Conversations in Jazz

 Three Concerts featuring:

Wilbo Wright (upright bass) – Sim Cain (percussion)

John Henry Goldman (trumpet) – Tom Tallitsch (reeds)

John Henry Goldman, a West Windsor resident for close to fifty years, is known in this community as a teacher and performer of music, basketball coach and Pilates instructor.  A veteran producer of concerts, Mr. Goldman invites Wilbo Wright, Tom Tallitsch and Sim Cain, top-tier musicians all from this area, for a concert highlighting originality and sparkling improvisation.  The collaboration playfully shares a journey into pulsating sound and silence, dancing rhythms,  the richness of tone and melodic expression. 

In performance the effort is always to connect, to respect, to entertain, to express humility and humanity.  The experience is one of give and take – the musicians benefit as much from what is received from the “audience” as is given in the form of professionalism and ability.  The selections fill the room with vibrance and harmony, an atmosphere of friendship permeates, and the joy of music is appreciated by all.

Tom Tallitsch, a Hopewell resident, is a composer (with eleven albums to his name) and multi-instrumentalist, playing the saxophone, clarinet, flute, piano, guitar, and drums. He regularly performs at jazz clubs and venues in New York City, New Jersey, and Philadelphia. A highly respected music educator who teaches at the Princeton Junior School and The Princeton Child Development Institute, Tom’s compositions and arrangements have gained recognition by professional musicians and vocalists alike and have accompanied performances by dancers from the Martha Graham Dance Company.

Wilbo Wright is a genre-hopping bass player (both upright and electric) who grew up on a tree farm in West Windsor.  His musical talents have taken him around the world, recording and touring with a stylistically wide variety of artists.  He is a DJ at WPRB where he has been curating “The Clothesline,” a weekly freeform radio program, since 1988.  He recently returned from LA, where his original band Ui performed at the 20th anniversary of their current record label, Numero Group.

Sim Cain, drummer and percussionist, has performed with everyone from punk provocateur Henry Rollins to the art music composer John Zorn, Jersey Shore blues masters Billy Hector and Kenny “Stringbean” Sorenson, the J. Geils Band, avant-garde guitarist Marc Ribot.  A Princeton native, he and bassist Wilbo Wright have worked together on stages, in clubs and roadhouses for decades, forging a musical bond and a rock-solid foundation to the delight of the musicians and audiences for whom they play.

John Henry Goldman began his life-long devotion to the beauty of sound and improvisation at the age of six.  He studied with Jimmy Maxwell, first trumpeter of the Benny Goodman big band and Johnny Carson’s NBC Orchestra; Nicholas Rodriquez, pianist with Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong; and the great jazz bassist Lisle Atkinson. Over the past twenty years John Henry, as leader and sideman, has performed in countless concerts, venues and events, both public and private, throughout the tri-state area.

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