Marsalis Berklee Jams Continues with Aaron Goldberg

Boston, MA, October 19, 2010 - Berklee College of Music and Marsalis Music present Marsalis Berklee Jams, a program that brings up-and-coming jazz artists to Boston for performances with Berklee students, as well as master classes and clinics. The featured artist for this sixth installment of Jams is Aaron Goldberg, a Boston-born pianist and composer “selfless in all the right ways … versatile and impressive, and he swings hard” (New York Times).

On November 3 and 4, Goldberg will present two performance/jam sessions at 8:00 p.m. While participation in the jam sessions are open to Berklee students only, tickets for the concert/jam sessions are available to the public. The Jams take place at Berklee’s Cafe 939, 939 Boylston Street. Doors open at 7:30 p.m. and tickets are $10. For tickets or more information, call (617) 747-2261 or visit Berklee.edu/events. Shows at Cafe 939 are all ages.

Aaron Goldberg (aarongoldberg.com) is a pianist and composer performing at the vanguard of jazz music. His new album Home (April 2010, Sunnyside) builds upon his last, Worlds. Both exhibit the sensitivity and dynamism of Goldberg’s longstanding trio featuring Reuben Rogers and Eric Harland. Goldberg has spent the last 12 years touring with many of the most brilliant voices in jazz, including Joshua Redman, Wynton Marsalis, Betty Carter, Stefon Harris, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Madeleine Peyroux, and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, among others.

Goldberg was born in Boston and got hooked on jazz in high school. He spent a year at the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music before graduating magna cum laude from Harvard College in 1996 with a degree in history and science, and a concentration in mind, brain, and behavior. On weekends, he held a longtime residence at Wally’s Cafe in Boston, and the fall after graduation he moved to Brooklyn.

He began performing with a cross‐generational array of legends and peers — including Tom Harrell, Freddie Hubbard, Mark Turner, and Greg Tardy — in addition to working with his own trio. In 1998, he joined the quartet of Joshua Redman, with whom he toured for four years and recorded two albums. Along with Goldberg’s four albums as a leader and four more as a coleader of the OAM Trio, he has recorded over 60 albums with a diverse spectrum of artists.

This is the sixth Marsalis Berklee Jams, following programs with Miguel Zenón, Sean Jones, Fly, Dafnis Prieto, and Claudia Acuña. Marsalis Jams was conceived by Branford Marsalis as an initiative to provide meaningful interaction between established musical ensembles and dedicated student musicians at the high school and college levels. The program consists of mini-residencies that include classroom interaction and culminate in performance/jam sessions in which the visiting band follows an opening set of its own music by inviting student musicians on stage to play. Since 2003, the program has been successfully presented in colleges and high schools in Florida, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, and Texas.