LIJF 2026: Tim Garland and Geoffrey Keezer

Tickets on sale on Friday 17th October at 9am
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Tim Garland (saxophones)Geoffrey Keezer (piano)
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In Spring 2025 in New York, Grammy award-winning musicians Tim Garland (saxophone) and Geoffrey Keezer (piano) recorded a brand-new duet album, Mezzo.
The transatlantic meeting between Garland and Keezer started 25 years ago with Garland?s Made By Walking album on Chick Corea?s label and continued with three albums with the Storms Nocturnes Trio (also featuring Joe Locke).
Both seasoned players have globe-trotted with some of the most famous players in music and show their crystalline lyrical maturity as well as incendiary virtuosity in a set that features one new and rare instrument after which the album is named.
Throughout an international career starting in the late 1980?s, Grammy-winning saxophonist Tim Garland has become known as a unique polymath in the UK?s music scene. His first break as a saxophonist was joining Ronnie Scott's band at age 23. Later he was to join Chick Corea as a regular member of several globe-trotting projects over a seventeen-year period including The Vigil. Playing tenor and soprano saxes, bass clarinet, and flute, he also won a Grammy for his symphonic orchestrations on Corea?s The New Crystal Silence album from 2007.
He has fulfilled commissions from several of the world's top orchestras, including a double concerto from the LSO, a piano concerto for Gwilym Simcock from The Royal Northern Sinfonia, with whom he went on to record three CDs, a cello and sax concerto from the CBSO, and a sax concerto from the BBC Concert Orchestra. His concert works continue to celebrate the fertile ground between modern composition and jazz.
His creative arranging skills have won much praise from such diverse artists as Jean Luc Ponty, John Patitucci, The Royal Holloway and Westminster Choirs, the Catalan National Cobla Group, the LPO, the London Session Orchestra, NYJO as well as Chick Corea.
As a band leader and co-leader, he is responsible for much of the output of the groups; Lammas, The Underground Orchestra, Storms / Nocturnes (feat. Joe Locke and Geoffrey Keezer), Acoustic Triangle, the last few years of Bill Bruford?s Earthworks, and Lighthouse, with Gwilym Simcock and Asaf Sirkis.
He has won awards and nominations from The Parliamentary Jazz Awards, The Worshipful Company Of Musicians, BASCA?s British Composer Awards, and won CD of the year in 2016 from Jazzwise for his album One.
Geoffrey Keezer is a Grammy-winning pianist, composer, arranger and producer based in New York City. A native of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, he began playing piano and composing at an early age. After briefly attending the Berklee College of Music in Boston, Keezer moved to New York in 1989, becoming the last pianist with the legendary Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers.
Keezer has toured and recorded with Ray Brown, Roy Hargrove, Joshua Redman, Diana Krall, Art Farmer, Benny Golson, Barbara Hendricks, Wayne Shorter, Dianne Reeves, David Sanborn, Chris Botti, Sting, Joe Locke and Christian McBride; produced and arranged three GRAMMY?-nominated recordings with vocalist Denise Donatelli, and released a series of albums drawing influences from Hawaiian, Okinawan and Afro-Peruvian folk traditions.
His 2009 album Aurea (ArtistShare) was nominated for a Best Latin Jazz Album Grammy award. Geoffrey?s 2013 solo piano release, Heart of the Piano (Motema Records), seeks to redefine solo jazz piano as a personal and interactive showcase of melody, energy and groove, while his 2018 album On My Way to You (MarKeez Records) is a stunning set of music featuring his working trio with the addition of guest vocalist Gillian Margot. Keezer?s latest album Playdate (MarKeez Records) earned a 2023 Grammy in the Best Instrumental Composition category for his song Refuge.
Geoffrey?s compositions have been commissioned by the Mainly Mozart Festival, Art of El?n ensemble, Saint Joseph Ballet, Zeltsman Marimba Festival, Carnegie Hall Jazz Orchestra and Scottish National Jazz Orchestra. His music can be heard in the films What Happens in Vegas, The Wedding Year, and Inhale, and in numerous TV shows including The Young and the Restless, Parks and Recreation, Casual, House of Lies, Call Me Kat, American Crime Story, Clarice, and The Originals.
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On Garland and Keezer:
?Geoffrey is a composer and conceptualist who can maintain the overall line and the DNA of the song in everything he plays. A musician?s musician.? ? Sting
?This just may be the best jazz duet I have ever heard? - Gary Burton
?Beautiful music of course. Tim?s saxophone tone is good enough to eat? - Bill Bruford
?The oneness of their communication and execution is magical? - Joe Lovano
"Few world-class jazz improvisers are comparably imaginative composers, but the British reeds player Tim Garland is that rarity" - The Guardian
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