The Jazz Room at the Stage Door Theater

Overview

JAZZ ROOM: Derek Douget plays WAYNE SHORTER

(Standards, Jazz Saxophone)

After much-acclaim and sold-out performances, Charlotte’s Jazz Arts Initiative’s (JAI) monthly series—The Jazz Room @ The Stage Door Theater – keeps the swing swingin’ on February 16 & 17 with a tribute to the legendary saxophonist WAYNE SHORTER by Grammy-award winning New Orleans tenor saxophonist Derek Douget. The Stage Door Theater is part of Blumenthal Performing Arts Center, at the corner of 5th and College in Uptown Charlotte.

Wayne Shorter is a celebrated American jazz saxophonist and composer. Many of Shorter's compositions have become jazz standards, and his output has earned worldwide recognition and critical praise. Shorter first came to prominence in the late 1950s as a member of, and eventually primary composer for, Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. In the 1960s he went on to join Miles Davis's Second Great Quintet. Following that he co-founded the jazz fusion band Weather Report. He has recorded over 20 albums as a bandleader and won 10 Grammy Awards. He has also received acclaim for his mastery of the soprano saxophone, after switching his focus from the tenor in the late 1960s. He began an extended reign in 1970 as Down Beat's annual poll-winner on that instrument, winning the critics' poll for 10 consecutive years and the readers' for 18. The New York Times has described Shorter as "probably jazz's greatest living small-group composer and a contender for greatest living improviser.”

Derek Douget has gained the reputation as one of the top tenor players in New Orleans for more than 20 years. In addition to his work with the Ellis Marsalis Quartet and the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra, Douget leads his own ensembles – when he isn’t busy directing the Jazz & Heritage Foundation’s free education program, the Heritage School of Music. Douget has been described as a performer who “serenades audiences with equally powerful and melodic vibes as he switches between alto, soprano, and tenor sax throughout his sets…Douget contains an advanced jazz dexterity that is reminiscent of Sidney Bechet and old world New Orleans.” Douget performed with the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra on the 2010 Grammy Winning Album “Book One,” which received a Grammy Award for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album.