Wayne Krantz Power Trio ft. Evan Marien & Josh Dion
AVAILABLE IN EUROPE
2025 | MARCH
Line up
Wayne Krantz | Guitar
(Steely Dan, Michael Brecker, Donald Fagen, Billy Cobham, Chris Potter, David Binney, Carla Bley, Tim Lefebvre, Keith Carlock)
Evan Marien | Bass
(Dana Hawkins, Virgil Donati, Tigran Hamasyan, Elliot Moss, Justin Brown’s NYEUSI, Allan Holdsworth’s band, Cory Wong, Button Masher)
Josh Dion | Drums
(Chuck Loeb, Candy Dulfer, Spyro Gyra, Will Lee, Pat Martino, Jeff Kashiwa, Jason Miles, Anthony Jackson, Edgar Winter, Randy Brecker, Bob James, Eric Marienthal, Til Bronner, Jim Beard, Ivan Lins)
WAYNE KRANTZ
Wayne Krantz was born in Corvallis, Oregon. He released his first album, Signals, in 1990, sporting an array of recognized jazz musicians such as Dennis Chambers, Don Alias, Anthony Jackson, and others.
In 1992, he formed a trio with bassist Lincoln Goines and drummer Zach Danziger and recorded two albums with them, Long To Be Loose (1993) and 2 Drink Minimum (1995), a live album, and began playing regularly at the 55 Bar, a jazz club in New York City. In 1996, Krantz released an acoustic album with Leni Stern, dubbed Separate Cages. After playing with Steely Dan for several years, Krantz formed a new trio in 1997 with Tim Lefebvre on bass and Keith Carlock on drums; on June 28, 2007, he played his final regular Thursday night gig at New York’s 55 Bar. As of October and November 2018, he is playing regularly at 55 Bar again with a rotating cast of sidemen.
Wayne Krantz’s first three solo albums were released on the jazz label Enja Records. His next three albums, 1999’s Greenwich Mean, 2003’s Your Basic Live, and 2007’s Your Basic Live ’06 were all released from Wayne’s private website. Like 2 Drink Minimum, these albums are excerpts of various sets at the 55 Bar. These albums also include more use of effects pedals, and are more unscripted and improvised than the previous three. He contributed to Donald Fagen’s release Morph the Cat, and toured with Fagen’s band in early 2006. He was featured on tenor saxophonist Chris Potter’s 2006 release, Underground.
Wayne Krantz signed with record label Abstract Logix to release his first studio record in over fifteen years. Krantz Carlock Lefebvre (2009) features the core trio of Krantz, Carlock on drums and Lefebvre on bass. In 2012, Krantz released Howie 61 (a reference to Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited), which includes performances by Keith Carlock, James Genus, John Patitucci, Charley Drayton, Tal Wilkenfeld, Vinnie Colaiuta, Anton Fig, Yasushi Miura, Jeremy Stacey, Paul Stacey, Pino Palladino, Gabriela Anders, Kenny Wollesen, Nate Wood, Henry Hey and Owen Biddle. In 2014, Krantz released “Good Piranha/Bad Piranha,” a live-in-the-studio album featuring his two dominant trio combinations at the time: Nate Wood/Keith Carlock and Tim Lefebvre/Nate Wood. The bands each recorded the same four cover songs with radically different improvisational results.
EVAN MARIEN
Evan Marien is an award-winning bassist, composer, producer, author, educator, and 3D artist, born and raised in the cornfields of Decatur, Illinois. He graduated from Berklee College of Music in 2009 and has lived in the NYC area since 2010.
Known for his collaborations with drummer Dana Hawkins, he has also performed in the bands of Tigran Hamasyan, Wayne Krantz, Tim Miller, Virgil Donati, Elliot Moss, Justin Brown’s NYEUSI, and was the last bassist to perform in guitar legend Allan Holdsworth’s band.
His latest release, ‘Elysian’ features Dana Hawkins, Tigran Hamasyan, Fredrik Thordendal, Plini, Intervals, J3PO, Tim Miller, Cory Wong, Zac Zinger, Button Masher, and Miguel Atwood-Ferguson.
You can hear his bass playing on numerous albums such as Tigran Hamasyan’s “The Call Within,” Virgil Donati’s “In This Life,” and “Ruination”, and Steve Hunt’s “Connections”.
His playing can also be heard on the Mitski song ‘Nobody,’ for which he received a gold record for participating on the album ‘Be The Cowboy,’ as well as on the songs ‘Should’ve Been Me’ and ‘That’s Our Lamp’ from her most recent album, ‘Laurel Hell’.
In partnership with MadeMusicStudio, Evan has composed music for renowned brands such as AT&T, Lexus, and NPR. Most recently, he won a 2022 CLIO award for composing the sonic logo and anthem for Turner Classic Movies (TCM).
As an author, he has written numerous books about his distinctive Hexatonic method for the bass guitar, as well as created video courses describing his specialized right hand technique. His first book, ‘Transcriptions Vol. 1,’ was an Amazon Best Seller in its first week of release.
Evan is also a part-time faculty member at The New School in New York City, where he specializes in providing private lessons to the next generation of contemporary musicians.
Evan Marien is a MarkBass artist!
Evan Marien
JOSH DION
Josh Dion was born at the tail end of the disco funk era, when popular radio bore the sounds of Quincy Jones, Michael Jackson, and ‘four on the floor’ drum beats! Raised in Storrs, CT, Josh started playing his father’s drums before he even started kindergarten. He grew up playing drums to the simple and beat driven sounds of Nick Mason and Ringo Starr. He also lived across the hall from his older brother, who not only followed the Grateful Dead, but introduced him to Cream at the tender age of seven. Rightfully so, Cream, Zeppelin and the Stones led Dion to Willie Dixon, Robert Johnson and beyond.
A prodigious talent, Josh started playing professionally at age eight and was invited to shed with the UConn Jazz Studies program by the time he was twelve. While he was impressing people with his percussion skills, he was playing piano and singing in his local church, developing talents which would eventually help him stand out even among the world class drummers in whose company he has now found himself.
After a stint in the music program at New Jersey’s William Paterson University, he has made New York City his home. Josh’s college days were greeted by an immersion in the Jam band scene with NYC funk band ulu, who toured the Eastern half of the US. Josh was soon noticed by jazz guitarist Chuck Loeb, who offered Josh an opportunity to be seen and heard by a whole new level of the music audience. From that platform, he has gone on to work with some of the major brand names of the music world: Candy Dulfer, Spyro Gyra, Will Lee, Pat Martino, Jeff Kashiwa, Jason Miles, Anthony Jackson, Edgar Winter, Randy Brecker, Bob James, Eric Marienthal, Til Bronner, Jim Beard, Ivan Lins and on and on.
Meanwhile, Josh Dion has been developing his solo career with the CD releases of the Josh Dion Band (www.joshdionband.net), their debut “Give Love” and the imminent “Josh Dion Band Live.” The Josh Dion Band has another studio release planned for early 2007.
“Give Love” was greeted with effusive praise by the UK’s Drummer magazine, who described it as “Brian Wilson meets Hall and Oates, with possibly Bruce Springsteen looking in and drums that sound like they were recorded at Muscle Shoals Studios. This is a collection of epic songs that build and move as songs used to in the old days when songwriters were exactly that and labels like Motown and Stax were market leaders…Great voice, great drums and great, great tunes…Dion is a young player that is going to create a very big impression indeed. Not only can this fella lay down a super funky beat, but he sings with a soulful voice that totally melts your mind…You are going to be hearing more from this extremely talented young musician…If there is any justice in this world, Dion will be huge.” YEAH!
Josh also enjoys nature-walking, driving, and attending history lectures.
GEAR LIST
Absolute Maple Nouveau
ABD-1518JF 18″x14″
ATT-1512J 12″x8″
AFT-1516 16″x16″
ASD-0545 14″x5.5″
MNS-1470EJ Elvin Jones Signature
What’s going on: https://www.coralriff.biz/events/
DENNIS CHAMBERS
JOEL TAYLOR
Grammy winning guitar virtuoso, Frank Gambale, exploded on the L.A. scene in the early ‘80s. His meteoric rise to fame is a testament to his passion-powered playing – a style Rolling Stone magazine called “ferocious!”
Grammy-award winning keyboardist George Whitty has spent 30 years playing on the road with the Brecker Brothers, Herbie Hancock, David Sanborn, Richard Bona, Chaka Khan, Sadao Watanabe, and a dozen others, and his resume as a session musician and producer includes some of the best-selling records of all time: Santana’s “Supernatural” (with Dave Matthews), Celine Dion’s “Falling Into You” and “These are Special Times”, and more than 300 other CDs. As a producer/keyboardist, his Grammy-winning streak began with Chaka Khan’s “The Woman I Am” in 1992 and extends through 3 award-winning releases with the Brecker Brothers, most recently Randy Brecker’s “34th and Lex”, 2004’s Grammy-winner for Contemporary Jazz Record of the Year. In April 2010, he completed work on several tracks for Herbie Hancock’s CD “The Imagine Project”, programming Herbie’s live rig for the tour as well. As a composer, he’s written for hundreds of episodes of television and several award-winning films, composing for a dozen shows from “The Road to Stardom with Missy Elliot” to “As the World Turns”, for which he was nominated for a 2006 Emmy award. In 2014 he won an Emmy award for scoring the long-running series “All My Children”. George recently finished the score to the feature film comedy “The Getdown”, which is in the rotation on Showtime, and has recently been working with Herbie Hancock, both as keyboardist in Herbie’s band at the Hollywood Bowl for 2012s “Concert for Peace”, and as an arranger/keyboardist, recently completing several orchestral arrangements for a duo CD for Herbie and classical pianist Lang Lang. George arranged 3 classic Herbie pieces for the LA Philharmonic’s 100th Anniversary Concert at the Hollywood Bowl, featuring Herbie and his band, and for a performance by Herbie at Disney hall in Los Angeles. In March of 2020 he arranged several pieces for full orchestra for Residente’s sold-out performance with the LA Phil, the night after 2 more pieces he arranged for Herbie Hancock premiered at Disney Hall. In May, 2018, George and his trio Third Rail played a nearly sold-out 3 nights at the Cotton Club in Tokyo. In 2020 George finished production and writing on a duo CD for Eric Marienthal and Randy Brecker, “Double Dealin’”, in addition to a number of other CD projects. In addition to all of his studio playing, producing and arranging projects, George maintains a busy schedule as a touring artist, currently playing around the world with Frank Gambale’s band, David Sanborn, Randy Brecker, Armand Sabal-Lecco (Paul Simon bassist), and Chris Minh Doky, in addition to ongoing Third Rail projects. He is currently mixing and mastering a steady stream of CDs, conducting clinics and master classes and teaching around the world. In the summer of 2015 he became the Jazz Piano instructor at Artistworks.com, the leading online lessons website. In between all his musical activities, he enjoys life in the mountains outside Los Angeles with his 2 boys and 2 cats.
Dominique Di Piazza was born in Lyon, France, with Sicilian ancestry and a gypsy stepfather. He started playing electric bass in 1979. After some time, he managed to free himself from the pervasive influence that Jaco Pastorius had over most bassists at the time, by creating his own style. Self-taught, he added an extra high string to his 4-string bass and created his own technique of using the right-hand thumb, index and middle fingers. This unique approach enabled a virtuosity and style that is quite unusual in the world of bass. A defining example is the track « Marie » a flagship piece for solo bass from the 90s, found on the album « Que alegria » by John McLaughlin.
Gergo is a professional drummer originally from Hungary but now living in Barcelona, Spain.
“It’s Jazz. It just doesn’t sound like it.”
also an early user of the five-string electric bass.
Anton Fig, known as “The Thunder from Down Under”, is a South African session drummer, perhaps best known as the drummer and second-in-command for Paul Shaffer and the World’s Most Dangerous Band. David Letterman, for whom the band served as house band on his late-night talk shows, often referred to Fig as “Anton Zip” or “Buddy Rich Jr.” Fig is also well known for his work with Kiss, Ace Frehley and Joe Bonamassa.