Among the busiest and most prolific of the Portland based guitar players, Balmer recently performed on a memorable debut concert with pianist and newly arrived PSU professor George Colligan as part of the PDX Jazz @ The Mission series. Balmer will also perform twice during this year’s festival, with his trio at the Aloft Hotel (Portland Airport) on February 18 and with his acclaimed Go By Train project at Rogue Ales on February 23. The Dan Balmer Trio features himself, pianist George Mitchell, and drummer Carlton Jackson. In his contemporary project Go By Train, Balmer is joined by keyboardist Clay Giberson and drummer Micah Kassel.

Balmer is a true musical gem of the Northwest. He is one of only five people to be members of both The Oregon Music Hall of Fame and the Jazz Society of Oregon Hall of Fame and is the youngest of the honorees. In addition to appearing on over 80 CD’s, Balmer has contributed 8 lauded and successful CD’s of his own. Balmer’s notoriety as a musician took off in the 1980s and 1990s with his partnership with renowned Portland pianist Tom Grant. He also has performed regularly over the years with other Northwest jazz stars like drummer Mel Brown and bassist David Friesen. Additional performers Balmer has worked with include: Joey DeFrancesco, Benny Green, Steve Smith, Airto Moreira, Bruce Forman, Houston Person, Jeff Hamilton, Bill Mays, Gerald Wilson, Eric Alexander, and Pat Martino among others.

The Jazz Passengers will perform songs off their first album in 12 years, “Reunited,” which includes a unique cover of the 1979 No. 1 hit of the same name by Peaches and Herb. Saxophonist Roy Nathanson and trombonist Curtis Fowlkes are the founders and mainstays of The Jazz Passengers, whose name is a satirical spin-off of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. Nathanson and Fowlkes have ties to John Lurie’s The Lounge Lizards and The Jazz Passengers have played with an eclectic blend of performers from Elvis Costello to Blondie’s singer Debbie Harry to Marc Ribot. 

Featured Special Guest with The Jazz Passengers

Sunday, February 19, 7:00pm @ The Winningstad Theatre 

The U.S. Bank Portland Jazz Festival Presented by Alaska Airlines announce Vijay Iyer + Prasanna + Nitin Mitta = TIRTHA in a program titled “New York to Tamil Nadu” at the Crystal Ballroom on Saturday, February 25th at 3:00pm.

Individually, Indian-American pianist-composer Vijay Iyer, Chennai (formerly Madras) born guitarist/composer Prasanna, and Hyderabad native and tabla player Nitin Mitta are already highly accomplished artists who shift easily among multiple musical languages. Together, they have achieved a fully realized, deeply thoughtful, and truly innovative collaboration. Combining the elemental directness of rock, the chamber-like intimacy of raga, and bebop’s hard, angular drive, Tirtha achieves a profound interplay of melody and rhythm that characterizes jazz at it’s best.

These artists’ musical and cultural experiences are part of their creative DNA. For example, you hear the distinctly South Indian, meticulous ornamentations of Prasanna’s guitar in dialogue with Iyer’s gloriously spacious harmonic palette, and Mitta’s superbly crisp Hindustani (north Indian classical) grooves and virtuosic, grounding presence. You hear familiar structural elements of jazz, Hindustani, and Carnatic music. However, the group completely shuns any musical clichés or previously heard “fusions” of those genres.

Iyer summarizes, “For us Tirtha represents a unity that only recently became possible, after several decades of South Asian global mobility, transition, and flow: it’s the sound of a new reality.”