JAZZ AT THE SANDBAR Presents: Drummer Herlin Riley!

Jazz at the Sandbar has been a popular performance series at the University of New Orleans since 1990. Jazz at the Sandbar 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 on Wednesday nights during the fall and spring semesters and features a different respected jazz artist each week. It provides a medium in which students exercise their improvisational skills and gives them the rare opportunity to work with jazz masters. “Jazz at the Sandbar” was established by Ellis Marsalis, the first Chairman of the Jazz Studies Program at UNO.  Downbeat Magazine calls "One of the best things going in America."

Kicking off the season is Herlin Riley. His authoritative style of melodic percussion is deeply imbued in the fertile creative soil of the Crescent City, encompassing as it does the entire length and breadth of America’s ongoing musical journey. New Orleans is a drummer’s town. But in this town full of first-class drummers, Herlin Riley is “the” drummer. The Baron of the Boom Boom. The Pulse that keeps the life flowing through any body of work. Born into a musical family steeped in gospel, blues, and jazz,  Wynton Marsalis asked him to join him in New York in 1988 where he stayed for almost two decades while still maintaining a home in New Orleans. He still is a regularly featured musician with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra but now is back in his hometown when he’s not on tour with Ahmad Jamal, Dr. John, or Harry Connick, Jr. He lights up a stage with just his presence and always fires up the first-class jazz artists who love to play with him. 

Jazz at the Sandbar

Wednesdays @ 7:00pm

LIVE @ UNO's the Cove

“Jazz @ the Sandbar” is presented by the UNO Jazz Studies Program with support from the UNO Student Government Assn, the New Orleans Jazz Celebration & the Snug Harbor Jazz Bistro, New Orleans Theatre Association, Nate & Priscilla Gordon, WWNO FM, and OffBeat Magazine.