Jay Hoggard Quartet @Alvin & Friends
Jay Hoggard Quartet performing at Alvin& Friends 14 Memorial Highway New Rochelle
Thursday, Friday, Saturday December 19, 20, 21,2024
Vibraphonist / Composer Jay Hoggard’s music has touched the hearts and souls of listeners around Planet Earth for over 40 years. Jay has long ranked with the greatest vibraphone innovators: he has been highly acclaimed as a master of the vibraphone and marimba, a supportive and engaging bandleader, a comprehensive and compelling composer immersed in the infinite musical varieties of the African Diaspora, a dedicated educator, and a respected recording artist.
Jay’s music is positive, spiritual, uplifting, and happy. He masterfully draws on traditional and contemporary musical vocabulary to develop new directions for the vibraphone. Jay seamlessly blends jazz and gospel roots with African marimba rhythms. His performance repertoire represents the three B’s of the jazz tradition (Blues, Bop, Ballads) with original innovations.
Overall, Jay Hoggard has recorded 23 CDs as a leader. His compositions have been featured internationally on radio, television, film and streaming. He has been consistently recognized as a significant composer of the music called jazz.
In 2023, Jay released two album’s on the JHVM label: RETRO FOCUS and RAISE YOUR SPIRIT CONSCIOUSNESS. RETRO FOCUS is a diverse and dynamic compilation featuring 13 of his compositions previously released on five albums from the JHVM Label: The Right Place (2003), Swing ‘Em Gates (2007), Soular Power (2008), Solo from Two Sides (2009) and Harlem Hieroglyphs (2016). “Retro Focus is a digitally remastered, curated playlist focused upon some of my up tempo, straight ahead compositions,” Hoggard says. “These compositions are core elements of my live performance repertoire, and always receive positive audience response. I am blessed to be able to offer them in this reissue format.” Retro Focus offers a presentation of Jay Hoggard’s solid musical foundation. “On this release, I was able to focus upon compositions which have stayed with me over the past thirty years” Hoggard relates. “They’ve grown and developed in performance and creativity, and are my signature of where I go when I'm working in a mainstream jazz setting.”
RAISE YOUR SPIRIT CONSCIOUSNESS, features original compositions, along with stunning and swinging reimaginations of compositions by Wayne Shorter, Duke Ellington, Thad Jones, and Stevie Wonder. As Hoggard wrote in the liner notes, “The music in this recording is intended to help you raise your spirit consciousness. It is grounded in African-derived global rhythms. The goal is to merge the sacred and the secular in the realm of thanksgiving for our everyday blessings. Let everything that has breath make a joyful noise to praise God.”
Reviews of Jay Hoggard’s perennial favorite 2012 recording, CHRISTMAS VIBES ALL THRU THE YEAR, stated, in All About Jazz: “this oft unsung mallet master delivers a set of...memorable performances...high points include "We Three Kings/What Child Is This," which starts off in a wild and rangy place before settling in for the ride, and "Little Drummer Boy," which balances the refined and noble with the spacey and angular.” And in NPR’s A Blog Supreme : “ …he draws upon the Christian tradition in which he was raised — his father was a clergyman — for a universal message surrounding all the good things of the season. Joining Hoggard are fellow respected veterans James Weidman on organ and Bruce Cox on drums. That combination of instruments creates spaciousness on a program of traditional songs and original meditations.”
Jay Hoggard is a tenured Professor of Music at his alma mater, Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT, where he directs the Jazz Orchestra, and has taught and mentored thousands of young musicians since 1991.
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