Thursday Night Jazz: Joe Sheehan Quartet’s Charts of Legendary Places (Inspired by Umberto Eco’s “The Book of Legendary Lands”)

Music for Distant & Fabled Lands, presented by Joe Sheehan & Kinetic, is a concert weaving together music, maps, and imaginary places. Inspired by Umberto Eco’s The Book of Legendary Lands, as well as Sheehan’s love of maps, the concert explores our ambition to chart the unknown and rediscover lost utopias, as well as our darker impulses to partition the world into spaces to be conquered and ruled.

The concert premieres new jazz-influenced pieces inspired by or incorporating folk melodies from Brazil, China, Ireland, and Uganda; new pieces about fabled lands such as Atlantis; and jazz classics connected to Iran and the Caribbean. Despite these distances, both real and imagined, we hope you leave feeling more deeply connected—to the past and present, to performers and audience, and to places familiar and far away.

Featured Musicians: 

Joseph Seman: saxophone, bansuri, flute

Joseph Sheehan: piano, vocals

Denzel Chismar-Oliver: bass

James Johnson III: drums

About the Artist:

Joseph Sheehan is a pianist, composer, and educator whose work lies at the intersections of jazz, global folk, and classical traditions. His music and performances seek to express wisdom, humility, openness, and joy. At the heart of his work is the ensemble Kinetic, a music collective he founded whose performances blend global folk traditions with modern jazz. The group has released two albums (Dances of Lake Volta and Songs of Lake Volta) interweaving Ghanaian folk song with original music composed by Sheehan. The recordings draw “magnificent connecting threads from classical music and contemporary jazz to the music of West Africa… buoyed by soaring melodies and infectious rhythms” (Textura.org) and “make a fascinating, in-depth approach to a creative universe…a real treasure” (Sonagrama Magazine). Open to many paths of musical activity, Sheehan has performed with jazz masters in Pittsburgh and beyond; traditional music experts from China, Cuba, Ghana, Senegal, and Uganda; classical ensembles and musicians; rappers and poets; and pop/R&B musicians. His piano playing is rooted in Pittsburgh’s historic jazz scene, and his compositions are informed by immersive field research of folk music as well as university studies in classical composition.

About Your Visit: 

The in-house restaurant, Cucina Alfabeto, is open for dinner from 5 to 10 p.m. Please visit OpenTable or call 412-435-1111 to make a reservation.