The Guinness Cork Jazz Festival are proud to present a stellar double bill with Jazz giants, Billy Childs and Billy Cobham. Audiences are in for a treat with this powerhouse duo!
Over 18's Only
Jazz pianist/composer Billy Childs remains one of the most diversely prolific and acclaimed artists working in music today. Childs’ canon of original compositions and arrangements has garnered him the 2013 Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship (2009), sixteen Grammy nominations, and five Grammy awards, most recently for Best Jazz Instrumental Album (“Rebirth”). Previously he won for Best Arrangement, Instrumental & Vocal (featuring Renée Fleming and Yo-Yo Ma) in 2015 for ‘New York Tendaberry’, from his highly successful release Map to the Treasure: Reimagining Laura Nyro. Other Grammy wins include Best Instrumental Composition for ‘The Path Among the Trees’ (2011) and ‘Into The Light’ (2005), from his much-heralded jazz/chamber releases, Autumn: In Moving Pictures and Lyric. Downbeat magazine states, “...Childs’ jazz/chamber group has taken the jazz-meets classical format to a new summit.”...
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The Guinness Cork Jazz Festival are proud to present a stellar double bill with Jazz giants, Billy Childs and Billy Cobham. Audiences are in for a treat with this powerhouse duo!
Over 18's Only
Jazz pianist/composer Billy Childs remains one of the most diversely prolific and acclaimed artists working in music today. Childs’ canon of original compositions and arrangements has garnered him the 2013 Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship (2009), sixteen Grammy nominations, and five Grammy awards, most recently for Best Jazz Instrumental Album (“Rebirth”). Previously he won for Best Arrangement, Instrumental & Vocal (featuring Renée Fleming and Yo-Yo Ma) in 2015 for ‘New York Tendaberry’, from his highly successful release Map to the Treasure: Reimagining Laura Nyro. Other Grammy wins include Best Instrumental Composition for ‘The Path Among the Trees’ (2011) and ‘Into The Light’ (2005), from his much-heralded jazz/chamber releases, Autumn: In Moving Pictures and Lyric. Downbeat magazine states, “...Childs’ jazz/chamber group has taken the jazz-meets classical format to a new summit.”
Born in Los Angeles in 1957, Childs was already proficient at the piano by age 6; he was accepted in USC’s Community School For The Performing Arts at age 16, studying music theory and piano with some of the world’s most renowned musical scholars. He graduated from USC in 1979 with a degree in composition. Among Childs’ early influences: Herbie Hancock, Keith Emerson, Chick Corea and others. He credits classical composers such as Paul Hindemith, Maurice Ravel, and Igor Stravinsky for also influencing his love of composition. Child’s performing career was also enriched with early-career apprenticeships with legendary jazz trombonist J.J. Johnson, and trumpet great Freddie Hubbard, in the late 1970s/early 1980s.
Childs’ multiple musical interests also include collaborations, arrangements, and productions for other acclaimed artists, including Yo Yo Ma, The Kronos Quartet, Wynton Marsalis, Sting, Chris Botti, and Leonard Slatkin, among others. He has received orchestral commissions from The Los Angeles Philharmonic, The Los Angeles Master Chorale, The Detroit Symphony Orchestra, and The Lincoln Jazz Center Orchestra. In 2013 he premiered “Enlightened Souls” a commission from Duke University featuring Dianne Reeves and the Ying Quartet, to commemorate fifty years of African-American students attending the school. In 2016, he premiered the piano quintet, "The Bird, The River, The Storm", also with the Ying Quartet (a piece they commissioned).
“As a pianist, he possesses the improvisatory skills and powerful sense of swing one associates with world-class artists… Childs is an inventive composer and arranger whose effort in those areas consistently expand the dimension of the jazz genre – and beyond.” The Los Angeles Times
Billy Cobham:
Jazz fusion pioneer Billy Cobham is an internationally renowned drumming virtuoso, percussionist, composer, producer, educator and master clinician whose life has been dedicated to musical exploration and creative expression. Since his birth in Colón, Panama, Cobham has been surrounded by music. His father was a pianist, his mother was a singer, and his family members built percussion instruments for religious purposes. When Cobham was three years old, his family moved to New York, where Latin and jazz music engulfed him. At the age of eight, he experienced his first paying gig. He later began drumming as a member of St. Catherine's Queensmen, a drum and bugle corps in St. Albans, Queens at the age of 14 years. Cobham attributes his time in the drum corps as instrumental in broadening his perspective, by giving him ample opportunities to compete, which he greatly thrived on, and learn how to play with fellow drummers and other instrumentalists.
He went on to attend New York's famed High School of Music and Art, (now known as the LaGuardia High School for Music and the Arts), where he studied music theory and percussion alongside other individuals who would also become today’s musical legends, such as trumpeter Jimmy Owens, pianist George Cables, flutist Jeremy Steig, singer Janis Ian, bassist Eddie Gomez, and pianist Larry Willis. His intense involvement in drum corps as a youth helped shape a rudimental approach to drumming, which Cobham subsequently mastered and brilliantly expanded upon throughout his career.
Cobham began his performing career with jazz artists such as: Horace Silver, George Benson, Ron Carter, Thad Jones, Kenny Burrell, Stanley Turrentine and Shirley Scott. In 1969, Cobham was a founding member of the band “Dreams,” which featured brothers Michael and Randy Brecker, along with Jeff Kent, Doug Lubahn, the late John Abercrombie, Barry Rogers, Eddie Vernon and later, Will Lee and Don Grolnick. The following year, he was invited to join Miles Davis’ group and contributed to four pivotal recordings by the trumpeter, including Bitches Brew (where he collaborated with guitarist John McLaughlin) and Tribute to Jack Johnson.
In addition to Cobham’s infinite musical explorations, he is an accomplished photographer, who began shooting seriously when he was in the U.S.Army in the mid-60’s. In recent times, Cobham’s works have been displayed at the Leica Gallery Mayfair, London. In 2017, he collaborated with Scene Four on an ingenious and visually stunning “Rhythmic Expressionism” art series created by long-exposure photography and lighted drumsticks that capture Cobham’s legendary, dynamic performance movements
“a technically accomplished soloist whose combination of bombastic power and rhythmic clarity made him the quintessential fusion drummer.” Allmusic.com
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