JAZZ AT LINCOLN CENTER

Jazz at Lincoln Center is dedicated to inspiring and growing audiences for jazz. With the world-renowned Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and a comprehensive array of guest artists, Jazz at Lincoln Center advances a unique vision for the continued development of the art of jazz by producing a year-round schedule of performance, education, and broadcast events for audiences of all ages. These productions include concerts, national and international tours, residencies, weekly national radio programs, television broadcasts, recordings, publications, an annual high school jazz band competition and festival, a band director academy, jazz appreciation curricula for students, music publishing, children’s concerts and classes, lectures, adult education courses, student and educator workshops, a record label, and interactive websites. Under the leadership of Managing and Artistic Director Wynton Marsalis, Chairman Clarence Otis, and Executive Director Greg Scholl, Jazz at Lincoln Center produces thousands of events each season in its home in New York City, Frederick P. Rose Hall, and around the world. For more information, visit jazz.org.

The Jazz at Lincoln Center Presents touring initiative provides an affordable opportunity to present great jazz programming, featuring up-and-coming musicians who have been identified as rising stars by JALC. The initiative also allows for expansion of the mission of JALC “to entertain, enrich and expand a global community for jazz through performance, education, and advocacy.”

Songs We Love was first presented as the 2016 Season Opener at Jazz at Lincoln Center. Songs We Love is a journey through the first 50 years of jazz song. Under the musical direction of Riley Mulherkar, 3 guest vocalists will join an all-star band made up of New York’s rising stars. Combining their distinct talents, the group will sing their way through four decades of music, beginning with the early blues and jazz of the 1920s and ending in the early 1950s. Iconic singers to be explored include Ma Rainey, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland.

VUYO SOTASHE, VOCALS

Young South African jazz vocalist, Vuyo Sotashe, is gradually making his mark in the New York jazz scene. Sotashe moved to NYC in 2013 after being awarded the prestigious Fulbright Scholarship to complete a Master of Music degree at William Paterson University. Since then, he has gone on to win first prize at the very first Mid-Atlantic Jazz Festival Vocal Competition in 2014, and performed on the festival’s main stage in February of 2015. More recently, he won the Audience Prize Award and placed second overall at the Shure Montreux Jazz Voice Competition in 2015, held at the annual Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland. In the same year, he placed third in the prestigious Thelonious Monk Institute International Jazz Vocal competition, where he was the very first male vocalist ever to place in the competition’s finals. Vuyo is also the winner of the biggest music scholarship competition in South Africa, the South African Music Rights Foundation Scholarship, where he performed for the former South African President Thabo Mbeki. Vuyo Sotashe is currently performing around New York City with the noted drummer Winard Harper, whose credits include work with Betty Carter, Shirley Horn, and many other legends in jazz.

BRIANNA THOMAS, VOCALS

Born and raised in Peoria, Illinois, Brianna grew up surrounded by music. Under the guiding hand of her talented father, at the age of eight she won her first of thirteen trophies from various district and regional talent shows and was soon performing for a variety of black tie affairs and as a guest on local radio stations, eventually touring Europe with the Peoria Jazz All-Stars. Brianna is the youngest person ever to be inducted into Peoria’s African-American Hall of Fame at the age of thirteen in 1996. Brianna’s singing is deeply enriched by an understanding of the masterful voices of jazz past, including Sarah Vaughn, Nancy Wilson, Ella Fitzgerald, and Dianne Reeves. She has performed at the Montreux , North Sea, and Umbria Jazz Festivals and in venues ranging from the Bahamas to Geneva, Switzerland. Brianna was a resident in both the 2001 and 2002 Betty Carter Jazz Ahead programs, an international artist-in-residence program with a focus on original compositions at the Kennedy Center. Legendary trombonist Curtis Fuller hails her as “a marvelous new artist who has all it takes to reach the top of the jazz profession and music in general.”