Marquis Hill, an award-winning trumpeter

Marquis Hill, an award-winning trumpeter, set for UC San Diego debut with his genre-leaping band

Trumpeter Marquis Hill will make his San Diego headlining debut at UC San Diego. (Photo by Deneka Peniston)

George Varga - Contact Reporter

In 2014, Chicago trumpeter Marquis Hill won the Thelonious Monk Institute Trumpet Competition, which included a $25,000 scholarship and an album contract with Concord Records.

Now 30, Hill has played in the Chicago Jazz Orchestra and in the bands of saxophonist Joe Lovano, former Miles Davis bassist Marcus Miller and other luminaries.

He also leads his own group, The Blacktet, with which he make his San Diego headlining debut tonight at the Loft@UC San Diego.


Hill stands out whether playing his own compositions — which draw from post-bop jazz, hard bop, hip-hop, spoken word and more — or his distinctively re-invented versions of jazz classics by Horace Silver, Donald Byrd and Herbie Hancock.

read more at: http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/entertainment/music/sd-et-radar-marquis-hill-20180305-story.html

Marquis Hill, Rez Abbasi, Eric Alexander ...

photo: SARAH ESCARRAZ

By NATE CHINEN • NOV 13, 2017
Marquis Hill, “Coming Out Of The Universe”


Marquis Hill emerged as a clarion new voice on trumpet several years ago, and then proved himself a great bandleader besides, at the helm of a group he calls the Blacktet. Originally from Chicago and now an adopted New Yorker, Hill has just announced a new EP, Meditation Tape, due out on Dec. 1. Featuring regular partners like drummer Makaya McCraven and bassist Junius Paul, the new music coasts on a cosmic-Afrocentric plane. Consider the lead single, which premieres here — a blissed-out groove odyssey that turns out to be the framework for some wisdom from an elder, the drummer Marvin “Bugalu” Smith. “I believe that the universe is reading your emotional content, and it responds to that,” he says. “The universe and us are the same.”

read more at: http://wbgo.org/post/universal-truths-and-heated-dialogue-marquis-hill-rez-abbasi-eric-alexander-more#stream/0

The winner of the 2014 Thelonious Monk ....

Published: 2014-11-16
The winner of the 2014 Thelonious Monk International Trumpet Competition is Marquis Hill. Raised on the south side of Chicago, Mr. Hill, 27, is a veteran of that city’s jazz scene and a product of its institutions—he earned a masters degree in jazz pedagogy from DePaul University and plays in the Chicago Jazz Orchestra. He’s currently a teaching associate at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and has released several albums on independent labels.

Mr. Hill won in a gala concert on Sunday night at the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles, which also included the presentation of an award to President Bill Clinton, and performances by Pharrell Williams with Herbie Hancock; Dianne Reeves with Wayne Shorter; and Taj Mahal with John Mayer and Marcus Miller. Mr. Hill’s winning performance consisted of the standards “If I Were A Bell” and “Polka Dots and Moonbeams,” with backing by the pianist Reginald J Thomas , the bassist Rodney Whitaker and the drummer Carl Allen.

Mr. Hill, who counts as his mentors the pianist Willie Pickens, the saxophonist Fred Anderson and the guitarist Bobby Broom, has prevailed in events like these before: he also won the 2013 Carmine Caruso International Jazz Trumpet Solo Competition and the 2012 International Trumpet Guild Jazz Improvisation Competition.

The Monk Competition runners-up, culled from a semifinal pool of 13 trumpeters, were Billy Buss, of Berkeley, Calif., and Adam O’Farrill, of Brooklyn. The judges this year were an array of trumpet heroes: Quincy Jones, Jimmy Owens, Randy Brecker, Arturo Sandoval, Roy Hargrove and Ambrose Akinmusire. (Mr. Akinmusire won the competition in 2007, the last time that the trumpet was its instrumental focus.)
read more: http://news360.com/digestarticle/rsfmDetS20OUKd2N4Kp2gg