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DAMIEN ESCOBAR
Born in the Jamaica neighborhood of Queens
in New York, Damien Escobar began playing
the violin at age , and two years later entered
a pre-college program at
e Juilliard School.
Damien and his older brother, Tourie, also
studied at the Bloomingdale School of Music in
Manhattan. In their teens, the duo began busk-
ing in subway stations and by
had earned
regular gigs around the city, performing as Nut-
tin’ But Stringz with a fusion of classical, R&B,
pop, and jazz music.
ey won a talent com-
petition at the Apollo
eater in
, and the
following year they appeared in the Channing
Tatum lm
Step Up
.
e Escobars released an
LP in the fall of
,
Struggle from the Subway
to the Charts
; its single “ under” was used in
numerous TV spots during
.
e brothers
also made several TV appearances themselves
that year, also performing at the White House
and ultimately competing on the third season
of
America’s Got Talent
, nishing in third place.
e duo was also invited to perform at one of
the events surrounding the rst inauguration
of President Obama in
, but they eventu-
ally parted ways in
. Damien retreated from
music and worked in real estate for a time, but
reemerged as a solo artist in
with gigs at the
Indy Car Championship Awards,
Food & Wine
magazine’s Best New Chef Awards, and Rus-
sell Simmons’ Hip-Hip Inaugural Ball, among
many other events, before releasing his rst solo
album,
Sensual Melodies
, in
.
at year he
also authored an autobiographical children’s
book,
e Sound of Strings
, and appeared on
Oprah’s “ e Life You Want” tour. He reentered
the charts in
with “Freedom,” a single o
his rst album, and in
with “Get Up and
Dance,” the lead single o his latest disc,
Bound-
less
(
), featuring entirely original material.
Damien Escobar is making his Ravinia debut.
JACOB COLLIER
Fusing jazz, a cappella, folk, electronic, classical,
gospel, and soul music with category-defying
improvisations, Jacob Collier has attracted more
than
thousand followers and million
YouTube streams since
, when he released
his rst homemade multitrack video. e singer,
composer, arranger, and multi-instrumentalist
has scored viral hits with both original tracks,
such as the electro-acoustic “Serendipity,” and
covers ranging from the Gershwins to Burt
Bacharach to Stevie Wonder (“Don’t You Worry
’Bout a ing”), making him especially popular
among jazz musicians such as Herbie Hancock,
Pat Metheny, Chick Corea, Take , and Quincy
Jones, who signed Collier to his management
group. While studying jazz piano performance
at the Royal Academy of Music in London,
Collier collaborated with Ben Bloomberg of
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s
Media Lab to design and build a revolutionary
one-man live performance vehicle to bring his
multi-instrumental, multi-visual format to the
stage, debuting it at the Montreux Jazz Festival
in
while opening for Hancock and Corea.
He subsequently was invited to give a TED Talk
about the technology in Vancouver in
.
Collier quickly became in demand as a musi-
cal collaborator, including for Beats by Dre’s
Rugby World Cup “ e Game Starts Here”
campaign, for which he arranged and recorded
the hymn “Jerusalem” as the soundtrack for the
commercial, and on Snarky Puppy’s early-
disc
Family Dinner, Vol.
. He released his rst
o cial single, “Hideaway,” soon a er, a preview
of his debut album,
In My Room
, which was re-
corded, composed, and produced his entirely at
his home in London and released in
.
e
disc won Collier two Grammy Awards, in both
of the arranging categories: Best Arrangement,
Instrumental or A Cappella, for “You and I” and
Best Arrangement, Instruments and Vocals, for
“Flintstones.” Later in
, he reinvented Sam-
sung’s “Over the Horizon” theme for the release
of its Galaxy / S phones and collaborated with
composer Hans Zimmer on the score to
Boss
Baby
. He also performed Pharrell Williams’s
song “Freedom” alongside the artist and Zim-
mer at Coachella
. Jacob Collier is making
his Ravinia debut.
SNARKY PUPPY
Formed by bassist and composer Michael
League in
, Snarky Puppy quickly trans-
formed from a group of University of North
Texas jazz program friends into a funky fusion
group once it began intersecting with the gospel
and R&B community of Dallas. Following a con-
cert album released in
,
Live at Uncommon
Ground
, Snarky Puppy gained a devoted fan base
with three independently produced studio discs,
e Only Constant
(
),
e World Is Getting
Smaller
(
),
Bring Us the Bright
(
), and
began attracting a wide range of musicians into
the group.
e band began releasing on the
Ropeadope label in
with
Tell Your Friends
,
the rst in a series of CD/DVD combos record-
ed with a studio audience, following up two
years later with
groundUP
. Supported by a grant
from Chamber Music America, Snarky Puppy
wrote and recorded
Amkeni
with Burundian ref-
ugee Bukuru Celestin in
. e group struck
a chord with a cover of Brenda Russell’s “Some-
thing,” recorded with Lalah Hathaway for
Fam-
ily Dinner, Vol.
later that year, winning their
rst Grammy Award in the R&B Performance
category. Snarky Puppy then hit the road for
Europe, recording
We Like It Here
(
) live in
the Netherlands and also embarking on a proj-
ect with the multi-Grammy-winning Metropole
Orkest while there.
e resulting disc,
Sylva
,
was released in
, helping earn Snarky Puppy
“Jazz Group of the Year” honors in the
Down-
Beat
readers poll as well as the group’s second
Grammy, in the Contemporary Instrumental
Album category. A second volume of
Family
Dinner
appeared in
(with Universal Music
Classics now being the band’s home), featuring
all original tracks with guest appearances from
David Crosby on “Somebody Home” and Jacob
Collier on “Don’t You Know,” among others.
Culcha Vulcha
, released later that year, marked
a return to pure studio work but lost none of
the spontaneity and energy of the preceding live
discs, earning Snarky Puppy another Grammy
for Best Contemporary Instrumental Album.
Snarky Puppy is making its Ravinia debut.
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