Nancy Wilson / Cannonball Adderley Tribute

Nancy Wilson / Cannonball Adderley Tribute Presented by Tampa Jazz Club Sunday Dec 10, 2017

Bay Area jazz favorites WHITNEY JAMES and JACK WILKINS will get together at the next Tampa Jazz Club concert, with the focus on the classic collaboration between song stylist Nancy Wilson and Tampa-born saxophone legend Cannonball Adderley. The Sunday afternoon concert, on December 10, 2017 at 3pm, takes place in the Mainstage Theatre at HCC/Ybor City, and is part of the HCC Visual & Performing Arts Series.

Like jazz devotees everywhere, both Whitney and Jack are lifelong fans of the original 1961 recording, which featured such favorites as ‘Save Your Love for Me,’ ‘A Sleepin’ Bee,’ and the Nat Adderley piece, ‘The Old Country.’ An added bonus will be new music that Wilkins has composed for the occasion, custom-made for the remarkable band featured in the Ybor City concert.

Whitney James has gained an avid following through her distinctive sound, creative choice of repertoire, and captivating stage presence. She has been called upon to sing challenging roles for jazz orchestral composers Maria Schneider and Rufus Reid, and her schedule this fall includes a Tribute to Barbra Streisand, and performing as part of the 20-piece Florida Bjorkestra during the Et Cultura Festival in St. Petersburg. 

The longtime Director of Jazz Studies at USF, saxophonist Jack Wilkins released his 6th CD, ‘The Banff Project,’ earlier this year. The music was premiered in a live performance/film event in USF’s Monday Night Jazz series. This concert will mark Jack’s return from spending the Fall semester on a prestigious Fulbright Award as Research Chair at the School of Creative & Performing Arts at the University of Calgary in Alberta. 

The band joining Whitney and Jack is stellar, featuring guitarist LaRue Nickelson, trumpeter James Suggs, bassist Patrick Bettison, and drummer Walt Hubbard. The combination of new interpretations of the Nancy Wilson/Cannonball Adderley classics, and new music written for this hand-picked band, promises to be a rare treat for the Tampa jazz audience.

PRESENTED BY:
Tampa Jazz Club
HCC Visual and Performing Arts Series

at

Mainstage Theatre

Performing Arts Center - HCC Ybor

1411 E 11th  Ave, Ybor City, FL 33605

Nancy Wilson in action

At JazzWax, seven videos of jazz-pop singer Nancy Wilson in action over the years https://t.co/6BXoRpxakx pic.twitter.com/oGTfBfNFKj

— Marc Myers (@JazzWax) December 27, 2016

Nancy Wilson

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRKeQOuzIxo

Though she embodies the record industry term crossover, and prefers to be referred to by the more general term "song stylist," Nancy Wilson is most assuredly a master jazz song stylist in addition to her other vocal and entertaining skills. She's a versatile artist, in the tradition of other song stylists who excelled in jazz, such as Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan and Nat Cole. Her most enduring influences are the passionate song stylings of Jimmy Scott and the vocal timbres of the "Queen of the Blues", Dinah Washington. Other influences included Cole, Louis Jordan, LaVern Baker, and Billy Eckstine.
After her family moved from Chillicothe to nearby Columbus, Ohio, young Nancy won a talent show at age 15, where the prize was a television show called Skyline Melodies. Soon she joined tenor saxophonist Rusty Bryant's band at the Carolyn Club, which led to her first recording for Dot Records. Eager to learn her craft, young Nancy sat in at clubs around town, including a fortuitous encounter with the great Julian "Cannonball" Adderley. Nancy so impressed the sax master that he urged her to come to New York and look him up when she arrived. In 1959 she did just that, whereupon she met her longtime manager John Levy. So excited was Levy that he arranged for Capitol Records A&R man Dave Cavanaugh to hear his new client, the results of which were a long, rich association with the label.
Nancy's first record for Capitol was Like in Love. In 1961 she dropped the hit single Guess Who I Saw Today, an ironically unfolding cheatin' husband tale that became her lifelong signature song. In 1962 she collaborated with Adderley's popular quintet, a record which yielded such gems as Save Your Love for Me, which proved to be another big hit for Nancy, as well as exceptional versions of Nat Adderley's The Old Country and the standard A Sleepin' Bee.
Since then Ms. Wilson has been a major star, with numerous television appearances, as both guest and host. She copped an Emmy Award for her NBC series The Nancy Wilson Show, which ran during the 1967-68 seasons. Her stardom was duly cemented with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Nancy Wilson has been a tireless champion of various charities and altruistic causes and is the voice of the syndicated National Public Radio series Jazz Profiles, where she always speaks with great conviction, authority and love on the subject of jazz.
http://www.wbgo.org/ontheair/artists/nancyWilson.php