UW Jazz Studies Hosts Bill O’Connell Trio April 21

The University of Wyoming Department of Music’s Jazz Studies program will host the Bill O’Connell Trio at 7:30 p.m. Monday, April 21, in the Buchanan Center for the Performing Arts recital hall.

Featured in the free public concert will be O'Connell, piano; and UW Department of Music Associate Professor Andy Wheelock, percussion, and Lecturer Gonzalo Teppa, bass.

O’Connell’s professional career spans almost half a century and has earned him widespread acclaim for his virtuosic skills as an attention-grabbing keyboardist, composer, arranger and bandleader.

Lauded by Downbeat Magazine as “an inspired hybridizer of modernist jazz and Afrodiasporic idioms as an improviser and composer,” O'Connell has been honored with the “Jazz Writer of the Year” award from the Society of European Stage Authors and Composers, as well as a Grammy Award nomination for Best Instrumental Arrangement.

His debut recording as a leader was “Searching” in 1978. Over the following four decades, he recorded 18 other sessions as a leader, highlighting his stylistic versatility on releases that include solo, duo and trio formats, and a wide range of sessions featuring various incarnations of his Latin Jazz All-Stars ensemble.

O’Connell has had several sideman roles with a stylistically eclectic group of major artists, such as Astrud Gilberto, Sonny Rollins, Chet Baker, John Lucien, Neanna Freelon and Gato Barbieri.

From blues and ballads to bebop and bossa, O’Connell’s most influential work is widely recognized in Latin jazz styles.

For more information, call Kathy Kirkaldie, UW Fine Arts coordinator, at (307) 766-2160 or email kirisk@uwyo.edu.