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PRESENTS
The Mark Gridley
“FluteJazz” Trio
Saturday, February 6th,
8pm - midnight
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Gridley’s trios have been featured on
such Cleveland television shows as The Morning Exchange and The Afternoon
Exchange, and they have broadcasted concerts on WCLV and WRUW radio. They have performed concerts at Blossom
Music Center, Severance Hall, the Cleveland Museum of Art, Beck Center and
Karamu. Their leader has been profiled in Cleveland Magazine and the
Cleveland Plain Dealer FRIDAY! Magazine.
In the mid-1970s Mark Gridley was
saxophonist/flutist with the pit orchestra of the Front Row Theater. Opening
in July of 1974, Sammy Davis, Jr. featured Gridley as part of each show by
improvising a dance to Gridley’s flute improvisations. During one concert
at the end of that run, Sammy reached down into the pit to shake Gridley’s
hand, and told Gridley and the audience “You sure play the hell out of that
flute!”
While lecturer for the Music Department
of Case Western Reserve University, Gridley wrote a jazz history book
called Jazz Styles. The work became America’s most widely used
introduction to jazz, and its tenth edition was published last year. It is
currently available in Korean, Bulgarian, Japanese and Danish. The book has
been required in classes at more than 400 colleges, including Harvard,
Columbia, UCLA, CSU, KSU, CCC, Baldwin-Wallace and John Carroll University.
Its success led to commissions for jazz articles in Encyclopaedia Britannica and the Grove Dictionaries of Music. Gridley won the Outstanding
Achievement Award of the Educational Press Association of America and is
listed in Who’s Who in the Midwest and Marquis Who’s Who in
America.
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