The Jazz at the Sandbar concert series will return to its intimate performance space at The Cove on the University of New Orleans (UNO) campus with an in-person audience for the first time since March 2020 when the pandemic forced the program into a virtual-only format.

On Wednesday, October 13, drummer Herlin Riley will be a special guest of a graduate student ensemble under the direction of Brent Rose at 7 p.m. and will subsequently perform a set with his own professional ensemble at 8:30 p.m. in tribute to the late Ellis Marsalis, who died in March of last year due to complications from COVID-19. Rose, who plays saxophone, has been a UNO faculty member since 2002. He is the program coordinator for the music department and teaches courses on music theory, jazz history and saxophone.

Marsalis was the first chairman of the Jazz Studies program at UNO. The Jazz at the Sandbar series is designed to provide UNO Jazz Studies students an opportunity to get real-life experience performing with respected professional musicians in front of a live audience.  The series is presented during the fall and spring semesters on Wednesday nights and features a different respected jazz artist each week. Jazz at the Sandbar provides a medium in which students exercise their improvisational skills and gives them the rare opportunity to work with jazz masters.

Riley came of age in the nurturing environment of a musical family and as part of a distinguished line of New Orleans drummers. He has enlivened the ensembles of such influential and demanding improvisers as pianist Ahmad Jamal and trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. His authoritative style of melodic percussion, while deeply representative of the rhythms of the Crescent City, encompasses the entire length and breadth of America’s ongoing musical journey.

Riley’s ensemble will include Ashlin Parker on trumpet, Derek Douget on saxophone, Oscar Rossignoli on piano and Jason Stewart on bass.