Mike Sailors Big Band

The Mike Sailors Big Band plays Monks Jazz Club on Monday, August 31, for a live taping and listening-room concert. It's a full big band on stage, and the whole thing is being recorded, so it's a listening-room night—the kind of show where you're there to hear the music rather than chat over it.

Mike Sailors leads the ensemble from the trumpet chair. He's a Charleston, South Carolina native and a Professor of Jazz Trumpet at the University of Texas at Austin. He's played worldwide at spots like the Blue Note in New York, Tokyo, and Sapporo, as well as Ronnie Scott's, Porgy and Bess, Dizzy's Club Coca Cola, The Jazz Standard, Smalls Jazz Club, Carnegie Hall, and Lincoln Center. He's also appeared at the Montreal, Detroit, EFG London, and Tokyo Blue Note Jazz Festivals. Beyond the bandstand, he was Music Director of the Broadway show Sleep No More and leads the Mike Sailors Nonet, which the New York Times once called "an all-star outfit."

As a sideman, he's played with the Birdland Big Band, the Hot Sardines, the Gerald Wilson Orchestra, and The Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra, and has written for Dewey Redman, Dick Oatts, Sean Jones, Jimmy Cobb, and Peter Bernstein. He also composes and records for TV and film, most recently for the Netflix series Cannon Busters, and teaches with Jazz at Lincoln Center's Let Freedom Swing and Essentially Ellington programs.

The lineup for the night is a full horn section: saxophones Seth Carper, Matt Chavez, Joel Frahm, Eric Hargett, and Ripley Swingle; trumpets Matt Collins, Isaac Pittinger, Mike Sailors, and Jonah Springs; and trombones Judah Guerra, Kevin Hrabak, Jacob Martinez, and Demetrius Thornton. The rhythm section consists of Aidan Berg, Jakob Hartz, and Mati Soto. Monks is at 310 E. Saint Elmo in Austin South. There are two shows: the first has doors at 7 PM and starts at 7:30 PM; the second has doors at 9 PM and starts at 9:30 PM.