Hamptons Jazz Fest Winter Series Presents Will Bernard Quartet

The Hamptons Jazz Fest Winter Series continues on March 25 with a performance of the Will Bernard Quartet at Southampton Arts Center (SAC).

Guitarist Will Bernard, a Berkeley, California native and Brooklyn transplant, studied guitar and piano from an early age with Dave Creamer, Art Lande and Julian White, later developing an interest in classical music composition. He received a degree in music from UC Berkeley where he studied with Andrew Imbrie and others.

He began playing and recording on an international level as a member of Peter Apfelbaum’s Hieroglyphics Ensemble, which made its recorded debut with Don Cherry on “Multikulti” (A&M 1989). Since then, Bernard has participated in a host of boundary stretching groups, ranging from jazz, hip-hop and world music to experimental music, with many stops in between. In the 1990s, Bernard recorded and performed with many projects under the direction of acclaimed producer Lee Townsend and worked with groups ranging from the Hindustani-influenced Jai Uttal to the political hip-hop group the Coup. The most commercially successful of these projects was the group T.J. Kirk (with Charlie Hunter) whose sophomore album “If Four Was One” on Warner bros. was nominated for a Grammy in 1997. He made further inroads with the Stanton Moore trio, which toured extensively and made three albums on Telarc and a Hal Leonard drum instructional video and book.

Tickets for Will Bernard Quartet on Saturday, March 25, are $35 ($30 SAC members) at southamptonartscenter.org. Southampton Arts Center is at 25 Jobs Lane, Southampton. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. and the music begins at 7 p.m. For more information about Hamptons Jazz Fest Winter Series visit hamptonsjazzfest.org.