El Mundo del Piano Latinoamericano Festival Debuts at Klavierhaus in NYC

The First Annual EL MUNDO DEL PIANO LATINOAMERICANO Piano Festival Debuts at Klavierhaus in NYC, March 10-12, 2023.

10 Concerts by New York’s Elite Jazz & Latin Pianists In Midtown Manhattan Celebrate the Resurgence of Intimate Salon-style Concert Performance by Pianists of the World Stage.

WHAT: Klavierhaus and the Luce Group present the first annual EL MUNDO DEL PIANO LATINOAMERICANO Piano Festival at Klavierhaus Pianos in Midtown Manhattan

WHEN: March 10-12, 2023  10 Concerts featuring elite New York jazz pianists:

Friday March 10 – Concerts at 6pm & 7:30pm, Saturday March 11 Matinees at 3pm & 4:30pm, Evening concerts at 6pm & 7:30pm, Sunday March 12 Matinees at 3pm & 4:30pm; Evening concerts at 6pm & 7:30pm

WHERE: Klavierhaus Pianos, 790 11th Avenue at 54th Street in Midtown Manhattan

BOX OFFICE: nycjazzpianofestival.com or at the door

TICKET PRICES:
Individual concerts $30
Saturday or Sunday One Day Pass $60  
3-day Full Festival Pass $135
STUDENT 50% Advance Discount Code: USLSM3K

CONCERT THUMBNAILS

2 concerts on Friday
1. 6pm David Virelles, Solo Piano – 6:30pm David Virelles, Piano| Brandon Ross, Guitar Duo
2. 7:30pm David Virelles, Solo Piano – 8pm David Virelles, Piano| Brandon Ross, Guitar Duo

4 Concerts on Saturday
MATINEES
1. 3pm David Chesky, Solo Piano – 3:30pm David Chesky, Piano | David Finck, Bass
2. 4:30pm David Chesky, Solo Piano – 5pm David Chesky, Piano | David Finck, Bass

EVENING
3. 6pm Arcoiris Sandoval, Solo Piano – 6:30pm Hector Martignon, Solo Piano
4. 7:30pm Arcoiris Sandoval, Solo Piano – 8pm Hector Martignon, Solo Piano

4 Concerts on Sunday
MATINEES
1. 3pm Axel Tosca Solo Piano – 3:30pm Axel Tosca Piano | Xiomara Laugart voice
2. 4:30pm Axel Tosca Solo Piano – 5pm Axel Tosca Piano | Xiomara Laugart voice

EVENING
3. 6pm Elio Villafranca, Solo Piano – 6:30pm Elio Villafranca, Piano| Vincent Herring, Saxophone Duo
4. 7:30pm Elio Villafranca, Solo Piano – 8pm Elio Villafranca, Piano| Vincent Herring, Saxophone Duo

COMPLETE FESTIVAL LINEUP & ARTIST BIOS

FRIDAY MARCH 10, 2023

DAVID VIRELLES
Pianist-composer David Virelles was born and raised in Santiago de Cuba, moving to Canada in 2001 and to New York City in 2009. In 2014, ECM released Virelles’ leader debut for the label: Mbókò – Sacred Music for Piano, Two Basses, Drum Set and Biankoméko Abakuá. As the subtitle indicates, the album’s 10 pieces feature his piano alongside a dual bass drone (by Thomas Morgan and Robert Hurst), the polyrhythmic percussion of a traditional trap set (Marcus Gilmore) and the all-important four-drum biankoméko kit (Román Díaz). With the sonic mysteries of Mbókò, Virelles transmuted the folkloric rhythms of Afro-Cuban religious ritual into a 21st-century musical impulse, tapping into a sound that’s simultaneously ancient and modern, communal and personal, meditative and propulsive.

BRANDON ROSS
As a performing and recording artist, guitarist and composer Brandon Ross has worked and collaborated with several innovative voices in modern music such as Henry Threadgill, Wadada Leo Smith, Cassandra Wilson, Jewel, Tony Williams, Lizz Wright, Arto Lindsay, The Lounge Lizards, Leroy Jenkins, Oliver Lake, Lawrence D. “Butch” Morris, Bill Frisell, Me’Shell N’degeocello, Arrested Development, Archie Shepp, Muhal Richard Abrams, Don Byron, Ron Miles and many others.

SATURDAY MARCH 11, 2023

DAVID CHESKY
Chesky’s style of composition has been called “Urban Orchestral” music, merging latin, jazz and classical techniques with sounds emanating from the streets of New York. As such, he draws from the energies and rhythms of the earth that collide with urban other contemporary orchestral sounds. According to Chesky, “When Stravinsky was influenced by jazz, it was the Roaring Twenties, it was a different type of jazz. These days, latin, hip-hop, funk music is my jazz. The important thing is it’s a folkloric art form, and I want to use these art forms and take them and encompass them and recreate them into symphonies and concertos, into a higher form. You need this building block to have connection to society. For me, art has to reflect time and culture. It has to be this. And by using these blocks of culture around you then it becomes organic, it becomes art; there’s a real humanism, a connection to the world. We are a rhythm nation and our orchestral music should reflect this. As a pianist, I have been playing jazz and Latin music for most of my life. I play African drums on the weekends in Central Park. My life is one giant rhythm as I move from place to place. Many people ask me, “Why do you use jazz in your orchestral music?” The real question is, “Why shouldn’t any American composer use jazz in their music?” After all, we are a jazz nation. Jazz is our indigenous art form.

DAVID FINCK
David Finck is an American jazz bassist. He plays both bass guitar and double bass. Finck was born in Rochester, New York. He studied under Sam Goradetzer and Michael Shahan of the Philadelphia Orchestra, and graduated from Eastman School of Music in 1980. He played with Woody Herman in 1980–81 and then moved to New York City, where he played with Joe Williams, Annie Ross, Mel Lewis, Al Cohn, Ernestine Anderson, Rosemary Clooney, Tom Harrell, Jerry Dodgion, Phil Woods, Clark Terry, and Al Grey in the 1980s. He worked with Paquito D’Rivera and Steve Kuhn in the 1990s, as well as Freddie Hubbard, Makoto Ozone, and Eddie Daniels.

ARCOIRIS SANDOVAL
Arcoiris Sandoval is a jazz pianist and composer residing in New York City originally from Tucson, Arizona. She is the leader of the Sonic Asylum trio and quintet, Co Director of the environmentally motivated orchestra The D.O.M.E. Experience along with bassist Mimi Jones and is the Musical Director for vocalist Allan Harris. She obtained her Master’s degree in jazz piano performance from the Manhattan School of Music and has won 2013 and 2015 ASCAP young jazz composer awards in addition to being a semifinalist at in the Montreux Solo Jazz Piano competition in 2012, a participant in the Mary Lou Williams Festival, Betty Carter Jazz Ahead and the Metropole Orkest Arrangers Workshop. Her arrangement of Richard Bona’s “Please Don’t Stop” was performed by the Metropole Orkest at the 2016 BBC Proms tribute to Quincy Jones. She performs at major festivals and clubs around the world with vocalist Allan Harris as well as with her own projects. She is a Next Jazz Legacy nominee, and is a recipient of the 2021 Chamber Music America Performance plus grant. She released her debut Sonic Asylum Trio album in 2018 with MEII Enterprises entitled “First Voyage” – featuring Marty Kenney on bass and Allan Mednard on drums and it won a Global Music Award.

HECTOR MARTIGNON
Martignon’s abilities as a pianist have always been enriched by his interest in varied musical genres. He paid for his studies of classical piano and composition at the prestigious Freiburger Musikhochschule in Germany by performing with the best Afro-Cuban and Brazilian bands of Europe, backing stars such as Celia Cruz and Ismael Quintana on their European tours, and recording with Tata Güiness and Arturo Sandoval. Hector studied contemporary composition with masters like Gyorgi Ligetti, Luigi Nono and Karl Heinz Stockhausen. He performs as a jazz and classical music pianist worldwide, and is as at home with modern jazz as he is with the music of Chopin, Bach and Debussy.

SUNDAY MARCH 12, 2023

AXEL TOSCA
Cuban-born pianist Axel Tosca is a dynamic performer known for his genre-bending mix of Jazz, Latin, and Timba music. Born in Cuba in 1983, he grew up in a prestigious musical family. His mother (and companion for this festival) is the renowned Trova singer Xiomara Laugart and his father, the folk singer-guitarist Alberto Tosca. Introduced to guitar at age four, Tosca was also playing piano by age seven and soon joined his parents on-stage. At music school, one of his teachers was Miriam Valdez, the daughter of Cuban piano legends Bebo Valdes and sister of Chucho Valdes. In addition to classical music, jazz, and Latin traditions, he also discovered hip-hop and played with The Roots when they toured Cuba. Tosca won multiple piano competitions at home, then he moved to the United States in 2005. In Las Vegas, he joined the Havana Nights revue and played for two years at the world-famous Stardust Casino and Resort. Tosca has worked with George Clinton, BeBe Winans, Mae-Sun, Steve Gadd, Ray Chew, Lenny White, Pino Palladino, Giovanni Hidalgo, Jocelyn Brown, Karren Wheeler, Monique Bingham, Godwin Lewis and J Balvin and Bad Bunny, among others. 

XIOMARA LAUGART
Xiomara Laugart was born in Guantanamo province of Cuba in 1960. She began her career at the age of 15, performing several different expressions of traditional and contemporary Cuban music. In the 1980s, she entered the Adolfo Guzmán Contest for Cuban Music where she was granted the highest award. She went on to win other international awards at Poland’s Sopot Festival in 1985, and at Germany’s Dresden Festival in 1986. After recording self-titled albums in Cuba, she moved to Rome and later to New York. Soon after, Laugart was invited to be the guest singer on Deep Rumba by Kip Hanrahan, Latin Lullaby by Ellipsis Art, and on Jacky Terrason’s album What It Is. Laugart is known for her work with the group Yerba Buena, whose first album President Alien was nominated for a Grammy Award. Yerba Buena’s second album Island Life, a brilliant mix of rhythms to which Laugart added her African and Caribbean legacy, was released in 2005. She was cast in 2007 as Celia Cruz in the Off-Broadway musical, Celia: The Life and Music of Celia Cruz, a tribute to the life of the late Cuban-American singer, which ran at New World Stages until May 2008. On Tears and Rumba, her third album on Chesky Records, Xiomara Laugart performed some Cuban classics from the golden era of the 1920s. Tears and Rumba is an introduction to the singer-songwriter’s driven trova style from the city of Santiago and features works by two extremely influential composers of that era, María Teresa Vera and Miguel Matamoros. Axel Tosca Laugart, the singer’s son, was responsible for the new arrangements.

ELIO VILLAFRANCA
Born in the province of Pinar del Río, Cuba, Steinway Artist, pianist, and composer Elio Villafranca is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship recipient; a two-time Grammy nominee; 2019 Downbeat Critic’s Poll Rising Stars Pianist; winner of the 2018 Downbeat Critic’s Poll Rising Stars Keyboard; first Cuban born recipient of the Sunshine Award (2017), founded to recognize excellence in the performing arts, education, science and sports of the various Caribbean countries, South America, Centro America, and Africa; and a recipient of the first Jazz at Lincoln Center (JALC) Millennium Swing Award in 2014. Villafranca was classically trained in piano, percussion, and composition at the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana, Cuba. Since his arrival to the U.S. in 1995, he’s been at the forefront of today’s pianists and composers, fusing classical and jazz with music from the African diaspora. Based in NYC, Villafranca is a jazz faculty member at The Juilliard School of Music, Manhattan School of Music, New York University, and Temple University in Philadelphia.

VINCENT HERRING
Saxophonist Vincent Herring’s intense, soulful, multi-noted style and ebullient swing have excited audiences worldwide. On stage, Herring and his band often make an incendiary sound over fine and controlled rhythms of modern times. He has played or recorded with Freddie Hubbard, Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Hayes, Art Blakey and The Jazz Messengers, Horace Silver Quintet, Jack DeJohnette’s Special Edition, Larry Coryell, Steve Turre, The Mingus Big Band (Won a Grammy in 2010), Kenny Barron, Nancy Wilson, Dr. Billy Taylor, Carla Bley, Mike LeDonne, Carl Allen, Ron McClure, and John Hicks among others. His extensive guest soloist appearances include performances with Wynton Marsalis at Lincoln Center and Jon Faddis and The Carnegie Hall Big Band. Vincent’s discography reveals over 20 titles as a leader and over 250 as a sideman.

James Luce
EL MUNDO DEL PIANO LATINOAMERICANO
PIANO WEEKEND

KLAVIERHAUS
790 11th Avenue
New York, New York 10019
917-371-1537