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Music Mountain

Think of the verdant green campus of Music Mountain, home of the oldest continuing summer chamber music festival in this country, and your thoughts might turn to Beethoven and Bach. But summer on the mountain has other attractions in addition to the 16-concert chamber music series. Saturday nights the mountain reverberates to a popular Saturday evening series of jazz concerts.

This Saturday, trumpeter Josh Lawrence and Color Theory fuse the blues, Afro-Cuban music and hip hop. Lawrence is a critically acclaimed trumpeter and composer. His ensemble, Color Theory, which includes pianist Orrin Evans, drummer Anwar Marshall, the Curtis Brothers—pianist Zaccai and bassist Luques—alto saxophonist Caleb Curtis and trombonist David Gibson, was dubbed “an all-star outfit” by The New York Times.

Their award-winning 2017 release inspired by Vasily Kandinsky’s first three Composition paintings, has been followed by a second album, Contrast. Contrast, like its predecessor was inspired by Kandinsky’s works. Kandinsky, a painter and art theorist, outlined the theory of the definitive sound of colors, noting for example the bright yellow conceptualization of treble so unlike the dark colors and depth of bass tones.

Contrast’s first suite takes its titles from the Kandinsky collection of paintings in the Guggenheim collection, the second being referred to as the “American side.”

Lawrence, Philadelphia native, has been acknowledged as “a preeminent voice among young composers.” He has received awards from Chamber Music America, the American Composers Forum, the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage and the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia. A member of the Fresh Cut Orchestra he’s also a faculty member for the city’s Drexel University and Kimmel Center Creative Music Program.

Music Mountain offers a concert and dinner package which includes a 5PM dinner at the Falls Village Inn and at 6:30PM Twilight Concert at the Mountain. The concert and dinner package must be purchased by 3PM on Friday prior to the concert.

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