Photos: The Jason Yeager Septet Celebrates CD Release At Birdland!

On Monday, March 27, Birdland presented the Jason Yeager Septet, celebrating the release of Unstuck in Time: the Kurt Vonnegut Suite. In addition to Mr. Yeager on piano were Alphonso Horne on trumpet, Patrick Laslie on woodwinds, Mike Fahie on trombone, Yuhan Su on vibraphone, Danny Weller on bass, and Jay Sawyer on drums. Julie Benko (Jason's wife and Broadway's Funny Girl) added spectacular vocals to the sold-out concert.

Following his Birdland bandleader debut with Broadway singer-actress Julie Benko, Jason Yeager returned to the storied club fronting his own seven-piece ensemble. This time, Yeager & Co. celebrated the release of his seventh recording, Unstuck in Time: The Kurt Vonnegut Suite (Sunnyside Records).

Launched on the occasion of Kurt Vonnegut's centennial, Yeager's colorful and exuberant suite employs novel approaches to integrate literature with instrumental music, dialoguing with the late master of American Letters through musical onomatopoeia, text painting, and imagined scene scoring.

Featuring Yeager's adventurous and lyrical writing, ranging from straight-ahead to Latin and modern jazz, the album features some of today's most dynamic improviser-performers, including Miguel Zenón, Lucas Pino, Yuhan Su, Jay Sawyer, and Alphonso Horne, among others. In his fall preview for WRTI, noted jazz writer and former New York Times critic Nate Chinen calls Jason's new album "a spirited tribute that engages in sneaky ways with the form of Vonnegut's texts."

Photo Credit: Matt Baker