Jason Palmer Presents the Upwards Mother's Project Featuring Kevin Harris

Having made Boston, MA his home for the past 22 years, Jason was recently named to the inaugural class of the Boston Artist in Residence Fellowship for Music Composition. Jason also received a 2019 New Jazz Works Grant from Chamber Music America. In 2011 and 2017, he was named a Fellow in Music Composition by the Massachusetts Cultural Council. In 2014, Jason was honored as a recipient of the French American Cultural Exchange Jazz Fellowship. Jason won 1st Place in the 2009 Carmine Caruso International Jazz Trumpet Solo Competition and was cited in the June 2007 issue of Downbeat Magazine as one of the “Top 25 trumpeters of the Future”.

He has performed with Roy Haynes, Herbie Hancock, Jimmy Smith (the organist), Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Ravi Coltrane, Mark Turner, Jeff Ballard, Lee Konitz, Phil Woods, Common, Roy Hargrove, Lewis Nash.

In addition to performing on over forty albums as a sideman, Jason has recorded thirteen albums under his own name on labels such as Ayva, Steeplechase, Newvelle, and most recently with Giant Step Arts. Four of his recordings were reviewed by Downbeat Magazine, all receiving 4 stars or better. Jason has toured in over 30 countries with saxophonists Mark Turner, Greg Osby, Grace Kelly, and Matana Roberts, and has been a featured guest artist on multiple projects in Portugal, Mexico, Canada and Russia.

For fifteen years, Jason’s quintet served the house band every weekend at Boston’s historic Wally’s Jazz Café. He has presented his band at numerous clubs throughout the northeast United States including the Tanglewood Jazz Fest, Sculler’s Jazz Club, the Stone in NYC, the Jazz Gallery in NYC, and the Beantown Jazz Festival. In 2007 Jason Palmer was commissioned by the Festival of New Trumpet Music in NYC to premier a new work (based on a Sudoku game) for his quintet at the Jazz Standard. The music from that suite was later featured on his 2016 recording on SteepleChase entitled “Beauty ‘n’ Numbers: The Sudoku Suite”.

For this special concert at the Regattabar, Jason is collaborating with his long-time musical colleague pianist Kevin Harris to present their Upward Mother’s Project for the first time since the inception of the project in 2018. This project is a musical celebration that recognizes and honors the courage and strength of mothers who have lost their children to acts of violence in this community. Through a series of interviews with the mothers, Jason and Kevin composed pieces based on the musical phrases of the words from each mother (a la Hermeto Pascoal’s Aura Sound technique).