Sacredness

Gerald Clayton suggests a new ideal and a promising way forward in modern jazz. A pianist, composer, and seven-time Grammy nominee, he stands out for his ability to balance heritage and innovation — bridging the tradition he grew up in and a fearless sense of exploration.

Over the past two decades, Clayton has built a career defined by versatility and depth. As a Blue Note bandleader, he’s created music that ranges from the intimate reflections of Bells on Sand to the electrifying immediacy of Happening: Live at the Village Vanguard. As a collaborator with artists like Roy Hargrove and Charles Lloyd, he’s earned a reputation for musicianship that is at once grounded and adventurous — profoundly attentive, open, and unafraid to take risks onstage.

Clayton is also a genial, empathetic soul who speaks about his music in similar terms. “I’m trying to make art that, first and foremost, sounds beautiful,” he says. “That entails all of what I would deem beautiful — a personal harmony between tension and release that changes as I evolve and grow.” His latest Blue Note release, Ones & Twos, captures that balance of curiosity and groove. Using a reimagined jazz-quintet setup, Clayton nods to the inventiveness of hip-hop while maintaining the organic spontaneity of live performance. The album meditates on coexistence – on how two independent voices can occupy the same space. Inspired by turntablism, its A-side and B-side are meant to be played together, forming a single, evolving piece.

Born in the Netherlands and raised in Los Angeles, Clayton grew up surrounded by creativity. His father, bassist and composer John Clayton, and his uncle, saxophonist Jeff Clayton, provided a powerful example of dedication to the craft. That family lineage instilled not only a love of jazz but a guiding principle: to serve the music with sincerity and purpose.

The home was filled with music, art, and nurturing support. Gerald discovered his enthusiasm for the family piano on his own and decided on a life in music through his naturally expanding love for it. “My family’s always been very close, and my dad was always a hero to me,” Clayton says. “I adored him, and I still do. So, it made sense that I would go down a similar path.”

But rather than following any stylistic or aesthetic angle, the Clayton legacy has manifested more as a mission statement, the pianist explains. “This idea of serving the music comes with the territory. It’s in my blood,” he says.

European Classical training helped Clayton build strong, supple technique, and he became familiar with the language of jazz piano through early mentors like Donald Vega. He dug further into the music at the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, and then at the University of Southern California, where his teachers included Billy Childs. Throughout his development, the optimism and ebullience of Los Angeles worked their way into Clayton’s personal sound. “Expressing joy is definitely an important aspect of the music in L.A., and that’s always been at my core,” says Clayton. “That joy is an extension of natural and social elements of the city — the sunshine, the positivity.”

From the onset of his professional experience, Clayton sounded assured, even magisterial. At the 2006 Thelonious Monk International Jazz Piano competition, he thrilled an elite judging panel and a packed Kennedy Center crowd to earn a silver finish. As Ben Ratliff wrote in the New York Times, Clayton “came to destroy: his playing had huge, authoritative presence, an Oscar Peterson-like style, highly controlled touch and dynamics and rhapsodic, episodic soloing. (The audience broke into applause during his solo.)”

After studies in Los Angeles, Clayton moved to New York to attend the Manhattan School of Music, immersing himself in a community of like-minded artists. The city’s intensity sharpened his instincts and accelerated his growth, leading to the formation of a dynamic trio with drummer Justin Brown and bassist Joe Sanders — a collaboration that helped define his early voice.

That band’s soulfully telepathic rapport, developed by “hanging and playing every day,” says Clayton, is preserved on his debut as a bandleader, Two-Shade, released through ArtistShare in 2009. DownBeat called the album “strikingly confident” and “decidedly fresh.” The trio evolved its language further with 2010’s Bond: The Paris Sessions and formed the core of 2013’s Life Forum — an artful, ambitious project that revealed Clayton’s gifts as a composer, arranger and conceptualist. On that album and 2017’s Tributary Tales, Clayton merges horns, wordless vocals, spoken word, and other elements into cinematic explorations of life and spirit.

Similarly, Clayton has over the years taken on audacious live projects, including the Duke Arts commission Piedmont Blues: A Search for Salvation, for which Clayton did field research in North Carolina; and White Cities, a meditation on the themes of racism and prosperity in the work of the artist Charles White. Such larger-scale, narrative projects “push me outside of my comfort zone,” says Clayton. “They give me an expanded perspective, as well as deeper feelings and thoughts, about whatever it is I’m paying tribute to. That’s incredibly rewarding.”

Clayton signed with Blue Note in 2020, earning a well-deserved place in the legacy of one of America’s most important record labels. Today, he continues to speak about the label with awestruck reverence. “I grew up staring endlessly at the hip album covers, falling in love with this music and with the musicians who play it,” he says. “I’m humbled by this opportunity to be a part of that history. It’s a reminder to put my head down and take the work seriously.”

In 2024, Clayton served as pianist and musical director for the Blue Note Quintet, a group of still-rising all-stars who paid homage to the Blue Note story with a marathon tour. Far removed from the staid programming that mars so many similar tribute concepts, Clayton led the Blue Note Quintet through forward-looking arrangements and high-stakes interplay that expanded in its boldness as the tour rolled on. “Somehow, things grew both tighter and looser,” he says. The depth of the band’s communication, and the confidence of its aesthetic, lead to two critically acclaimed releases under the moniker Out Of/Into, the quintet released Motion I in December 2024 followed by Motion II in December 2025.

Along the way, Clayton has proven a collaborative presence capable of elevating any ensemble. In addition to Lloyd and Hargrove, his list of credits is staggering — from monumental peers like Ambrose Akinmusire, to postbop heroes including John Scofield, Terri Lyne Carrington and Bill Frisell, to crossover superstar Diana Krall. To detail just one project, Clayton took on Duke Ellington’s role when Carrington, reimagined the iconic LP Money Jungle, casting herself as Max Roach and Christian McBride as Charles Mingus. Her effort won the Grammy for Best Jazz Instrumental Album in 2014; among the other nominees was Clayton’s Life Forum.

In the end, Clayton is driven by his search for meaning and beauty, and by a muse that shifts and advances as he does. “I don’t feel like I can be pinned into one aesthetic or idea,” Clayton says.

“I have an open mind,” he continues, pausing. “I have an open heart. And I strive to express the full range of that in my art.”

Washington, DC-born and North Carolina-raised, Grammy nominated vocalist, composer and educator Christie Dashiell lives at the musical crossroads of jazz, rhythm and blues, gospel and soul. Known for her improvisational prowess and effortlessly rich and clear tone, she has become one of the most sought-after artists on the scene today. Growing up in a musical family, Christie has been singing all of her life. She is the third of four multi-talented and musical children of jazz bassist, Carroll Dashiell, Jr. Her musical lineage is deeply rooted.

Christie is a graduate of Howard University and the Manhattan School of Music. While at Howard, Christie sang in the university’s premier vocal jazz ensemble, Afro-Blue. As a member of the Afro-Blue, she appeared on NBC’s “The Sing Off.” She has twice received recognition in DownBeat Magazine’s Student Music Awards as Outstanding Soloist and Best Vocalist in the Graduate College division and was selected as a semifinalist in the 2015 Thelonious Monk Institute International Vocals Competition.

Christie’s long awaited sophomore album, Journey In Black, was nominated for a 2025 Grammy Award in the category of Best Jazz Vocal Album, and deemed a “masterpiece” by Downbeat Magazine, features seven original compositions and two arrangements that explore themes of freedom, legacy, grief and joy. Funded in part by Chamber Music America’s Performance Plus Grant, the collection of music fuses the sounds of improvised music and various styles of Black American Music. Titled Journey in Black, the album boasts a stellar cast of musicians, including Shedrick Mitchell, Marquis Hill, Allyn Johnson, Romeir Mendez and Carroll Dashiell, III with creative guidance from NEA Jazz Master, Dianne Reeves. 

Josette Wiggan began her dance adventure with Paul and Arlene Kennedy in Los Angeles at the age of 12. Her love for performing was fostered by the Kennedys and then refined as an adult while working with Jazz Tap Ensemble.

A graduate of UCLA, Wiggan’s career highlights include, the 2001 Spotlight Award winner in non-classical dance category, the 1st National Broadway Tour of 42nd Street, movies Idlewild and Princess and the Frog and studying with Germaine Acogny at L’ecole les Sables in Toubab Dialaw, Senegal.

Alongside her brother, she was a part of two original casts of Cirque du Soleil’s Banana Shpeel and Michael Jackson: The Immortal World Tour from 2009-2013. The duo also performed in Tireless, a curated show by Michelle Dorrance that had its debut at Jacob’s Pillow in 2017.

In 2019, Wiggan was also a co-creator with Michelle Dorrance and Hannah Heller for a Christmas work entitled, …The Nutcracker Suite… and in 2020 created and directed a work for film featuring vernacular jazz and tap dance entitled, Harlem Stomp.

Most recently Wiggan, in collaboration with jazz trumpeter extraordinaire, Keyon Harrold, created her latest work entitled Praise: The Inevitable Fruit of Gratitude. It had its debut with the Dorrance Dance Cast at Jacob’s Pillow and the Queens Theatre in the Park in 2021.

Wiggan is a sought after educator/choreographer/performer and director and can be seen teaching at festivals around the world. She is a Kennedy legacy holder and has dedicated her life to the perpetuation of African American Vernacular Jazz Dance.