The Art of the Guitar

The Jazz Loft @ Southampton Concert Series | Thursday, September 25, 2025 | 7 pm

PERFORMER BIOS

Pasquale Grasso
It was the kind of endorsement most rising guitarists can only dream of, and then some. In his interview  for Vintage Guitar magazine’s February 2016 cover story, Pat Metheny was asked to name some younger  musicians who’d impressed him. “The best guitar player I’ve heard in maybe my entire life is floating  around now, Pasquale Grasso,” said the jazz-guitar icon and NEA Jazz Master. “This guy is doing  something so amazingly musical and so difficult... He has somehow captured the essence of that language from  piano onto guitar in a way that almost nobody has ever addressed. He’s the most significant new guy I’ve  heard in many, many years.”  

Many serious guitar heads have been hip to Grasso for a while now and are aware of his jaw-dropping  online performance videos, his beautiful custom instrument -- built in France by Trenier Guitars -- and his  early career triumphs. In 2015, he won the Wes Montgomery International Jazz Guitar Competition in  New York City, taking home a $5,000 prize and performing with guitar legend Pat Martino’s organ trio.  Last year at D.C.’s Kennedy Center, as part of the NEA Jazz Masters Tribute Concert, Grasso  participated in a special performance to honor Pat Metheny, alongside his guitar-wunderkind peers Dan  Wilson, Camila Meza, Gilad Hekselman and Nir Felder.  

These days, Grasso teaches and maintains a packed gig schedule around New York, including frequent  solo performances at the popular Greenwich Village haunt Mezzrow, where a regular Monday-night gig  allowed him to develop his solo-arranging skillset. Not that Grasso thinks his work is done. “All [of the  musicians I love are] inspiration for me to get new ideas and form my style, because it’s still growing,”  Pasquale says. “And it’s gonna be growing until the day I die.” 

 

Keith Balla
A native of Austin, Texas, drummer Keith Balla began playing at the age of 13, inspired by his older brother, who through his record collection exposed him to the rich lineage of jazz drummers.

After moving to New York at 17 to pursue his musical studies at Purchase College, Balla sought the tutelage of the great drummer/educators Kenny Washington and John Riley, and found equal inspiration in the performances of master drummers such as Leroy Williams, Jimmy Wormworth, Jackie Williams, Fukushi Tainaka, Joe Farnsworth, Clifford Barbaro, Steve Little, Taro Okamoto and the archival recordings of the late Jimmy Lovelace. He quickly found himself immersed in the fertile jazz community of New York City, performing at many of New York's finest jazz venues such as Smalls, Mezzrow, Smoke, The Metropolitan Room, The Zinc Bar, The Jazz Gallery and Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola.

Balla has had the good fortune to perform alongside some elder jazz giants such as pianist/composer of Blue Note Records fame, Freddie Redd, the late tenor saxophone master Charles Davis, vocal legend Annie Ross, and famed pianist and bebop pedagogue Dr. Barry Harris. Beyond NYC, Keith Balla has performed concerts and conducted educational workshops in 51 countries spanning Europe, Africa, Asia and the Middle East as a member of the Ari Roland Jazz Quartet with the US State Department’s “American Music Abroad” program — a life-changing opportunity to experience  how music has the capacity to bring people together.

 

Ari Roland
Ari Roland has led over 150 U.S. State Department “Jazz Ambassadors” tours throughout Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Europe. He has featured in the groups of jazz icons Betty Carter, Barry Harris, Lou Donaldson, Dakota Staton, Harold Mabern and George Coleman among numerous others, as well as with Wynton Marsalis, Harry Connick Jr.

A native of New York City and classically trained at Juilliard, he is on faculty at The New School and the Tribeca Jazz Institute, has appeared extensively as a clinician for Jazz at Lincoln Center and directed multi year Public Diplomacy jazz programs in Europe and the Middle East.