Jim Gailloreto's Jazz String Quintet

About me:

Jim Gailloreto is an accomplished jazz saxophonist, arranger and composer. He has a Bachelors in Music Composition from De Paul University and a Masters in Music Composition from Northwestern University. He is a recipient of the New Works: Creation & Presentation Program Grant from Chamber Music America. Through this grant he has created an intricate four movement work entitled “American Complex”.

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His performing, composing and arranging can be heard on his release Jazz String Quintet. As a soloist, he has performed with Fulcrum Point with director Stephen Burns, Bill Russo and the Chicago Jazz Ensemble and Blue Note Recording Artists Patricia Barber (Mythologies) and Kurt Elling (Man In The Air) .

He has performed with the Bill Russo's Chicago Jazz Ensemble, Chicago Chamber Musicians and the new music group Fulcrum Point. He also recorded and performed with Blue Note artist Patricia Barber on "Mythologies", Origin artist guitarist John Mc Lean's "Better Angels", with pianist Jeremy Kahn on "Most of a Nickel", vocalist Grazyna Auguscik's "Lulajze".

His string quartet arrangments can be heard on Kurt Elling's CD "Dedicated To You". He recently performed a Chicago premier of Marc Anthony Turnage's "Scorched" with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and John Scofield.

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Jazz String Quintet:

In 1997, Jim Gailloreto embarked on a new project called Jazz String Quintet. It is an integration of both jazz and classical music written for string quartet and soprano saxophone. Inspired by sources as diverse as Debussy and Ravel to Miles Davis and John Coltrane, composer and saxophonist Jim Gailloreto offers a perfect blend of classical music and jazz: structure and spontaneity. The compositions interweave his own soprano saxophone with skilled modernist writing for string quartet. “No composer has shaped the structures and layered the phrases of the string quartet to so successfully accommodate full-tilt improvisation,” writes jazz authority Neil Tesser.

Jazz String Quintet is immersed in all the traditions and performance practices of classical music, while simultaneously expanding and exploring all the truest elements of jazz. Working with longtime associates of The HAWK String Quartet, Jazz String Quintet achieves a true fusion of forms, which has collaborated with such artists as vocalist Kurt Elling, pianist-composer Fred Hersch, Corky Siegel’s “Chamber Blues” and West African kora player Foday Musa Suso.