Arts & Culture Joy4Jazz Lorber leads off Playboy Jazz Festival in Baldwin Hills
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May 24, 2012
By Joy Childs
Jeff Lorber doesn’t know why he was picked to kick off the Playboy Jazz Festival in the community, but the Philadelphia native is happy he was. He’d love for folks “to come and check out his music.” He’s looking forward to showing why he’s worthy of this distinction this Sunday, May 27, at the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza’s Outdoor Promenade.
With piano stylings inspired by funky fusion masters Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea, there’ll be a lot of heads bobbing and toes tapping to cuts from his early days in the 1970s to his current “Galaxy” CD project.
By the time that decade ended, Lorber had become one of the new voices in jazz fusion. He and his band first honed their craft in the Portland, Oregon, club scene and rapidly expanded their reach to a national and international audience via a combination of complex harmonies, unconventional time signatures and compelling rhythms.
Lorber says he doesn’t consider himself a “smooth jazz” player, rather a “contemporary jazz man.”
Whatever it’s called, if this is your style of music, it’s FREE jazz.