Bill Lowe-Andy Jaffe Big Band

The Williams College Department of Music presents the Bill Lowe-Andy Jaffe Big Band with a return engagement on Saturday, April 9 at 8 p.m. in Chapin Hall on the Williams College campus. This event, co-sponsored by the Williams College Department of Music and Africana Studies Program, with the support of the W. Ford Schumann Performing Arts Endowment and the Sterling A Brown 1922 Fund for Visiting Faculty, is free and open to the public.

The team of Bill Lowe and Andy Jaffe know how to build musical foundations. Their work provides a basis for others to create their own fanciful constructions. Together they constitute a brotherhood of the low frequencies, and a partnership devoted to sharing the secret of good music with the rest of the world. Mr. Lowe, a tubist and bass trombonist, has made his mark over the last decades as a performer with such artists as the great be-bop trumpet player Dizzy Gillespie, Eartha Kitt, and the incomparable trumpeter Clark Terry. The musically voracious Bill Lowe also worked with the leaders of the avant-garde like Muhal Richard Abrams, Henry Threadgill, and Cecil Taylor. Andy Jaffe is perhaps best known to the general public for leading the Williams Jazz Ensemble and as the Lyell B. Clay Artist in Residence in Jazz and Director of Jazz Activities at Williams College, and to his students as an educator of seemingly tireless energy and enthusiasm. To jazz musicians, his street credibility can be chalked up to his chops as a bass player, pianist, composer and arranger. Jaffe’s bona fides include performances or recordings of his original compositions with Max Roach, Richard Stoltzman, and former students Branford Marsalis, Wallace Roney, and Marvin “Smitty Smith,” among many others.

The drive to build organizational and musical bridges is part of what makes these two jazz artists tick. Bill Lowe, introduced to Williamstown audiences last year as co-leader of the swinging Lowe-Jaffe Big Band, returns this year as the Sterling Brown ’22 Visiting Professor of Music and Africana Studies, and the jazz and college community look forward to welcoming him and learning from his unique experience as a musician who was at the epicenter of an unusually creative phase of American music.

The big band, comprised of players from all over the Northeast, counts among its ranks some of the finest free-lance professionals in the scene today. Performing original repertoire, much of it by Andy Jaffe, this hard driving ensemble leaves no doubt that the big band is an original American form of expression living and kicking into the twenty-first century. Featuring arrangements that push jazz into new territories, the enthusiasm and technical wizardry of the rank and file of the band propel this group on a jazz journey which keeps audiences stomping and hollering for more. The group astonishes audience with its depth: every musician is a soloist who loves to lay back in the pack playing the tightest of lines with the rest, only to burst those bonds when solo time comes. Explosive or expressive, low frequencies or high, the Jaffe-Lowe Big Band brings more than just burning jazz to the heart of the Berkshires: it is a musical foundation that we can all build on.

Event Program