Bill Charlap Trio
The Bill Charlap Trio was formed in 1997. Recognized as a leading jazz group, the trio has earned Grammy nominations for Uptown Downtown, Somewhere: The Songs of Leonard Bernstein, and The Bill Charlap Trio: Live at the Village Vanguard. The 2016 recording, Notes from New York, earned a five-star review in DownBeat magazine. Street of Dreams, the trio’s most recent release, marks its return to the Blue Note label. The Bill Charlap Trio tours all over the world, and the group’s New York engagements include regular appearances at Jazz at Lincoln Center, Birdland, and the Village Vanguard.
Bill Charlap Piano
Grammy Award–winning pianist Bill Charlap has performed with leading artists, including Wynton Marsalis, Tony Bennett, Phil Woods, and Ron Carter. He is acclaimed for his interpretations of the American Popular Songbook and recorded albums featuring the music of Leonard Bernstein, George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Richard Rodgers, and Duke Ellington. From 2005 to 2023, Charlap was artistic director of New York City’s Jazz in July Festival at the 92nd Street Y. He is currently director of jazz studies at William Paterson University of New Jersey, one of the world’s longest-running and most respected jazz programs.
Born in New York City, Bill Charlap began playing the piano at age three. His father was Broadway composer Moose Charlap, who wrote the score for the production of Peter Pan starring Mary Martin. His mother is singer Sandy Stewart, who toured with Benny Goodman, appeared on the Ed Sullivan and Perry Como shows, and earned a Grammy Award nomination for her 1963 recording of the song “My Coloring Book.”
Charlap’s album with Tony Bennett, The Silver Lining: The Songs of Jerome Kern, won the 2016 Grammy Award for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album. It features Charlap and Bennett’s duets in collaboration with the Bill Charlap Trio and piano duo performances with his wife, renowned jazz pianist and composer Renee Rosnes. Charlap and Rosnes frequently perform piano duo concerts, and their recording, Double Portrait, was released to critical acclaim.
billcharlap.com
David Wong Bass
Bassist David Wong was born and raised in New York City. In 2004 he graduated from the Juilliard School with a degree in classical music. His instructors have included Orin O’Brien (New York Philharmonic) and Ron Carter. Wong is currently a member of Roy Haynes’s Fountain of Youth Band, the Charles McPherson Quintet, Vanguard Jazz Orchestra, and Cécile McLorin
PHOTOS BY CAROL FRIEDMAN, R.R. JONES
Salvant’s Ogresse. He was the last bass player in the Heath Brothers Quartet, led by Jimmy Heath and Albert “Tootie” Heath, as well as Hank Jones’s Great Jazz Trio, and he was featured on the piano master’s last recording. Wong was a member of the Benny Green Trio and regularly performs with Bill Charlap, Terell Stafford, Aaron Diehl, and Helen Sung. Appearing on over eighty recordings, he received a Grammy Award with Best New Artist Samara Joy.
David Wong is on faculty at Temple University, Purchase College, the New School, William Paterson University, and City College of New York.
Kenny Washington Drums
Kenny Washington was born in Brooklyn, New York. In 1977, while he was still in his teens, he worked with Lee Konitz and his nonet. He has been a member of the Bill Charlap Trio for the past twentyeight years and has performed and recorded with dozens of major artists, compiling a discography of hundreds of titles. Artists include Benny Carter, Betty Carter, Johnny Griffin, Ron Carter, Milt Jackson, Tommy Flanagan, Dizzy Gillespie, Arturo Sandoval, and Benny Goodman. Washington is a noted jazz historian and radio personality; he has written liner notes and helped prepare re-releases by Art Blakey and Count Basie. He has also been a disc jockey on WBGO and Sirius satellite jazz radio. He currently serves on the faculties of the State University of New
York at Purchase and the Juilliard School, teaching drums and jazz history.
Dee Dee Bridgewater Vocals
Over the course of a multifaceted career spanning four decades, Grammy and Tony Award–winning jazz giant Dee Dee Bridgewater has ascended to the upper echelon of vocalists, putting her unique spin on standards and reenvisioning jazz classics.
A three-time Grammy winner, most recently, she won a Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Album for Eleanora Fagan (1915–1959): To Billie with Love from Dee Dee. Bridgewater started her professional experience as a member of the legendary Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra and, throughout the 1970s, performed with jazz notables Max Roach, Dexter Gordon, and Dizzy Gillespie. After a foray into the pop world in the 1980s, she relocated to Paris and returned to jazz.
Bridgewater self-produces all her CDs. All but one of her recordings have received Grammy nominations, including her wildly successful double Grammy Award–winning tribute to Ella Fitzgerald, Dear Ella.
Bridgewater also pursued a career in musical theater, winning a Tony Award for her role as Glinda in The Wiz and receiving a Laurence Olivier Award nomination for Best Actress in a Musical for her role in Lady Day.
As a Goodwill Ambassador to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture
Organization, Bridgewater appeals for international solidarity to fight world hunger.
She received the prestigious Doris Duke Artist Award and was inducted into the Memphis Music Hall of Fame.
Nicholas Payton Trumpet
A leading voice in American popular music, Grammy Award–winning Nicholas Payton is a multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, composer, producer, arranger, essayist, and social activist who defies musical and artistic categories. All the while, he honors the tradition of what he calls “postmodern New Orleans music” and the spirit of Black American Music.
New Orleans–born Payton grew up under the tutelage of his parents— acclaimed bassist Walter Payton and
pianist and vocalist Maria Payton. He began playing trumpet at four and performing professionally at ten. In 1995 Payton released his first album, From This Moment. In 1997 he received his first Grammy nomination for Doc Cheatham and Nicholas Payton and won Best Instrumental Solo for Stardust. In his over twenty recordings, he pushes musical boundaries while displaying his ambidextrous ability to play both the trumpet and keyboard at the same time.
To represent musical creations of any genre by Black people in the United States, he introduced the term Black American Music (#BAM), entered in the New York Times’s “The Decade in Jazz: 10 Definitive Moments.”
“Pretty much all the music that I play is centered in Black culture, Black music. And that’s why I’ve eschewed jazz and came up with the term Black American Music, because I want to be connected to the whole of it,” Payton says about genre.
Funding for educational programs during the 2024–25 Season of SCP Jazz has been generously provided by Dan J. Epstein, Judith Guitelman, and the Dan J. Epstein Family Foundation.
PHOTO BY DANA DISTORTION
