Marquis Hill’s Love Tape

Please join us for a scintillating performance by inventive trumpeter Marquis Hill and his soulful new project Love Tape.

From his beginnings as one of Chicago’s most thrilling young trumpeters to his current status as an internationally renowned musician, composer, and bandleader, Marquis Hill has worked tirelessly to break down the barriers that divide musical genres. Contemporary and classic jazz, hip-hop, R&B, Chicago house, neo-soul—to Hill, they’re all essential elements of the profound African-American creative heritage he’s a part of. “It all comes from the same tree,” says the 2014 Thelonious Monk Competition winner. “They simply blossomed from different branches.”

Hill’s eighth studio album, Love Tape, is a sonic masterpiece that explores the depths of self-love. Hailing it as one of the year’s 10 Best Jazz Albums in the New York Times, Giovanni Russonello described the album as “caught between album and mixtape, between casual one-off and conceptual ambition, between jazz and hip-hop and beat music.”

For Love Tape, Hill assembled a collection of interviews of women sharing their perspective on the subject of self-love, resulting in further confirmation of a familiar adage: “Before you can love someone else, you must first love yourself.“ Its sonic nuances reveal Hill’s ever-growing comfort with his own musical identity. The album weaves spoken-word selections by such artists as Eartha Kitt, Phylicia Rashad, and Abbey Lincoln into a rich genre-blurring tapestry exploring the territory between jazz, hip-hop, R&B, and more.