Above: St. Mark’s students and faculty will be joined at their annual jazz festival by a professional composer-musician and jazz players from Algonquin and Trottier. (cropped image of flyer)
This month, St. Mark’s School is holding its annual jazz festival. The Cutler Jazz Festival features guest performers along with the school’s Jazz Band. The public is invited to attend for free or stream live!
The year’s featured guest performer is Taylor Ho Bynum, a musician, teacher, and composer. He’ll bring along three other members of a quartet.
The private school also invited Southborough’s public school jazz musicians to be part of the music festival. Trottier Middle School Big Band will play, along with Algonquin Regional High School’s Jazz I Ensemble. (For the full list of student performers, click here.)
Bynum website’s bio describes his musical background and other “interdisciplinary” work:
Taylor Ho Bynum (b.1975) is a musician, teacher, and writer, with a background including work in composition, performance, interdisciplinary collaboration, production, organizing, and advocacy.
His expressionistic playing on cornet and other brass instruments, his expansive vision as composer, and his idiosyncratic improvisational approach have been documented on over twenty recordings as a bandleader and over a hundred as a sideperson. Bynum enjoys playing with friends in collective ensembles like his duo with Tomas Fujiwara, Illegal Crowns (with Fujiwara, Benoit Delbecq, and Mary Halvorson), and Geometry (with Kyoko Kitamura, Tomeka Reid, and Joe Morris), and as a sideperson in Fujiwara’s Triple Double and Shizuko, Reid’s Stringtet and Septet, Jim Hobbs & the Fully Celebrated Orchestra, and Bill Lowe’s Signifyin’ Natives.
You can read more about him here. But to get a feel for his work and his musical approach, the “behind the scenes” video below is even better:
The St. Mark’s concert will take place Sunday, April 13th at 6:30 pm. The event will be in the Class of ’45 Hall inside Putnam Family Arts Center (#13 on the campus map).
No registration is required to attend. But if you prefer to watch from home (or elsewhere) you can live stream the performance here.
