Jazz in the Neighborhood is proud to present the George Brooks Trio featuring pianist Osam Ezzeldin, bassist Kai Eckhardt and saxophonist George Brooks at the Red Poppy Art House in San Francisco.
George Brooks is a saxophonist and composer, acclaimed for successfully bridging the worlds of jazz and Indian classical music. He founded the seminal groups grounded in Indian music: Summit with Zakir Hussain, Bombay Jazz with Ronu Majumdar and Larry Coryell, the Raga Bop Trio with Steve Smith and Prasanna and Elements with Gwyneth Wentink and Kala Ramnath.
Raised in Germany and Liberia, Kai Eckhardt came to the USA in 1980 to study at the Berklee College of Music. Upon graduating Kai garnered world-wide recognition performing with the John McLaughlin Trio. The trio, consisting of Kai, John and Indian percussion phenomenon, Trilok Gurtu, recorded “Live at the Royal Festival Hall.” Kai, touring the world with McLaughlin’s trio and later with Trilok Gurtu’s outstanding ensembles, developed a remarkable facility with African and Indian rhythmic cycles. He combined these global rhythms with his love of funk and developed a unique slapping style simultaneously reminiscent of African kora and James Brown....
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Jazz in the Neighborhood is proud to present the George Brooks Trio featuring pianist Osam Ezzeldin, bassist Kai Eckhardt and saxophonist George Brooks at the Red Poppy Art House in San Francisco.
George Brooks is a saxophonist and composer, acclaimed for successfully bridging the worlds of jazz and Indian classical music. He founded the seminal groups grounded in Indian music: Summit with Zakir Hussain, Bombay Jazz with Ronu Majumdar and Larry Coryell, the Raga Bop Trio with Steve Smith and Prasanna and Elements with Gwyneth Wentink and Kala Ramnath.
Raised in Germany and Liberia, Kai Eckhardt came to the USA in 1980 to study at the Berklee College of Music. Upon graduating Kai garnered world-wide recognition performing with the John McLaughlin Trio. The trio, consisting of Kai, John and Indian percussion phenomenon, Trilok Gurtu, recorded “Live at the Royal Festival Hall.” Kai, touring the world with McLaughlin’s trio and later with Trilok Gurtu’s outstanding ensembles, developed a remarkable facility with African and Indian rhythmic cycles. He combined these global rhythms with his love of funk and developed a unique slapping style simultaneously reminiscent of African kora and James Brown.
Osam Ezzeldin was born in Cairo, Egypt and grew up immersed in the music of North Africa. At the age of 18 he heard his first recording of jazz and his life immediately transformed. Osam embarked on a journey of self-directed jazz study and began a rapid rise to excellence, soon becoming indispensable to leading jazz musicians of North Africa. Osam’s love of the genre brought him to the US at the age of 21. His prodigious abilities at the keyboard soon brought him to the attention of the local musicians and he quickly became immersed in the professional world of Texas jazz, blues and R&B. Osam’s unique ability to blend contemporary jazz vocabulary with Arabic, Indian and Caribbean influences has led to performances with many luminaries of world music including Indian maestros Zakir Hussain, Niladri Kumar and Kala Ramnath and Turkish multi-instrumentalist Orhan Osman and the Turkophony Allstars, Uzbek percussionist Abbos Kasimov, as well as jazz stars Giovanni Hidalgo, Billy Cobham, Chuck Rainey, Kai Eckhardt and Dave Weckl.
Emerging Artist will be violinist Baiju Bhatt. Bhatt picked up the violin at the age of six, and studied western classical music at the Lausanne Conservatory (Switzerland) until his early twenties. He discovered jazz by playing piano as a kid, and started soon enough to play swing and other forms of jazz with his violin. He later studied with jazz violinist Pierre Blanchard, and he joined in 2009 the professional course of the Conservatory (HEMU) in Lausanne, in the jazz section, which gave him the opportunity to study violin with Christine Sorensen and Mario Forte, as well as jazz, composition and arrangement with musicians such as Emil Spanyi, Jeff Baud or Robert Bonisolo, and violin pedagogy with Tina Strinning.
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