Jazz Up Close

Drummer/composer Donald Edwards will present and discuss his compositions in a quartet accompanied by Henry Lugo on bass, host and Jazz Up Close series curator Noah Baerman on piano, and special guest Abraham Burton on saxophone.

A longtime mainstay of the New York and Philadelphia jazz scenes Donald Edwards’s drumming is steeped in the rich and varied traditions of his home state of Louisiana. His extensive recording credits include multiple albums apiece by Wessell Anderson, Mark Whitfield, George Colligan, Orrin Evans, Conrad Herwig, Anthony Branker, Ben Wolfe, and Joey Calderazzo, among others. Edwards is an accomplished composer with five recordings as a bandleader and multiple albums as co-leader of several collective ensembles on the Criss Cross and Posi-Tone labels. As co-founder of Dirty Soap Entertainment he has also been active as a producer and as a composer for film and television. At Russell Library he will be joined by prominent saxophonist Abraham Burton, with whom he has appeared on multiple recordings by Jack Walrath and the Mingus Big Band as well as on Edwards’s most recent album, “The Color of Us Suite,” an extended work resulting from Edwards’s 2018 receipt of the prestigious New Jazz Works grant from Chamber Music America.

Support for this event has been provided by Resonant Motion’s donors and the Middletown Commission on the Arts.