Jazz String Quintet

Blending jazz and classical styles that both Mozart and Miles would surely dig!

In 1997, Jim Gailloreto embarked on a new project called Jazz String Quintet.  It is an integration of both jazz and classical music written for string quartet and soprano saxophone.  Inspired by sources as diverse as Debussy and Ravel to Miles Davis and John Coltrane, composer and saxophonist Jim Gailloreto offers a perfect blend of classical music and jazz: structure and spontaneity. The compositions interweave his own soprano saxophone with skilled modernist writing for string quartet.  “No composer has shaped the structures and layered the phrases of the string quartet to so successfully accommodate full-tilt improvisation,” writes jazz authority Neil Tesser.

Jazz String Quintet is immersed in all the traditions and performance practices of classical music, while simultaneously expanding and exploring all the truest elements of jazz.  Working with longtime associates of The HAWK String Quartet, Jazz String Quintet achieves a true fusion of forms, which has collaborated with such artists as vocalist Kurt Elling, pianist-composer Fred Hersch, Corky Siegel’s “Chamber Blues” and West African kora player Foday Musa Suso.

See more information at www.jazzstringquintet.com

Karen Carroll

Blues singer Karen Carroll was seemingly destined for a career in music: not only was her mother Jeanne Carroll a blues and jazz vocalist as well, but her godparents were guitarist George Freeman and singer Bonnie Lee. Born in Chicago on January 30, 1958, Carroll started performing at the age of nine, joining her mother’s band as a guitarist five years later; at 18 she struck out on her own, cutting her teeth in tiny South Side blues joints and developing a deep vocal style heavily influenced by jazz phrasing as well as the intensity of gospel. She made her recorded debut on Carey Bell’s 1984 outing Son of a Gun, followed by the 1989 Eddie Lusk LP Professor Strut; Carroll made her solo debut with 1995’s Had My Fun, returning two years later with Talk to the Hand.