Tour Dates:
Sunday, June 4, 2023
10:00am -11:00am
11:30am - 12:30pm
1:00pm - 2:00pm
Take a behind the scenes look at one of the top international venues for jazz in the world (as professed by Downbeat Magazine). Tour our newly renovated music hall, learn about the technology it takes to put on a jazz concert from the new tech deck, watch what happens in our professional video studio and enjoy listening to past concerts from the MCG Jazz archives in our recording studio. Participants will walk away with an understanding of how a quality performance venue and recording studio are run.
TOUR HOST BIO:
MCG Jazz is a social enterprise of Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild, a subsidiary of Manchester Bidwell Corporation, a non-profit arts and learning center in Pittsburgh, PA.
Through our guiding principles: environment shapes behavior, people are assets and creativity fuels enterprise, and our mission to preserve, present and promote jazz, we aim to strengthen the Pittsburgh jazz community and contribute to the overall cultural and artistic diversity of the region.
The MCG Jazz concert series – one of the longest running subscription-based jazz performance series in the county –has been a safe place for artists to share their art and discuss relevant issues of the time. Our recording label produces distinctive albums from a wide variety of artists, our educational programs serve elementary, middle and high school aged students in urban and rural communities, and our archives of audio/video recordings, photographs, interviews and individual artist collections exists as a model for learning for future generations to help grow the audience for jazz and enhance the art form and its creators.
Marty Ashby is a jazz guitarist, GRAMMY® Award-winning producer, programming consultant, motivational speaker and lifelong advocate of jazz music and its unique place in American culture. He is Executive Producer of MCG Jazz, which he started in 1987 and since then he has produced more than 2,000 concerts and over 55 recordings on the MCG Jazz label garnering five GRAMMY® Awards and 11 additional GRAMMY® nominations. For more than three decades, Ashby has been an artistic advisor and producer for jazz concerts and festivals around the country, including the Animal Crackers jazz series in Racine, WI, Jazz at Seven Springs Festival and Jazz on the Circle Series in Cleveland. He was the EPP Goldman-Sachs Fellow at the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian and has worked with many Jazz organizations as a consultant. Ashby produced the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra’s “Jazz Beyond Borders” 2019 International tour. Ashby has presented his Jazz is Life® professional development workshop to corporate and community audiences nationally and internationally. In 2018, Ashby produced the documentary film, We Knew What We Had: The Greatest Jazz Story Never Told which explores the social conditions and historical events that conspired to make Pittsburgh one of the leading contributors to the legacy of jazz music in the world. The film won two Telly Awards in the categories of Music and Arts and Culture. As a guitarist, Ashby has performed and recorded with Slide Hampton, Claudio Roditi, Nancy Wilson, Paquito D’Rivera, Herbie Mann, Phil Woods, The Dizzy Gillespie™ All-Star Big Band and others.
TOUR STARTS/ENDS: 1815 Metropolitan Street, Pittsburgh, PA 15233
Photography is allowed.
A restroom is available.
Wheelchair accessible restroom is available.
Insider Tour