Performers for this celebration of the label’s 70th anniversary include Samara Joy, a six-time GRAMMY winner and Bronx native, and Christian McBride, a world-class bassist and bandleader, a Juilliard graduate and 11-time GRAMMY winner who has recorded with legends of both the jazz (McCoy Tyner, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Wynton Marsalis, Eddie Palmieri, and more) and pop (Sting, Paul McCartney, Celine Dion) spheres. Also, Mei Semones, an American indie rock musician who writes jazz-influenced songs in both English and Japanese, has invited her own crew of friends including aron!, Liana Flores, and John Roseboro to perform music from Getz/Gilberto, the classic collaborative album by João Gilberto and Stan Getz released on Verve in 1964. Sparklmami will begin the show with a DJ set.

Wagner’s transcendent meditation on love and death features a powerhouse pair as the Irish princess Isolde and the love-drunk Tristan in a revelatory new production by acclaimed director Yuval Sharon. Due to its extended run time, the performance will be offered over the course of two evenings.

Casting:

Lise Davidsen, Isolde

Michael Spyres, Tristan

Original transmission: March 21, 2026

https://pools.events/event/O5taluYb/dave-burrell-windward-passages/?wf_source=pools&wf_surface=site&wf_placement=event_link&wf_item=O5taluYb&wf_ref=v-0732d8d8-31b2-4b9c-a892-6d45cc2b356a

With Dave Burrell, Monika Larsson, Ken Filiano, Michael TA Thompson, Edward Washington II, Afi Bijou, and Aakash Mittal

FourOneOne is thrilled to present Windward Passages, a concert featuring scenes from pianist Dave Burrell’s groundbreaking jazz opera. Written in collaboration with Swedish poet and librettist Monika Larsson, Windward Passages is a deeply personal, major work that presents a socio-political coming-of-age-story following a Black American family’s migration from Harlem to Honolulu just as Hawaii transitions into the fiftieth American state. Musically, the opera is a heady, vibrant and seamless tapestry of Ellingtonian melodies, blues, ragtime, bebop, free jazz and formal operatic arias that has been a hallmark of Burrell's approach to the tradition.

Remarkably, despite its position as Burrell’s life-defining composition and several stagings in Europe, Windward Passages has never been performed in its full, orchestrated capacity in the United States. Instead, American audiences have primarily known the piece through intimate solo piano or duo reductions—leaving the full, multi-vocal, and choreographed brilliance of this monumental American tale largely unheard on its home soil.

This concert will be the first ensemble performance of this material in the United States since 1982. Monika Larsson will introduce and set the narrative context for each piece in the performance. Dave Burrell will lead the ensemble at the piano.

Windward Passages has been a life-defining work not only for Burrell but also for his wife, collaborator, and partner in everything, Monika Larsson. They met in Honolulu in 1978 and quickly fell into, in Burrell’s words, “a love we couldn’t escape.” Larsson turned Burrell’s memories and music into a sensitive and expressive libretto, tracing his parents’ struggles, his own youth and the relationship between the indigenous Hawaiians and their land. As Burrell describes it: “the work is semi-biographical and takes place when Hawaii reached statehood in 1959. I performed the night of the actual statehood celebration with my regular band. In the story line we have a band of youngsters performing in front of a huge, American flag backdrop. My parents have fictional parts, along with a land developer, Mr. Henry J. Kaiser, a South African man who I actually worked for…Some of the villagers in our story line demonstrated against the development. There is one murder, there is also a love interest, blues and several beautiful arias. There are three acts.”

The performance is one night only and presents a rare opportunity to experience the richness of Windward Passages in the company of its creators.

Pianist, composer, and improvisor Dave Burrell’s life's work spans all facets of jazz and its history, from blues, ragtime, stride, and bebop to the “fire music” he helped sculpt in the 1960s. The richness of his sixty-year career reflects his singular ability to connect voices and histories across musical genres and generations. For Burrell, tradition is a living, embodied dialogue between past and future, a study in dissolving musical binaries of “inside” and “out.”

Monika Larsson is a Swedish poet, writer, and author of the forthcoming book, A Jazz Life, about her relationship and partnership with Dave Burrell.

Joining Burrell and Larsson for this performance is an intergenerational group whose creative lives connect them to a range of performance traditions reflective of New York City. The rhythm section consists of two long-time friends, collaborators, and integral components of New York City’s creative music community: bassist Ken Filiano, who has performed with the likes of Bill Dixon and Warne Marsh; and Michael TA Thompson, the Virgin Islands-raised drummer and collaborator of reggae legend Owen Gray and saxophonist Charles Gayle. Born in London and raised in both the States and Saudi Arabia, Edward Washington II is the evening’s tenor vocalist, who had his solo debut at Carnegie Hall this year and has premiered numerous works for American composers. The evening's soprano is Afi Bijou, the Bronx native who began performing as a child actor on and off-Broadway; her career has taken her to Essence Fest stages and led to concerts with Angélique Kidjo and Nas. Aakash Mittal, whose work “points toward new possibilities in improvised music," (Denver Post) likely due in part to his study of Hindustani Classical Music and relationship with drum revolutionary Milford Graves, will put his multi-instrumental talents to use through tenor saxophone and flute.