Jazz aficionados won’t want to miss the fall faculty recital at State College of Florida, Manatee-Sarasota (SCF) as Pete Carney, director of jazz studies, presents his original compositions in “Music from a Distant River,” at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 1, at SCF’s Neel Performing Arts Center, 5840 26th St. W. The concert is free and open to the public.
Carney is a saxophonist and arranger who has worked with Grammy Award winners Kirk Franklin, Tito Puente, The Winans and rock legends, The Plain White T’s. He has opened for B.B. King in a Mississippi cotton field, Al Green at The Superdome and Aretha Franklin in Chicago. He has performed with The Tommy Dorsey Band, Milt Jackson, Curtis Fuller, Arturo Sandoval, The New World Symphony and toured Europe with various groups.
As a writer, he has scored for The Chicago Blues Festival, Imatra Big Band Festival in Finland, Looking Glass Theater and the Pori Jazz Festival. His own group, Orange Alert, headlined the Rochester International Jazz Festival, Milwaukee’s Jazz in the Park, Halo-London and was the first American group to perform at the Aberdeen Jazz Festival in Scotland. His albums “Orange Alert” and “Redline Grooves” have been featured on NPR Electro Lounge, NBC and the BBC.
Carney holds two degrees from the University of Michigan in classical saxophone and music composition, and a master’s from Florida International University. He recently completed his doctorate in jazz at the University of Illinois with his dissertation on jazz modeling of Louis Armstrong and Alice Coltrane by the rock band Radiohead.
The music education method he designed, known as “Interactive Listening,” is taught in hundreds of schools around the world, including the University of North Carolina, Florida International University and the United Nations International School. Florida adopted Carney’s self-published method as the official state music textbook for high school and middle school curriculum in 2016.
For more information, contact Carney at CarneyP@SCF.edu or 941-752-5590.