JAZZ@theEDGE FESTIVAL

Theo Croker Sessions
ELEW (piano)
JONATHAN BARBER (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 globe many times over.

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

ELEW

Eric Lewis “ELEW”, a high energy pianist, has toured, recorded and performed with music legends including Jon Batiste, Cassandra Wilson, Elvin Jones, Roy Hargrove, and many others.  He has performed and recorded with Wynton Marsalis & the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.

As a young musician he won the The Thelonius Monk International Piano Competition, the most prestigious prize in all of jazz at the time.

A decade into his career Lewis re-emerged as “Elew”, fusing his jazz technique with rock guitar-based ideas, generating a powerful crossover genre he labeled “RockJazz”.   Over the course of multiple award-winning, critically acclaimed albums, ELEW has reimagined songs by The Killers, Nirvana, Coldplay and Michael Jackson to name a few.   His diverse fan base includes Michele and Barack Obama, Will Smith and Al Pacino.

A perpetual innovator, ELEW has also melded complex classical techniques with idiosyncratic Afrocentric jazz rhythms creating Counterbop.  His album “Cubism”, a tribute to contemporary Jazz legend Kurt Rosenwinkel, showcases the genre bending techniques of Counterbop.

ELEW’s innovative brilliance doesn’t stop with the keyboard.  He is a successful film scorer, and DJ ELEW has combined turntables with the piano to create a globally popular innovation he calls “Piano Turntablism”, which has been showcased at TED, The World Economic Forum, Art Basel, the Cannes Film Festival and many other international events.   ELEW is nothing short of an artistic genius, full of experimentation, creativity and unparalleled energy.