Jazz pianist Larry Karush in concert Friday, August 19

Larry Karush comes to our attention via a Shoreline student at Occidental College in Los Angeles, Jennifer Fox, daughter of Frank and Mary Fox. She wrote, "He's really phenomenal, very interesting jazz music ... I would definitely recommend going!"

Larry Karush in concert, Friday, August 19, 2011

Wayward Music Series and Thinkdance music 

present Larry Karush

Solo Piano: Jazz/world/new music

Friday, August 19, 8pm

Chapel Performance Space (4th floor)

the Good Shepherd Center

4649 Sunnyside Ave N, Seattle

Corner of 50th and Sunnyside in Wallingford

Admission is a sliding scale donation $5-15 suggested.

Additional information at 206-789-1939, music samples at LarryKarush.com

For composer/pianist Larry Karush, improvisation is integral to the music he creates out of his roots in Jazz, Indian classical, Afro-Caribbean, western classical and 20th century music. This solo concert of his "comprovisations" will feature the northwest premiere of “The Wheel”, a large-scale piano work commissioned by the City of Los Angeles, and revised in 2009 during an artist-in-residency at the MacDowell Colony for the Arts (NH).

Also on the program will be works by contemporary performer/composers (Bloom, Hammer), an unstandard treatment of a jazz standard, and a little 9/8 boogie-woogie.

"In Art of the Improviser, a riveting set of solo piano tracks, Karush draws together such disparate elements as bluegrass banjo, stride, tinges of Erik Satie, boogie-woogie, country and the blues. But his own vision – one of the most fascinating in current jazz – remains constant."

-- Los Angeles Times (Don Heckman)

"Elegant and earthy … His music travels around the world carving out some real poetry. Highly recommended."

-- Cadence

Larry Karush is an improvising pianist/composer with roots in Jazz, 20th/21st century western music, African-based percussion, and the classical music of North India. 

From Carnegie Hall to the Purple Onion, he has performed Jazz with John Abercrombie, Jane Ira Bloom, Jay Clayton, Bennie Wallace, and Oregon, World Music with Kanai Dutta, Francisco Aguabella, and Glen Velez, and New Music with Steve Reich and Terry Riley, in addition to his own solo piano performances.

His compositions and improvisations have been recorded extensively. He has received grants and commissions from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the NEA/Arts International, Meet the Composer, the California Arts Council, and the City of Los Angeles. 

He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in music composition, and a nominee for the 2008 Herb Alpert Foundation Prize in Music.

Mr. Karush has been a faculty artist-in-residence at the University of California Santa Barbara and at New York University, and a composer-in-residence at the Wurlitzer (NM), Ucross (WY), and MacDowell (NH) Foundations.

He has presented lecture/demonstrations at numerous universities. Mr. Karush (M.A. New York University) is currently on the faculty of Occidental College in Los Angeles.