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Jason Yarde

"Swing, hip-hop, improv, you name it, he can make it all sound as if it was meant to live together" Guardian

Composer, arranger, producer, musical director and saxophonist Jason Yarde creates music that has been described as powerful, spiritual and formidable. He composes across variety of styles (jazz, classical, hip-hop, R&B, reggae, soul) and for a variety of media (orchestras, chamber ensembles, big band, dance, film). His potential and originality has been rewarded with nominations for the Bird Award at the North Sea Jazz Festival, the Jazz on 3 Innovation Award for the BBC Jazz Awards, the inaugural prize for Contemporary Jazz Composition at the British Composer Awards and a prestigious Paul Hamlyn Award for Composers.

Places & Other Spaces - Yarde’s second CD with pianist Andrew McCormack was released on Edition Records in 2011 (Edition Records) and he is currently working on arrangements for Urban Classic with Fazer and Ms Dynamite for the BBC Symphony Orchestra ahead of the premiere of this event at the Barbican as part of Music Nation - a weekend of live music events devised and led by the BBC, and the first nationwide countdown event for the London 2012 Festival.

Yarde is also composing Skip, Dash, Flow a specially commissioned New Music 20 x 12 piece for the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad, to be performed with Welsh band Wonderbrass, with support from the PRS for Music Foundation, the BBC, LOCOG and Sound and Music.

"Places & Other Spaces is a powerful marriage of brilliant musicianship and composition of the first rank” The Arts Desk

"The partnership between Yarde and McCormack is unmistakably fuelled by the reflexive spirit of jazz…it's a wonderful conversation...Yarde’s sax improvising has quietly blossomed to world class. " Guardian

“Both players seriously assert themselves with mature performances and tight narrative focus that presents jazz composition and improvisation as infinitely fluid entities” Jazzwise

www.joyandears.com

www.myduomusic.com

www.editionrecords.com/artists/mccormack-yarde-duo

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