The Magic Triangle Jazz Series begins its 16th season on Thursday, February 24, in Bezanson Recital Hall at 8:00pm with a performance: Graham Haynes Presents Electric Church, featuring Graham Haynes, cornet; Velibor Pedevski, turntables; James Hurt, keyboards and Michelle Halsell, projected images.

"At a time when major-label jazz tends to lean toward the snug, conventional wisdoms,” says Jazziz, “Graham Haynes continues his engagingly outbound trek..."

Cornetist/composer Graham Haynes was born in 1960, and raised in the New York suburb of Hollis, Queens (also home to Roy Eldridge, Milt Jackson, and Jaki Byard, among other jazz greats). His father Roy Haynes revolutionized modern jazz drumming, and early on Graham was exposed to a wide variety of music.

In 1979, Graham Haynes met alto saxophonist Steve Coleman with whom he formed a band called Five Elements, which ultimately evolved into the M-Base collective. He spent much of the 1980s as a sideman with Coleman and Cassandra Wilson. In the late 1980s he formed his own ensemble, Graham Haynes and No Image, and recorded his first album as a leader, What Time it Be?

Around this time Haynes immersed himself in a wide range of African, Arabic, and South Asian music, which prompted his move to Paris to seek out the city’s African, Arabic, and Indian music scene. There he recorded Nocturne Parisian and The Griots Footsteps.

"Haynes is onto a truly universal sound here,” writes Vibe. “In this, the most reactionary period in the history of music, he defies national boundaries and narrow-minded ideas about what a jazz recording is."

Haynes spent the next three years gigging throughout Europe, occasionally returning to the U.S. to work with artists such as Ed Blackwell, Uri Caine and David Murray. In 1993, Haynes moved back to New York City, where he began investigating the burgeoning hip hop scene. The album Transition came out of this investigation. His next project, Tones for the Twenty-First Century, combined sound effects, textures, drones, and samples, layered over Haynes’s electronically manipulated horn.

Graham Haynes has twice been nominated for the Alpert Award in the Arts and has been awarded grants by the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts and Meet The Composer. He served as music director of Tracie Morris’s Afrofuturistic (2003), presented at The Kitchen, and A Cruel New World (2003), a collaboration with Donald Byrd and Spectrum Dance Company.

"By coupling wide-ranging sonic and stylistic vision with top-shelf musicianship, writes Jazz Times, “Graham Haynes achieves what lesser new breed jazz ‘experimentalists’ have only hinted at."