Allison Miller Boom Tic Boom - Angel City Jazz Festival

NYC-based drummer, composer & teacher Allison Miller gathers inspiration from a wide array of genres. Coming from the Jazz tradition, she engages her deep roots in improvisation as a vehicle to explore all music. Described by critics as a charismatic and rhythmically propulsive drummer with melodic sensibility, Allison has been named “Rising Star Drummer” and “Top 20 Jazz Drummers” in Downbeat Magazine’s acclaimed Critics Poll. Her band, Boom Tic Boom is a 2014 recipient of Chamber Music America’s “Presenter Consortium for Jazz Grant.”

Allison is currently celebrating her latest release No Morphine No Lilies (The Royal Potato Family.) The album has been met with critical acclaim receiving 4.5 stars from Downbeat and making “Top 10 Jazz Albums of 2013” lists for Downbeat, Jazz Journalists Association, and Something Else. NMNL features her band Boom tic boom: pianist Myra Melford, violinist Jenny Scheinman, bassist Todd Sickafoose, and special guests: Steven Bernstein, Erik Friedlander, Rachel Friedman, and Ara Anderson. “No Morphine No Lilies demonstrates that her (Allison Miller) craftiness as a percussionist is met by her ingenuity as a composer and group conceptualist.” -The New Yorker 

This concert is sponsored in part by a grant from Chamber Music America.

Pianist Satoko Fujii and her husband trumpeter Kappa Maki are one of the most boldly creative and fearlessly innovative couples in contemporary music. Whether together in one of their regular groups or alone they continue to push the boundaries of improvisation and composition.

Critics and fans alike hail pianist and composer SATOKO FUJII as one of the most original voices in jazz today. A truly global artist, she splits her time between Berlin and Japan and tours internationally leading several ensembles. Just as her career spans international borders, her music spans many genres, blending jazz, contemporary classical music, rock, and traditional Japanese music into an innovative synthesis instantly recognizable as hers alone. Her wide-ranging compositions can incorporate the simple melodies of folk song, the harmonic sophistication of jazz, the rhythmic power of rock, and the extended forms of symphonic composers. Although Fujii’s compositions are full of sudden shifts in direction and mood, the extremes are always part of a greater conceptual whole. As an improviser, Fujii is equally wide-ranging and virtuosic. In her solos, explosive free jazz energy mingles with delicate melodicism and a broad palette of timbre and textures. 

Japanese trumpeter and composer Kappa Maki is internationally recognized for his ability to blend a unique vocabulary of extended techniques with touching jazz lyricism. This unpredictable virtuoso “has some of the stark, melancholy lyricism of Miles, the bristling rage of late 60s Freddie Hubbard and a dollop of the extended techniques,” according to Mark Keresman of JazzReview.com. Tamura’s seamlessly limitless creativity led Francis Couture in All Music Guide to declare that “… we can officially say there are two Kappa Makis: The one playing angular jazz-rock or ferocious free improv… and the one writing simple melodies of stunning beauty… How the two of them live in the same body and breathe through the same trumpet might remain a mystery…”