The Pete Roth Trio and Bill Bruford

The Pete Roth Trio creates jazz for a new generation of music lovers who look beyond the usual jazz conventions. The trio consists of Mike Pratt on bass and the legendary Bill Bruford on drums.

JAZZ WITHOUT BORDERS

The word "jazz" implies musicians who listen and interact; people who never play the same way. The trio has these qualities in abundance, but the group's music is also something above, around, over and under jazz. Some use qualifiers like "near-jazz", "neo-jazz" or "stadium jazz" to break out of the straitjacket of "old-man jazz". Such phrases act as trigger warnings that what the trio plays won't always be appropriate or nice. The group's roots are firmly planted in pop music, but it seeks to expand the notion of what is acceptable or possible within that genre, or what it can represent.

The trio's original music is considered neither "better" nor "worse" than the existing repertoire, but simply another playground. A song can begin in a country mood but end in an urban dystopia. A standard can reveal everything, but only in the dying embers of its performance. Roth's own compositions like "Dancing with Grace", the trio's collaborative compositions like "Trio in Five" or "Looking Forward to Looking Back" or their reinterpretation of existing masterpieces like Anton Dvorak's "Largo from the 9th Symphony" offer just three points of entry into the creative world of the Pete Roth Trio, a world you are unlikely to leave without re-evaluating your views on what the guitar trio format is still capable of.

Program and cast

Pete Roth: guitar
Mike Pratton: bass
Bill Bruford: drums