Gillian Margot & Geoffrey Keezer | Farrell Family Athenaeum Jazz: Summer 2025 Series | Athenaeum Music & Arts Library | San Diego | La Jolla Concert

The series continues on June 11 with former San Diego residents vocalist Gillian Margot and Geoffrey Keezer (piano), featuring music from their eponymous new duo album. For this Athenaeum date, they are joined by Ben Williams on bass and San Diego jazz hero Peter Sprague on guitar. With an exquisite voice, a disarmingly wide vocal range, and a style that is deeply rooted in the tradition of the great jazz vocalists, Margot possesses a gift of storytelling and stunning lyrical delivery. A native of Toronto, Canada, Margot studied under a generation of jazz legends including Oscar Peterson, Freddy Cole, Carol Welsman, and Norman Simmons. Keezer is a GRAMMY-winning pianist, composer, arranger, and producer based in New York City, where he first moved in 1989 to become the final pianist with the legendary Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. Keezer has toured and recorded with a galaxy of stars including Ray Brown, Roy Hargrove, Joshua Redman, Diana Krall, Wayne Shorter, Dianne Reeves, Sting, and Christian McBride.

Partners in music since 2014 and in life since 2016, both Margot and Keezer share a predisposition to address, in Margot’s words, “different styles, genres, or grooves and feels, and harmonic implications,” an attitude that accounts for the capacious range of repertoire in their performances. A spirit of freedom judiciously balanced with collective consciousness pervades their recent recording, as Keezer and Margot mind meld on a half-dozen “Standard” standards along with authoritatively interpreted songs by Hermeto Pascoal, Peter Gabriel, Chick Corea, and Donald and Dorothy Brown.