    
Yvettep
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Yvettep
Post Number: 2981
Registered: 01-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, June 19, 2008 - 08:53 am: | 
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In case Sabiana wants to slip in some young jazzmen into her set. 
First, Jonathan Batiste graduated from the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts high school, and then from Juilliard. He performed at 2004's Grammy Week in Los Angeles and the 2008 NBA All-Star Game half-time show in New Orleans. He has released two CDs, with another on the way.
At Jazz Standard in New York, he's with a trio of what he calls his "musical brothers": Phil Kuehn (bass), Joe Saylor (drums), and Jamie Allegre (percussion). The only piece that doesn't display his simultaneous speed, grace, and grounding in classic New Orleans piano is the closer: Chopin's Prelude in E Minor.
In the 1990s, John Ellis moved his jazz studies from North Carolina to the University of New Orleans, but he found so much work with the likes of Ellis Marsalis and Walter Payton (the Preservation Hall bassist and father of trumpeter Nicholas) that Ellis dropped out of school to take advantage. The second time he entered the Thelonious Monk Saxophone Competition, he took second place.
As a graduate of the New School jazz program and a Brooklyn resident, Ellis tries to keep one foot in New York and the other in New Orleans — the city that inspires Double-Wide, with Gary Versace on organ and accordion, Matt Perrine on sousaphone, and Jason Marsalis on drums. Every piece Ellis wrote for Double-Wide's Dance Like There's No Tomorrow exists to make listeners dance, whether in church, in the streets, in Jackson Square or Cajun country, or in their hearts.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91420639 |
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