Joel Harrison Septet Search

“Add Joel Harrison to Metheny and Frisell as guitarist/composers who have created a new blueprint for jazz.”—New Orleans Times-Picayune

Adventurous New York–based jazz guitarist and composer Joel Harrison leads his seven-piece band in Search, a special program showcasing how the techniques of his favorite modernist composers (among them John Adams, Charles Ives, and Olivier Messiaen) underscore his own inventive writing. In these pieces, Harrison builds on his wealth of experience in jazz, extending his dynamic improvisational flair with a lyrical new musical language, as accessible and expressive as it is advanced.

Harrison’s talent-packed septet features Columbus’s own Christian Howes on violin, cellist Dana Leong (who last appeared here with Dafnis Prieto), Jacob Sacks on piano, Drew Gress on bass, Seamus Blake on sax, and Dan Weiss (who performed here last season with guitarist Rez Abbasi) on drums. As the German publication Jazzthing notes, “definitions blur, and suddenly it no longer matters whether Harrison improvises or composes…. It all comes down to this: imagination without limits.” Initially billed as Singularity, the project is now know as Search.