Scott Gwinnell is an award-winning pianist, composer/arranger, and educator born in Detroit, and residing in the Metro-Detroit area. He currently freelances as a sideman and leads various groups; the most well-known being the 16-piece Scott Gwinnell Jazz Orchestra. He is an adjunct professor of music at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, and an ensemble director at Michigan State University’s Detroit Campus.
Mulgrew-ology, the second Detroit Music Factory recording by the Scott Gwinnell Jazz Orchestra, explores this lesser-spotlighted side of Miller.
Gwinnell intersperses Miller’s compositional ideas throughout a body of arrangements that include songs penned by Miller as well as other artists’ compositions for which he was famous for playing in his certain way—because even when Miller played someone else’s tune, it was a markedly Mulgrew Miller version.
“There are certain albums where the work is about you and you want to shine through your own work,” says Gwinnell. “But this record is more about Mulgrew than about me.”
Just as the inflections, the words, the idiosyncrasies that make up a person’s manner of speaking sum up into one’s personality, Miller’s compositions and playing have a definitive voice. Gwinnell mined for those nuances, the subtle licks and chord progressions, choices like the melodic sequence that Miller plays over a diminished harmony, the stuff that tells you you’re listening to Mulgrew Miller.
The Troy Athens High School band will open the show at 7pm.