Ravinia_2018_Week

Rufus Reid

con-

tinues to build on

a 50-year music

career that has

included over 400

recordings

with

some of the jazz

world’s

greatest

performers.

2006, he received

the Raymond Sackler Commission and creat-

ed a five-movement suite for large jazz ensem-

ble,

Quiet Pride: The Elizabeth Catlett Project

the 2014 album of which was nominated for

two Grammys. Reid also received a Guggen-

heim Fellowship in 2008, on which he wrote a

three-movement symphonic work,

Mass Tran-

sit

. He was named Harvard University’s Jazz

Master in Residence in April 2016, during which

he participated in public conversations about

and performances of his original works, and the

following month he was awarded the America

Composers Forum Commission to compose a

work for the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble

to premiere this July. Last spring, Reid’s third

symphonic work,

Lake Tyrrell In Innisfree

, was

premiered by the Raleigh Civic Symphony, and

Newvelle Records released a vinyl of his

Ter-

restrial Dance

, featuring his trio and the Sirius

Quartet, in December.

FEATURED ARTISTS

A resident ensem-

ble of Northern Il-

linois University’s

School of Music,

the

Avalon String

Quartet

also per-

forms an annual

concert series at

the Art Institute

of Chicago’s Ful-

lerton Hall, where it has performed complete

Beethoven, Bartók, and Brahms cycles in recent

seasons. The quartet attended RSMI in 1998 and

went on to earn top prizes from the Concert

Artists Guild and ARD (Munich) Competitions,

subsequently adding 2002 RSMI alumnus An-

thony Devroye as its violist. The Avalon Quar-

tet has been heard at such major venues as New

York’s Bargemusic, 92nd Street Y, Alice Tully

Hall, and Carnegie Hall; the Library of Congress

and National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC;

and London’s Wigmore Hall. Prior to taking the

NIU post, the quartet was a guest of the Icicle

Creek Chamber Music Institute, Interlochen

Advanced Quartet Program, the Britten-Pears

School, and numerous conservatories and uni-

versities. The Avalon Quartet recently released

Illuminations

, its first album on Cedille Re-

cords, adding to a discography also featuring an

award-winning Ravel/Janáček debut album.

Pennsylvania na-

tive

Billy Test

award-win-

ning pianist and

composer based

in New York. He

completed a dual

bachelor’s degree

in jazz and classi-

cal piano at Wil-

liam Paterson University in 2011, also winning

the school’s first concerto competition that year,

and in 2015 he earned a master’s at the Man-

hattan School of Music and attended RSMI.

Test was among the finalists for this year’s Herb

Alpert Young Jazz Composer’s Award with

The What If Game

, and he was recently a sec-

ond-prize winner of the Montreux Jazz Pia-

no Competition, a Downbeat Student Music

Awards “Outstanding Soloist” prizewinner, and

a Betty Carter Jazz Ahead participant. Test has

served as accompanist for Essential Voices USA,

a choir in residence at Carnegie Hall and with

the New York Pops. His work with the choir has

included collaborations with composers Ste-

phen Schwartz, Paul Schoenfeld, Larry Hoch-

man, and Joshua Schmidt, such as the New York

premiere of Schwartz’s

Testimony

A New York na-

tive

transplant-

ed to Florida,

Ilya

DaCosta

played both flute

and electric bass

throughout mid-

dle

and

high

school, picking up

the double bass

just before attending Florida State University,

where he graduated with bachelor’s degrees in

both jazz studies and actuarial science. While

at FSU, he joined the Forward Quartet, releas-

ing an album in 2015 and regularly appearing

at Tallahassee’s B-Sharps Jazz Club and on local

radio and television broadcasts. He participated

in RSMI in 2016 and is an active part of the jazz

scene in Louisville, KY.

While attending

North

Carolina

Central Univer-

sity, where he

earned a BA in

Music and a BM

in Jazz Perfor-

mance,

Clif Wal-

lace

also earned

the drum seat in

the Historically Black College and Universi-

ty (HBCU) All-Star Big Band for three years.

With the HBCU Band, he performed with Jim-

my Heath, Joe Chambers, Gerald Wilson, and

Jimmy Cobb, additionally drumming for such

artists as Branford Marsalis and blues guitarist

Roy Roberts during college. Back in his native

Indiana, Wallace joined the panel of judges for

the 2008 Notre Dame Collegiate Jazz Festival,

and the following year he participated in both

the Betty Carter Jazz Ahead program and RSMI.

Wallace was chosen to be the drummer for the

2010 Chicago Jazz Institute Young Lions con-

cert, and he now resides in Chicago, where he

leads a quintet and has been gigging with the

likes of Bobby Broom, Pharez Whitted, Dee Dee

Bridgewater, Marquis Hill, and Orbert Davis.

Shai Golan

is an

Israeli saxophon-

ist splitting time

between

New

York and Los An-

geles. He began

learning

music

on piano before

switching to clar-

inet and, finally,

the sax at age 10. Golan attended RSMI in 2017

and completed a master’s degree at the Man-

hattan School of Music that same year, having

earned a bachelor’s degree at California State

University–Northridge in 2015. He’s already

amassed performing credits with the likes of

David Binney, Steve Wilson, Walter Smith III,

Chris Potter, David Liebman, John Escreet, Matt

Brewer, Nate Wood, Louis Cole, Dan Weiss, and

John Daversa, as well as such honors as the top

prize of the 2016 Vandoren Emerging Jazz Artist

Competition and the Best Soloist and Best Ar-

ranger awards from the 2015 Amsterdam Keep

an Eye International Jazz Competition.

Trombonist and

composer

Tom

Garling

solidified

his career at age

20, joining Buddy

Rich’s Big Band

in 1986. He then

joined Maynard

Ferguson’s band in

1992, and in 1995

he became that band’s music director until 1998.

He maintains a busy performing schedule at

premier jazz clubs and large venues in Chicago

and around the world. His playing and writing

can be heard on numerous albums by Ferguson

and Rich, and more recently on discs by the

Chicago Jazz Ensemble and the Chicago Yestet,

among others.

Miles

Okazaki

is a guitarist and

composer based

in New York,

originally

from

Port

Townsend,

WA. His fourth

album,

Trickster

was released on

Pi Recordings in

2017. Okazaki has toured for two decades with

such artists as Steve Coleman, Kenny Barron,

Jonathan Finlayson, John Zorn, Amir El Saffar,

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