NINETY-THIRD SEASON
Saturday, March 30, 2024, at 8:00
Jazz Series
HERBIE HANCOCK
Herbie Hancock Piano and Keyboards
Terence Blanchard Trumpet
Devin Daniels Saxophone
James Genus Bass
Trevor Lawrence, Jr. Drums
Lionel Loueke Guitar
The program will be announced from the stage.
There will be no intermission.
Funding for educational programs during the 2023–24 Season of SCP Jazz has been generously provided by Dan J. Epstein, Judith Guitelman, and the Dan J. Epstein Family Foundation. The CSOA thanks the Epstein Family Foundation for ten consecutive years of generous, innovative support for the SCP Jazz Education program.
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association acknowledges support from the Illinois Arts Council.
DownBeat magazine, WDCB, and WBEZ Chicago are media partners for this program.
Herbie Hancock Piano and Keyboards
Now in the seventh decade of his professional life, Herbie Hancock remains where he has always been: at the forefront of world culture, technology, business, and music. Hancock has been an integral part of every popular music movement since the 1960s. As a member of the Miles Davis Quintet that pioneered a groundbreaking sound in jazz, he also developed new approaches on his own recordings, followed by his work in the 1970s—with record-breaking albums such as Headhunters—that combined electric jazz with funk and rock in an innovative style that continues to influence contemporary music. “Rockit” and Future Shock marked Hancock’s foray into electronic dance sounds; during the same period, he also continued to work in an acoustic setting with V.S.O.P.
Hancock received an Academy Award for his Round Midnight film score and fourteen Grammy awards, including Album of the Year for River: The Joni Letters and two for the globally collaborative CD, The Imagine Project.
Herbie Hancock serves as the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association’s creative chair for jazz and as chairman of the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz. In 2011 he was named a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador; in 2013 he received a Kennedy Center Honor. His memoir, Herbie Hancock: Possibilities, was published by Viking in 2014, and in 2016 he was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.
Terence Blanchard Trumpet
Renowned composer and trumpeter, Terence Blanchard has consistently been a creative force who makes powerful musical statements concerning painful American tragedies, past and present. Blanchard is unique in the jazz world as an artist whose creative endeavors go far beyond the genre into film scoring, crafting television series soundscapes, and conceiving grand operas that have been recognized at the highest levels of art appreciation.
A eight-time Grammy Award winner, Blanchard also is only the second African American to be nominated twice in the Original Score category at the 2022 Academy Awards. In addition, he is heralded as an opera composer, whose Fire Shut Up in My Bones, the first composed by an African American to premiere at the Metropolitan Opera, opened its 2021–22 season; the Met’s recording of Blanchard’s Champion from the following season won the 2024 Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording.
In addition, Blanchard has been at the forefront of giving voice in his works to socio-cultural issues and racial injustices of our time. He stands tall as one of jazz’s most esteemed trumpeters and defies expectations by creating a spectrum of artistic pursuits.
His most recent recording, Absence, is a masterwork of sonic zest in collaboration with his longtime E-Collective band and the acclaimed Turtle Island Quartet.
Devin Daniels Saxophone
Alto saxophonist
Devin Daniels has performed in many different configurations of bands in the jazz idiom since 2010. Hailing from Inglewood, California, Daniels started playing saxophone in the Just Lovin’ Music Studios program led by pianist Michelle Love. He has studied with some of the leading educators and performers in America, including Keschia Potter, Rusty Higgins, Josh Johnson, Shannon LeClaire, and George Garzone. Daniels was accepted into the Berklee College of Music as a Presidential Scholar. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in professional music and is now pursuing a master’s degree at the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz Performance at UCLA. He also took part in a Focusyear Basel program in Switzerland. This season, he has a residency at the 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica, California, generously supported by the Herb Alpert Foundation. Daniels has released content on the up-and-coming Preference Records label, as well as his first jazz-trio album.
James Genus Bass
James Genus is well-known in many musical genres, playing both electric and acoustic bass. He has recorded and played with such artists as Roy Haynes, Horace Silver, Whitney Houston,
Michael Brecker, the Brecker Brothers, David Sanborn, Dave Douglas, Bob James, Ravi Coltrane, Jeff “Tain” Watts, Bob Berg, Makoto Ozone, John Scofield, Michel Camilo, Anita Baker, Branford Marsalis, and John McLaughlin. Most recently, Genus was part of Daft Punk’s multiple Grammy Award–winning album Random Access Memories. Genus was born in Hampton, Virginia, and began on guitar at the age of six and switched to bass at thirteen. He studied at Virginia Commonwealth University from 1983 to 1987 with Ellis Marsalis (father of Branford, Wynton, and Delfeayo). He later moved to New York. He currently performs with the iconic pianist Herbie Hancock.
Since 2000, James Genus has been a member of the Saturday Night Live Band
Trevor Lawrence, Jr. Drums
Trevor Lawrence, Jr., comes from a musical family that includes a forefather of gospel music, a member of the Supremes, and original members of Stevie Wonder’s Wonderland Band. Lawrence began playing drums at the age of two. At eighteen, he graduated from Hamilton High School with two scholarships: the Nat King Cole Scholarship from Capitol Records and the Leiber and Stoller Award from ASCAP. His first record date was with an artist named Vinx on Sting’s Pangea Recordings label. Lawrence went on to record with artists like Macy Gray, Boys II Men, Dr. Dre, Peter Himmelman, Jimmy Jam, Terry Lewis, Stevie Wonder, Lionel Richie,
and Snoop Dog. Lawrence also is a producer, with pages of credits stemming from his work across the industry with artists from Herbie Hancock and Bruno Mars to Alicia Keys and Lionel Richie, in addition to the wide breadth of his hip-hop expertise, showcased in his performance at the Super Bowl LVI halftime show.
Lionel Loueke Guitar
Lionel Loueke combines harmonic sophistication, soaring melody, a deep knowledge of African music, and conventional and extended guitar techniques to create a warm and evocative sound
PHOTO BY MATHIEU BITTONall his own. Starting out on vocals and percussion, Loueke picked up the guitar late, at the age of seventeen. After his initial exposure to jazz in his native Benin, he left to attend the National Institute of Art in nearby Republic of Ivory Coast. In 1994 he left Africa to pursue jazz studies at the American School of Modern Music in Paris, then on to the United States on a scholarship to the Berklee College of Music in Boston. From there, Loueke was accepted to the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz (now the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz), where he studied with his greatest mentors: Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, and Terence Blanchard. In 2008 and 2009, Loueke was picked as Top Rising-Star Guitarist in DownBeat magazine’s annual Critics Poll.
Funding for educational programs during the 2023–24 Season of SCP Jazz has been generously provided by Dan J. Epstein, Judith Guitelman, and the Dan J. Epstein Family Foundation.
The CSOA thanks the Epstein Family Foundation for ten consecutive years of generous, innovative support for the SCP Jazz Education program.