Herbie Hancock is among the artists on the just-announced lineup for the Wellington Jazz Festival 2019. RNZ Music jazz specialist Nick Tipping appraises the artists playing at this year's event.
Photo: Supplied
The 2019 Wellington Jazz Festival’s lineup covers the full range from legend of the genre Herbie Hancock, to young up-and-coming stars. This year’s line-up also features musicians who cross over from jazz to other genres, including hip hop, pop, opera, and chamber music.
- Wellington Jazz Festival | 5th - 9th of June 2019 | Head to jazzfestival.nz for more details.
Herbie Hancock
The master of jazz piano almost defies superlatives. As a young pianist, Hancock was part of Miles Davis’s second great quintet, and he went on to redefine jazz through jazz fusion projects like Rockit and more straight-ahead albums including Empyrean Isles and Maiden Voyage. More recently Hancock has been a champion of younger musicians, including guitarist Lionel Loueke and bass player Tal Wilkenfeld. Herbie Hancock has also pushed the boundaries of jazz with crossover pop recordings, ranging from 1973’s Head Hunters to his later recordings The New Standard and The Imagine Project.
Ambrose Akinmusire
Trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire is at the forefront of the younger generation of jazz artists, who draw from other kinds of music including hip hop and chamber music. Akinmusire’s compositions are genre-defying works in which the trumpet often takes a back seat. For this concert, he’s joined by his New York-based quartet of pianist Sam Harris, bass player Harish Raghavan, and drummer Kweku Sumbry.
Ghost-Note
If you like the contemporary big band-meets-pop stylings of Snarky Puppy, you’ll love this side-project by the Puppies’ two percussionists, Robert "Sput" Searight and Nate Werth. Their brand of “conscious funk” draws on jazz, hip hop, and EDM.
Alicia Olatuja
Alicia Olatuja first gained international attention as the featured soloist with the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir at President Barack Obama’s second inauguration. She combines gospel with pop, drawing on her background as an operatic mezzo-soprano. Olatuja is a strong proponent of female composers, and her critically-acclaimed album Intuition: Songs from the Minds of Women, celebrates the achievements of women including Sade, Tracy Chapman, and Kate Bush.
Simon O'Neill & Rodger Fox Big Band
Rodger Fox presents another collaboration with a leading New Zealand classical artist, when his big band returns to the Michael Fowler Centre with one of the world’s leading operatic tenors, Simon O’Neill. O’Neill has a particular affinity with brass instruments – he’s the patron of the NZ Brass Foundation, and has performed on Eb bass with the Ashburton Silver Band and tuba with the Southern Sinfonia. In this concert, Simon and the band will premiere new arrangements of Wagner’s ‘Die Walküre’ and ‘Notung! Notung!’ as well as Puccini’s ‘Nessun Dorma’.
