Jazz on the Mountain

Aaron Seeber, a 29-year-old drummer living in Queens, NY is making his name as an emerging jazz drummer in New York City. As a performer, Seeber has had the incredible opportunity to share the stage with greats Eric Reed, Pete Malinverni, Warren Wolf, Grant Stewart, Cyrille Aimée, Jeremy Pelt, Paul Bollenback, Tim Green, Ugonna Okegwo, Bruce Harris, Gary Smulyan, Mike Ledonne, Freddie Redd, Butch Warren, Chuck Redd, and many others. He has performed internationally with The Warren Wolf Trio and nationally with the grammy award-winning group, The New York Voices. Aaron has played at many of the renowned venues and festivals around the world including Blues Alley, Marian’s Jazz Room (Switzerland), The Blue Note New York, Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, Birdland, The Mid-Atlantic Jazz Festival, Twins Jazz, The Kennedy Center, Carnegie Hall, The Caramoor Jazz Festival, The DC Jazz Festival, and The Falcon. Seeber recently recorded his debut record “First Move” featuring Warren Wolf, Tim Green, Sullivan Fortner, and Ugonna Okegwo. It will be released on May 13th, 2022, on Cellar Live Records.

Ugonna Okegwo is one of the most distinctive and sought-after jazz bassists in the world. Critics across the globe have praised him for his rich tone, supple sense of swing, stylistic range, and inventiveness. These qualities have not only earned him a place on the bandstand with jazz legends as diverse as Clark Terry, Benny Golson, Pharoah Sanders, and Joseph Jarman – they have established him as one of the leading lights of a younger generation redefining jazz for the new century. Born in 1962 in London to a German mother and Nigerian father, Okegwo was raised in Germany, studying with American expatriates, bassist Jay Oliver, and pianist Walter Norris. There Okegwo caught the attention of trombonist and Mingus alum, Lou Blackburn, who invited Okegwo to tour Europe with his Afro-Jazz group “Mombasa”. In 1989, Okegwo made the leap to Manhattan and began playing with musicians like saxophone legends Big Nick Nicholas, Junior Cook, and James Spaulding. Okegwo is also a bandleader taking his quartet to Europe and documented the group with a recording entitled “UOniverse” [Satchmo Jazz]. The material, which consists of his compositions and brilliantly arranged standards, draws from a wide range of influences, including jazz, African, funk, and classical music.

Will Friedwald writes about music and popular culture for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Sun, The New York Stage Review, Vanity Fair, Playboy magazine and other publications. He is also the host of the radio show Sing! Sing! Sing! on San Diego KSDS on Saturday mornings. He also is the author of ten books including the award-winning A Biographical Guide To The Great Jazz And Pop Singers, Sinatra: The Song Is You, Stardust Melodies, Tony Bennett: The Good Life, Looney Tunes & Merrie Melodies, and Jazz Singing. He has written over 600 liner notes for compact discs, received eleven Grammy nominations, and appears frequently on television and other documentaries. He is also a consultant and curator for Apple Music. Current books: The Great Jazz And Pop Vocal Albums (Pantheon Books / Random House, November 2017), Sinatra: The Song Is You! – New Revised Edition (Chicago Review Press, May 2018) and Straighten Up and Fly Right: The Life and Music of Nat King Cole (Oxford University Press, July 2020). He studied elocution with Prof. Henry Higgins and musicology with Prof. Harold Hill.

Anaïs Reno is an 18-year-old LaGuardia High School graduate who is currently attending SUNY Purchase as a jazz major. Winning the Forté International Competition, Great American Songbook Competition, The Mabel Mercer Competition, the Julie Wilson award and being a winner and Finalist in YoungArts, Anaïs has performed in New York at important venues such as Birdland, Carnegie Hall, David Geffen Hall, The Django, Chris’ Jazz Café in Philadelphia, and many others. Her album, “Lovesome Thing: Anaïs Reno Sings Ellington & Strayhorn”, which was recorded with Emmet Cohen when Anaïs was 16, received critical acclaim and rose to number 6 on the jazz chart. She was featured in the “New York State of Mind” video with Idina Menzel and Stephen Colbert and was on national television singing “America the Beautiful” for the Mets/Yankees 9/11 game last year. She performed in Houston, Cleveland, Buffalo, Philadelphia, and London this last spring, and opened the baseball season on April 15th at Citi Field for the Mets. Additionally, Anaïs will be coming out with a new album soon, featuring Peter Bernstein, David Wong, and Joe Farnsworth.

Scott Robinson, one of today’s most wide-ranging instrumentalists, has been heard on tenor sax with Buck Clayton’s band, on trumpet with Lionel Hampton’s quintet, on alto clarinet with Paquito D’Rivera’s clarinet quartet, and on bass sax with the New York City Opera. On these and other instruments, he has been heard with a cross-section of jazz greats representing nearly every imaginable style of the music, from Braff to Braxton. His discography now includes more than 190 recordings. Scott has performed in some 30 nations, in such diverse venues as Carnegie Hall, the Village Vanguard, the Library of Congress, and the Vienna Opera House. Scott’s group was selected to be the closing act at the Knitting Factory’s Sun Ra Festival in New York City. Scott has also written magazine articles and liner notes, and was an invited speaker at the Congressional Black Caucus Jazz Forum in Washington, D.C.

Helen Sung is an acclaimed jazz pianist and composer, and a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow. A native of Houston, Texas, and alumna of its High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, she eschewed her classical upbringing after encountering jazz during undergraduate studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Helen went on to become part of the inaugural class of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Performance at the New England Conservatory of Music, and win the Kennedy Center’s Mary Lou Williams Jazz Piano Competition. In addition to her own band, Helen has performed and toured with such luminaries as the late Clark Terry, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter, Wynton Marsalis, Regina Carter, Terri Lyne Carrington, Cecile McLorin Salvant, and the Mingus Big Band. She is currently visiting faculty at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and an Associate Professor at Columbia University, where she also was the inaugural jazz artist-in-residence at its prestigious Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute exploring the intersection of jazz and neuroscience. Helen is a Steinway Artist.

Ralph Lalama is well known and respected as a top-flight ensemble player with a singular voice as a soloist, embodied in the tenor saxophone. He is a seasoned veteran of the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra and Joe Lovano Nonet, as well as the Carnegie Hall Jazz Band, Woody Herman, Buddy Rich, and Jon Faddis Jazz Orchestra. He has earned three Grammys and has ten CDs as a leader, five of them on the distinguished Criss Cross jazz label. Lalama leads his own trio, “Bop Juice,” regularly at Smalls Jazz in NYC. He is an accomplished jazz educator at SUNY Purchase, as well as teaching jazz camps and clinics across the USA and abroad. He is an Official D’Addario Performing Artist. DownBeat jazz reviewer Zan Stewart said, “Lalama is a grand, modern-minded storyteller…a first-class jazz soloist.”

Donavan Austin is a trombonist, composer, arranger and educator who appreciates the tradition of jazz and is dedicated to keeping it alive. Originally from Pennsylvania, Donavan quickly and fluidly began to make his mark on the New York City jazz scene, playing with countless artists across the metropolitan area. With many musical projects coming to the bandstand down the line, the world should expect to see him take the music scene by storm.

Bio coming soon.