OPENING NIGHT: Esperanza Spalding (USA)
CLOSING NIGHT: Wayne Shorter Quartet (USA)
The Melbourne International Jazz Festival will present jazz wunderkind Esperanza Spalding for her first time ever in Australia, opening the 2016 Festival with her new project, Emily’s D+Evolution.
From her early years performing with the likes of Joe Lovano and Wayne Shorter, to the international successes of her Chamber Music Society and Radio Music Society albums, the young bassist/vocalist/composer has continually blazed unmarked territory. Her announcement as Best New Artist at the 53rd Grammy® Awards – an unprecedented win in that category by a jazz musician – has become the theme of Spalding’s musical life, setting her apart as the most important new voice in jazz today.
Her new project – Emily’s D+Evolution – maintains her lifelong passion for seeking new sounds and making the unprecedented her norm. Born during a “sleepless night of full moon inspiration,” Emily’s D+Evolution rekindles Spalding’s childhood interest in theatre, poetry and movement through a series of musical vignettes which magically unfold in a whimsical mixture of performance, video and text.
Responsible for some of the most revolutionary jazz of the 20th century, Wayne Shorter takes to the stage with three of the world’s finest jazz musicians – Danilo Perez, John Patitucci and Brian Blade – for an evening of unrivalled virtuosity on the closing night of the 2016 Melbourne International Jazz Festival.
“The most skillful, mutually attuned and fearlessly adventurous small jazz group on the planet… (the quartet) celebrates humanity’s hope for harmony” The Guardian
For over 50 years composer and saxophonist Wayne Shorter has shattered the limitations of jazz with his transcendent musicality. His iconic body of work as a solo artist, as a part of Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, Miles Davis’ Second Great Quintet and fusion pioneers Weather Report, has defined and redefined jazz for generations. Compositionally unmatched, winner of a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, musical icon. No matter what superlatives are thrown Shorter’s way, nothing compares to the experience of a live performance by “jazz’s greatest living small-group composer and a contender for greatest living improviser” (New York Times).
Melbourne International Jazz Festival 3 – 12 June 2016
Program launch Tuesday, 15 March 2016
MORE INFO
