Gene Bertoncini and Roni Ben-Hur
WHEN: Sunday, April 15. Doors open at 3 p.m., and the music is performed from 3:30-5:30 p.m., with one short intermission.
WHERE: Shanghai Jazz, 24 Main St. in Madison
TICKETS: free for New Jersey Jazz Society members and $10 for non-members. There is also a $10 food/beverage minimum.
For more information, email music@njjs.org, or call 973 372-5409.
In 2008, guitarists Gene Bertoncini (right) and Roni Ben-Hur recorded a duet album on the Motema Music label called Smile, a fundraiser for the Dizzy Gillespie Memorial Fund at Englewood Hospital. In his review in the Washington Post, Geoffrey Himes said the two musicians “sound extremely comfortable together”, adding that Bertoncini “plays a nylon-string guitar with classical and Brazilian influences like the late Charlie Byrd,” and “Ben-Hur plays a hollow-body electric guitar in the boppish style of Pat Martino.”
Bertoncini and Ben-Hur (left) will again be playing together, at the New Jersey Jazz Society’s Sunday jazz social held at Shanghai Jazz in Madison. Bertoncini, a member of the jazz faculty at William Paterson University in Wayne, started out his career as member of the Tonight Show band during Johnny Carson’s tenure. He has worked with composers and arrangers such as Michel Legrand and Lalo Schifrin and has performed with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. Ben-Hur has appeared and recorded with such jazz legends as pianist Barry Harris, tenor saxophonist Jimmy Heath, and trumpeter Clark Terry. They will be joined by bassist Josh Marcum.
Funding for the New Jersey Jazz Society socials has been made possible in part by Morris Arts through the N.J. State Council on the Arts/Department of State, a partner agency of the National Endowment for the Arts.
