N INET Y-F I FTH SEASON
Sunday, October 26, 2025, at 7:00
Jazz Series HERBIE HANCOCK Herbie Hancock Piano and Keyboards Terence Blanchard Trumpet James Genus Bass Lionel Loueke Guitar and Vocals Jaylen Petinaud Drums The program will be announced from the stage. There will be no intermission.
Funding for educational programs during the 2025–26 Season of SCP Jazz has been generously provided by Dan J. Epstein, Judith Guitelman, and the Dan J. Epstein Family Foundation. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association acknowledges support from the Illinois Arts Council. Chicago Jazz, DownBeat magazine, and WDCB 90.9FM Jazz are Media Partners for this event.
Herbie Hancock Piano and Keyboards Now in the seventh decade of his professional life, Herbie Hancock remains at the forefront of world culture, technology, business, and music. Hancock has been an integral part of every popular music movement since the 1960s. As a member of the Miles Davis Quintet that pioneered a groundbreaking sound in jazz, he also developed new approaches on his own recordings, followed by his work in the 1970s—with record-breaking albums, such as Headhunters—that combined electric jazz with funk and rock in an innovative style that continues to influence contemporary music. “Rockit” and Future Shock marked Hancock’s foray into electronic dance sounds. Hancock received an Academy Award for his film score for Round Midnight and fourteen Grammy awards, including Album of the Year for River: The Joni Letters and two for the globally collaborative CD The Imagine Project. Hancock serves as the creative chair for jazz for the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association and chairman of the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz. In 2011 Hancock was named a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador and, in December 2013, received a Kennedy Center Honor. His memoir, Herbie Hancock: Possibilities, was published by Viking in 2014, and in February 2016, he was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.
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Terence Blanchard Trumpet Renowned composer and trumpeter Terence Blanchard has consistently been a creative force who makes powerful musical statements concerning painful American tragedies, past and present. Blanchard is unique in the jazz world as an artist whose creative endeavors go far beyond the genre into film scoring, crafting television series soundscapes, and conceiving grand operas that have been recognized at the highest levels of art appreciation. An eight-time Grammy Award winner, Blanchard is also only the second African American to be nominated twice in the Original Score category at the 2022 Academy Awards. In addition, he is heralded as an opera composer whose Fire Shut Up in My Bones, the first composed by an African American to premiere at the Metropolitan Opera, opened its 2021–22 season; the Met’s recording of Blanchard’s Champion from the following season won the 2024 Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording. Blanchard has been at the forefront of giving voice in his works to sociocultural issues and racial injustices of our time. He stands tall as one of jazz’s most esteemed trumpeters and defies expectations by creating a spectrum of artistic pursuits. His most recent recording, Absence, is a masterwork of sonic zest in collaboration with his longtime E-Collective band and the acclaimed Turtle Island Quartet.
James Genus Bass James Genus is among the world’s most versatile and sought-after bassists. An accomplished player on upright and electric bass, he has recorded and performed with a wide array of top-shelf artists in the realms of jazz, pop, and beyond. In addition to playing alongside masters such as Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea, he’s regularly seen and heard by an audience of millions thanks to his long-running gig as a member of NBC’s distinguished Saturday Night Live Band. “I think music is music,” Genus says. “I try to bring all kinds of different elements into my playing. If it’s jazz, or rock, or funk, whatever it may be, I’m not giving it a label. I’m playing music.” Genus studied with Ellis Marsalis and later worked with Marsalis’s influential progeny, Branford and Wynton. He has played alongside luminaries including Ravi Coltrane, David Sanborn, and Dianne Reeves.
Lionel Loueke Guitar and Vocals Lionel Loueke combines harmonic sophistication, soaring melody, deep knowledge of African music, and conventional and extended guitar techniques to create a warm and evocative sound all
his own. Starting out on vocals and percussion, Loueke picked up the guitar late, at age seventeen. After his initial exposure to jazz in his native Benin, he left to attend the National Institute of Art in the nearby Republic of Ivory Coast. In 1994 he left Africa to pursue jazz studies at the American School of Modern Music in Paris, then on to the United States on a scholarship to the Berklee College of Music in Boston. From there, Loueke was accepted to the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz (now the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz), where he studied with his greatest mentors: Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, and Terence Blanchard. In 2008 and 2009, Loueke was selected as Top Rising-Star Guitarist in DownBeat magazine’s annual Critics Poll.
Jaylen Petinaud Drums Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Jaylen Petinaud grew up playing in the church. He graduated from Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts in 2016 and earned a bachelor of music degree in jazz studies at SUNY Purchase College in 2020. Petinaud currently tours with Herbie Hancock and is the drummer for Alicia Keys’s Tony– and Grammy Award– winning Broadway musical, Hell’s Kitchen. He also worked on the Tonynominated revival of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When
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the Rainbow is Enuf under the direction of Camille A. Brown. Petinaud frequently plays with artists such as Keyon Harrold, Kenny Garrett, José James, and Terrence Blanchard’s E-Collective. Endorsed by Gretsch, Zildjian, and Vic Firth, he has established himself as one of today’s “top calls.” In 2024 he was nominated
for Best Jazz Drummer by Modern Drummer magazine’s Readers Poll and appeared on Keyon Harrold’s NPR Tiny Desk performance featuring Robert Glasper, PJ Morton, and more. His style blends jazz, gospel, pop, classical, hiphop, and R&B with worldbeat rhythms and contemporary funk, creating a sound that is both soulful and explosive.
SY M P H O N Y C E N T E R P R E S E N T S Jeff Alexander Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association President Cristina Rocca Vice President for Artistic Administration The Richard and Mary L. Gray Chair James M. Fahey Senior Director, Programming, Symphony Center Presents Lena Breitkreuz Artist Manager, Symphony Center Presents Michael Lavin Director of Production Joseph Sherman Associate Director of Production, SCP and Rental Events
Funding for educational programs during the 2025–26 Season of SCP Jazz has been generously provided by Dan J. Epstein, Judith Guitelman, and the Dan J. Epstein Family Foundation.