SHOWTIMES: 7:30PM AND 9:30PM. “Live Life with Passion” is Mark Adams’ motto for the new Jazz generation. Adams served as the music director for the legendary producer/composer Roy Ayers for thirty years. This Baltimore native, son of professional musicians, and world class Jazz and Soul pianist began music training at five years old when Velma Adams, his mother and a former music instructor, sat him down at the piano. Seven years later his family re-located to New York City where his late father, the renowned Broadway classical woodwind player Kenneth Adams, inspired him to study classical music and jazz at the Greenwich Village School of Music and to consider a career as a pianist.

Adams is a composer and musical director and regularly performs throughout the U.S., Cuba, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Nigeria, South Africa, Turkey, Japan and China with jazz legend and mentor Roy Ayers (whom he calls his surrogate father). He has toured with many other renowned artists including Ron Carter, Ronnie Laws, Hugh Masekela, the late Lou Rawls, Bobbie Humphrey, Angela Bofil, Jon Lucien, Lonnie Liston Smith, Lela Hathaway, Dave Valentine, Wayne Henderson and tap dance sensation, Savion Glover. He has performed with R&B artists Erika Badu, Mary J. Blige, Maysa, Bilal, Jocelyn Brown, Queen Latifa and DJ Pete Rock. Adams also debuted as on Broadway in the musical ‘Five Guys Named Moe’ and ‘The Color Purple’ and in numerous off-Broadway productions, including in Frankfort, Germany.

Mark Adams’ live sound, ‘Fresh & New,’ is “the beginning of the new movement of Souljazz, transport[ing] Jazz away from the Smooth Jazz format” and in 2010 Adams began touring under his own name. Adams has a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Music Performance from City College, City University of New York (CUNY) and a Master of Arts from Queens College – City University of New York (CUNY). He is a faculty member at York College (CUNY) in New York where he teaches music theory and jazz history, music appreciation, beginning and advanced piano techniques (classical and jazz), jazz styles and techniques, jazz improvisation, keyboard harmony, and advanced harmony – forms and analysis.