Feature Photo: John Raymond Quartet
September 18, 2015
Jazz trumpeter and composer John Raymond performs at the David H. Stull Recital Hall with pianist Dan Tepfer, bassist Joe Martin and drummer Billy Hart. The quartet highlighted the talents of musicians from a broad age range, mirroring its contemporary yet traditional sound. While Raymond is part of the next generation of jazz, the 74-year-old Hart achieved leg- endary status early in his long and illustrious career, having played with seminal jazz artists including Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock and Pharoah Sanders. The concert featured songs from the quartet’s album, Foreign Territory, which was released this year. Show-goers crowded the hall beyond capacity, reacting positively to compositions like “Deeper,” for which the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers gave Raymond the 2015 Herb Alpert Young Jazz Composer Award. Despite high attendance, the performance was an intimate one, with Raymond’s accessible phrasing grounding the fluidly rhapsodic playing of the rest of the quartet.
