CJP @ Ten
November 14, 2014 at 7:30PM, Auditorium Theatre
Celebrating its 10th Anniversary, CJP and a cast of special guests presented a montage of favorite moments from past performances. Special guests included Dee Alexander, Terisa Griffin, Maggie Brown, Bobbi Wilsyn, Ari Brown, Mwata Bowden, and Howard Levy, performing Davis’ acclaimed arrangements and compositions showcasing CJP’s signature style of effortlessly combining classical music and jazz.
Press
Newcity Music (November 11, 2014)“Davis’ dream is to shatter boundaries, not only for music, but for people. “I call it inner diversity,” he says. ‘You know, diversity is not going to a concert and counting the African Americans. Diversity is if a musician of any hue can identify with the cultural nature of the music they’re performing and allow themselves to be that. That’s what we have in our orchestra; there are African-American classical musicians who study jazz, but there are also non African-Americans who can swing like Count Basie. The external simply becomes like a box of crayons: it’s the internal that matters.’”-Dennis Polkow
The Chicago Tribune (November 15, 2014)
“What was most striking, though, was not the time-travel aspect of this musical journey but the stylistic breadth of the work. Thorny scores and tuneful miniatures, avant-garde improvisation and easygoing swing, virtuoso instrumentalists and easily accessible vocalists – all of it, and more, turned up on this program.
Davis often refers to his music as Third Stream, a term that generally means a jazz-meets-classical hybrid. But to Davis, Third Stream cannot be restricted to a particular sound, style, epoch or approach. Instead, as this concert reaffirmed, the CJP draws from a century's worth of jazz and an even broader stretch of classical music to create new works of widely varied character.”-Howard Reich
The Chicago Tribune (November 13, 2014)
“That a start-from-scratch organization as ambitious as this should survive – even flourish – for fully a decade is cause for celebration. And that's precisely what Davis and colleagues have planned for this season[...]. The season-opening performance will revisit highlights of scores Davis has composed for his jazz-meets-classical band, as if to take stock of what has happened before pushing ahead into what comes next.”-Howard Reich
CJP at Ten, Fanfare for Cloud Gate