JAZZ@theEDGE FESTIVAL

Theo Croker Sessions

MICHAEL KING (piano)
SHEKWOAGA (Michael) ODE (drums)
GIULIO XAVIER (Bass)
THEO CROKER (Host+Trumpet)

Seating times: 6:00pm & 8:00pm

Theo Croker is a storyteller who speaks through his trumpet. A creative who refuses boundaries, the GRAMMY® Award-nominated artist, composer, producer, thought leader, and influencer who projects his voice through the music.

After seven years of sojourn in Shanghai, Croker crash-landed with a simmering original sound on the 2014 Dee Dee Bridgewater-assisted album Afro Physicist. Following the success of Escape Velocity in 2016, he ascended to a new stratosphere with Star People Nation in 2019. The record garnered a nomination in the category of “Best Contemporary Instrumental Album” at the 62nd GRAMMY® Awards. It attracted widespread critical acclaim including Stereogum, Paste, and The New York Times who called it “an album that gallivants from swirling, left-field hip-hop beats to propellant swing to entrancing passages of African percussion. Through it all, Croker’s understated trumpet playing holds his small band together with swagger and poise.”

Along the way, he also lent his sound to platinum-selling albums by everyone from J. Cole to Ari Lennox while touring his band across the globemany times over.

In 2020, he hunkered down at his childhood home in the midst of the global pandemicand wrote his sixth full-length album, releasing fall 2021 [Sony Music Masterworks].

MICHAEL KING

Virtuosic pianist Michael King, a Chicagoan native, began playing
drums in his local church band at the early age of 4. This
fortuitously melodic schooling nurtured an undeniable affinity to
the piano and organ, the very seat that he began to occupy, by
ear, at age 14. Mr. King is an alumni of Lincoln Park High School
and the prestigious Oberlin Conservatory. He was selected to
attend the Thelonious Monk Institute and The Ravinia Jazz
Scholars program on merit scholarships. In 2021, he won the
renowned Luminarts Cultural Foundation’s Jazz Fellowship.
Michael has performed with Bobby Watson, Kevin Eubanks, Dave
Liebman, Gary Bartz, Billy Hart, Joel Frahm, Rufus Reid, &
Antonio Hart, among others. Currently you can catch Mr. King
touring internationally with: DeeDee Bridgewater, Robin Eubanks,
Theo Croker’s DVRK FUNK, Soul Understated, & Marcus Printup.