MCG Jazz Announces Season 38 -- The Season of Firsts Welcome to the 2024/25 Season of Firsts. Every performance will feature artist who have never performed at MCG Jazz or are long-time friends presenting a brand new project. Every concert will entourage you to experience the past, present and future of jazz. We have added pre-concert activities exploring our vast jazz archives and new concession options. Beginning in Fall 2024, MCG Jazz is launching an Artist-In-Residence program with pianist, composer and producer Ray Angry. Ray…
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The Manchester Bidwell Corporation podcast. In-depth conversations from Manchester Bidwell Corporation about art, music, workforce development, philanthropy and more. Hosted by MBC’s Director of Communications, Jonathan Zito, the wide range of topic experts, teachers, artists, students, alums, and more get an opportunity to share with the wider world the life-changing work that’s happening in Pittsburgh. Listen at: In Earnest Marty Ashby
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I had a wonderful time talking about Jazz, Modernism and Frank Lloyd Wright for the Fallingwater webinar on March 22, 2022. To watch the archive recording of the webinar, please go to, I played clips from the following songs during the presentation. The songs are listed by the song title, artist and the album title. Sing Sing Sing (with a Swing): Benny Goodman, The Essential Benny Goodman Body and Soul: Coleman Hawkins, Body and Soul In The Mood: Glenn Miller and His Orchestra. The…
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Hosted by Monika Herzig. Talking Jazz features conversations, stories, insights, and guided listening with today's jazz creators hosted by pianist, composer, author, and educator Monika Herzig. Our guests today are Marty Ashby and Ken Kimery from the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra talking about the "Bernstein Reimagined" project. Enjoy their insights into the arranging process and Bernstein's timeless music.
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MCG Jazz 35th Anniversary Season Restarts LIVE JAZZ in a New Concert Hall The concert season is a restart of programs that MCG Jazz was unable to present during the COVID-19 shutdown during 2020 and 2021 in the newly renovated concert hall. Upgrades to the concert hall will take place over the Summer of 2021 and will include new seats, an updated stage, new flooring, video projection, and accessibility upgrades. On September 24 and 25, the Yellowjackets will be the first artists to perform on…
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MCG Jazz The New Jazz Age Goes Virtual SPRING 2021 STREAMING CONCERT SERIES 7 PREMIERES and 1 STAR-STUDDED GALA FINALE In an effort to keep everyone safe, MCG Jazz is pausing all previously planned in-person concerts and educational events. When restrictions are lifted and we can safely hold in-person events, we will. We do not have a date set to reopen our doors, but we are proactively working with artists, their managers and agents to present these artists when it is safe to do so.…
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The Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra explores the vast, diverse repertoire of legendary composer Leonard Bernstein on stunning, revelatory new album Bernstein Reimagined, due out January 29, 2021 via MCG Jazz, explores lesser-known Bernstein pieces through the transformative lens of five gifted jazz arrangers Legendary composer Leonard Bernstein once called jazz “the ultimate common denominator of the American musical style.” The music made a profound impact on Bernstein’s work, not only in the more explicit “jazziness” of his work in musical theater, but throughout his “serious”…
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For All We Know is a collection of tunes that speaks to the deeply personal, often heart-breaking, and eternal hopeful nature of love and relationships. All of the songs evoke in the listener the question: how do you face the denial, sorrow, anger that arises from a break-up, a lost love, and pick yourself up to start over and celebrate love once again? For All We Know, available February 14, 2020 on the MCG Jazz recording label, carries the listener through the myriad of emotions…
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NEWS, FROM DOWNBEAT MAGAZINE, MARTY ASHBY By Geoffrey Himes July 30, 2018 In 1983, when Marty Ashby was a struggling young jazz guitarist in New York City, fresh out of Ithaca College, he went looking for a day job. Answering a classified ad from the New York Philharmonic, he found himself in an elevator with a man carrying a stack of sheet music. “I asked him,” Ashby recalled, “what his gig was, and he said, ‘I put the scores on the music stands.’ I said, ‘That’s a…
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Guest lecturer for the IU Jazz Institut in Graz on July 3, 2018, Austria Jazzinstitut Moserhofgasse 39 www.kug.ac.at/en/home.html
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