On Saturday, December 7, 2019 at 8:00 p.m., jazz supergroup Artemis make their Carnegie Hall debut in Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage. Each renowned for their outstanding solo work, these powerhouse musicians including Cécile McLorin Salvant (Vocals), Renee Rosnes (Music Director and Piano), Anat Cohen (Clarinet and Bass Clarinet), Melissa Aldana (Tenor Saxophone), Ingrid Jensen (Trumpet), Noriko Ueda (Bass), and Allison Miller (Drums) captivate audiences with bold new arrangements of classics by The Beatles to Thelonious Monk, as well as strikingly original compositions by the group's members.
Hailing from America, Canada, France, Israel, Chile and Japan, the musicians first assembled as a band for a European tour in summer 2017, and with each member being a bandleader in her own right, were able to align schedules and perform at the Newport Jazz Festival, Miami's Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, and the Ferring Jazz Bistro in St. Louis. Eventually naming themselves Artemis after the Olympian goddess of the hunt and the wild, the group has just been signed to the world-famous Blue Note record label, releasing their debut album in the new year along with upcoming appearances at San Francisco's SFJAZZ, Chicago's Symphony Center, and Washington D.C.'s John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
Renee Rosnes is one of the premier jazz pianists and composers of her generation. Upon moving to New York City from Vancouver, Canada, she quickly established a reputation of high regard, touring and recording with such masters as
Joe Henderson, Wayne Shorter, J.J. Johnson,
James Moody and Bobby Hutcherson. She was a charter member of the all-star ensemble, the SFJAZZ Collective, with whom she toured for six years.
Rosnes has released 17 recordings, including 10 for Blue Note Records, and has appeared on many others as a sideman. In 2016, Written in the Rocks (Smoke Sessions) was named one of the Best Albums by The Nation, and earned Rosnes her 5th Canadian Juno Award. Her most recent session, Beloved of the Sky, draws inspiration from Canadian painter Emily Carr, and features Chris Potter,
Steve Nelson, Peter Washington and Lenny White.
Over her 30-year career, Rosnes has collaborated with a diverse range of artists, such as Jack DeJohnette, Zakir Hussain,
Christian McBride, Chris Potter, Renée Fleming and Nicholas Payton. Her works have been performed and recorded by J.J. Johnson, Phil Woods, Michael Dease, and the Danish Radio Big Band, among others.
Rosnes is a member of bassist Ron Carter's Foursight Quartet and often performs with her husband, acclaimed pianist
Bill Charlap. The couple released Double Portrait (Blue Note) and performed their New York City concert debut in Zankel Hall in spring 2011 as part of The Shape of Jazz series. The piano duo was also featured on the 2016 Grammy Award winning album,
Tony Bennett &
Bill Charlap - The Silver Lining: The Songs of
Jerome Kern (Columbia).
From 2008-2010, Rosnes was the host of The Jazz Profiles, an interview series produced by CBC Radio and has contributed two cover story interviews for JazzTimes with Wayne Shorter and with Geri Allen.
Anat Cohen was born in Tel Aviv, Israel and began clarinet studies at age 12. She discharged her mandatory Israeli military service duty from 1993-95, playing tenor saxophone in the Israeli Air Force band. Through the World Scholarship Tour, Cohen attended the Berklee College of Music. She then spent a decade with
Sherrie Maricle's Diva Jazz Orchestra; worked with Choro Ensemble and
Duduka Da Fonseca's Samba Jazz Quintet, and with David Ostwald's Gully Low Jazz Band.
In 2009,
Anat Cohen became the first Israeli to headline at the Village Vanguard and paid tribute to
Benny Goodman with the 2010 release Clarinetwork: Live at the Village Vanguard. She served as the music director for the Newport Jazz Festival: Now 60! American tour in 2014 and toured with pianist
Fred Hersch, as well as with Omara Portuondo. Cohen and Hersch released Live in Healdsburg (Anzic) in 2018.
Cohen has recorded four albums as part of the 3 Cohens Sextet with her brothers, saxophonist Yuval and trumpeter Avishai. Happy Song (Anzic), the 2017
Anat Cohen Tentet debut release was arranged and conducted by her musical partner and producer Oded Lev-Ari. Earlier in 2017, Cohen released Outra Coisa: The Music of Moacir Santos and Rosa Dos Ventos. Both Anzic recordings were made in Rio de Janeiro and Brasilia and received Grammy Award nominations. The Tentet released Triple Helix (Anzic) in 2019. The album's centerpiece is a three-movement concerto composed by Lev-Ari and commissioned by
Carnegie Hall and Chicago's Symphony Center for live world premieres.
She has taught at Stanford, Oberlin, Michigan State University, University of California-San Diego, the Centrum Choro Workshop and California Brazil Camp. Cohen has been declared Clarinetist of the Year by the Jazz Journalists Association every year since 2007.
Melissa Aldana was born in Santiago, Chile and began playing the saxophone at six, under the influence and tutelage of her father Marcos Aldana, also a professional saxophonist. Aldana began with alto, influenced by artists such as
Charlie Parker, Cannonball Adderley, and Michael Brecker and switched to tenor upon first hearing the music of
Sonny Rollins. She performed in Santiago jazz clubs in her early teens and was invited by pianist Danilo Pérez to play at the Panama Jazz Festival in 2005.
She attended Berklee College of Music and graduated in 2009. She recorded her first album in 2010, Free Fall (Inner Circle), and her second album, Second Cycle, was released in 2012. In 2013, at 24, she was the first female and the first South American musician to win the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Saxophone Competition, in which her father had been a semi-finalist in 1991.
On her most recent album Visions (Motéma), Aldana connects her work to the legacy of Latina artists who have come before her, creating a pathway for her own expression. Inspired by the life and works of
Frida Kahlo, Aldana creates a parallel between her experiences as a female saxophone player in a male-dominated community, and Kahlo's experiences as a female visual artist working to assert herself in a landscape dominated by men.
Ingrid Jensen has been hailed as one of the most gifted trumpeters of her generation and is a sought-out teacher, collaborator, and soloist.
After graduating from Berklee College of Music in 1989, Jensen became the youngest professor in the history of the Bruckner Conservatory in Linz, Austria. She recorded three albums for ENJA in the 90s and become one of the most in-demand trumpet players on the global jazz scene.
She has been a member of the innovative jazz orchestras of
Maria Schneider (1994-2012) and Darcy James Argue (2002-present) and has performed with a cast of jazz legends ranging from
Clark Terry to
Esperanza Spalding. Jensen performed alongside British R&B artist Corrine Bailey Rae on Saturday Night Live and recorded with Canadian pop icon
Sarah McLachlan. More recently, Jensen has been performing with Grammy winner Terri Lyne Carrington.
One of Jensen's most frequent and closest collaborators is her sister, the saxophonist and composer Christine Jensen. She is a featured soloist on the Christine Jensen Jazz Orchestra's Juno-award-winning album, Treelines(2011), and its successor, Habitat (2013). The sisters released a small group recording entitled Infinitude (Whirlwind) in 2016.
As a dedicated jazz educator, Jensen has taught at the University of Michigan and Peabody Conservatory; performed and lectured with the Thelonious Monk Institute High School group featuring
Herbie Hancock; and performed and taught at the Centrum Jazz Workshop, The
Dave Brubeck Institute, the Banff Centre Workshop in Jazz & Creative Music, the Stanford Jazz Camp, and the Geri Allen Jazz Camp for Young Women.
Jensen won the Carmine Caruso Trumpet Competition in 1995 and recently served as artist-in-residence at the prestigious Monterey Jazz Festival.
Her latest album Invisible Sounds (Whirlwind) honors the late Kenny Wheeler, and Jensen was hailed by the Jazz Journalist Association as 2019's Trumpeter of the Year.
Noriko Ueda is originally from Hyogo, Japan. Her interest in music began early in her life, studying classical piano at the age of four. At 16, she began playing the electric bass, and by 18, she began her career with the upright bass.
Ueda was the B.E.S.T. scholarship recipient for the Berklee College of Music where she majored in jazz composition, graduating in 1997. She then relocated to New York City and has since become an in-demand player with such legendary groups such as The Frank Wess Quintet and his Nonet, the
Ted Rosenthal Trio,
Sherrie Maricle and The Diva Jazz Orchestra, Five Play,
Grady Tate's Band, Harry Whitaker's Band and with artists such as
Marion Cowings, Makoto Ozone and Terumasa Hino.
Other career highlights to date include leading her own small groups and her big band, the
Noriko Ueda Jazz Orchestra, and recording her first trio album, Debut (Terashima Records), in 2015, which features pianist
Ted Rosenthal and drummer Quincy Davis. She toured Japan with the
Ted Rosenthal Trio for 11 consecutive years (2006 - 2017), and performed on his album Out of this World, which reached #1 on the national jazz radio charts in 2011.
Ueda was featured on a Japanese documentary TV show called Gutto Chikyu-bin, which introduced the life of a jazz musician in New York City and won the third annual BMI Foundation/
Charlie Parker Jazz composition Prize for her original big band piece "Castle in the North."
Drummer, composer and teacher
Allison Miller has been described as a "Modern Jazz Icon in the Making." She has been named "Top 20 Jazz Drummers" in Downbeat and her composition "Otis Was a Polar Bear" is on NPR's list of The 200 Greatest Songs by 21st Century Women. Miller served as a Monterey Jazz Festival 2019 Artist in Residence and is the first recipient of the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation's Commissioning Grant.
Miller's band Boom Tic Boom, featuring pianist
Myra Melford, violinist Jenny Scheinman, clarinetist
Ben Goldberg, cornetist Kirk Knuffke, and bassist
Todd Sickafoose is currently celebrating its 10th anniversary with the release of their album, Glitter Wolf. Previous releases include 5am Stroll, Boom Tic Boom, Live at Willisau, No Morphine No Lilies, and Otis was a Polar Bear.
Miller co-directs Parlour Game with Jenny Scheinman and Science Fair with
Carmen Staaf. She is the musical director for Camille A. Brown's "ink,"
Michelle Dorrance and the American Ballet Theater's "Dream Within A Dream," "Speak" with Rachna Nivas and
Michelle Dorrance, and "And Still You Must Swing" with
Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards.
As a side-musician, Miller has collaborated with Ani DiFranco,
Sara Bareilles,
Natalie Merchant, Brandi Carlile, and
Toshi Reagon as well as Dr. Lonnie Smith, Patricia Barber,
Marty Ehrlich,
Myra Melford,
Steven Bernstein, and
Ben Allison.
Miller is a three-time Jazz Ambassador for the U.S. State Department and has been appointed Arts Envoy to Thailand for her work with Jazz Education Abroad. She is on Yamaha's Top 30 Clinicians List and teaches at the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music in NYC, Stanford Jazz Workshop, and is the Artistic Director of Jazz Camp West. Her instructional videos are produced and published by Reverb. In 2008, Miller founded the Walter Salb Memorial Musical Scholarship Foundation in honor of her late teacher and mentor.
Cécile McLorin Salvant was born and raised in Miami, Florida of a French mother and a Haitian father. She started classical piano studies at five and began singing in a children's choir at eight. Early on, she developed an interest in classical voice.
In 2007, she moved to Aix-en-Provence, France, to study law, as well as classical and baroque voice at the
Darius Milhaud Conservatory. It was in Aix-en-Provence, with reedist and teacher Jean-François Bonnel, that she started learning about jazz, and sang with her first band. In 2009, after a series of concerts in Paris, she recorded her first album "Cécile", with Jean-François Bonnel's Paris Quintet. A year later, she won the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Vocal competition.
In 2014, her second album, WomanChild (Mack Avenue Records) was nominated for a Grammy. Her third and fourth albums, For One To Love and Dreams and Daggers (Mack Avenue Records), both won Grammy Awards for Best Jazz Vocal Album. Her latest album, released in fall of 2018, The Window (Mack Avenue Records) was recorded duo with Sullivan Fortner (piano), featuring Melissa Aldana (tenor saxophone) and garnered her third Grammy Award for Best Jazz Vocal Album. Ogresse is McLorin Salvant's latest musical journey. With its dark and romantic "fairytale-like" story, Ogresse is a delightfully audacious addition to Salvant's increasingly eclectic body of work.
She frequently makes music with Aaron Diehl,
Paul Sikivie,
Kyle Poole, and Sullivan Fortner. She has collaborated with
Archie Shepp,
Wynton Marsalis, John Clayton, Jeff Hamilton,
Renee Rosnes,
Bill Charlap,
Fred Hersch, Jacky Terrasson, and Darcy James Argue.
