Billy Mintz Quintet

In an extraordinary career spanning nearly 40 years, drummer Billy Mintz has played with some of the biggest names in the jazz and pop worlds. Mr. Mintz was born in Queens, New York in 1947. By the age of 15 he was firmly entrenched in several of the show bands of the Catskill Mountain resorts, and as his musicianship developed he would eventually tour with jazz artists such as Lee Konitz, Eddie Daniels, Harold Danko, Mike Garson, Mose Allison, Mark Murphy, and the Kim Richmond Sextet. He also toured and recorded extensively with Bobby Shew.At the same time, his credentials grew in the pop arena, leading to tours with Juliette Prowse, James Darren, Gloria Gaynor, and a stint with the show band for the Merv Griffin Show.In 1986, Mr. Mintz toured Japan with the Los Angeles Symphonic Jazz Orchestra (having relocated to Los Angeles in 1981). In 1988 he toured Europe with saxophone great Charles Lloyd, and from 1989 to 1995 he performed with the Alan Broadbent TrioThroughout his life Mr. Mintz has taught privately and done clinics at schools around the world, including the Berklee School of Music, the Dick Grove School of Music, Bloomingdale House of Music, Long Island Drum and Percussion Club, Eagle Rock H.S., Arizona State University at Tempe, University of Arizona at Phoenix, and North Texas State University. He also taught extensively while on tour with various artists in Sydney, Australia, Tel Aviv, Israel and Wellington, New Zealand. Mr. Mintz has written two books: Different Drummers, originally published by Aamsco Music Publishing and Advanced Sticking and Sight-Reading (BM Publications). He has also had articles published in Not Just Jazz and Modern Drummer magazines. Mr. Mintz appears on records by the following artists, among others: Bill Perkins/James Clay Quintet; Vinny Golia; Fred Tompkins; The Cryers; Harold Danko; Eddie Daniels; Bobby Shew; Bob Magnusson; Mike Garson; Art Resnick; Walking Wounded; Kim Richmond; Clay Jenkins; Ken Filiano; John Woods; Joey Sellars; Bruce Fowler.In recent years, Mr. Mintz has taken on new roles as a bandleader and a composer, performing his own compositions with various ensembles. He also performs solo drumset concerts with increasing frequency. weblinks:www.billymintz.com Born in New York City in 1961, Anton Denner began playing the saxophone in 1974. After early studies with Lee Konitz and Joe Lovano, he began to freelance in the New York area in the early '80's, performing at The Village Gate, Visiones, The 55 Bar, Birdland , and many other venues.Anton has also worked with or played alongside with many of the great musicians in jazz, such as Ray Charles, Rosemary Clooney, Clifford Jordan, Mel Lewis, Al Foster, Norman Simmons, Brad Meldau, Bill Carrothers, Larry Goldings, Terell Stafford, Dave Stryker, and Bill Stewart, to name only a few. Anton has also been a featured soloist at The Napa Valley Jazz Festival, the Istanbul Jazz Festival (with the NY Jazz Giants) and the LaVillete Festival in France (with the Bill Carrothers Trio).Recorded work includes the critically acclaimed Bill Carrothers Trio CD, Ghost Ships, Happy Apple's, Blown Shockwaves & Crash Flow, and John McKenna's Apparition, to name only a few. As an educator, he has served on the faculty of the Stanford Jazz Workshop, and has been an adjunct professor at Seton Hall University since 1999.Anton is married to Nicki Denner, the Latin Jazz pianist and composer, and resides in Bloomingdale, New Jersey. Jason Rigby has received notable acclaim for his recordings and performances from The New York Times, The Village Voice, Wire Magazine and AllAboutJazz. His debut leader effort, Translucent Space, has been praised by a number of critics as one of the top jazz recordings of 2006. Jim Macnie of the Village Voice states: "Diverse program" is sometimes a euphemism for "hodge-podge," but the young reed player's Translucent Space accounts for all its aesthetic zig-zags. Allusions to electric jazz and classical motifs snuggle next to free-bop jaunts and hard-driving swing. Rigby plays as it lays, and does so with élan.Not bound to traditional harmony, Rigby bases many of his fresh-sounding originals on free-style melodies and ostinato rhythmic patterns. His artistic approach is a mixture of melodicism, free-bop, minimalism, modal thrashing, lush harmonic progressions and both chaos and control.Since moving to NYC in 1998 Jason Rigby has performed with the Village Vanguard Jazz Orchestra, Aretha Franklin and has contributed as a sideman to a number of musically creative ventures. Rigby has toured the US and Europe, and has appeared at many of NY's top music venues including the 55 Bar, The Village Vanguard, Cornelia Street Cafe, The Stone, Small's, The Jazz Gallery, The Jazz Standard, The Knitting Factory, Barbes, Smoke, B.B. King's, Pete's Candy Store, Sweet Rhythm, Piano's, Bowery Poetry Club, NuBlu, Detour, The Tea Lounge, Galapagos, Madison Square Garden Theater and Radio City Music Hall.During his university study Jason Rigby was the winner of DOWNBEAT Magazine's Award for 'Best College Jazz Instrumentalist' in 1999. Rigby received a full scholarship to attend Manhattan School of Music where he studied with Dick Oatts, Mike Abene and Rich Perry.Jason Rigby's musical approach has been described as a "synthesis of Wayne Shorter and Ornette Coleman, with echoes of Paul Motian's trio," balancing "Shorter's elliptical nuance and Coltrane's ecstatic fluidity." While striving to create his own personal sound, Rigby looks to a myriad of sources for inspiration including Bartok, Berg, Paul Bley, Joe Henderson, Dewey Redman, Ernest Hemingway, Mahler, Paul Motian, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, and Frank Lloyd Wright.Weblinks:www.jasonrigby.net/ Pianist/composer Roberta Piket is one of a handful of New York musicians who is respected for both her swinging and inventive straight-ahead jazz playing as well as her powerful and sensitive work in creative improvised music. For Roberta, there are no genre boundaries, only exceptional music to be made. Roberta has played professionally as a sidewoman with David Liebman, Rufus Reid, Michael Formanek, Lionel Hampton, Mickey Roker, Billy Mintz, Harvey Wainapel, Eliot Zigmund, Benny Golson and the BMI/NY Jazz Orchestra and has thrice been a featured guest on Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz, on National Public Radio. She has also performed with some of the most interesting musicians in European and American creative music, including drummers Klaus Kugel and Billy Mintz, and saxophonists Petras Vysniauskas, Roby Glod and Louie Belogenis. A gifted composer as well, Roberta was a finalist in the Thelonious Monk BMI Composers’ Competition. Roberta is from Queens, NY. Her father, the composer Frederick Piket, gave her her first piano lessons when she was seven. Roberta began playing jazz in her early teens, studying jazz piano with Walter Bishop, Jr and classical piano with Vera Wels. After graduating from prestigious Hunter College High School, she entered the joint double-degree program at Tufts University and the New England Conservatory of Music, earning a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science from the former and a Bachelor’s Degree in Jazz Studies from the latter. During this time she studied privately with Fred Hersch, Stanley Cowell, Jim McNeely and Bob Moses. Upon returning to New York, she studied for six years with Richie Beirach, and later studied briefly with Sophia Rosoff. Roberta’s trio has toured Japan and Spain as well as the U.S. She has performed her music at the Kennedy Center (Washington, D.C.), at the Earshot Festival (Seattle), at the Rochester (NY) Jazz Festival, and in New York at Small’s, the Blue Note, Birdland, and Dizzy’s at Jazz at Lincoln Center. Roberta’s CDs frequently make the “best of” lists of the major jazz magazines. Whether performing her original compositions or highly personalized reworkings of standards, Roberta’s daring rhythmic modulations and harmonic expansiveness set a new standard for the piano trio. “September of Tears”, released in Japan, finds Roberta joining forces with Rufus Reid and Billy Hart. The 2006 release, Love and Beauty, features bassist Ratzo Harris and drummer Billy Mintz. A confessed “closet singer”, Roberta also made her vocal debut on Love and Beauty. Her new release, Sides, Colors, features herself and Mintz with bassist Johannes Weidenmueller in settings for winds and strings. The new CD offers other surprises, including a scat/piano vocal and Roberta on B3 organ. Roberta’s Nabokov Project sets five poems by Vladimir Nabokov to music for piano, violin, mezzo-soprano with percussion, and speaker. It blends neo-classical harmonic concepts with lush melodies and free improvisational sections. Roberta’s recordings have earned rave reviews in JazzTimes, downbeat, the Washington Post, and Jazziz. A musical pioneer in several ways, Roberta is the first and only female jazz pianist with a release as a leader on the prestigious Criss Cross label (the 1997 Unbroken Line). Roberta maintains an active schedule as an educator. She has held master classes at the Eastman School of Music (where she performed solo and in duo with Marian McPartland), Rutgers University, Cal Arts, Duke University, the Northwestern University Composers’ Colloquium, and many others in the U.S., Europe and Japan. She has coached ensembles at Long Island University, has several private students, has served as a panelist for the Queens Council on the Arts grant review process and has taught at the Litchfield Jazz Camp and the Vermont Jazz Center. She is also the author of the Jazz Piano Vocabulary series of workbooks (Muse-Eek Publishing). Roberta occasionally performs on B3 organ, playing at clubs such as the Harlem landmark Showman’s. She has written several big band compositions, three of which are in the repertoire of the Seattle Women’s Jazz Orchestra. In recent years she has toured Europe several times, including France, Germany, Luxembourg, Ukraine and Spain. This artist does not have a bio yet.