A Vince Guaraldi Holiday + Duke Ellington Nutcracker Suite featuring the Isaiah Thompson Quartet & the OJS All Stars

Join us at the historic Kentucky Theatre in Lexington for a special pay what you can holiday show featuring the Isaiah J. Thompson Quartet playing holiday classics from Vince Guaraldi and the OJS All-Stars Big Band playing the Duke Ellington Nutcracker Suite.

The first half of the concert will feature Isaiah J. Thompson, winner of the 2023 American Pianists Awards and the Cole Porter Fellowship in Jazz of the American Pianists Association. Isaiah has performed with major artists, including Ron Carter, John Pizzarelli, Christian McBride, Cécile McLorin Salvant, Steve Turre and Buster Williams. For this show, his quartet will be playing from his album A Guaraldi Holiday, which features tunes from Vince Guaraldi’s famous A Charlie Brown Christmas.

After that, Thompson’s quartet will join with Origins Jazz Series (the sister org of the Louisville Jazz Society) veterans from around the region to play the classic Ellington/Strayhorn arrangement of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite.

Why is this concert pay what you can? It’s the holiday season! While all Origins concerts cost money to put on, including this one, we’re hoping that the capacity of the Kentucky Theatre will help us bring in enough ticket revenue across all pay what you can tiers to make it work! This concert will cost about $7,000 to put on after we pay the artists, venue fees, sound technicians, and more, and we hope everyone’s ticket fees and donations will cover all of that.