Hopkins Center for the Arts

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DOUBLE BILL

VIJAY IYER TRIO AND

DAFNIS PRIETO SEXTET

Thursday, January 29 • 7 pm
Spaulding Auditorium
$26 • Dartmouth students $5
18 & under $14

Vijay Iyer

Dafnis Prieto

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Two innovative, cross-cultural jazz players and their ensembles take the Hop stage in this double bill of the Vijay Iyer Trio and the Dafnis Prieto Sextet. Pianist Iyer brings potent straight-ahead jazz in the tradition of Coltrane and Monk, layered with elements of European classical music, funk and rhythms from his own South Indian heritage. In his visionary compositions and occasional standards, Iyer and his Trio veer from contemplative beauty one moment to fierce energy the next. Named by Downbeat the Number 1 Rising Star Jazz Artist and Best Composer for '06 and '07, Iyer displays a “strikingly original pianistic voice…a marriage of intellect and power, of brains and brawn” (JazzTimes).

Drummer Prieto wowed listeners with his mastery of Afro-Cuban and American jazz rhythms when he emigrated from Cuba in 1999. After a series of “A list” sideman assignments, he emerged as a prolific and inspired ensemble leader and composer, bringing together some of the best players of his generation. Buoyed by Prieto's intricate percussion and seamless interplay with the piano and bass, the sextet's horn section features saxophonist Peter Apfelbaum and trumpet player Avishai Cohen. The result is “some of the best of New York's new Latin-jazz movement, distinguished by complex, jaggedly modern writing, but also by a deep cultural literacy of Cuban folklore” (The New York Times).