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$20 general admission
Students free (ticket required)

Mead Witter School of Music Faculty Artist Series

“An Evening of Jazz Standards”
With Dan Cavanagh, piano, with and bass and drumset
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Dan Cavanagh is a composer and pianist who has garnered numerous awards in both areas. In 2023 he was awarded the Social Justice Prize in Wind Ensemble Composition as well as 2nd Prize in the American Prize for Composition in the Wind Symphony/Band Category. He received a 2009 gold medal prize from the International Music Prize for Excellence in Composition, and in 2017 he was awarded a Special Judges’ Citation in the American Prize for Chamber Music Composition. As a composer Cavanagh has been commissioned to write for Latin Grammy-winning AfroBop Alliance, the legendary Patti LaBelle, and a wide range of classical and jazz performers across North America and Europe. He has released five jazz recordings as a leader, including Pulse and Heart of the Geyser on Seattle’s OA2 Records, and two recordings with Minnesota-based vibraphonist Dave Hagedorn, Horizon and 20 Years. His most recent recording with James Miley and John Hollenbeck was released on Japan’s S/N Alliance Records in November 2022 to critical acclaim. His music can be heard on many other recordings both classical and jazz. His film scoring work can be heard in the documentary The Beat Hotel, a film exploring the hotel in Paris in the late 1950s and early 1960s where the beat poets, led by Allen Ginsberg, lived and created much of their famous work.

Cavanagh continues to be commissioned and programmed around the world. His compositions for wind symphony and saxophone/piano are published by Murphy Music Press, and his works for jazz big band are published by UNC Jazz Press, Sierra Music Publications, and E-Jazz Lines.

Cavanagh has performed extensively in North America and Europe as a pianist, and he has also performed in Asia and Central America. He has appeared in concert with Grammy-winners Irma Thomas, Adonis Rose, and Joe McCarthy and a wide number of jazz artists across the world. He has been a finalist in the EuropaFest Jazz Contest in Bucharest, Romania, and in the Jacksonville Jazz Festival Piano Competition. Cavanagh is the Pamela O. Hamel/Board of Advisors Director of the Mead Witter School of Music and Professor of Composition and Jazz Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Prior to his time at UW-Madison he held numerous appointments at the University of Texas at Arlington, where he served for eighteen years. From 2015-2020, he served as the Co-Chair of Region VI for the Society of Composers, Inc., an international organization dedicated to new and contemporary music and composers. In Texas, Cavanagh served as the Vice Chairman of the Board of Trustees for the Dallas Winds, a five-time Grammy nominated professional Wind Symphony, and now serves on the boards of the Madison Symphony Orchestra and the Wisconsin Youth Symphony Orchestra.

Cavanagh received his Ph.D. in Creative Arts from the University of Tasmania (Australia), where he studied with composer Maria Grenfell and gospel pianist Andrew Legg, and additional studies with jazz composer and guitarist Glen Hodges. He received a Master of Music in Jazz Studies from the University of Oregon (studies with Steve Owen, Randy Porter, Toby Koenigsberg, and Robert Kyr) and a Bachelor of Music from St. Olaf College in Northfield, MN, (primary studies with Dave Hagedorn, Peter Hamlin, Timothy Mahr, and Mary Ellen Childs).

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Jazz is America’s music and the U.S. Navy Band Commodores, the Navy’s premier jazz ensemble, have been performing the very best of big band jazz for the Navy and the nation for 50 years. Formed in 1969, this 18-member group continues the jazz big band legacy with some of the finest musicians in the world. The Commodores’ mission includes public concerts, national concert tours, ceremonial support in honoring our veterans, jazz education classes and clinics, and protocol performances for high-level military and civilian government officials.

The Commodores are held in high regard nationwide by concert patrons and critics alike. The list of guest artists that have appeared with the Commodores reads like a who’s who of jazz and popular music: Ray Charles, Branford Marsalis, Clark Terry, Grover Washington Jr., Chris Potter, Jerry Bergonzi, Eddie Daniels, James Moody and many more. They have appeared on television shows, played nearly all major jazz festivals and toured across the United States and abroad. As a versatile and relevant musical organization in the 21st century, the Commodores write and arrange much of their vast library of music. Their concerts are an eclectic mix of traditional big band music, exciting jazz vocal arrangements and fresh new instrumental music written specifically for the Commodores of today. This vibrant, dynamic musical group is constantly striving for musical excellence and the pursuit of new and exciting ways to communicate with their audiences.

Purchase tickets
$20 general admission
Students free (ticket required)

Mead Witter School of Music Guest Artist Series

Hank Dutt, viola

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The longtime violist of the Kronos Quartet, Hank Dutt has been a major figure in expanding the role of chamber music of the 20th and 21st centuries. With Kronos, he was part of a major commissioning project, with many works written to showcase Dutt in particular.

Dutt graduated from Indiana University, where he studied with violists David Dawson, and Georges Janzer, earning his BM and MM degrees. Mentors at the university included János Starker and Josef Gingold, and among his collaborators at school was future Kronos Quartet cellist Joan Jeanrenaud.

In 1977, Dutt joined the Kronos Quartet. With over 40 albums to its credit and having performed worldwide, the Kronos Quartet has been called “probably the most famous ‘new music’ group in the world” and been praised in philosophical studies of music for the inclusiveness of its repertoire.

Kronos has performed live with the poet Allen Ginsberg, Astor Piazzolla, The National, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Tom Waits, David Bowie, Paul McCartney and Björk, and has recorded with Nelly Furtado, Rokia Traoré, Joan Armatrading, Brazilian electronica artist Amon Tobin, Texas yodeler Don Walser, Faith No More, Tiger Lillies. It has worked with many minimalist composers, including John Adams, Arvo Pärt, George Crumb, Henryk Górecki, Steve Reich, John Luther Adams, Roberto Paci Dalò, Philip Glass, Terry Riley, Peter Sculthorpe and Kevin Volans; collaborators hail from a diversity of countries—Kaija Saariaho from Finland, Pēteris Vasks from Latvia, Franghiz Ali-Zadeh from Azerbaijan, Homayun Sakhi from Afghanistan, Hamza El Din from Egypt, Victoria Vita Polevá from Ukraine and Fernando Otero, Astor Piazzolla, and Osvaldo Golijov from Argentina. Many of Kronos’s string-quartet arrangements were published in 2007.

The 2023-2024 season marked the 50th anniversary of the Kronos Quartet, which featured celebratory concerts, premieres, and events at Carnegie Hall’s Isaac Stern Auditorium. Culminating this season was the Kronos Quartet “50 for the Future” project of a free library of 50 new works for string quartet.

In July 2024, Dutt retired from the Kronos Quartet and was succeeded by Ayane Kozasa. In October 2024, Hank was one of four featured violists performing and coaching for the Nobuko Imai Celebration in Cincinnati.