[members-announce] BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA PRESENTS 2005 TANGLEWOOD JAZZ FESTIVAL, SEPTEMBER 2-4 IN LENOX, MASS.

[Dawn Singh]

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
DATE:  August 5, 2005


BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA PRESENTS 2005 TANGLEWOOD JAZZ 
FESTIVAL,SEPTEMBER 2-4 IN LENOX, MASS.

FEATURED PERFORMERS INCLUDE TONY BENNETT AND THE COUNT BASIE ORCHESTRA, 
SONNY ROLLINS, MADELEINE PEYROUX, TOOTS THIELEMANS, KENNY WERNER, OSCAR 
CASTRO-NEVES, AIRTO, MARIAN MCPARTLAND,CHRIS BOTTI, THE YELLOWJACKETS, 
SKITCH HENDERSON, BUCKY PIZZARELLI, JAY LEONHART, AND DIANE SCHUUR AND 
THE CARIBBEAN JAZZ PROJECT FEATURING DAVE SAMUELS

TANGLEWOOD INTRODUCES THE NEW TANGLEWOOD JAZZ CAFE FEATURING RISING 
STARS AND UP-AND-COMING NEW ARTISTS

THE 2005 TANGLEWOOD JAZZ FESTIVAL IS SPONSORED BY VOLKSWAGEN, BORDERS 
BOOKS, AND JAZZTIMES MAGAZINE

The Boston Symphony Orchestra will present its annual Labor Day Weekend 
Tanglewood Jazz Festival to be held September 2-4 at the orchestra’s 
summer home in the Berkshire Mountains in Lenox, Mass.  Jazz greats 
highlighting this year’s festival include Tony Bennett with the Count 
Basie Orchestra, Sonny Rollins, Madeleine Peyroux, Toots Thielemans, 
Kenny Werner, Oscar Castro-Neves, Airto, Marian McPartland, Chris 
Botti, the Yellowjackets, Skitch Henderson, Bucky Pizzarelli, Jay 
Leonhart, and Diane Schuur and the Caribbean Jazz Project.

A new addition to the jazz festival this year is the Tanglewood Jazz 
Cafe, an informal venue for new artists who will perform before each 
concert.  Rising stars appearing this year include Esperanza, the Andy 
Ezrin Trio, the Marta Topferova Trio,       and the Taylor 
Eigsti-Julian Lagos Duo.  Food and beverages will be available in both 
the Hawthorne Tent and the Party Tent.  Admission to the Tanglewood 
Jazz Café is free for ticketholders for that day’s performance.

The festival opens Friday, September 2, at 8 p.m. in Ozawa Hall with a 
performance by Diane Schuur and the Caribbean Jazz Project featuring 
Dave Samuels.  Diane Schuur’s interpretative powers and her legendary 
three-and-a-half octave vocal range have earned her the title of “the 
new First Lady of Jazz,” five Grammy nominations, two Grammy awards, 
and acclaim from critics worldwide.  Her latest release, Schuur Fire 
(Concord Picante Records), was recorded with the Grammy-winning 
Caribbean Jazz Project, led by vibraphonist and marimba player Dave 
Samuels, with the world-renowned Brazilian guitarist Oscar Castro-Neves 
as producer and arranger.  The Caribbean Jazz Project has become the 
gold standard of today’s dynamic Latin jazz movement.  The CJP’s 
cohesive quality has become one of its most bankable trademarks.  Four 
of the current principals – Samuels, drummer Mark Walker, pianist Dario 
Eskenazi, and bassist Oscar Stagnaro – are charter members of the band. 
  Today’s CJP also includes Diego Urrcola on trumpet and flugelhorn and 
percussionist Robert Quintero.

Toots Thilelmans’ sweet and truly unique jazz harmonica sound will 
follow Diane Schuur and the Caribbean Jazz Project with a performance 
by the Toots Thielemans Quartet, featuring pianist Kenny Werner, 
Brazilian guitarist Oscar Castro-Neves, and percussionist Airto. 
Thielemans, the preeminent exponent of the harmonica in jazz, took a 
simple folk instrument and brought it into the contemporary jazz 
ensemble.  Non-jazz audiences are familiar with Thielemans on the 
soundtracks of Midnight Cowboy, Sugarland Express, The Pawnbroker, The 
Anderson Tapes, The Wiz, and many other films.  He also wrote and 
performed the theme for Sesame Street.  Thielemans is also the composer 
of the classic jazz waltz “Bluesette,” which he performs at each 
concert.

Pianist Kenny Werner has performed with such jazz dignitaries as Ron 
Carter, Joe Williams, Lee Konitz, Billy Hart, John Scofield, Charlie 
Haden, and dozens of others.  Werner has composed music for and 
produced the Brussels Jazz Orchestra and is accompaniast to vocalist 
Betty Buckley.

Brazilian-born guitarist Oscar Castro-Neves is one of the founders of 
the Bossa Nova movement along with Antonio Carlos Jobim and Joao 
Gilberto.  One of triplets in a talented musical family, Oscar had a 
national hit song in Brazil at the age of 16
  that was covered by over 50 other artists.  In 1962 Oscar came to New 
York to appear at the first Bossa Nova concert in America at Carnegie 
Hall.  He toured with his own quartet, as well as with the Dizzy 
Gillespie Quintet, the Stan Getz Quartet, and the Lalo Schiffren Trio.  
In 1971 he joined Sergio Mendes’ Brazil 66 and has subsequently 
performed and recorded with numerous artists such as Quincy Jones, Ella 
Fitzgerald, Barbra Streisand, Stevie Wonder, Herbie Hancock, and Joe 
Henderson.

Friday night’s concert will be broadcast live on WGBH-FM in Boston, 
WBGO in Newark, and National Public Radio stations across the country 
and will be available for rebroadcast to NPR stations nationwide 
throughout Labor Day Weekend.

Saturday’s lineup will kick off at 12 noon with The Legends Trio 
featuring Skitch Henderson, Bucky Pizzarelli, and Jay Leonhart on the 
Theatre Stage.  Pianist and conductor Skitch Henderson was the music 
director for NBC Television in its early days and later The Tonight 
Show with Steve Allen and Johnny Carson.  He was also the musical 
director for Frank Sinatra’s Lucky Strike Show on NBC Radio and The 
Philco Hour with Bing Crosby.  In 1983 Henderson founded the New York 
Pops to share his passion for music by bringing the more accessible 
symphonic pops fare to a broader audience.  The New York Pops is now 
the largest independent symphonic pops orchestra in the United States 
and its subscription season is one of the most successful at its home 
at New York’s Carnegie Hall.

Bucky Pizzarelli has been a part of the fraternity of musicians who 
have kept mainstream and traditional jazz alive for more than half a 
century.  The list of big bands and vocalists with whom Bucky has 
performed and recorded reads like a Who’s Who of Jazz.  Bucky is a 
superior guitarist who swing musicians in particular appreciate.  In 
1952, Pizzarelli joined the staff of NBC and played for many years in 
the Doc Severinson Band on The Tonight Show.  He also played and toured 
with Benny Goodman and led his own trio and recorded duos with Zoot 
Sims, Bud Freeman, Stephane Grappelli, and his son, guitarist and 
vocalist John Pizzarelli.

Bassist Jay Leonhart has played with dozens of the great jazz 
musicians, big bands, and singers such as Thad Jones, Mel Lewis, Tony 
Bennett, Marian McPartland, and Jim Hall.  Between 1975 and 1995 he was 
named The Most Valuable Bassist in the recording industry three times 
by the National Association of Recording Arts and Sciences.  When he 
was 14 he started playing bass in a Dixieland jazz band in Baltimore 
and studied at the Peabody Institute, The Berklee School of Music, and 
The Advanced School of Contemporary Music in Toronto before leaving 
school to tour with the traveling big bands of the 1950s and 1960s.  
Leonhart has recorded 15 solo albums including a one-man show of songs 
about his life in music called The Bass Lesson.

On Saturday, September 3, at 3 p.m. at Ozawa Hall Marian McPartland 
will celebrate her fourth anniversary at Tanglewood to record a live 
performance for NPR’s “Piano Jazz.”  Her guest for this year’s taping 
is vocalist Madeleine Peyroux.  Since 1978, Ms. McPartland has 
interviewed over 500 musicians and performers including Norah Jones 
(recorded live at Tanglewood), Diana Krall, Elvis Costello, Dave 
Brubeck, Dizzy Gillespie, Rosemary Clooney, Herbie Hancock, Bill Evans, 
Brad Mehldau, Ray Charles, Carmen McRae, and even William F. Buckley.  
Her easy, comfortable style, charm and quick wit engage her guests in 
fascinating and sometimes revealing conversations while seated at the 
piano.

Madeleine Peyroux’s meteoric rise to the top of the jazz charts has 
been stunning.  Her second CD, Careless Love (Rounder Records), 
skyrocketed to number three on the Billboard Chart earlier this year.  
Peyroux (pronounced like the country “Peru”), was born in Athens, Ga., 
and grew up in Brooklyn, Southern California, and Paris.  She started 
as a street musician in Paris 1989 and joined the Lost Wandering Blues 
& Jazz Band, which toured around Europe for several years.  She burst 
onto the recording scene in 1996 with her debut album Dreamland selling 
over 200,000 copies worldwide.  Time magazine pronounced the 
groundbreaking Dreamland “the most exciting, involving vocal 
performance by a new singer this year.”  Peyroux signed with Rounder 
Records in 2003 and released Careless Love in 2004.  The recording is a 
blend of acoustic blues, country ballads, torch songs, and pop, 
featuring a diverse song list covering W. C. Handy, Bob Dylan, Hank 
Williams, Leonard Cohen, Edith Piaf, and Gene Austin.

Headlining the festival on Saturday, September 3, at 8 p.m., 
international singing star Tony Bennett will take the stage at the 
5,100-seat Koussevitzky Music Shed performing with the Count Basie 
Orchestra in a much anticipated and rare reunion to celebrate their 
landmark 1959 Capitol recording Basie & Bennett.  Bennett has sold over 
50 million records worldwide and has platinum and gold albums to his 
credit as well as 12 Grammy Awards and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement 
Award.  Bennett was called “the best singer in the business” by Frank 
Sinatra.  The MTV generation first took Tony Bennett to heart during 
his appearance with the Red Hot Chili Peppers on the 1993 MTV Video 
Awards ceremony.  A resulting recording garnered the singer Grammy’s 
top award, “Album of the Year.”

In the 1930s, the Count Basie Orchestra created what would be known 
forever as swing.  Today the musical joy that Count Basie himself 
created lives on through the superb orchestra that bears his name, 
directed by Bill Hughes.  William Basie, a New Jersey native from Red 
Bank, grew up with the tempos of the Swing Era in New York City.  But 
toward the close of the 1920s, it was Kansas City that was drawing 
notice for jazz.  Young pianist Bill Basie landed there while working 
the national vaudeville circuit and briefly joined Walter Paige’s Blue 
Devils, then stayed on with the Benny Moton Orchestra.  With Moten’s 
sudden death three years later, Basie went from pianist to bandleader.  
He took the name “The Count” when his new group headlined at Kansas 
City’s Reno Club in 1936.  With a keyboard touch or two, sound was set 
into motion.  Always swinging, his piano spots became the band’s claim 
to fame.  A simple “plink, plink, plink” closing triplet was all the 
signature his music needed.  Despite half a century of changing tastes 
in popular music, the endurance of the Count Basie Orchestra confirms 
the genius of his earliest musical instincts.

On Sunday, September 4, at 2 p.m., jazz giant and “saxophone colossus” 
Sonny Rollins returns to Tanglewood for his first performance since 
2001.  Rollins has played for nearly a half century and today remains 
one of the few surviving icons from a golden era of jazz that will 
probably never be equaled.  Rollins first recorded in 1949 and today – 
over 50 years later – remains the most formidable of all jazz 
improvisers, a living inspiration to musicians and listeners worldwide. 
  Jazz critic Gary Giddins said in the Village Voice, “If jazz must have 
a king, the present ruler is Sonny Rollins.”  Rollins began playing 
professional dates in high school and jamming in Manhattan with 
Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell.  Following a short stint in Miles 
Davis’ band, Rollins became a bandleader releasing classic albums like 
Sonny Rollins Plus Four, Way Out West, and The Freedom Suite.  On 
1956’s Saxophone Colossus, he introduced his signature composition “St. 
Thomas.”  The song’s calypso rhythm, an homage to Rollins’ parents’ 
West Indian heritage, would become one of his trademarks.  His upcoming 
CD, Without A Song (The 9/11 Concert), was recorded live at the Berklee 
Performance Center in Boston just four days after September 11, 2001.

The Yellowjackets will perform material from their new CD Altered 
States (Heads Up Records) on Sunday, September 4, at 8 p.m. at Ozawa 
Hall.  One of the most popular American jazz ensembles of the past 20 
years, the Yellowjackets include keyboardist Russell Ferrante, 
saxophonist Bob Mintzer, Bassist Jimmy Haslip, anddrummer Marcus 
Baylor.  The Yellowjackets began as the session band for guitarist 
Robben Ford in the late 1970s and took on a life of its own in a matter 
of a few years.  More than two decades after its genesis, the band 
continues to delve into every corner of the musical universe – simply 
because it’s there to be explored – and weave a multilayered and 
innovative tapestry of sonic experience.

Following the Yellowjackets at Ozawa Hall on Sunday evening will be 
trumpeter Chris Botti, a gifted composer and instrumentalist and a 
charismatic performer who has created a series of recordings that have 
made him a virtual genre-of-one in the realm of contemporary jazz.  
Through a singular combination of lush atmospheres and thoughtful 
improvisations, he has earned both critical acclaim and mainstream 
appreciation.  On his latest recording, When I Fall in Love, the 
best-selling trumpet virtuoso expands the range of his earlier work 
with an album devoted to classic love songs, each one performed with 
Botti’s impeccable taste and signature tonal qualities.  Featuring 
guest vocal performances from Paula Cole and Sting, When I Fall in Love 
reunites Botti with legendary producer/musician Bobby Colomby who 
helmed Botti’s 2002 seasonal collection, December.  Botti is 
accompanied by the London Session Orchestra and the result is a lush 
and sultry sojourn into the very heart of romance.  Botti has toured 
with Sting and was voted one of People Magazine’s “2004’s 50 Most 
Beautiful People.”

All programs and artists are subject to change.  Tickets for the 2005 
Tanglewood Jazz Festival are on sale now through SymphonyCharge at 
888-266-1200 or online through the BSO’s website, www.tanglewood.org, 
powered by EMC Corporation.
Tickets are also available in person at the Tanglewood Box Office in 
Lenox. All ticket prices include a $1 Tanglewood Grounds Maintenance 
Fee. For further information, please call the Boston Symphony Orchestra 
at 617-266-1492.


2005 TANGLEWOOD JAZZ FESTIVAL PROGRAM LISTING

Friday, September 2, 7 p.m., Hawthorne Tent Jazz Cafe
ESPERANZA QUARTET
Admission free with ticket to Friday 8 p.m. concert

Friday, September 2, 8 p.m., Ozawa Hall
DIANE SCHUUR with THE CARIBBEAN JAZZ PROJECT featuring DAVE SAMUELS, 
TOOTS THIELEMANS, KENNY WERNER, OSCAR CASTRO-NEVES, and AIRTO
Tickets: $55, $47, $40; lawn tickets: $17

Saturday, September 3, 12 noon, Theatre
THE LEGENDS TRIO featuring SKITCH HENDERSON, BUCKY PIZZARELLI, and JAY 
LEONHART
Tickets: $35, $25

Saturday, September 3, 1:30 p.m., Hawthorne Tent Jazz Cafe
THE ANDY EZRIN TRIO
Admission free with ticket to Saturday 3 p.m. concert

Saturday, September 3, 3 p.m., Ozawa Hall
MARIAN MCPARTLAND
Live taping for NPR’s Piano Jazz with special guest MADELEINE PEYROUX
Tickets: $45, $37, $30; lawn tickets: $17

Saturday, September 3, 6:30 p.m., Party Tent Jazz Cafe
THE MARTA TOPFEROVA TRIO
Admission free with ticket to Saturday 8 p.m. concert

Saturday, September 3, 8 p.m., Shed
TONY BENNETT and THE COUNT BASIE ORCHESTRA
Tickets: $81, $61, $41; lawn tickets: $23

Sunday, September 4, 12 noon, Hawthorne Tent Jazz Cafe
THE MARTA TOPFEROVA TRIO
Admission free with ticket to Sunday 2 p.m. concert
                                            \
Sunday, September 4, 2 p.m., Ozawa Hall
SONNY ROLLINS
Tickets: $45, $37, $30; lawn tickets: $17

Sunday, September 4, 6:30 p.m., Hawthorne Tent Jazz Cafe
THE TAYLOR EIGSTI-JULIAN LAGOS DUO
Admission free with ticket to Sunday 8 p.m. concert

Sunday, September 4, 8 p.m., Ozawa Hall
THE YELLOWJACKETS
CHRIS BOTTI
Tickets: $65, $55, $42; lawn tickets: $20

PRESS CONTACTS:
Dawn Singh, Dawn Singh Publicity (dawn at dawnsinghpublicity.com)
857-544-0739
www.dawnsinghpublicity.com

Sean Kerrigan, BSO Associate Director of Media Relations 
(skerrigan at bso.org)
413-637-5286