Hill & Hollow Music Presents: Alan Blackman Jazz- Performing "Coastal Suite"

Baltimore-based jazz artists perform The Coastal Suite, a milestone in the rising career of award-winning composer-pianist Alan Blackman. A New Jazz Works commission by Chamber Music America, funded by the Doris Duke Foundation, the multi-media jazz suite evokes a 24-hour tidal cycle at the ocean with projected images of gorgeous abstract seascape paintings by renowned Shetlands artist Ruth Brownlee. The Coastal Suite represents a highly programmatic sound-universe that encourages the musicians to imitate nautical sounds and expand the vocabulary of their instruments to best reproduce the sonic environment that the projected images evoke. The Coastal Suite features 17 continuous numbers, with titles such as “Before Dawn,” “Eddies and Pools,” “Driftwood,” “Steps in the Sand,” and “Fractured Moonlight.” Blackman’s regular trio of bassist Max Murray and drummer Frank Russo is joined by Brazilian percussionist Rogerio Boccato and Canadian saxophonist Jeff Antoniuk.