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 Wallace Roney © Andrea Canter
The Wallace Roney Sextet continues touring this month in the East with stops at the Iridium in New York on March 10th and 11th, the Long Island University Kumble Theater in Brooklyn on March 15th 16th, the club Zanzibar in Philadelphia on March 23rd and 24th, and finally the Kennedy Center, Washington, DC on March 31st.
Roney, who much like his mentor Miles Davis, is a highly skilled, expressive performer and an active force in the evolution of jazz. His Sextet includes the inovative trumpeter with his brother Antoine Roney on sax, Rashaan Carter on bass, Eric Allen on drums, Frank LoCastro [or Robert Irving] on piano/synth, and DJ Val Jeantry on turntables. For the Kennedy Center performance on March 31st, dancers Maurice Chestnut and Nia Love will join the performance.
Wallace Roney, while one of the most accomplished and acclaimed trumpeters in jazz today, remains one of today's most misunderstood jazz masters. Roney rose to national prominence in the 1980's as a member of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, earning favorable notice as a young lion with impressive technique in the Clifford Brown-Lee Morgan-Freddie Hubbard tradition. By the middle of the decade Roney was holding down a difficult dual membership with both the Messengers and Tony Williams' Quintet. Soon he began to display a more thoughtful and spacious approach to sound and improvisation -- one that nodded in the direction of Williams' former leader, Miles Davis, who by that time had befriended the young trumpeter, having given him the blue horn that is his trademark.
“I feel that my music is always a tribute to Miles because my music definitely has Miles’ stamp. He was like my father and I never ran from his influence.” -- Wallace Roney  DJ Val Jeantry © Andrea Canter
In 1991, at Davis' request, Roney played side-by-side with his mentor at the Montreux Jazz Festival, performing Gil Evans' classic arrangements from Miles Ahead and Porgy and Bess with the Quincy Jones-George Gruntz Orchestras. Wallace's immersion into the Davis canon and ten years of study with Miles had an understandably profound effect on his approach to music one that perfectly suited his own forward-looking artistic vision. On his Warner Brothers debut cd Misteriosos, the eerie resemblance of the sound of Roney's trumpet to that of Davis caused much of the jazz press, who were superficially focused on the trumpeter's tone while overlooking his very personal choice of notes, to misguidedly label him a Davis clone.Born in Philadelphia, May 25, 1960, the young trumpeter's special musical gift was first recognized at the age of six by Sigmund Hering, the first trumpet chair of the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra with whom Wallace would later study. When police brutality and gang violence threatened his Philly neighborhood, Roney was sent him to live in Washington, DC, where he attended the prestigious Duke Ellington School for the Arts, while playing professionally with his own group. He went on to study further at Howard University, where he met his future wife, pianist Geri Allen, and Berklee College of Music in Boston, a prime incubator of the burgeoning neobop movement. Moving on to New York, he paid heavy dues before eventually joining Blakey and then Williams.
Wallace would go on to share bandstands and recording studios with many of the giants of jazz, including Kenny Barron, Sonny Rollins, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Randy Weston and Chick Corea, in addition to Miles. Since the beginning of nineties it has been as the leader of his own bands that the trumpeter made his most consistently rewarding music. His excellent early efforts on Muse introduced the world to Roney's skill as composer and bandleader, while ialso ntroducing such important young talents as Christian McBride and Jack Terrason.
Performance Dates:
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Wednesday, 03 December 2008
