Acclaimed Jazz Duo to Perform in Asheville
On the evening of Sunday, September 7, Asheville’s Diana Wortham Theatre will be hosting two highly acclaimed musicians with barely 40 years of life experience between them.
The Julian Lage / Taylor Eigsti Duo, friends and co-“players” since an (even earlier) age, have recently performed to rave reviews at Symphony Hall in Boston, the Newport Jazz Festival, the San Francisco Jazz Festival, and the Ouro Preto Jazz Festival while on a Brazilian tour, just to name a few. Lage comes to Asheville this year after a summer touring England and Spain, and Eigsti before a late September performance at Carnegie Hall.
Guitarist Julian Lage, a former child prodigy, has been performing professionally now for over a decade. At the age of 12, he played on the nationally televised Grammy Awards, which resulted in a long-lasting collaborative musical relationship with internationally renowned jazz vibraphonist Gary Burton. Bela Fleck, Herbie Hancock and David Grisman have also publicly lauded his talent for both technical composition and improvisation.
Lage was educated in Western classical music at the San Francisco State Conservatory and Sonoma State University, but resisted the temptation to focus solely on technical performance skills and developed a passion for jazz on his own. He honed his improvisational skill at Ali Akbar College of Music in California and Berklee College of Music in Boston.
Pianist Taylor Eigsti is also no stranger to fame at an early age. His initial inspiration to sit at the piano came after the loss of his older sister, a talented pianist herself, to cancer when Eigsti was only three. He began playing a year later, and by the age of eight was opening for friend and mentor David Benoit. By age 12, he was playing with Dave Brubeck and opening for Diana Krall and Al Jarreau. Eigsti has twice been the featured guest on Marian McPartland’s award-winning Piano Jazz program on NPR.
Eigsti’s breakout debut CD for Concord Records, Lucky to be Me, was released in 2006 and became one of the top 15 most-played jazz albums on the radio. Let it Come to You is his newest release, including both standards and Eigsti’s original compositions. His past year of concerts have included the integration of electronic effects with acoustic grand piano, to rave reviews at venues such as the Hollywood Bowl and the Montreal Jazz Festival.
Together, Julian Lage and Taylor Eigsti perform a wide range of exiting new arrangements of jazz standards, to originals, co-authored originals, and adventurous takes on many Brazilian songs and music from other genres. Their performance dynamic has been compared to that of Bill Evans and Jim Hall. The Boston Herald wrote of a recent performance: “A set of duets as electrifying and virtuosic as it was mature.”
The Eigisti & Lage Duo will perform on Sunday, September 7 at 7pm at the Diana Wortham Theatre in Asheville. This performance, like all Jazz Series 2008 performances, is open to the public. Tickets can be purchased at the Diana Wortham Theatre Box Office or by calling (828) 257-4530. Tickets are $21 for members, $29 for non-members, and $10 for students with valid school ID (new membership applications are accepted at every performance). For more information about the artists and the WNC Jazz Society, please visit www.wncjazzsociety.org.
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