In a Silent Way: Joel Harrison Quartet plays Miles Davis

In a Silent Way at Bird & Beckett brings guitarist and composer Joel Harrison, a former Berkeley resident now based in New York, back to the Bay Area to work through Miles Davis’s 1970 record of that name. A 2010 Guggenheim Fellow and two-time winner of the Jazz Composers Alliance competition, Harrison has around twenty albums as a leader spanning jazz, country, contemporary classical and Indian and African traditions, and the New Orleans Times-Picayune credited him with creating a new blueprint for jazz. He is joined by three Bay Area players: bassoonist and saxophonist Paul Hanson, an NEA jazz fellowship recipient who appears on Bela Fleck and the Flecktones’ Grammy-winning Outbound; bassist Michael Manring, who recorded extensively for Windham Hill and took lessons from Jaco Pastorius; and drummer Scott Amendola, a T.J. Kirk alumnus and one of the busiest players on the Bay Area creative music scene. The set reaches beyond the album as well.