INFORMATION FOR
William Paterson University continues its more than three-decade tradition of presenting summer jazz music on campus with the 32nd annual Summer Jazz Room, a weeklong series of evening concerts from July 21 to 25, 2025 in the Shea Center for Performing Arts on campus.
The annual concert series, which has drawn thousands of jazz fans to the University’s campus, is designed to make jazz more accessible to the community. This year’s line-up includes the Dana Pugach Big Band on July 21, Manuel Rivera and New Cuban Express on July 22, April May Webb and the Sounds of A & R on July 23, the Dayna Stephens Quartet on July 24, and Wycliffe Gordon and Friends on July 25.
Concerts begin every evening at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $20 for each concert or $75 for a weeklong Summer Jazz Pass for all five concerts. Summer Jazz Passes must be purchased prior to the first show on Monday, July 21. Tickets for all shows can be purchased in advance via the online box office ticketing system or in person at the Shea Center Box Office. For tickets, visit wppresents.org or contact the box office at 973.720.2371 or boxoffice@wpunj.edu.
The Summer Jazz Room coincides with the University’s annual weeklong Summer Jazz Workshop for middle and high school jazz students with trombonist Wycliffe Gordon as artist-in-residence.
The Summer Jazz Room opens on Monday, July 21 with the Dan Pugach Big Band. The composer and drummer brings his big band to Shea for the very first time, featuring music from his 2025 Grammy Award-winning album Bianca Reimagined: Music for Paws and Persistence, featuring Nicole Zuratis. This adds to his growing list of awards as a composer, which include the ASCAP Foundation Jazz Composer Award and the BMI Charlie Parker Composition Prize. He also played drums on the 2024 Grammy Award-winning album How Love Begins. Pugach, who was born in Isreal and spent time in Rio de Janeiro and Boston before moving to the metropolitan area, also leads a nonet, which along with his big band, performs in well-established New York venues and at international festivals and performing arts centers.
On Tuesday, July 22, the pianist, composer, and Guggenheim Fellow Manuel Valera takes the stage with his New Cuban Express. Born and raised in Havana, Valera has collaborated as a pianist and composer with artists such as Arturo Sandoval, Paquito D’Rivera, Brian Lynch, Dafnis Prieto, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, Jeff “Tain” Watts, John Benitez, Samuel Torres, Yosvany Terry, and classical violin virtuoso Joshua Bell. Valera has released 18 albums as a bandleader including with New Cuban Express, a trio; the New Cuban Express Big Band, and playing solo piano works. Along with the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019, he has been awarded three Chamber Music America New Jazz Works grants, two Dranoff International Piano Foundation commissions, and the ASCAP Young Jazz Composer Award. He has performed in more than 30 countries at some of the world’s most prominent international venues and festivals.
The midweek performance on Wednesday, July 23 features William Paterson University jazz alumna April May Webb and Sounds of A & R. Named “Best Jazz Group” at the 2019 New York City Reader’s Jazz Awards, Sounds of A&R (S.O.A.R.) is the creation of the husband-and-wife duo, vocalist April May Webb and trumpeter Randall Haywood. Both are rising artists: Webb won the 2024 Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition, while Haywood was recognized as the "Male Rising Star" at the Hot House and Jazzmobile NYC Reader's Jazz Awards. They have represented the United States as cultural ambassadors and have received a grant from Chamber Music America. Their third studio album, Questions Left Unanswered, reached #12 on the national Jazz Week charts and was featured in Jazz Week’s Top 50 Jazz Albums of the Year.
The Dayna Stephens Quartet takes to the Shea Center stage on Thursday, July 24. One of today’s best-known tenor saxophonists, Stephens is an in-demand bandleader and sideman, lauded for his lyrical style and rhythmic explorations as both a player and composer. Raised in the Bay Area and educated at Berklee College of Music and the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz, he was the first-place recipient of the 2019 DownBeat Critics Poll in the Rising Star–Tenor Saxophone category. Over the past 15 years, the prolific Stephens has released 13 albums under his name, including his latest release Hopium and his 2024 album Closer Than We Think. He has toured and recorded with many renowned artists such as Kenny Barron, Julian Lage, Gerald Clayton, Linda Oh, Ambrose Akinmusire, and Al Foster. Stephens teaches at the Manhattan School of Music and William Paterson University.
The weeklong series concludes on Friday, July 25 with Wycliffe Gordon and Friends. Gordon is one of today’s most outstanding trombonists, as well as a composer and arranger. He has been in the limelight since 1988 when he joined the Wynton Marsalis Septet and subsequently joined the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. Currently, Gordon tours the world as a soloist and with his own group; in 2018 he represented the U.S. on a State Department tour to Sri Lanka where he premiered a piece written for the country’s 70th anniversary. He has 21 CDs as a leader, has been named the Jazz Journalists Association’s Trombonist of the Year 15 times and topped DownBeat’s Critic’s Poll for Best Trombone six times. The recipient of numerous awards and honors, Gordon has an extensive catalog of original compositions, and his arrangement of the theme music of NPR’s All Things Considered is heard daily around the globe. He is also a committed music educator, serving as director of jazz studies at Augusta University.
William Paterson University has been a flagship of jazz education for more than 50 years and is recognized internationally for its Jazz Studies Program and nationally acclaimed Jazz Room Series of concerts each fall and spring.
The 32nd annual Summer Jazz Room series is funded, in part, by a grant from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, a partner agency of the National Endowment for the Arts.
For more information, visit wppresents.org or email boxoffice@wpunj.edu
