The New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation presents the jazz pianist Cyrus Chestnut and his trio in a special concert on Thursday, March 31, 2016, at the George and Joyce Wein Jazz & Heritage Center. WWOZ will be broadcasting live from the 8p performance.

For Chestnut, there has always been a deep connection between jazz and God. He believes jazz to be a religious musical genre. "I believe the ability to play music is a gift from God and every time I play, I'm thankful. Every time I sit down to play, for me, is worship and expression," he told Down Beat magazine. To this day, Chestnut attends church every Sunday, and whenever he can he plays in the local church in Brooklyn, New York, where he lives with his family. He told CBS News, "If I'm not working, you'll find me in somebody's church."

Chestnut has earned a reputation for his skillful versatility, his ability for blending sounds and for unabashedly bringing gospel into the club performances he gives. And despite his sense of playful showmanship, he takes jazz very seriously and believes that jazz has great staying power. "Just as Bruce Springsteen has that ability to appeal to a mass audience, I have a vision that jazz can do the same. You can't underestimate the power of this music," Chestnut told the St. Petersburg Times.

“The pianist Cyrus Chestnut is one of jazz’s most convincing anachronisms. His brand of crisp articulation and blues-inflected harmony evokes another era, sometime before the ascent of Bill Evans and McCoy Tyner, to say nothing of Herbie Hancock and Keith Jarrett. But unlike the typical nostalgist, who pines for the past partly because of a queasy discomfort with the present, Mr. Chestnut appears comfortable with his placement in time. What makes his music fly is a complete security in his style, and that sense of untroubled self-assurance.” — New York Times

http://www.jazzandheritage.org/events/cyrus-chestnut-in-concert