Ninety Miles

Ninety Miles
featuring Stefon Harris, Nicholas Payton & David Sánchez

Friday, April 26, 2013 . 8PM
Ninety Miles
Ninety Miles photo by Jimmy Katz
Principal People: 

Vibraphone Stefon Harris

Trumpet Nicholas Payton

Saxophone David Sánchez

Event Attributes

Presented By

Presented By: 
Venue: 
Intermission: 
90 minutes with no intermission
Program Notes: 

The distance between the coastal United States and Cuba is a short 90 miles but politics and history have sometimes made the distance seem insurmountable.

The Ninety Miles Project brought leading Cuban and American jazz musicians together in Cuba over the span of a week to record music that both highlights and synthesizes their different cultures.

The program at the Center features three American-based artists — vibist Stefon Harris, trumpeter Nicholas Payton and saxophonist David Sánchez — who, along with three additional players, will perform the distinctly unique collection of songs inspired by this Cuban-American collaboration.

This tour engagement of Stefon Harris is funded through the Mid Atlantic Tours Program of Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation with support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Maryland State Arts Council.

This performance is included in Diversity Through Music, an event series sponsored by the UMD Office of Diversity Education and Compliance and the Nyumburu Cultural Center through a grant from the Office of Diversity and Inclusion with the cooperation of the Clarice Smith Center. To view a full schedule of events, visit the Nyumburu Cultural Center’s website.

Preview by Washington City Paper

The Ninety Miles project…was a recording-studio summit…made possible by recently eased U.S. travel restrictions. The result was one of the best Latin jazz albums of 2011, a brilliant collection of original music that could only have come from a collision of American and Cuban traditions. (A live performance, recorded in Havana days after the initial sessions and issued last year, was one of 2012’s best.)

– MICHAEL J. WEST, Washington City Paper, Friday, April 26, 2013

Preview by The Gazette

Tenor sax man David Sánchez and two other American jazz musicians went to Havana for nine days in 2010 to collaborate with Cuban musicians to make a live CD and documentary DVD called “Ninety Miles.”

…Sánchez liked the project’s title so much that he and the other American musicians kept it for the traveling jazz band of American musicians…

“We discovered as we toured that we had a great chemistry,” Sánchez said. “Now we do our own take on the [original collaborative] project.”

– VIRGINIA TERHUNE, The Gazette, Thursday, April 25, 2013

Resources from the Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library

Our neighbors at the Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library have compiled a list of available resources relevant to this performance:

Stefon Harris, vibraphone

Nicholas Payton, trumpet

David Sánchez, saxophone

Afro-Cuban jazz, Cuban music and Cuban jazz in America