Jazz Houston’s Bayou City-Crescent City Christmas

About Jazz Houston

Jazz Houston promotes the cultivation of jazz music globally through Performance, Education, and Community Outreach, and honors the Houstonians and Texans who have and continue to be major contributors to Jazz through the celebration of their legacies and the performance of their works.

Special Guest Artists

Doreen Ketchens has been called Lady Louie, Miss Satchmo & The Female Louis Armstrong, to name a few. On May 26, 2022, Doreen, was honored with a Doctorate degree, in music from Five Towns College, in Long Island New York. Now she is Dr. Doreen J. Ketchens! Dr. Doreen has changed the way scholars view their clarinets. She has successfully created her own style that blends her classical training with the soul of jazz. Be it, Gospel, Blues, R&B, Classical or Jazz. Dr. Doreen Ketchens can rock her clarinet on many levels, then sing like a songbird on a sunny day.

Since coming of age in the nurturing environment of a very musical family and a distinguished bloodline of drummers, New Orleans native Herlin Riley emerged from that most creative era of all things rhythmic in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, to enliven the ensembles of such influential and demanding improvisers as pianist Ahmad Jamal and trumpeter Wynton Marsalis through his commanding yet elegant rhythmic presence. His authoritative style of melodic percussion is deeply imbued in the fertile creative soil of the Crescent City, encompassing as it does the entire length and breadth of America’s ongoing musical journey.