BRIC JazzFest 2024 | Night 1

The sonically innovative harpist, Brandee Younger, is revolutionizing harp for the digitalera. Over the past fifteen years, she has worked relentlessly to stretch boundaries and limitations for harpists.  In 2022, she made history by becoming the first Black woman to be nominated for a Grammy® Award for Best Instrumental Composition. That same year, she was also nominated for an NAACP Image Award and later, the winner of the 2024 NAACP Image Award in the category of Outstanding Jazz Album for her latest album Brand New Life.  Ever-expanding as an artist, she has worked with cultural icons including Ravi Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Common, Lauryn Hill, John Legend and Christian McBride.  Her original composition “Hortense” was featured in the Netflix Concert-Documentary, Beyoncé: Homecoming and in 2019, Brandee was selected to perform her original music as a featured performer for Quincy Jones and Steve McQueens’ “Soundtrack of America”.  Brandee is often noted for standing on the shoulders of the very women who ushered in the harp as a clear and distinct voice in jazz & popular styles - particularly Detroit natives Alice Coltrane & Dorothy Ashby.  Her latest album, Brand New Life, builds on her already rich oeuvre, and cements the harp’s place in pop culture.  As the title of the album suggests, Brand New Life is about forging new paths–artistic, personal, political, and spiritual.  Younger's music is imbued with a sense of purpose and respect of legacy, creating a larger platform for the harp to reach newer and wider audiences than ever before.   In addition to performing and recording, Brandee Younger is on the faculty at New York University, Steinhardt School and The New School College of Performing Arts. 

NEA Jazz Master Gary Bartz has been a leading voice in jazz since the 1960s, known for his concept of “informal composition” on the alto saxophone. He has collaborated with legends like Max Roach, Charles Mingus, Art Blakey, and Miles Davis, while also staying connected to younger jazz artists through projects like Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Adrian Younge’s Jazz Is Dead series. With over 45 solo albums and appearances on more than 200 recordings, Bartz's influence spans decades. His early exposure to jazz came from his parents' nightclub in Baltimore, where he first heard Charlie Parker. He went on to study at Juilliard, join the Charles Mingus Jazz Workshop, and work with Roach and Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. In 1970, Miles Davis recruited him for the iconic Isle of Wight Festival, leading to Bartz’s feature on Live/Evil.

Bartz’s pioneering group, NTU Troop, fused soul, funk, African folk, and avant-garde jazz, gaining recognition for its blend of genres and social consciousness. His work has earned him two Grammy Awards and the BNY Mellon Jazz Living Legacy Award. Bartz remains influential both as a performer and educator, teaching at Oberlin Conservatory since 2001, where he encourages students to deepen their listening and understanding of music. His continued collaborations with younger artists, like London’s Maisha, showcase his ability to evolve while maintaining his roots in jazz tradition.

Kassa Overall is a Grammy-nominated musician, emcee, singer, producer and drummer who melds avant-garde experimentation with hip-hop production techniques to tilt the nexus of jazz and rap in unmapped directions. He previously released four critically acclaimed projects: I THINK I’M GOOD, Go Get Ice Cream and Listen to Jazz, Shades of Flu and Shades of Flu 2.

On ANIMALS, his Warp Records debut, Kassa pushes his kaleidoscopic, subversive vision further. He layers Roland 808s against avant-garde drumming in the vein of his mentors Elvin Jones and Billy Hart, the latter of whom he studied with at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. Virtuoso musos appear alongside rap poets, including Danny Brown, Wiki, Lil B, and Shabazz Palaces. Top-flight jazz improvisation weaves in and out of orchestral string arrangements by Jherek Bischoff. The album’s diverse, all-star roster of collaborators includes several of his close friends, like vocalists Nick Hakim, Laura Mvula, Francis and the Lights, and jazz stars like Theo Croker and Vijay Iyer.

ANIMALS pushes Kassa’s message further too, the title a loaded metaphor for the paradoxes of his life as an entertainer and as a black man in America. ANIMALS is the sound of an artist aware of the cost of embodying one’s natural self in the public eye, a deep reckoning with the two-sided truth that to perform one’s freedom for an audience can mean succumbing to life inside a cage.

Josh Johnson is a saxophonist, composer, multi-instrumentalist, and Grammy
Award-winning producer. His second solo album, Unusual Object, a striking work of
futuristic jazz and modern composition, will be released April 5 on Northern Spy
Records. This spare work for processed saxophone and subtle samples shows Johnson
further sharpening his unique compositional voice. Unusual Object, Johnson says, “is a
development and documentation of a more personal world of sound. What’s it like for
me to create the context for my sound, to frame it myself?”

His solo debut Freedom Exercise (Northern Spy) was featured in Rolling Stone’s Best
Music of 2020 and Bandcamp’s Best Jazz Albums of 2020. Pitchfork called the record
“excellent, daringly melodic” and PostGenre praised it as “a songwriting marvel”.
Johnson is a regular collaborator with some of contemporary music’s most innovative
artists, including Jeff Parker, Makaya McCraven, Nate Mercereau, Marquis Hill, and
Kiefer. Parker’s widely-acclaimed 2022 record Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy
features Johnson on saxophone and effects as part of the longstanding quartet. This is
the most recent in a series of Parker’s records to highlight Johnson, with the latter also
contributing saxophone and synths to 2016’s The New Breed and 2020’s Suite for Max
Brown.

Between 2018 and 2022 Johnson held the role of Musical Director for soul singer Leon
Bridges, with whom he also played keyboards and saxophone. During his time with
Bridges, Johnson performed throughout Europe, North America, Asia and Australia,
with performances at the Hollywood Bowl, Glastonbury and the Sydney Opera House.
Along with Nate Walcott (Bright Eyes), Johnson arranged 14 of Bridges’ songs for a
performance with London’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, also contributing a choral
arrangement and directing the concert.

Johnson produced and appears on Meshell Ndegeocello’s 2023 album The Omnichord
Real Book which was awarded the 2024 Grammy for Best Alternative Jazz Album. He
can also be heard on wide-ranging records by artist such as Harry Styles, the Red Hot
Chili Peppers, Moonchild, Broken Bells, Miley Cyrus, Louis Cole and Carlos Niño,
among others. He currently resides in Los Angeles.

Called “a revelation” by The New York Times, Spanish composer, trumpeter, and flugelhorn player Milena Casado is quickly gaining notice for her unique and deeply personal approach to music. Both as a composer and instrumentalist,
Casado masterfully blends the familiar and the unknown — rooted in tradition, yet reaching for something fundamentally new.

Having already caught the attention of many renowned artists, Casado has performed with such greats as Terri Lyne Carrington, Aaron Parks, Kris Davis, Vijay Iyer, Jazzmeia Horn, and Jorge Rossy, among others. She has been featured at many of the world’s top venues and festivals, including Carnegie Hall,
the Village Vanguard, the Kennedy Center, the Blue Note NYC, North Sea Jazz Festival, Montreal Jazz Festival, and Monterey Jazz Festival .

An increasingly notable bandleader in her own right, Casado now leads her own working quintet, with recent performances at NYC Winter Jazzfest, Savannah Jazz Festival, and other major venues. Backed by this group, she is currently producing her debut album.