Joey Sellers Trio at The Nash

Joey Sellers Trio is Sellers’ latest endeavor, closing boundaries between improvisation and composition. The Joey Trio plays unique improvised music that straddles myriad genres. Plus, where else are you going to hear balloon music?! Sellers is recipient of the Gil Evans Fellowship In Jazz Composition, the Sammy Nestico Award, and the Julius Hemphill Award. An accomplished composer in both jazz and classical idioms, Sellers has written for Doc Severinsen, the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, symphony orchestras in Tulsa, Long Beach and San Antonio and several works commissioned by the St. Louis Brass...

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Joey Sellers Trio is Sellers’ latest endeavor, closing boundaries between improvisation and composition. The Joey Trio plays unique improvised music that straddles myriad genres. Plus, where else are you going to hear balloon music?! Sellers is recipient of the Gil Evans Fellowship In Jazz Composition, the Sammy Nestico Award, and the Julius Hemphill Award. An accomplished composer in both jazz and classical idioms, Sellers has written for Doc Severinsen, the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, symphony orchestras in Tulsa, Long Beach and San Antonio and several works commissioned by the St. Louis Brass. Warner Brothers, Advance Music, and Hal Leonard have published his music and transcriptions. He has received grants from the American Music Center, Meet the Composer, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He moved to Los Angeles in 1985, where he performed actively on piano and trombone. The 11-piece ensemble manifested itself there as the Jazz Aggregation, and that ensemble’s recordings and performances garnered critical praise. The Los Angeles Times says of the ensemble, “[Joey Sellers’] Jazz Aggregation is one of the most exciting new surprises of the decade.” The Penguin Guide to Jazz states of the Aggregation’s 9Winds release Pastels, Ashes “Sellers blends structure and surprise with a deftness that should leave other arrangers genuflecting.” In Los Angeles, Sellers played and recorded with the Kim Richmond/Clay Jenkins Ensemble, Joe LaBarbara, Bruce Fowler, Allen Vizzutti and Bobby Shew. He studied improvisation with Warne Marsh, and jazz composition with Bill Holman. During this period, Sellers also served as music director, trombonist and pianist for the Side Street Strutters, reworking and adapting the music of Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, Fletcher Henderson and other seminal jazz figures for that ensemble’s six recordings for StopTime Records.

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