Jazz Room Special Edition: Sean Jones, Dizzy Spellz featuring Brinae Ali

Trumpet master Sean Jones and renowned tap artist Brinae Ali join forces in the groundbreaking piece “Dizzy Spellz”, a riveting tribute to Dizzy Gillespie presented through an Afro-futuristic lens. Blending jazz, tap dance, Bebop, and Hip Hop, this performance intersects cultural and spiritual dilemmas within the African Diaspora through the music of Dizzy Gillespie. Describing their immersive, expansive, and evolving performance “Dizzy Spellz,” trumpeter Sean Jones and tap dancer/chanteuse Brinae Ali explain, “We’re looking at Dizzy Gillespie as this spirit guide, an ancestor that helped us along our journey, and can help us figure out our path as we heal ourselves from trauma as a people.” With jazz legend Gillespie as an avatar of perseverance and transcendence, “Dizzy Spellz” traces a spellbinding throughline woven through African American vernacular expression, connecting jazz and tap and hip hop as expressions of protest, healing, and hope. Sean Jones’ first musical home was the gospel choir of St. James Church of God in Christ in his hometown of Warren, Ohio. Jones took up the trumpet in fifth grade, inspired by an exceptional teacher who gave him two Miles Davis recordings, by his grandmother’s stories about his grandfather playing the trumpet during World War II—and by the fact that the trumpet was so hard to play that none of his classmates wanted to touch it. That penchant for taking on big challenges defines Jones as an exceptional performer and educator; his many credits include longtime lead trumpet for Wynton Marsalis, director of Carnegie Hall’s National Youth Orchestra’s jazz section, and in 2019 becoming Chair of the Jazz Studies Department at Johns Hopkins’ Peabody Institute.