Splitter Orchester // Cécile McLorin Salvant Quartet // Vincent Peirani

Formed in 2010, Splitter Orchester consists of 24 Berlin-based improvisers involved in the Echtzeitmusik movement. Their founders are Clare Cooper, Clayton Thomas and Gregor Hotz, and the musicians represent many different countries of origin and several disciplines. Tonight they will give the world première of a piece by George Lewis, the celebrated American composer and trombonist. Born in Chicago in 1952, Lewis is a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. He has worked with many ensembles, including the Globe Unity Orchestra and the Instant Composers Pool Orchestra, as well as collaborating with such individuals as Anthony Braxton, Laurie Anderson, Frederic Rzewski, Wadada Leo Smith and Evan Parker. He and has been a professor at Columbia University in New York since 2004.
www.berlinsplitter.org

The child of a French mother and a Haitian father, Cécile McLorin Salvant was born in 1989 in Miami, Florida, where she grew up. She studied at the Darius Milhaud Conservatory in Aix-en-Provence and at the age of 20 her precocious originality and creativity were recognised when she won first prize in the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition. Her album “WomanChild”, released in 2013, was nominated for a Grammy for the best jazz vocal album, and she topped no fewer than four categories in the 2015 “DownBeat” critics’ poll. She is a regular performer with Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. In the “New York Times”, the critic Ben Ratliff called her “the latest answer to the question of what jazz has to do with you”. Her new album, containing a mixture of new and rediscovered material, is titled “For One to Love”.
www.cecilemclorinsalvant.com

With his appearance as a member of Daniel Humair’s quartet last year, celebrating the festival’s 50th anniversary, the French accordion virtuoso Vincent Peirani showed that he has created a bold and wonderfully inventive new jazz voice for an old instrument. The swift return of Peirani symbolises the beginning of the festival’s second half-century. Born in Nice in 1980, he began playing the instrument at the age of 11 and went on to study at the Conservatoire Nationale Supérieure in Paris. His quintet – whose album, “Living Being”, was released this year – includes the saxophonist Émile Parisien, also a member of Humair’s group. In 2015 Peirani won two awards at the ECHO Prize, as an individual musician and for his duo with Parisien, and was named the artist of the year in the Victoires du Jazz awards.
www.vincent-peirani.com