$15 at the door 7:30pm Show
Tommaso Moretti (drums, vocals, samples), Ben Dillinger (bass), Jake Wark (tenor sax), and Edinho Gerber (guitar) will perform new original compositions by bandleader Moretti and music from the album Inside Out (Bace, 2022).
Tommaso Moretti is a drummer, composer, and educator born and raised in Italy and now based in Chicago.
Tommaso began to play drums at the age of 10. His musical career started when he moved to Rome and became part of the city’s vibrant music scene. Between 2004 and 2013, he released albums and toured internationally with four different bands: Thrangh, an avant/rock quartet; Tribraco, a punk/jazz trio; The Orange Man Theory, a noise-core combo; and Underdog, an indie jazz-rock/world music ensemble. Busy as a musician and music educator in Italy, he also cultivated international collaborations in Chicago—where he founded the math rock band Tasty Gasoline and become part of Ben LaMar Gay’s project Tones for Tales—and London.
In 2013, he relocated to Chicago, where he is now freelancing as a jazz drummer and educator. In 2017, he released an album on the International Anthem record label with the band Bottle Tree. Later that year, he released his first album as a leader: SemoComeSemo on Amalgam record label. Since 2018, he has performed with Ben LaMar Gay’s quartet at various festivals, including the North Sea Jazz Fest (Rotterdam), Sesc Pompeia (San Paolo), Chicago Jazz Festival, Barbican Center (London), and Winter Jazz Fest (New York). In 2022, he released his second album as a leader: "Inside Out" on BACE records. This “building blocks music project” stretches from a trio to a sextet. It emphasizes the composer’s love for intimate melodies and harmonies and exposes his passion for Afro Latin and Brazilian rhythms.
Tommaso is currently a member of the following Chicago-based music projects: Rob Frye Exoplanet, Ben LaMar Gay Quartet, Eric Hines Pan Dulce, Kevin and Hell group, and Chicago Samba. He has also played with musicians such as Renè Baker, Pharez Whitted, Matt Gold, Macie Stewart, Ernest Dawkins, Greg Ward, Matt Piet, Aaron M. Frison, and Jaime Branch.
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“An expressive, polyrhythmic intermingling of jazz and samba from the Italian-born, Chicago-based composer and his band. Percussionist Tommaso Moretti takes listeners on a rhythmic trip around the world with a melange of jazz, samba, and canzone napoletana.” – Bandcamp New and Notable
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Ben Dillinger is an upright and electric bassist, composer, and educator who has been working professionally in Chicago for the past 10 years. His formal training is in jazz performance and composition, but he has also performed in settings including classical, musical theater, rock, and popular music. As an educator, he has taught at Roosevelt University, Morton College, and the Chicago High School of Performing Arts (ChiArts), both in private lessons and in a classroom setting.
Edinho Gerber possesses a rich musical vocabulary developed in the two countries where he was raised: the United States and Brazil. Navigating effortlessly among the genres of choro, jazz, samba, and blues, he is always in search of the intersections between his two cultural identities. He has performed in prestigious festivals and concerts throughout the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, and Japan. He regularly tours with the Brazilian guitar legend Rogério Souza as Duo Violão Brasil.
Jake Wark is a saxophonist and composer. He has been active in Chicago’s vibrant creative music community since 2014, when he moved there from upstate New York. Jake has released two albums as a leader: 2020’s Scrawl, featuring Angel Bat Dawid, Jakob Heinemann, and Adam Shead, and 2017’s Tremor, with Drew Gress and Phil Haynes. He can be heard in numerous groups as a sideman and collaborator, including Javier Red’s Imagery Converter, whose first release, Ephemeral Certainties, was included in an NPR Jazz Critics’ Poll list of the best debuts of 2019. Jake has appeared at the Chicago Jazz Festival, the Hyde Park Jazz Festival, Constellation, the Green Mill, Elastic Arts, and many other prominent venues for creative music in the Midwest.
