(PRINCETON, NJ) -- Jazz at Princeton University presents the 2025 Jazz Festival on Saturday, April 12 from 1:00pm to 10:00pm. The lineup includes performances by Roxy Cross, Warren Wolf, Matt Stevens, Princeton University Faculty Septet, and Jazz at Princeton's and the Program in Latin American Studies present the Creative Large Ensemble, directed by Darcy James Argue and special guest Etienne Charles (trumpet).
From 1:00pm to 6:00pm, the festival has free admission into the Richardson Auditorium and is unticketed. There is a ticketed concert at 8:00pm in Alexander Hall. Tickets are available for purchase online.
1:00pm-2:00pm | Roxy Coss (Saxophone) with Small Group X. Grammy award-winning Musician, Composer, Bandleader, Recording Artist, Educator and Activist Roxy Coss has become one of the most unique and innovative Saxophonists on the scene. Winner of the 2022 Downbeat Critics’ Poll “Rising Star” category in Soprano Saxophone, an ASCAP Young Jazz Composer Award, Jazziz Magazine listed her an “Artist to Watch,” and she received the Hothouse Magazine & Jazzmobile “Tenor Saxophone” Award. She is the Founder and President of Women In Jazz Organization (WIJO), Co-Artistic Director of the Brubeck Jazz Summit, and a Visiting Fellow for the Think Tank at Wesleyan University’s Bailey College of the Environment ‘24-’25. Starting in September 2025, Roxy will be joining Stony Brook University as Assistant Professor of Music in the role of Director of Jazz Studies. She is also an endorsing artist for P. Mauriat, Vandoren, and Keyleaves products.
Roxy has been a fixture on the New York scene for over fifteen years, and has also performed extensively around the world, including headlining major festivals and venues. Her band, the Roxy Coss Quintet, has held residencies at New York City clubs including SMOKE Jazz Club and Club Bonafide. Roxy was also a featured guest musician on the television show Harry (host Harry Connick, Jr.) in 2017.
Roxy has six recordings out as a bandleader. Her latest, Disparate Parts, was released March 2022 on the Outside in Music label. It features her longtime working band, the Roxy Coss Quintet, playing a suite of music composed by Coss, and two additional original compositions of Roxy’s, as well as originals from the other band members. This is the follow-up to their previous album, Quintet, recorded live in the studio (OiM) released in 2019. In 2018, Coss released her fourth album as a leader, The Future Is Female, follow-up to Chasing the Unicorn (2017), both on Posi-Tone. The Future Is Female received a 4.5-Star Review from both Downbeat and All About Jazz, and Chasing the Unicorn made the “Best of 2017” lists in Downbeat, Somethin’ Else Reviews, and Ken Franckling’s Jazz Notes. Past albums also include Restless Idealism on Origin Records (2016), and Roxy Coss (2010), her self-released debut and self-titled album.
Coss has performed and recorded as a side musician with Jazz greats and luminaries including Clark Terry, Louis Hayes, Rufus Reid, Billy Kaye, Houston Person, Bill Charlap, Claudio Roditi, Jeremy Pelt, Willie Jones III, Geoffrey Keezer, Ken Peplowski, Mike Pope, and bands such as Darcy James Argue’s “Secret Society”, the Mingus Big Band, Birdland Big Band, and The Generation Gap Jazz Orchestra. She has been a member of The Diva Jazz Orchestra since 2010, including an Off-Broadway run with Maurice Hines is Tappin’ Thru Life. Past performance experience also includes appearances with Wynton Marsalis, Buster Williams, Joshua Redman, Joe Lovano, Mulgrew Miller, Harry Allen, Steve Wilson, Mark Gross, Gary Smulyan, Harold Mabern, Jerry Vivino, and Eric Marienthal, among others.
2:15pm-3:15pm | Warren Wolf (Vibraphone) with Small Group A. Warren Wolf is a multi-instrumentalist from Baltimore, Maryland. He is an International touring musician and has performed throughout the United States of America, South America, Canada, Italy, Spain, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Scotland, London, Greece, Singapore, Thailand, Jarkata, Bangkok, Tokyo, Paris, Moscow and many other countries.
Warren has made ten recordings, most notably for Mack Ave Records. Warren is a member of the SFJAZZ Collective and Christian McBride & “Inside Straight”. Warren is a faculty member at the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore, MD & the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in San Francisco, CA.
3:30pm-4:30pm | Matt Stevens (Guitar) with Small Group I. A leading guitarist of his generation, Grammy Award winning “Matthew Stevens’ singular style dissolves the demarcation lines between jazz, rock and ambient music.” (Mojo****) Stevens’ music is “honest and soulful” (Pitchzfork) and is described as “music (that) advances the ideals of modern jazz”. (WBGO)
In addition to his critically acclaimed solo albums, Woodwork, Preverbal, Pittsburgh and In Common 1, 2 and 3 with Walter Smith III, Stevens’ songs and guitar playing are featured on over 70 recordings including those by Christian Scott atunde Adjuah, Esperanza Spalding, Terri Lyne Carrington, Dave Douglas, Next Collective, Sean Jones, Linda May Han Oh, Harvey Mason, and Anna B Savage.
Stevens is an Associate Professor at Berklee College of Music in Boston, MA. He has performed at top venues and festivals all over the world with his groups as well as being a featured performer with artists from Chris Thile to Gustavo Dudamel. As a producer, Stevens worked on Esperanza Spalding’s groundbreaking album Exposure, and her Grammy Award winning album 12 Little Spells. He also co – produced and performed on Terri Lyne Carrington’s Grammy nominated album Waiting Game and Grammy Award winning New Standards. Most recently, Stevens produced I Am A Pilgrim, Doc Watson at 100, which features artists including Valerie June, Dolly Parton, Rosanne Cash, Marc Ribot, Bill Frisell, and Steve Earle.
4:45pm-5:45pm | Princeton University Faculty Septet featuring Rudresh Mahanthappa (alto saxophone), Ted Chubb (trumpet), Michelle Lordi (voice), Miles Okazaki (guitar), Sumi Tonooka (piano), Matthew Parrish (bass), Dom Palombi (drums).
8:00pm Concert in Richardson Auditorium, Alexander Hall. Jazz at Princeton‘s and the Program in Latin American Studies present the Creative Large Ensemble, directed by Darcy James Argue and special guest Etienne Charles (trumpet). For tickets and more about this headlining event, click here. Darcy James Argue, “one of the top big band composers of our time”(Stereophile), is best known for Secret Society, an 18-piece group “renowned in the jazz world” (New York Times). Argue brings an outwardly anachronistic ensemble into the 21st century through his “ability to combine his love of jazz’s past with more contemporary sonics” and is celebrated as “a syncretic creator who avoids obvious imitation” (Pitchfork).
Acclaimed as an “innovative composer, arranger, and big band leader” by The New Yorker, Argue’s accolades include multiple GRAMMY nominations and a Latin GRAMMY Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Doris Duke Artist Award, and countless commissions and fellowships. His prescient 2016 Real Enemies, an album-length exploration of the politics of paranoia, was named one of the 20 best jazz albums of the decade by Stereogum. Like Real Enemies, Argue’s previous recordings — his debut Infernal Machines and his follow-up, Brooklyn Babylon — were nominated for both GRAMMY and JUNO awards.
The long-awaited fourth Secret Society album, Dynamic Maximum Tension, coming in 2023, is named after the three words that inventor and futurist R. Buckminster Fuller combined to form his personal brand: “Dymaxion” — a term reflecting Bucky’s desire to get the most out of his materials, the utopian vision of his designs, and his quest to improve the pattern of daily life. In composing the music for this recording, Argue found optimism and creative renewal in Fuller’s extraordinary prescience as an early proponent of wind and wave power, and in his timelessly futuristic designs inspired by the geometry of the natural world.
Argue has been named Composer of the Year and Secret Society named Big Band of the Year by the DownBeatInternational Critics Poll. He has been commissioned by the MAP Fund, the Fromm Music Foundation, the Newport Festival Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, BAM, and the Jazz Gallery, as well as ensembles including the Danish Radio Big Band, the Canadian National Jazz Orchestra, NYO Jazz, the Hard Rubber Orchestra, the West Point Jazz Knights, and the Orquestra Jazz de Matosinhos. He is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, New Music USA, Composers Now, the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, the Canada Council for the Arts, and MacDowell.
