Christopher Bakriges

Christopher Bakriges was born in Detroit in 1958 and grew up near the original Motown Studios. He soon gave up his classical repertoire for lessons with Earl Van Dyke, Hitsville USA’s heralded sideman. “I learned how to approach playing in the Detroit Style of jazz piano, imitating Barry Harris, Tommy Flanagan, Hank Jones, Sir Roland Hanna, Kirk Lightsey, and trying to phrase on the piano like Yusef Lateef does on his horn…and that kind of improvisation was a gradual process of teaching to be myself.” Chris began training with the Detroit Artist Collective and Temptation’s saxophonist Kusuku Mafie (Norris Patterson) which ultimately led to playing his own music with Jaribu Shahid and Tanni Tabbal.

After getting degrees from the University of Detroit, Chris had an opportunity to teach and play in the Republic of China where he developed a keen interest in the music of other cultures. Returning to the States, he began combining jazz, Mediterranean elements derived from his Greek heritage, and the rich African American cultural milieu in which he grew up, into a unique form of musical storytelling. “I heard what McCoy Tyner, Randy Weston, Abdullah Ibrahim and Mal Waldron were doing and said, ‘that’s it.’” Chris worked with Nadi Qamar in Vermont, Billy Taylor and Jimmy Giuffre in Massachusetts, and Harold Danko in New York before entering the world music program at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, serving for a time as Anthony Braxton’s pianist and music copyist and studying piano with Philadelphian Frederick Simmons. He later left for York University in Toronto to study ethnomusicology and work with Oscar Peterson. “These artists encouraged me to consider the entire history of jazz so that I could try and carve out my own place in it.” As a result, Chris’s improvisations blend jazz and more ancient cultures in his music.

Chris has performed internationally since 1990, including tours in India, Pakistan, Turkey, England, France, Canada, and the Czech Republic. In the early 90’s he was invited to co-direct “JazzFest” on Northeast Public Radio after its station director heard his ensemble Critical Theory in concert with Bobby McFerrin and David Darling. Broadcast monthly from the WAMC-FM Studios in Albany, New York, “JazzFest” became the only live jazz radio program being aired at that time in the United States.

Besides performing his compositions, Bakriges was able to accompany many acclaimed artists such as Kenny Burrell, Bernard Purdie, Lee Shaw, and Pat Metheny’s original rhythm section of Danny Gottleib and Mark Egan. Chris's music reflects his diverse paths in life and his desire to interweave the past with the future, and traditional with new sounds. He has worked with many world music performers, including Swedish Sami nine-string guitarist Jonny Johannson, Jazz Manglam’s Rikhi Rays, whose double-neck guitar was bequeathed to him by John McLaughlin, Indian percussion master Shiva Manni, Japanese bassist Kazu Sato, Italian bassist Mauro Battisti and trumpeter Cicci Santucci, world rhythms drummer Steve Leicach, marimbist/vibraphonist Jay Hoggard, and Pakistan Sufi legends Sabri Brothers.

Chris has lived in Vermont since the late nineties and has headlined the Canada's Guelph and Toronto's Jazz Festivals, Celeveland's Ingenuity Festival as well as the city's Tri-state Jazz Festival and both the Hartford International Jazz Festival and the Hartford Public Library's Jazz Piano Series in Connecticut. He has performed at the legendary Greenwich Village haunt 5C Cafe, New York's Museum of Natural History, Brooklyn's internationally recognized new music venue Roulette and the Big Apple's 52nd Street jazz club, Miles Cafe.

Chris lectures both at Elms College in western Massachusetts and at MassArt in Boston where he served as Artist-in-Residencein the Studio for Interrelated Media. In 2014 Chris will once again curate the Jazz in the Mountains Music Series at Memorial Hall in Wilmington, Vermont. The Matisse Project was performed in Bloomington at the Indiana University Museum of Art for their Matisse retrospective with guest bassist Jeremy Allen, faculty at IU's Jacob School of Music. He has been performing both the fiddleFunk and the Matisse Jazz Project out East with violinist Stanley Chepaitis, string chair at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania. This summer he and trumpeter Glen Whitehead, music department chair at the University of Colorado in Silver Springs, performed their collaborative work carving into time at New School University in New York as part of the cross-cultural conference sponsored by the International Society of Improvised Music. A brazilian jazz project in tribute to Tom Jobim, Johnny Alf and others was just completed with New York guitarist and New School University faculty member Richard Boukas and New Haven based bassist Jeff Fuller; and another opportunity to perform with Oregon guitarist John Stowell and Williams College faculty bassist Avery Sharpe was recently had at Memorial Hall in Wilmington, Vermont. Show less