Nasar Abadey Group

Doors open: 6:30pm

Show starts: 7:00pm

$15 in advance, $20 day of show

Featuring Allyn Johnson (piano), Mike Matthews (bass), Grant Langford (tenor sax), and Nasar Abadey (drums).

Nasar Abadey began playing drums at age five. Drawing influences from powerhouse drummers such as Tony Williams, Max Roach, Roy Haynes, Elvin Jones, Art Blakey, and his cousin, Frankie Dunlop. Nasar Abadey creates jazz music steeped in modal, free form, and avant-garde styles. He has performed in ensembles with Amiri Baraka, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Rouse, Gary Bartz, David Sanchez, Cyrus Chestnut, Sean Jones, Gregory Porter, Sonny Fortune, Ella Fitzgerald, Eartha Kitt, Kenny Kirkland, Gary Thomas, Stanley Turrentine, Sun Ra, Frank Morgan, Bobby Hutcherson, Pharaoh Sanders, Malachi Thompson and many others.

In addition to his quartet playing at Takoma Station, Abadey runs the 11-piece SUPERNOVA Chamber Orchestra with strings; a 16-piece big band, The Washington Renaissance Orchestra (WRO), and The Renaissance Trio.

Since 2006 Abadey has been a Professor of Jazz Percussion, Jazz Analysis / History, and Jazz Combo in the Jazz Studies Department of the Peabody Institute, Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Among his many honors and awards, Abadey was selected by Washington City Paper as Artist of the Year Award and best drummer in 2015. He has won awards from the Community Foundation for the National Capital Region; the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities for Merit and Artistic Performance; the National Endowment for the Arts Artist Award; the United Black Community Organization of DC, which presented Abadey with the John Coltrane Black Classical Music, Living Legends in Music and Culture Award; the Capitol Hill Jazz Foundation, which honored him with the Jazz Leadership and Service Award; and the DC Legendary Musicians, which awarded him with the Community Service Award.