Saturday October 28 2017, 8:00 pm. A night of jazz and poetry featuring Harvey Diamond, piano; TickleJuice members James Merenda, saxophone, and Jon Dreyer, bass; Maureen, poetry. At the New School of Music, 25 Lowell St, Cambridge MA. Walk from Harvard Square, take the #71 or #73 bus, or park free in the lot behind the school.
The legendary jazz pianist Harvey Diamond has graced the Boston area for decades with his music which is at once both deeply technical and deeply emotional to even the most casual listener. Critic Steve Elman of The Arts Fuse says that pianist Harvey Diamond … is almost as revered among Boston musicians as the Dalai Lama is in Tibet. He has done concert appearances with NEA Jazz Masters Sheila Jordan, Dave Liebman, and Art Farmer, and also with Charles Neville, Harvie S, Jay Clayton, Joe Hunt, Jason Palmer, Cameron Brown Marcus McLaurine, and many others. After decades of patience by his fans, he has finally released his first CD as a leader, The Harvey Diamond Trio. He is also a revered teacher.
Pianist/saxophonist/bandleader/composer James Merenda has performed with; Ran Blake at the Knitting Factory, the Darmstadt Jazz Festival in Germany and recorded on Hatology Records; with Roswell Rudd and Beat Science, Cameron Brown, Joe McPhee, Joe Hunt, former Ornette Coleman keyboardist Dave Bryant, Grammy Award winning pianist David Maxwell, the Either/Orchestra, the Ardvark Orchestra, the Slip, contemporary guitarists Marc Ribot, David Fiuczynsdi, Dave Tronzo and with drummer Bob Gullotti. James has also performed on Radio France, Radio Europa in Italy and in Holland, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Sweden, Denmark and Belgium with Perilous Foil and in Cambridge at the Mandorla Music Series. Jon Garelick of the Arts Fuse calls him irrepressible and says Merenda never fails to bring it. James is a brilliant performer and composer, but beyond that he's also an exceptional listener, both to his exceptional record collection and to every musician on the bandstand with him.
Bassist Jon Dreyer is one of Harvey Diamond's closest collaborators. He also performs regularly with James Merenda, both as a member of his band TickleJuice and also in more mainstream jazz settings, and has performed with most of the Boston jazz community, including Jason Palmer, Adam Janjigian, Yoko Miwa, Frank Wilkins, Joe Hunt and Steve Langone.
Unsure of when she started calling what she writes "poetry," Maureen has been writing for as long as she can remember. It started with a love of music and lyrics, feeling as though she had a friend in the words. Thus began an interest in songwriting. As she began to explore other realms of self expression such as painting, filmmaking, and photography, writing always stuck. As a student of Visual Media Arts and once a student of music, writing is something she's never had formal training in outside of high school English classes, where she usually daydreamed. Often unedited and steam of consciousness, like jazz improvisations, her poems reflect outer experiences felt in her inner world through a lens provided by various spiritual teachings and her own intuition. Feeling as thought they write themselves, she uses them as one way to interpret the world around her.
There will be no set list and no charts. Anything can happen. Listen to what Warne Marsh called "the spontaneous creation of beauty."