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Minstrels

Arranjos de Jeremy Siskind e Andrew Rathbun

As a performer, JEREMY SISKIND was a top finisher in the Nottingham International Jazz Piano Competition, the Montreux Jazz Festival Solo Piano Competition, and the American Pianist Association’s Cole Porter Fellowship. As an educator, he serves as Chair of the Keyboard Area at Western Michigan University, has several educational publications with Hal Leonard, and teaches abroad in China, India, Thailand, Nepal, and Tunisia.

A native of Southern California, Siskind began studying at the age of four in the Yamaha Education System, a program that teaches composition and improvisation from a student’s first lessons. He became dedicated to jazz after hearing Oscar Peterson as a teenager, and studied with Los Angeles-based jazz pianists Linda Martinez and Tamir Hendelman. As a high schooler, he twice traveled to Japan as a winner of Yamaha’s Junior Original Composition competition and was recognized by ASCAP as a winner of their Young Jazz Composers Award.

At the Eastman School of Music, where he earned degrees in Jazz Performance and Music Theory, Siskind met jazz legend Marian McPartland who invited him to perform on her famed show, Piano Jazz in 2006. In his college years, Siskind was twice a second-place finisher in the Kathleen T. and Phillip B. Phillips Piano Competition in Pensacola, Florida and twice among the five finalists selected for the American Pianist Association’s Cole Porter Fellowship.

After college, Siskind moved to New York to pursue a degree in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and study with legendary piano teachers Fred Hersch and Sophia Rosoff. While there, he released his first album, Simple Songs (for When the World Seems Strange), which earned four-stars from Downbeat magazine. Featuring Chris Lightcap (bass), Ted Poor (drums), and Jo Lawry (voice), Simple Songs was named one of the year’s best by Downbeat, the Ottawa Citizen, and the Accujazz blog. During this period, Siskind also enjoyed stints as musical director for comediennes Lea Delaria and Sandra Bernhard.

Siskind made a sold-out solo debut at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Hall in 2012, performing Debussy’s Etudes in the first half and solo jazz piano in the second half. His simultaneous CD release, Finger-Songwriter, featuring Nancy Harms and Lucas Pino, was hailed in ecstatic terms as “one of the most remarkable recordings I’ve heard in a very long time” (MinnPost), “One of the best albums I’ve heard all year” (emusic.com), “the most exciting musical project I’ve heard in a long time” (Jazz Police), and “winsome…literate and spry” (The New York Times). Emusic.com placed it in its top 100 albums of the year (of any genre), and independent blog birdistheworm.com named the CD the fifth best jazz disc of 2012.

The band from Finger-Songwriter, the “Housewarming Project,” started touring in 2012, primarily performing in-home concerts. From the summer of 2012 to 2014, the band played nearly 70 in-home concerts in 18 states, making new friends and converting unsuspecting audiences into new jazz fans. Siskind us a major advocate for in-home concerts, speaking on the subject at the Music Teachers National Association (MTNA) conference in Chicago 2014 and the Jazz Education Network (JEN) conference in San Diego in 2015. The group was joined by some of the greatest jazz vocalists alive – Kendra Shank, Peter Eldridge, and Kurt Elling – to record Housewarming (2015), an album that features nine new Siskind songs as well as four covers.

Siskind is an active author for Hal Leonard, having published books of original compositions (Jazz Etude Inspirations), and arrangements (The Magic of Standards), four-hand piano music (Double Agent), and a major instructional book (Jazz Band Pianist). As a pedagogue, Siskind is a frequent clinician for Hal Leonard, a regular contributor to Clavier Companion magazine, an instructor at the International Institute for Young Musicians summer camp, and a frequent instructor in Asia with Jazz Education Abroad. He has served as the Artistic Director for the American Jazz Pianist Competition in Melbourne, Florida since its inaugural year in 2014, helping to give younger pianists an opportunity to interact and secure important funding. Siskind has given masterclasses at the Eastman School of Music, University of California, Irvine, Bucknell University, Bethune-Cookman University, Indiana University, Butler University, Iowa Wesleyan University, Saddleback College, and the Interlochen Arts Academy. Jeremy Siskind is a Yamaha artist.


Toronto native ANDREW RATHBUN is widely esteemed as one of the most creative and accomplished saxophonists, composers and bandleaders of his generation. On tenor and soprano saxophones he has achieved a rare depth of lyricism, authoritative swing and compositional intelligence. Recording steadily as a leader since the late 1990s, he has documented his stirring original music with an array of extraordinary lineups, featuring the talents of such greats as Kenny Wheeler, Billy Hart, George Garzone, Phil Markowitz and Bill Stewart. “Rathbun’s lines dance and glide,” writes David Whiteis of JazzTimes, “reflecting both childlike wonder and well-honed artistry.”

Rooted in the fiery improvisatory legacy of post-bop jazz, Rathbun’s music is also deeply informed by classical composition. His works include song cycles, suites, and chamber and orchestral pieces for a wide range of ensembles. His 2005 duo release with pianist George Colligan, Renderings, features adaptations of Maurice Ravel and Federico Mompou, as well as an original seven-movement “Suite for Soprano Saxophone and Piano” inspired by the great Wayne Shorter. His 2010 release The Idea of North, inspired by the radio documentaries of Glenn Gould, includes a sextet arrangement of Christoph Glück’s “Minuet and Dance of the Blessed Spirits.” Rathbun has also written big band commissions for the Danish Radio Jazz Orchestra, the Brussels Jazz Orchestra, the Metropole Orkest and other ensembles, and performed and composed commercial music for roughly 10 years as well.

Another of Rathbun’s inspirations is poetry: his 1998 recording Jade set to music the verse of Cathy Song, while his 2000 follow-up True Stories focused on the work of fellow Canadian Margaret Atwood. On both these recordings, acclaimed Brazilian vocalist Luciana Souza captured the imagery and deep emotion of the poems while meeting every technical challenge posed by Rathbun’s involved orchestrations. Trumpeter Taylor Haskins played a major role on these early releases, not to mention Rathbun’s debut, Scatter Some Stones; he would later appear on Affairs of State, The Idea of North and two tracks from Numbers & Letters, Rathbun’s exploratory 2014 quartet session.

Rathbun’s 2002 release Sculptures (co-produced by Haskins) found him leading a quintet with trumpet legend and Toronto native Kenny Wheeler. JazzTimes declared of Sculptures: “[The music] cloaks subtle avant-garde proclivities in soft light and open air.” After the album release, Rathbun collaborated with Wheeler in a live large-ensemble setting at Birdland in New York, performing classic Wheeler compositions as well as new Rathbun works including the “Power Politics Suite.” After Wheeler’s death in 2014 at age 84, Rathbun led his own large ensemble at the Jazz Gallery for a performance in the trumpeter’s honor.


The “Power Politics Suite” is but one example of Rathbun’s interest in social and political change, a theme running throughout his 2007 quintet session Affairs of State, released as the Bush years were coming to a close. Where We Are Now (2009), Rathbun’s quintet session with Billy Hart on drums, had a more implied political thrust, as Taylor Haskins wrote in his liner notes (the release date came just weeks before the inauguration of Barack Obama). Shadow Forms, from 2006, was more open-ended in its meanings, sparser in instrumentation — Rathbun played tenor, soprano, clarinet and even keyboard in a bracingly open trio setting, with mentor George Garzone adding raw and brilliant tenor sax on five of the 12 tracks. Kenny Wheeler’s “Onmo” closed the album in rousing form.

Fellow saxophonist and Torontonian Pat LaBarbera produced Days Before and After (2004), Rathbun’s co-led session with drummer and Edmonton native Owen Howard. The “outstanding set” (allaboutjazz.com) featured original music driven by the unorthodox two-guitar team of Ben Monder and Geoff Young.

Rathbun earned a Masters in Performance from Boston’s New England Conservatory, where he studied with George Garzone, Jimmy Giuffre and George Russell. After moving to Brooklyn in 1997 he became a fixture on the New York jazz scene, helping to shape the sound of the music in the new millennium as he earned a Doctorate in Jazz Arts from Manhattan School of Music. He has secured recognition and support from the Ontario Council for the Arts, the Canada Council and the American Music Center. He has also served as a fellow at the Aspen Music Festival and an artist at the Banff Center for the Arts.

Following teaching stints at the University of Maine, Kingsborough College and the Amadeus Conservatory in northern Westchester County, New York, Rathbun took a position in 2012 as Professor of Saxophone and Jazz Studies at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, where he now lives with his family. He continues to perform in New York and internationally. He is also a member of the Western Jazz Quartet, WMU’s resident faculty band, featuring fellow professors Jeremy Siskind (piano), Tom Knific (bass) and Keith Hall (drums). The quartet’s latest release is Free Fall (2014).

Apoio: Horto do Campo Grande