer Luther Gray, though largely self-taught, his musical training involved drum lessons from Kim Martin, Larry Bright, Steve Bagby, and Mickey Newman. In 1995 he graduated the University of Miami with a Bachelor of Music, after which he taught privately and performed in the Washington , D.C. area with, among others, Butch Warren, Cecil Payne, Webster Young, Tsunami, Liquorice, Peter Edelman, Jenny Toomey, Bob Butta, and Buck Hill. Since moving to Boston he has resumed teaching private drum lessons and has played with Joe Morris, Jay Hoggard, Joe McPhee, Timo Shanko, Cameron Brown, Allan Chase, Joseph Daley, Sabir Mateen, Roy Campbell, Ida, Geoff Farina, Andrew White, Rob Brown, Bill Lowe, Greg Abate, Raqib Hassan, Bill Pierce, Mitch Seidman, Steve Swell, Joe Beck, Fred Anderson, Ken Vandermark and many others. In addition to his performing schedule Luther teaches art and music at an after-school program for elementary school children.
Jason Robinson, Tenor
The music of American composer, saxophonist, flutist, and scholar Jason Robinson ("rugged and scintillating," New York Times) thrives in the fertile overlaps between improvisation and composition, acoustic music and electronics, tradition and experimentalism. Initially a devotee of post-1960s jazz and creative music, Robinson is celebrated for bringing together various historical directions in jazz--bebop, post-bop, the avant-garde--with an improvisatory and compositional sensibility drawn from and extending the languages of John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, and Lester Young. His musical interests, however, span far and wide. Born in 1975, he is a critically acclaimed distinctive voice in a generation of creative musicians in equal dialogue with jazz, popular music, experimental music, and electronic music.