Jazz Trombonist At MB&G

Beginning Sunday, March 18, and continuing every 3^rd Sunday of the month, noted Jazz trombonist, and Ramsey resident, Michael Treni will be performing with his trio at the ever-popular Mahwah Bar & Grill.

Coming of age in Portland, Maine in the 1960s, Treni studied with a succession of highly accomplished big band veterans, including Don Doane, a brilliant trombonist who toured with Woody Herman. After winning a full scholarship to the Berklee College of Music in 1968, Treni chose instead to attend the University of Miami.

At the University of Miami Treni displayed such prowess that the school recruited him for the faculty at age 19. Before long, he launched the band Kaleidoscope with guitarist and classmate Pat Metheny. Following his graduation, and after a brief stint teaching at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, Treni moved to New York City. By the late 1970s he was a rising player in the New York jazz scene, first as part of a cadre of brilliant young improvisers and later as a top-shelf studio arranger and composer. But when Treni lost the opportunity to tour Europe with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, his ambition took him in another direction. Recommended for the Messengers by his University of Miami buddy Bobby Watson, Treni impressed Blakey at an on-stage audition at a Village Vanguard.

“After the set Art came up and gave me a bear hug and said, ‘Damn man, you can play!’” Treni recalls. “I finished the week with him and everything seemed set for the European tour, but when I didn’t hear anything I called Bobby. It turned out that Jazz Messenger Alumnus Curtis Fuller heard about the tour and asked if he could rejoin the band, so I didn’t get to go. That snapped something in me. If I wasn’t going to play with Blakey, I was going to pursue a career as a writer and commercial arranger.”

When he walked away from music in the late 1980s, it was to pursue an entrepreneurial vision as the founder of a company specializing in innovative wireless audio and language interpretation systems (he holds two patents in wireless technology). He returned to his first passion, jazz, about nine years ago. Working in partnership with his equally gifted producer Roy Nicolosi, who’s also an accomplished reed player, he has gradually assembled the Michael Treni Big Band, a jazz orchestra loaded with heavyweight players.

Treni’s new release, Boys Night Out (set to be released April 17, 2012), is Treni’s fourth jazz release since rededicating himself to music. While Boston tenor sax legend Jerry Bergonzi is the band’s best-known player, the cast features an array of veteran cats well-versed in turning a brief solo into a compelling, personal statement. Two members of this band, pianist Charles Blenzig, and bassist Takashi Otsuka, will be joining Treni for the Mahwah Bar & Grill event.

The music starts at 4pm and runs until 6.