Rudresh Mahanthappa's Bird Calls

Buffalo, NY- The Center for the Arts, University at Buffalo presents Rudresh Mahanthappa’s Bird Calls on Saturday, March 19, 2016 at 8:00pm. Tickets are $34.50, Students (any school) $20.50. The concert will be held in the intimate Drama Theatre as part of the Center’s Jazz Series.

Few musicians share the ability of alto saxophonist/composer Rudresh Mahanthappa to embody the expansive possibilities of his music with his culture. What has materialized is a sound that blends progressive jazz and South Indian classical music in a fluid and forward-looking form that reflects Mahanthappa's own experience growing up a second-generation Indian-American. The current manifestations of that trajectory include his latest project Bird Calls, which was issued in 2015 and named “Album of the Year” in Downbeat Magazine's International Critics Poll. Rudresh was also honored as “Alto Saxophonist of the Year” for the fourth time, as well as “Rising Star Composer of the Year” in the poll.

Though it pays homage to Charlie “Bird” Parker, one of jazz’s Founding Fathers, Bird Calls is not a tribute album. But Bird’s DNA is strongly present in all of the pieces, each of which takes a particular Parker melody or solo as its source of inspiration then is wholly reimagined and re-contextualized by Mahanthappa and his quintet.

Mahanthappa has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and numerous commissions. He has been named alto saxophonist of the year for five years running by the Jazz Journalists Association. In 2013 he received the prestigious Doris Duke Performing Artist Award.

Tickets: Center for the Arts Box Office (Mon-Fri 10 am-6 pm) and tickets.com.  To charge tickets call 1-888-223-6000. Groups call 716-645-6771. For more information call 716-645-2787 or visit www.ubcfa.org or www.rudreshm.com.