JAZZ@theEDGE FESTIVAL

Theo Croker Sessions

CHINA MOSES (vocals)
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].

CHINA MOSES

Daughter of the great vocalist Dee Dee Bridgewater and the acclaimed director Gilbert Moses, China Moses was born into a life filled with music, theater and the arts.  A longtime resident of Paris, she has frequently appeared on television, MTV, music channels and radio in France.  She hosted the acclaimed TV documentary “Soul Power”, presented Jazz Radio’s “Made in China” daily program, and performed at the UNESCO International Jazz Day.

China has recorded many amazing albums including “Time”, “China”, “On Tourne en Rond (We Turn Around)” “Good Lovin” and “Crazy Blues”.  Her albums have included collaborations with Swedish hip hop label Breaking Bread as well as artists such as DJ Mehdi, Diam’s, Guru, Anthony Marshall and renowned sound engineer Bob Power.

She has created and collaborated on several grand projects celebrating the great female blues and jazz singers who have inspired her.  She created a show with French pianist Raphaël Lemonnier called “Gardenias for Dinah, a tribute to mutual idol Dinah Washington, leading to a Blue Note album “This One’s for Dinah”.  She performs in “Cafe Society Swing,” a show that revives the good times of the 1940’s New York nightclub Cafe Society which promoted racial equality; it is where the then highly controversial “Strange Fruit” was first performed by Billie Holiday.

China has created and performed many other shows honoring great female vocalists including Mamie Smith, Nina Simone, Etta James, Janis Joplin, Donna Summer and many others.