CHUCHO VALDÉS: THE CREATION- WORLD PREMIERE!
Jazz legend celebrates his 80th birthday with an extraordinary summation of an extraordinary career
Friday, November 5, 2021
DIANE REEVES: CHRISTMAS TIME IS HERE
Five-time Grammy winner Dianne Reeves
with opening act Brandon Goldberg Trio
Friday, December 17, 2021
LEDISI SINGS NINA
Vocal powerhouse Ledisi honors the legendary singer Nina Simone
Friday, January 14, 2022
PAT METHENY SIDE-EYE
Grammy-winning guitarist and composer Pat Metheny
With James Francies and Joe Dyson
Friday, February 18, 2022
SFJAZZ COLLECTIVE: NEW WORKS REFLECTING ON THE MOMENT
Featuring Lizz Wright, Chris Potter, David Sanchez, Etienne Charles,
Warren Wolf, Edward Simon, Aneesa Strings, Kendrick Scott
Friday, March 25, 2022
LUCIANA SOUZA & VINCE MENDOZA: STORYTELLERS
Grammy-winning Brazilian vocalist Luciana Souza and multi-Grammy Award winning composer-arranger-conductor Vince Mendoza and the Frost Concert Jazz Band
With opening act John Daversa Quintet
Friday, April 8, 2022
Miami, FL – June 2, 2021 – The Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts of Miami-Dade County (@arshtcenter) is proud to announce the return of its critically acclaimed JAZZ ROOTS series to the Center’s Knight Concert Hall. The 2021-2022 season features a world premiere performance by jazz legend Chucho Valdés and five extraordinary, curated evenings of live music that celebrate everything from Latin jazz, American jazz masters and the brightest local stars in a series that was made for Miami. The Arsht Center is ready to welcome back jazz lovers safely, and EFG returns as the presenting sponsor for Jazz Roots 2021-2022.
“The 2021-2022 JAZZ ROOTS season was worth the wait. We welcome you back to Jazz Roots with a season of celebrated jazz artists giving unparalleled performances in a series of distinctive concerts,” said Liz Wallace, vice president of programming for the Arsht Center.
“This season of Jazz Roots may be the most exciting yet, and exemplifies the vision of the series founder, Larry Rosen,” said Frost School of Music Dean and JAZZ ROOTS artistic advisor Shelly Berg. “We are curating and presenting programs that are new and unique to Miami, with a some of the world’s greatest and most compelling artists, reflecting the diversity of cultures in our special community. JAZZ ROOTS is a celebration of and for Miami.
JAZZ ROOTS 2021-2022 presents six incomparably moving and diverse evenings of jazz, featuring top headliners and exciting new artists. The series kicks off on November 5, 2021, when legendary jazz pianist Chucho Valdéspresents the world premiere of “The Creation.” The show was specially commissioned by the Arsht Center and explores the story of creation according to the Regla de Ocha, the Afro-Cuban religion known as Santería. The series gets festive on December 17, 2021, when Grammy winner Dianne Reeves rings in the end-of-year holidays with Miami pianist Brandon Goldberg and his trio as her opening act. JAZZ ROOTS continues into 2022 when vocal powerhouse Ledisi honors the legendary singer and civil rights icon Nina Simone on January 14, 2022; followed by guitarist and composer Pat Metheny and an eclectic gathering of emerging young artists on February 18, 2022; and all-star ensemble SFJAZZ Collective performs original compositions reflecting on the past year and current times. The series culminates as Grammy winner Luciana Souza sings songs by some of Brazil’s most popular songwriters together with Grammy-winning composer-arranger-conductor Vince Mendoza and The Frost Concert Jazz Band, on April 8, 2022 with opening act John Daversa Quintet. Jazz Roots: Sound Check also makes its return in the 2021-2022 season with a unique behind-the-scenes musical experience for Miami-Dade County high school jazz students.
JAZZ ROOTS 2021-2022 is presented by the Arsht Center with generous support from presenting sponsor EFG. EFG is a global private banking group headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland, with regional headquarters in Miami, and the presenting sponsor of other global jazz events, including the EFG London Jazz Festival and EFG Lugano Estival Jazz.
Sanjin Mohorovic, Head of EFG’s Americas Region said, “We are delighted to partner with the Arsht Center for this season’s Jazz Roots, such a welcome part of our international jazz portfolio. The past year has really demonstrated the importance of the arts and music in all our lives and the power they have to bring us together. We are proud to be part of such an exciting line up.”
JAZZ ROOTS 2021-2022 is also presented with generous support from Baldwin Richardson Foods, Quint Family Foundation, Alan and Diane Lieberman and Steinway & Sons, the official piano of the Adrienne Arsht Center. WDNA 88.9 FM is a media sponsor.
COMMITMENT TO HEALTH AND SAFETY
While the protocols are evolving, the Adrienne Arsht Center is working in collaboration with federal, state, city and county health authorities and medical advisors from FIU Academic Health System to further guide our plans and welcome you back for Jazz Roots season with safety and health as a priority. The Arsht Center has already made updates – such as digital ticketing, touchless fixtures, enhanced air filtration and an increased number of hand-sanitizing stations – and will share further enhanced safety protocols with plenty of time prior to your first arrival at the Center. All updates will also be shared at arshtcenter.org/covid-19. We’ve been working hard to ensure that when you return to the Arsht Center, your experience is better than ever!
The star-studded lineup for the JAZZ ROOTS 2021-2022 season is as follows*:
CHUCHO VALDÉS: THE CREATION – World Premiere!
With the Yoruban Orchestra
Hilario Durán and John Beasley, Musical Directors
Featuring the Frost Studio Jazz Band conducted by Etienne Charles
Friday, November 5, 2021 at 8 p.m.
The great Cuban pianist and composer JESUS “CHUCHO” VALDÉS presents La Creación (The Creation), his new work for big band, Afro-Cuban percussion and vocals. A suite in four movements, La Creación explores the story of creation according to the Regla de Ocha, the Afro-Cuban religion known as Santería. It is an extraordinary summation of an extraordinary career.
“This new work represents the accumulation of all my experiences and everything I’ve learned in music,” says Valdés, who will celebrate his 80th birthday in October. “This is a moment of full maturity, personally and musically, and I feel prepared to do this work.”
La Creación represents a return to big-band sonorities for Valdés. The pieces include elements of Santería ritual music, African music, the blues and what Valdés describes as “an atmosphere in the style of Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew.”
“This work is very significant to me,” Valdes says. “I think it’s my masterpiece — so far.”
DIANNE REEVES: CHRISTMAS TIME IS HERE
Vocalist Dianne Reeves with opening act Brandon Goldberg Trio featuring Ben Wolfe, bass and Donald Edwards, drums
Friday, December 17, 2021 at 8 p.m.
Grammy Award-winning DIANNE REEVES rings in the holiday season with music from her celebrated albumChristmas Time Is Here.
Reeves melds her timeless grace, elegance and charisma into unforgettable jazz renditions of holiday favorites such as “Little Drummer Boy,” “Carol of the Bells,” “Christmas Waltz,” “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” “Let It Snow” and many others. In addition to being a five-time Grammy Award recipient, Dianne Reeves has received honorary doctorates from Juilliard and Berklee College of Music.
Opening for Reeves on this joyous occasion is 15-year-old keyboard wunderkind BRANDON GOLDBERG, whose “jazz IQ is phenomenal,” according to Downbeat magazine. His album “In Good Time” will be released in September 2021. He’ll perform with his trio.
LEDISI SINGS NINA
Vocalist Ledisi
Friday, January 14, 2022 at 8 p.m.
2021 Grammy winner LEDISI is a 13-time Grammy-nominated powerhouse vocalist with a career spanning almost two decades. Since arriving on the scene in the late 1990s, she’s garnered three Soul Train Music awards, an NAACP Theater Award and six NAACP Image Award nominations. Most recently, Ledisi received two L.A. Stage Alliance Ovation Award nominations, including one for Best Featured Actress in a Musical.
LEDISI SINGS NINA is a beautiful mixture of classical, jazz and R&B sounds with a riveting narrative of a musical bond between artists from different eras. Ledisi returns to her jazz roots while honoring one of her greatest inspirations, Nina Simone, the brilliant and celebrated American singer, songwriter, musician, arranger and Civil Rights activist.
PAT METHENY SIDE-EYE
Friday, February 18, 2022 at 8 p.m.
Internationally renowned guitarist PAT METHENY brings to Jazz Roots his new project Side-Eye, a touring collaboration with a rotating lineup of new and emerging musicians who have impressed and inspired Metheny throughout the world. This edition of Side-Eye will feature keyboardist James Francies and drummer Joe Dyson. “While touring, I regularly listen to new musicians who claim to be influenced by my records,” Metheny says, “and I often invite them to play with me. This inspires me to see the way they challenge music represented by the old melodies, and I’m curious what could happen if I write new music just for them.”
Metheny has established himself as one of the most original jazz musicians in the world. He has won 20 Grammy Awards and is the only artist to do so in 10 categories.
SFJAZZ COLLECTIVE: New Works Reflecting on the Moment
Featuring Lizz Wright, Chris Potter, David Sanchez, Etienne Charles,
Warren Wolf, Edward Simon, Aneesa Strings, Kendrick Scott
Friday, March 25, 2022 at 8 p.m.
The SFJAZZ COLLECTIVE is an all-star jazz supergroup featuring vocalist Lizz Wright on vocals, saxophonistsChris Potter and David Sánchez, trumpeter Etienne Charles, vibraphonist Warren Wolf, keyboardist Edward Simon, bassist Aneesa Strings and drummer Kendrick A.D. Scott.
New Works Reflecting on the Moment is a vital program of new compositions by the band written in response to the extraordinary social and global issues we have faced over the past year.
Founded in 2004 by SFJAZZ in San Francisco, the award-winning SFJAZZ Collective is a composers’ workshop that represents what’s happening now in jazz. The group’s membership includes the most influential instrumentalists and performers in modern music. This year’s lineup features multiple Grammy Award winners and nominees as well as critics’ and readers’ poll winners.
LUCIANA SOUZA & VINCE MENDOZA: STORYTELLERS
Luciana Souza, Vince Mendoza and Frost Concert Jazz Band
with opening act John Daversa Quintet
Friday, April 8, 2022 at 8 p.m.
Melding the worlds of Brazilian pop and American jazz, Grammy Award-winning vocalist LUCIANA SOUZA brings her deeply personal, colorful and illuminated musicality to big-band arrangements of songs by her fellow Brazilians Antonio Carlos Jobim, Edu Lobo, Chico Buarque, Guinga, Djavan, Ivan Lins and Gilberto Gil. “Her voice traces a landscape of emotion that knows no boundaries,” Entertainment Weekly raves.
Souza is one of jazz’s leading singers and interpreters. Her work transcends traditional musical boundaries, offering solid roots in jazz, a sophisticated lineage in world music and an enlightened approach to the latest sounds. She will be joined onstage by Steinway piano artist and multiple-Grammy winner VINCE MENDOZA and the University of Miami’s FROST CONCERT JAZZ BAND.
VINCE MENDOZA has been at the forefront of the jazz and contemporary music scene as a composer, conductor and recording artist for the last 20 years. Mendoza’s arranging has appeared on many critically acclaimed projects that include dozens of albums with song writing legends such as Björk, Chaka Khan, Al Jarreau, Bobby McFerrin, Melody Gardot, Sting and Joni Mitchell. He has 6 Grammy Awards and 25 nominations. Mendoza is the Music Director and Chief conductor of the Netherlands Metropole Orchestra. In addition, he appears frequently as a guest conductor with orchestras throughout Europe, the U.S., Japan, Scandinavia, and the U.K.
Mendoza has also written commissioned compositions and arrangements for the Turtle Island String Quartet, the Chicago Symphony, the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet, the Metropole Orchestra, the Berlin Philharmonic, West Deutsche Rundfunk and the BBC. His music was featured at the Berlin Jazz Festival. He has performed at the Montreux and North Sea Jazz Festivals.
JOHN DAVERSA is a distinguished trumpet-player, composer, arranger, producer, bandleader and educator. He is world-renowned for his virtuosic, dynamic and emotive style of trumpet and EVI playing, along with imaginative, genre-bending compositions and arrangements. Originally from Los Angeles, CA, he is currently residing in Miami, FL where he is Chair of Studio Music and Jazz at the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music. In addition to multiple awards as a bandleader and educator, his large jazz ensemble album, American Dreamers: Voices of Hope, Music of Freedom received three Grammy Awards and his big band album Kaleidoscope Eyes: Music of the Beatles received three Grammy nominations.
His 2020 release, Cuarentena: With Family at Home, an album of original and traditional Cuban boleros, pays homage to familial love and the healing power of music during the time of COVID and features Latin Jazz stars pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba, bassist Carlo De Rosa, drummer Dafnis Prieto and percussionist Sammy Figueroa. His 2021 release, All Without Words: Variations Inspired by Loren, is a lush orchestral trumpet concerto played by the Daversa Jazz Orchestra and composed by Daversa’s friend Justin Morell, dedicated to Morell’s autistic son Loren.
Daversa’s music embraces gratitude, humility, integrity, and innovation. As fellow trumpeter and composer Terence Blanchard said of Daversa’s work: “This is art. This is what music should be. No re-creation. No mimicking. Just honesty. Fearless honesty.”
TICKET INFORMATION
JAZZ ROOTS 2021-2022 series subscriptions, which include tickets to all six performances, are on sale to the public beginning June 1 with seating priority given to renewing subscribers. Packages range in price from $193-$562*. Subscriptions can be purchased by calling (305) 949-6722 or online at arshtcenter.org/jazz. Single tickets, if available after the subscription campaign ends, will go on sale later this year.
ABOUT JAZZ ROOTS
JAZZ ROOTS is an institution in Miami music and has been credited with revitalizing America’s art form in the region, with more than 100,000 people attending the annual six-part concert series. In addition, the series has benefitted more than 9,000 high school jazz music students who have participated in the accompanying JAZZ ROOTS: Sound Check educational program. JAZZ ROOTS was co-created by the Adrienne Arsht Center in 2008 in collaboration with the late music industry entrepreneur Larry Rosen and since then has presented a rich variety of thematically based concerts exploring the spectrum of jazz, featuring more than 160 of the greatest living jazz artists/ensembles on the scene today. Since its inception, the series has included jazz superstars such as Jon Batiste, George Benson, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Dave Brubeck, Chick Corea, Paquito D’Rivera, Michael Feinstein, Dave Grusin, Keith Jarrett, Eddie Palmieri, and Sonny Rollins, Chucho Valdés as well as world-class ensembles, including the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis, the Count Basie Orchestra, and the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra. Quincy Jones has heralded JAZZ ROOTS as “the most important new jazz and educational series in America!” This history-making series has sold out dozens of concerts.
JAZZ ROOTS also features JAZZ ROOTS: Sound Check, an in-depth educational partnership with Miami-Dade County Public Schools which has brought more than 9,000 high school music students to the Center for a complimentary and unique behind-the-scenes experience including: a pre-concert sound check; a Q&A session with featured artists followed by a workshop with a local jazz expert that will highlight the music, the artistic process and the practical skills needed for a career in the arts; and free entry to the evening’s performance. The JAZZ ROOTS education program is presented by Baldwin Richardson Foods, and made possible in part by EFG, the Green Family Foundation, Quint Family Foundation, Citizens Interested in Arts and Alan and Diane Lieberman.