FRIDAY AND SATURDAY SHOWTIMES: 7:30 AND 9:30 PM. Singer/Songwriter Tony Hightower is taking up the mantle to be a bridge that ushers R&B audiences into Jazz…Real Jazz. With years of experience as a musical performer and actor with familial roots that place him firmly within the music’s firmament, Atlanta-native Hightower is still just getting started on this benevolent turn in his journey. And he is bringing a lot of young people with him.

Growing up in Atlanta with a local legend mother who was a Funk-Rock singer but could sing anything and mentored many singers coming behind her, Tony learned music first-hand from Bobby Blue Bland and the Platters to Mother’s Finest, S.O.S. Band and Brick. “My first jazz musical loves were Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra,” When I started making my transition into Jazz, I asked Freddy Cole for his tutelage. He gave me a lot of obscure artists and songs to learn. Then one day, he told me in earnest, ‘You need to start writing your own songs. We need new songs!’ 

Hightower concludes. “What I’m doing is finding the ways that I can sing Jazz and still make it appropriate which I think is going to make me different as a jazz singer. I have the understanding of what it should be but then I have these other tools that are separate from what Traditional Jazz is. I’m figuring out the balance of where Jazz purists will respect it while people who don’t think they like Jazz dig it.”