Returning for the third year, Monterey Jazz Festival's Sunday Morning Gospel will once again feature pianist Tammy L. Hall and the Texas Southern University Gospel Choir.
Grammy Award-winning pianist, composer, arranger, lecturer, and musical director Tammy L. Hall began playing the piano at age four and is still devoted to that instrument, music, and its calling. After attending Mills College in Oakland, California, Hall’s career now spans more than four decades, with no end in sight.
In pursuit of the creation and development and performance of Good Music, Tammy has worked with and accompanied numerous vocalists and instrumentalists, including: Etta Jones, Ernestine Anderson, Melba Moore, Darlene Love, Linda Tillery, Holly Near, Alive!, Barbara Dane, Kim Nalley, Ph.D.; Tiffany Austin, Queen Esther Marrow, Rhiannon, Mary Wilson, Denise Perrier, and the vocal trio of Brown, Sturgis & Brown; saxophonists Houston Person and David “Fathead” Newman, Noah Howard, Kristen Strom, Tia Fuller, James Carter; guitarists Greg Skaff and Mimi Fox, Grammy Award-winning violinists Regina Carter, Laurie Anderson, and Mads Tolling; “Harpist from the Hood” Destiny Muhammad, NEA Jazz Master and three-time Grammy Award-winning drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, drummer/bandleader Allison Miller, and bassist/bandleader Marcus Shelby, three-time Grammy Award-winning bassist Ruth Davies, and Dr. Angela Davis. Most recently, Tammy has begun a new collaboration with the sublime classical vocalist, Leberta Lorál.
In 2017, the Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle awarded Tammy the honor of Best Musical Direction for Blues Is A Woman, written by Pamela Rose. Other theatrical productions include Sister Act, produced by Theatre Rhinoceros (2017), Ella Fitzgerald: An American Story (Kim Nalley/Cinnabar Theater 2010); Bessie, Dinah and Denise (Denise Perrier 2005-2018), Black Odyssey (2017, Marcus Gardley/Linda Tillery, music director/Cal Shakes), and many other collaborative projects.
Just recently, Tammy recorded with members of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, whose new conductor, the very much celebrated Esa-Pekka Salonen, begins his highly awaited tenure as one of the most adventurous and progressive music directors/conductors in that milieu. The project, Currents: Bay Area Blue Notes, a new series is curated by the late Maestro Michael Morgan, conductor of the Oakland Symphony and guest conductor of the San Francisco Symphony. Shelter-in-place restrictions have made us all dive deeply into our creative pools and some great ideas/concepts certainly have emerged —Currents being one of them. Currents seeks to celebrate the unifying force of music through its many and varied genres by illuminating the commonalities shared in all genres. Tammy was personally chosen by Morgan to play on the jazz segment of the series, which aired in August 2020. In 2021, Marcus Shelby, Artistic Director of the Healdsburg Jazz Festival, conferred upon Tammy the honor of inaugural Artist-in-Residence for the 2021-22 season. She premiered her first written (theatrical) work in progress: Convergence, a story of an imagined meeting between Mary Lou Williams, Dorothy Donegan, Nina Simone and Hazel Scott, in March 2021.
