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Mauricio Morales + Jeff Denson & Romain Pilon Trio featuring Clarence Penn
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October 17, 2024 @ 8:00 pm – 10:30 pm
Doors at 7:30pm
8:00pm – Jeff Denson & Romain Pilon Trio featuring Clarence Penn
Jeff Denson – Bass
Romain Pilon – guitar
Clarence Penn – drums
9:00pm – Mauricio Morales‘ Seven Days CD Release Party
Mauricio Morales – Bass
Horace Bray – Guitar
Luca Mendoza – Piano
Ido Meshulam – Trombone
Roni Kaspi – Drums
Edmar Colón – Sax
Mauricio Morales is celebrating the release of his new record ‘Seven Days’ which will be availabel for sale at thie event.
“Double bassist Jeff Denson capitalizes on his considerable gifts as an improviser, performer and sonic trailblazer.”
– Downbeat
“Clarence is a charismatic player, with great dynamic range and drama and musicality.”
– Maria Schneider
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Mauricio Morales
Morales has been a rising force as a player and bandleader/project leader for the past several years, but his formative musical life goes back to his picking up the electric bass at 13 years old and the upright bass six years later. With the noted artist Tere Lojero as his mother and a music aficionado father to guide his interests, Morales discovered a passion for writing and manifesting his own music. Working on the East Coast scene after heading to Berklee School of Music in 2012, Morales migrated westward to Los Angeles in 2018.
Morales launched what has become a diverse discography with the sometimes fusion-tinged tracks of 2021’s Luna, followed by the improvisation-leaning trio album Eclipse in 2022 and The Endless Ride last year, in 2023. The pop resonances and qualities on that album, including vocals, are in marked contrast with the almost entirely acoustic sextet context of Seven Days.
Of the variety between projects, Morales explains, “I want to explore different areas of my artistry. My first record had a very youthful essence to it. I wanted to put everything within seven songs–my writing, my playing, and everything else. And then the second record was the complete opposite because it is completely stripped down.” With The Endless Ride, he explains, “I wanted to also experiment with all my influences of when I was younger because when I started playing music, I wasn’t really listening to jazz at all.”
Clearly, from the evidence of Seven Days, Morales is by now deeply steeped in jazz, as a player and composer, and expertly equipped to create his own new vision within the genre. In terms of influences on his writing, especially in a discernible “jazz” mode, he points to such prominent artists as Aaron Parks, Brad Mehldau, Brian Blade, and especially Pat Metheny. “Even though his music can be complex,” Morales says of Metheny’s music, “there’s something very accessible about it that I’ve always resonated with since before I played jazz.”
Jeff Denson
Jeff Denson is an award-winning bassist, vocalist, and composer who has released 16 albums as a leader or co-leader and toured extensively throughout the US, Canada, and Europe with both his own groups and others at some of the world’s most prestigious venues and festivals such as the Village Vanguard, Birdland, The Kennedy Center, JVC Jazz Festival Paris, Montreal Jazz Festival, Berlin Jazz Festival, and SFJazz, among many others.
Jeff has worked with some of jazz’s finest artists such as Brian Blade, Joe Lovano, Chris Potter, Mike Stern, Charles McPherson, Billy Childs, Jane Ira Bloom, Craig Handy, Ingird Jensen, Dave Douglas, Walter Smith III, Kendrick Scott, Rachel Z, Omar Hakim, Gerald Cleaver, Anat Cohen, Warren Wolf, Leo Genovese, Etienne Charles, Edward Simon, Paul McCandless, Cuong Vu, Ralph Alessi, Dan Weiss, Lionel Loueke, Mark Turner, Paul Hanson, George Cables, Romain Pilon, Mimi Fox, and many others, and had an ongoing relationship with the legendary Lee Konitz for over a decade until his passing in 2020.
Jeff’s work has been reviewed in many of the world’s leading periodicals including The New York Times, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, along with many more international periodicals, and has been ranked in the DownBeat Rising Star Critic’s Poll 13 times in the Bass, Electric Bass and Male Vocalist categories, and was the First Place Winner of the 69th Annual DownBeat Magazine Rising Star Critic’s Poll for “Electric Bass”.
Jeff is the Founder and President of Ridgeway Arts, Inc., a 501c3 arts nonprofit organization and the Dean of Instruction at the California Jazz Conservatory in Berkeley.
https://www.jeffdenson.com/
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