GVLJazz Underground | Antonio Plumer: Music of/for Kenny Barron

Local pianist Antonio Plumer leads a combo of music inspired by Kenny, as well as some of the great music Kenny is still creating.
About this Event

We often think of great jazz musicians who repeatedly generate radical style innovations.  Pianists Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea and Keith Jarrett come to mind considering only musicians born in the early 1940s.  But also important are the musicians who integrate, synthesize, and deeply refine styles with staying power that become pillars for future developments in jazz.

Kenny Barron is one such jazz master, and pianist Antonio Plumer will lead a quintet on exploration of the music Kenny is in his seventh decade creating.

Born in 1943, Kenny Barron has seemingly played with everyone - but perhaps most notably with Stan Getz, and Dizzy Gillespie.  He co-led bands such as Sphere (performing the works of Thelonious Monk) and the Classical Jazz Quartet (performing classical music).  He has taught jazz piano at Julliard, and is known as a notable accompanist for jazz singers.  So what do you end up with when you mix all that together?

He starts with the elegance and taste of great swing pianists like Hank Jones and Tommy Flanagan. To that, he adds the modal approach he and other pianists of his era came up in.  With a splash of post-bop and latin, the result is what you might call modern mainstream jazz…a style Kenny has refined since the 1960s. 

Antonio has been a student of piano since the age of 3; in his teens beginning to add jazz to the classical repertoire he still continues to explore.  His development has included performing at Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center in his youth, four years as a US Marine Corps musician, and being part of the music scene in Greenville for the past couple of years.  Combining acute listening on bandstand with a deep vocabulary of jazz (and more generally Western music), his playing is a conversation of the present moment with what has come before.

Joining Antonio will be Ruben Valentin on flute and saxophone, Larry Gareau on trumpet, Shannon Hoover on bass and Patrick Lane on drums (although Antonio will mix it up a bit with some pieces played as a piano solo, as a piano/flute duet, and as a trio).  

The set will not only include much of Kenny’s most important works, but also an original by Antonio (the “for” in our program title).