Project Trio Plays Ferst Center for the Arts Friday
If fifty million Frenchmen can’t be wrong, then nearly 55 million views on YouTube must make Project Trio all right.
Actually, far more than all right.
The most innovative band I have heard in the past 20 years, Project Trio will be playing at the Ferst Center for the Arts at Georgia Tech this Friday.
Classically trained composers-performers Greg Pattillo (flute), Eric Stephenson (cello), and Peter Seymour (bass) combine jazz, classical, hip-hop, rock, folk and bluegrass to create original songs and arrange pieces by Mingus, Monk, Duke, Bach, Tchaikovsky, Jethro Tull and Guns n’Roses.
In 2007, Patillo put on YouTube a video of him playing flute mixing jazz and beatbox that instantly went viral.
There are plenty of YouTube videos of the band, but the video above is my favorite, even though Seymour is not in it. I love the sounds of the subway and the tile wall behind them, which has such a Keith Haring flavor to it. (I find that ironic since Haring used to get busted for drawing on subway ad spaces where there were no ads.)
Seymour, however, no less of a musician, has performed alongside Wynton Marsalis, Roy Hargrove and Bobby McFerrin and serves as a regular sub with the Cleveland Orchestra and the New World Symphony.
Pattillo has been lauded by The New York Times as “the best person in the world at what he does.”
Seymour was once named Downbeat Magazine’s “Best jazz Soloist.”
Project Trio will play two free concerts Friday at noon and 5 p.m. in the amphitheater to the right of the Ferst Center for the Arts at Georgia Tech, weather permitting.
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