RAINBOW SIGN: BRIAN BLADE/BILL FRISELL/JASON MORAN/THOMAS MORGAN

RAINBOW SIGN: BRIAN BLADE/BILL FRISELL/JASON MORAN/THOMAS MORGAN

SHOW @ 8:00PM | DOORS @ 7:30PM

$55 MEMBER | $60 ADVANCE | $75 DAY OF

DINNER & SHOW: $115 MEMBER | $125 ADVANCE

SEATED SHOW | ALL AGES

DINNER & SHOW

TACAW is pleased to partner with Epicure Catering to offer Dinner & A Show. Only 60 tickets are available for the dinner, so don’t wait to reserve your spot now. Guest Chefs Julie and Allen Domingos are planning a delicious culinary adventure. Dinner will be served in our beautiful lobby prior to the show. Patrons who don’t have a dinner reservation are welcome to purchase a standalone ticket for the show.

Doors open for dinner @ 5:45pm | Dinner served at 6:00pm

Genre: Jazz

Rainbow Sign:

Brian Blade, Bill Frisell, Jason Moran & Thomas Morgan play the Music of Ron Miles. The death of cornet master Ron Miles on March 8, 2022 at the age of 58 left his fans, friends and colleagues shocked and bereft. After creating so much beauty he seemed to be reaching sublime new vistas while enjoying increasing visibility through a recording contract with Blue Note Records and a rare North American performance with his all-star quintet at Knoxville’s Big Ears Festival scheduled for March 25.

Rather than cancel the Big Ears date, his bandmates–drummer Brian Blade, guitarist Bill Frisell, pianist Jason Moran and bassist Thomas Morgan–decided to turn the performance into a celebration of Miles’ life and music. Among jazz’s busiest and most acclaimed artists, the foursome continues to be bound both by their abiding love for Miles and deep, life-shaping ties with each other.

“If you played a Ron Miles song right, in the best of moods you’d be crying,” Jason Moran told NPR. “Because the songs were full. I equate it to the way John Coltrane made ‘Lonnie’s Lament.’ He knew how to find the joy in a melody, and he knew where the heart was in it. Even just in the moment of playing them, it would just rush over you. A lot of music we play doesn’t have that.”

His ability to improvise with startling lyricism and intensely distilled emotion meant that Miles was sought out by many of jazz’s most eloquent and adventurous composers. He toured and recorded with Frisell over some three decades, a period in which he also earned renown through his membership in Myra Melford’s Snowy Egret, Joshua Redman’s Still Dreaming band, and collaborations with Moran, Matt Wilson, The Bad Plus, Wayne Horvitz, Ben Goldberg, Madeleine Peyroux, Don Byron, Otis Taylor, and Ginger Baker, while also releasing a dozen consistently acclaimed albums as a leader.

A devoted educator and mentor who made a particularly profound impact in his hometown, Denver, he served for more than two decades as musician-in-residence and ultimately as Director of Jazz Studies at Metropolitan State University. “Ron was a great player, not a good player, a great player,” said Norman Provizer, a political science professor emeritus at MSU Denver and former jazz critic for the Rocky Mountain News and DownBeat Magazine. “At the same time he was a dedicated, terrific teacher.” It’s more than fitting that one of the ensemble’s rare performances takes place at MSU on February 10, 2023 in a Ron Miles Tribute Concert, followed by a performance at The Arts Campus in Willits (TACAW), in Basalt, CO, on February 11.

Miles introduced the all-star quintet with his widely hailed 2017 release I Am a Man, which built on his trio with Frisell and Blade featured on 2012’s Quiver and 2014’s Circuit Rider. With Moran and Morgan on board Miles’ compressed lyricism continued to unfurl on the 2020 quintet album Rainbow Sign, his debut for the iconic Blue Note label. In adopting the name with its Biblical allusion the Rainbow Sign quartet expands a singular musical legacy. A gentle soul with a steel trap mind, a generous mentor and educator with a deep well of wisdom, Miles created a sumptuously melodic body of music that this band continues to illuminate. “He’d make a chart with so much soul and simplicity,” Moran wrote on Facebook in tribute to Miles. “And he would imbue any other song with that soulfulness as well. Every turn was original.”