INFORMATION FOR
Composer and drummer Dan Pugach brings his big band to Shea for the very first time this summer, featuring music from his 2025 GRAMMY® Award-winning album Bianca Reimagined: Music for Paws and Persistence, featuring Nicole Zuratis. This adds to his growing list of awards as a composer, which include ASCAP Foundation Jazz Composer Award, and the BMI Charlie Parker Composition Prize. He also played drums on the 2024 GRAMMY® Award-winning album How Love Begins. Pugach, who was born in Isreal and has spent time in Rio de Janeiro and Boston before moving to our area, also leads a nonet, which along with his big band, performs in well-established NYC venues and at international festivals and performing arts centers.
General Admission: $20 (includes $3 ticket fee)Series Subscription: $75 Summer Jazz Pass (Includes all 5 Summer Jazz concerts for one low price and total savings of $25. Jazz Pass must be purchased before the first show on Monday, July 21, 2025.)
Born and raised in Havana, pianist, composer and Guggenheim Fellow Manuel Valera is a well-established NYC musician. He has collaborated as a pianist and composer with artists such as Arturo Sandoval, Paquito D’Rivera, Brian Lynch, Dafnis Prieto, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, Jeff “Tain” Watts, John Benitez, Samuel Torres, Yosvany Terry, and classical violin virtuoso Joshua Bell. Valera has released 18 albums as a bandleader including with New Cuban Express, a trio, the New Cuban Express Big Band, and playing solo piano works. Along with the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019, he has been awarded three Chamber Music America New Jazz Works grants, two Dranoff International Piano Foundation commissions, and the ASCAP Young Jazz Composer Award. He has performed in more than 30 countries at some of the world’s most prominent international venues and festivals.
Named “Best Jazz Group” at the 2019 New York City Reader’s Jazz Awards, Sounds of A&R (S.O.A.R.) is the creation of the husband-and-wife duo, vocalist April May Webb and trumpeter Randall Haywood. Both are rising artists: Webb won the 2024 Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition, while Haywood was recognized as the "Male Rising Star" at the Hot House and Jazzmobile NYC Reader's Jazz Awards. They have represented the United States as Cultural Ambassadors and have received a grant from Chamber Music America. Their third studio album, Questions Left Unanswered, reached #12 on the National Jazz Week charts and was featured in Jazz Week’s Top 50 Jazz Albums of the Year.
One of today’s best-known tenor saxophonists, Dayna Stephens is an in-demand bandleader and sideman, lauded for his lyrical style and rhythmic explorations as both a player and composer. Raised in the Bay Area and educated at Berklee College of Music and the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz, he was the first-place recipient of the 2019 DownBeat Critics Poll in the Rising Star–Tenor Saxophone category. Over the past fifteen years, the prolific Stephens has released thirteen albums under his name, including his latest release Hopium and his 2024 album Closer Than We Think. He has toured and recorded with many renowned artists such as Kenny Barron, Julian Lage, Gerald Clayton, Linda Oh, Ambrose Akinmusire, and Al Foster. Stephens teaches at the Manhattan School of Music and William Paterson University.
Wycliffe Gordon is one of today’s most outstanding trombonists. A composer and arranger as well, he has been in the limelight since 1988 when he joined the Wynton Marsalis Septet and subsequently the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. Currently, Gordon tours the world as a soloist and with his own group; in 2018 he represented the US on State Department tour to Sri Lanka where he premiered a piece written for Sri Lanka’s 70th anniversary. He has 21 CDs as a leader, has been named the Jazz Journalist’s Association’s Trombonist of the Year 13 times and Downbeat’s Critic’s Poll six times. Recipient of numerous awards and honors, Gordon has an extensive catalog of original compositions, and his arrangement of the theme music of NPR’s “All Things Considered” is heard daily around the globe. He is also a committed music educator, serving as Director of Jazz Studies at Augusta University.
A WP audience favorite, singer Catherine Russell has had a career that has spanned numerous decades and musical styles. Early on, she sang background vocals for Steely Dan, Donald Fagen, David Bowie, Madonna, and many more. When she embarked on a solo career, she reached for standards like “Harlem on My Mind” and appeared in a biopic about early jazz leader Buddy Bolden. She has received three Grammy Award nominations and continues to collaborate with performers like Sean Mason and John Pizzarelli, with whom she performed here on the Jazz Room. Her amazingly flexible voice will bring a great message of warmth and blues to the Jazz Room stage again.
$25 – Public
$22 - Senior/WP Community
$15 – Non-WP Student
Free for WP Students with show of ID
All prices include fees.
Ted Rosenthal has collaborated, toured, and worked with some of the jazz greats of the past 40 years, including Gerry Mulligan, Art Farmer, Jon Faddis, Phil Woods, the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, and Bob Brookmeyer. Early in his career, he was winner of the 1988 Thelonious Monk International Jazz Piano Competition, and his appearance on Marian McPartland’s NPR Piano Jazz program is well known. His CDs show his approaches to the American popular song and Broadway classics. Today’s concert will showcase his trio’s versions of the compositions of one of the greatest American composers of any genre, George Gershwin, including Rosenthal’s unique version of Gershwin’s iconic “Rhapsody in Blue.”
Sponsored by Keith Danish
Winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Music and a Macarthur “Genius Grant” Fellowship, Tyshawn Sorey is a jazz alumnus of William Paterson University, and of the famed Newark Arts High School. Althoughhemaybebetter known worldwide for his compositions, he is a virtuosic and imaginative, powerful drummer who is a steady fixture on today’s jazz scene, collaborating with Aaron Diehl, Greg Osby, Marilyn Crispell, Roscoe Mitchell, Vijay Iyer, and many more. He is on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, formerly taught at Wesleyan University, and his doctorate in composition is from Columbia University. We are proud to bring Tyshawn Sorey back to the Jazz Room stage.
This concert brings to the stage one of the main solo voices of the legendary Vanguard Jazz Orchestra, trumpeter Scott Wendholt. He has been the lead soloist on many of the Vanguard Orchestra’s most famous pieces, including “Mean What You Say,” and a newer composition written for him by the great Bob Brookmeyer. Wendholt has also performed or recorded with Bobby McFerrin, Chris Botti, Toshiko Akiyoshi, the Mingus Big Band, Christian McBride, Cyrus Chestnut, and led the house band at the famous Augie’s Jazz Club in New York in the early 1990s. He has been featured on more than 120 CDs. His virtuosity will be paired with the William Paterson Jazz Orchestra, led for the first time by Dr. Mitch Butler, WP’s new coordinator of jazz studies.
Sponsored by Thomas Larson
The great pianist, singer, and arranger Eliane Elias came to New York from her native Sao Paolo, Brazil to attend Juilliard, but a year later joined the powerful acoustic fusion band Steps Ahead with Michael Brecker, Mike Mainieri, and others. Aside from her long relationship with Steps, she has collaborated with Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock. Her main influences are Antonio Carlos Jobim and Bill Evans; she has dedicated albums to both, including one recording that featured unrecorded Evans compositions. Her deep dedication to the tradition of the bossa nova continues to showcase her as a vocalist as well as at the piano. A multiple Grammy Award winner, she continues to create albums at the highest level, including her newest release Time and Again. We welcome her return to the Jazz Room for the finale of our fall season.
Pricing
$50 Gold Circle
$45 Rear Orchestra
$40 Front Loge
$35 Rear Loge
Branford Marsalis continues to thrill audiences around the world while racking up achievements across diverse musical platforms, even after four decades in the international spotlight. From his initial recognition as a young jazz lion, landing his first major jobs with trumpet legend Clark Terry and alongside his brother Wynton in Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, he has expanded his vision as an instrumentalist, composer, bandleader, and educator, crossing stylistic boundaries while maintaining an unwavering creative integrity. Branford went on to form his own quartet and it remains his primary performance vehicle. Known for the telepathic communication among its uncommonly consistent personnel, its deep book of original music replete with expressive melodies and provocative forms, and an unrivaled spirit in both live and recorded performances. The Branford Marsalis Quartet has long been recognized as the standard to which other ensembles of its kind must be measured.
Along Branford’s musical journey, he has become an avatar of contemporary artistic excellence winning three Grammy Awards, a Tony nomination for his work as a composer on Broadway, a citation by the National Endowment for the Arts as Jazz Master, and a 2021 Primetime EMMY nomination for the score he composed for the Tulsa Burning documentary.
As for other public stages, Branford spent a period touring with Sting, collaborated with the Grateful Dead and Bruce Hornsby, served as Musical Director of The Tonight Show Starring Jay Leno and hosted National Public Radio’s widely syndicated Jazz Set. The range and quality of these diverse activities established Branford as a familiar presence beyond the worlds of jazz, classical, and beyond.
Pricing: Gold Circle $75Rear Orchestra $67Front Loge $57Rear Loge/Accessible $47
Discounts:10% off for senior citizens and William Paterson employees and students. 15% off for groups of ten or more.
