With his gift for bebop, ballads, blues, and swinging jazz, Kevin Mahogany has been called “the standout jazz vocalist of his generation” by Newsweek, and Billboard has declared him to be “unquestionably one of today’s most exciting and musically adept jazz vocalists.”
Jeff Rupert heads Jazz Studies in the Music Department at UCF. He enjoys an active career as a freelance tenor saxophonist, composer, and arranger, and possesses “a classic tenor sound, the virtuosity to execute practically any musical idea, and the imagination to make those ideas worth hearing” according to Ed Berger of The Institute of Jazz Studies. Jeff is also a long-time member of Sam Rivers’ band, with recent performance and recording at Lincoln Center, for Ed Bradley’s Jazz from Lincoln Center broadcast on NPR.
Since opening in 1971, the Kennedy Center has presented some of the greatest performers from across America and around the world. More information is available on the Kennedy Center website.
Jeff Rupert is a professor in the UCF Department of Music, and the program director of the Department of Music Jazz.