Earshot Jazz Festival

October 19
Matt Wilson Quartet &
Roosevelt High School Jazz Band
The Triple Door, 7:30 $22 general, $11 youth BUY ONLINE

Matt Wilson’s raucous New York quartet joins the award-winning Roosevelt High School Jazz Ensemble. Under the 23-year leadership of Scott Brown, the big band remains one of the best of its kind in the country. In 2008, for the second year in a row and third time overall, the band won top honors at the Essentially Ellington competition. The Roosevelt High School Jazz Ensemble is directed by Scott Brown with the assistance of Stuart MacDonald.

“This Matt Wilson Quartet is dedicated to bringing the music to the people. We perform music that is not afraid to challenge and entertain. We have fun and so will you!” Such is the guiding philosophy of percussionist Matt Wilson’s longstanding and widely celebrated quartet.

Formed in 1996, the Matt Wilson Quartet satisfied the drummer’s dream of having his own working jazz band. Wilson’s passion, joy, and driving creativity have powered both his career as a percussionist and bandleader, and has earned him the respect of peers, critics, and audiences alike. Wilson views himself as a sort of “ringleader of sonic fun,” allowing participating musicians to carve out their own space and identity in his ensembles. As a result, the band is raucous, inspiring, and full of energy. This incarnation of the ensemble is to feature Kirk Knuffke (trumpet), Jeff Lederer (sax and clarinets), and Chris Lightcap (bass).

Wilson’s playfulness and quirky sense of humor appear inseparable from the music itself. Wilson once explained his four children fully understand that the band is up there on stage playing in a sort of sandbox, just as they would. “There’s a deep sense of play in Matt Wilson’s quartet,” wrote Ben Ratliff of the New York Times. “It’s full of feints, slang, sentimentality and a peaceful lack of inhibition; its loose ensemble feeling has a grace born of practice... there’s a specific kind of gentle humor in this band, as there has been since its beginning, 13 years ago. The performance spills over with personality.”

The quartet’s most recent release, 2009’s That’s Gonna Leave a Mark, features an eclectic brew of originals (one contributed by each member of the band), with John Lewis’s and Gillespie’s “Two Bass Hit,” War’s signature “Why Can’t We Be Friends?” and the traditional “Come and Find the Quiet Center” mixed in for good measure. “There’s a lot of alignment in the music and there’s a lot of collision,” Wilson notes of the album. “I like all of that; it doesn’t always have to be smooth sailing.”

In addition to touring and performing at jazz festivals around the world, the quartet has maintained a strong commitment towards music education and reaching the next generation of involved listeners. “We have also had the opportunity to expose thousands of students to improvisational music with our innovative educational workshops,” Wilson adds. “We love interacting with the students and are looking forward to playing our MWQ plus big band charts more in the future (they rock, the kids’ll love ‘em!).”

Presented in association with Cornish College of the Arts.

– Peter Walton

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