Derrick Hodge Presents The Dazzle Session — TWO SHOWS! Thursday, Aug 1 — 7 & 9:30 p.m.

TICKETS

USE CODE: CELEBRATE for a discounted ticket for the 9:30 PM SHOW ONLY

Dazzle has been at the Denver Arts Complex (14th & Arapahoe) for a year now!

Come celebrate as Dazzle at the Arts Complex turns 1

Even though it’s our birthday, we’re giving YOU presents. A drawing will be held before the show starts. Everyone present gets an entry to win one of these presents:

A pair of tickets to any touring show at Dazzle (available seats only)

A pair of tickets to any local show at Dazzle (available seats only)

A signed print of Dazzle by photographer Mark Payler

Official Dazzle water bottle

A cocktail created for and named after YOU by master mixologist Westin Elliot; it will be on the Dazzle menu for a month

The best gift of all is Derrick Hodge. Derrick performed at the soft opening for Sponsors, Friends, and Family before Dazzle opened to the public last year. This year, he puts together ‘The Dazzle Sessions’, with an all-Denver-based band: Derrick Hodge on bass, Aaron Daniels  on keyboards, Solomon Chapman  on piano, and Matt Campbell  on drums

We are celebrating by bringing in Derrick Hodge, one of contemporary music’s most complete and complex artists. Also lauded as a composer, he is revered as one of the great bassists and musicians of his generation, and his solo projects—Live Today (2013), The Second (2016), and Color of Noize (2020)—have been met with praise from critics and audiences alike. His albums are rich, raw, and revelatory, reflecting his roots in the church, a passion for hip-hop, and an eternal reverence for melody and classical composition. Like the artist, Hodge’s music contains multitudes.

Hodge has founded and played in bands and groups as diverse and as influential as R+R=Now, the Robert Glasper Experiment, and The Blue Note All-Stars. Hodge has devoted himself to projects that elevate and animate the African American legacy: the struggle but also—and always—the poetry and the triumph too. He is an incurably hopeful man, who, through his work and his art, has made the world a definitively more beautiful place.

Derrick Hodge is one of contemporary music’s most complete and complex artists. Also lauded as a composer, he is revered as one of the great bassists and musicians of his generation and his solo projects—Live Today (2013), The Second (2016), and Color of Noize (2020)—have been met with praise from critics and audiences alike. His albums are rich, raw and revelatory, reflecting his roots in the church, a passion for hip-hop, and an eternal reverence for melody and classical composition. Like the artist, Hodge’s music contains multitudes.

Hodge has founded and played in bands and groups as diverse and as influential as R+R=Now, the Robert Glasper Experiment, and The Blue Note All-Stars. As a producer, he has collaborated with icons including Quincy Jones, Don Was, and Common. As a musical director, he has worked with luminaries including Yasiin Bey and, from 2009 to 2019, Maxwell.

The Color of Noize project is Hodge’s signature concept-series, bringing together contrasting sounds, and styles to create an immersive audio-visual experience. Color of Noize premiered in 2019 as part of Hodge’s artist residency at the Monterey Jazz Festival, where he brought together a collection of musicians, some as young as four, to explore his compositions in a remarkably moving and beautiful concert. As he puts it “It was never just my potential that made things happen; it was my community advocating for me—now I want to advocate for others, to pass that on.”

Whether collaborating with giants, writing for the big screen, forging new paths for orchestral composition, or providing access to his symphonic scores and original arrangements to HBCUs and inner-city music programs, his work always contains social commentary, awareness, or insight. Here we find the fundamental character of Hodge; an incurably hopeful man, who, through his work and his art, has made the world a definitively more beautiful place.