The Antonio Madruga Quartet at the Sunny Isles Beach Jazz Festival 10/15/11

The Antonio Madruga Quartet will be performing at the Sunny Isles Beach Jazz Festival
Saturday, October 15, at 8 PM.
Heritage Park
19200 Collins Avenue.
Tickets are $25.

Featured are Antonio Madruga, piano, Felipe Lamoglia, sax, Russell Hall, bass, and Goetz Kujack, drums. The Quartet appears courtesy of KCC Productions and is opening for Spyro Gyra.

Antonio (“Tony”) Madruga was born in 1994 in Pembroke Pines, Florida. His home environment is one where music is highly appreciated. His father Omar played the trumpet during his youth, and his mother Cora prenatally exposed Tony to classical, jazz, and rhythm and blues by placing headphones on her abdomen. He began formal piano lessons at five, and has always loved to jazz up any song regardless of its original genre.

Tony has participated in local talent events since the age of eight and has earned various awards. He has appeared at the Lincoln Theater in Miami Beach, in Lecce, Italy, as part of the Miami International Piano Festival, and at the Golandsky Institute Symposium in Princeton, NJ. At Princeton he performed with Danilo Perez. He was featured in Jazziz magazine in October 2005.

He made his solo debut in 2006 for the Miami International Piano Festival at the Lincoln Theater. He was a guest performer in with Bill Charlap’s master Class at the 92nd Street Y festival in Manhattan. He was featured on HBO’s family special “The Music in Me”, performed with Danilo Perez at the Panamanian Jazz Festival, and played at the New York jazz Club Sweet Rhythm with David Rozenblatt (drums) and Matt Fieldes (bass). Paquito D’Rivera made a guest appearance with him, and he appeared on Leonard Lopate’s program on radio station WNYC. He also made a guest appearance at Birdland with the Chico O’Farrill Jazz Orchestra and at Carnegie Hall as the guest of Paquito D’Rivera.

He received a DownBeat magazine student award for outstanding solo jazz performance and as best classical pianist. He performed with Paquito D’Rivera at the Duke Ellington Jazz Festival in 2007, and in 2009 was invited to back up Paquito and Wynton Marsalis at the White House. In 2011 he joined Esaperanza Spalding at the Grammy awards in the 2011 Grammy Jazz Ensemble on national TV. That same year Wynton Marsalis named him to his “Who’s Got Next” list of rising young jazz musicians. In the summer he was named a semi-finalist in the prestigious Thelonious Monk competition. This is a story which is obviously just beginning!

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