ALLISON, CARDENAS & NASH
JULY 27, 4:45
With over 25 years of creative collaboration, bassist Ben Allison, guitarist Steve Cardenas, and saxophonist Ted Nash weave musical conversations full of subtlety and surprise. These independently successful jazzmen have released four albums as a trio. The inspiration for this collaboration was Jimmy Giuffre’s drummerless units of the 1950s and 60s.
Their latest trio project resulted in the recording, Tell the Birds I Said Hello: The Music of Herbie Nichols.
Bassist, composer and producer Ben Allison has performed and recorded his own brand of music for nearly three decades. He founded the Jazz Composers Collective, a non-profit organization fostering new music when he was just 25 and since then has appeared on international tours and over 100 albums. All these recordings notwithstanding, it turns out his most listened to composition is the theme for NPR’s On the Media, with 1.5M tuning in a week! He has received numerous awards for his work, from Chamber Music America, the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, the National Endowment for the Arts, and many others. Ben made his Carnegie Hall debut in 2012.
Guitarist and composer Steve Cardenas was a longstanding member of the Paul Motian Electric Bebop Band, Charlie Haden Liberation Music Orchestra, Steve Swallow Quintet and Joey Baron’s Killer Joey. He is currently a member of the John Patitucci Electric Guitar Quartet, Ben Allison Band, Jon Cowherd Mercy Project and Adam Nussbaum Lead Belly Project. Steve tours extensively and leads his own group. He is on faculty at The New School, Banff International and Stanford Jazz Workshops, and many others. He co-authored the Thelonious Monk Fakebook (Hal Leonard), marking the first time all Monk’s compositions were assembled into one volume, many for the first time. Steve appeared with Peter Bernstein’s Quartet for Litchfield Jazz Presents, an ongoing live and live stream series begun early in the pandemic. That performance has been viewed some 50,000 times.
Saxophonist and composer Ted Nash, a two-time Grammy Award winner, has had an extraordinary career as a performer, conductor, composer, and educator. His interest in music was encouraged by his father, trombonist Dick Nash, and uncle, reedman Ted Nash. His first professional gig came at age 16, playing with legendary vibraphonist Lionel Hampton.
He is a co-founder, with Ben Allison, of the Jazz Composers Collective. One of his most important associations today is with the JALC Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis. Portrait in Seven Shades, commissioned by the orchestra, was credited by Ted Panken in Downbeat as marking a new direction for the group, and Nash received his first Grammy nomination as its
arranger. Growing up in a household of civil rights activist/musicians, Nash’s work today often embraces social themes. He received two Grammy Awards and the Jazz Journalists Association Composer of the Year Award in 2017 for his Presidential Suite, a work inspired by great political speeches of the 20th Century.