Troy Davis
Artist-in-Residence
Drumset
Biography
Born in 1965 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the highly regarded jazz drummer, Troy Davis, studied with the great clarinetist and innovator Alvin Batiste at Southern University before heading to New York in 1986. His education took a giant step the following year, when he enrolled in one of the great post-graduate programs in jazz: he joined the band led by vocalist Betty Carter, famous (and feared!) for her demanding but rewarding mentorship of young musicians. Davis spent two-and-a-half years with Carter, touring the world and recording two albums before moving on to the groups led by some of jazz’s pre-eminent “young lion” trumpeters of the 1990’s: Roy Hargrove, Marlon Jordan, and Terence Blanchard.
Davis has appeared on more than a half-dozen discs by Blanchard- including his self-titled debut and several of the trumpeter's movie soundtrack albums. In 1995 he was a member of the Blanchard quintet that toured Latin America as “cultural ambassadors” designated by the U.S. Information Agency. Since 1994 Davis has also toured and recorded with Jamaican born jazz pianist Monty Alexander; in addition, he has been tapped to work with a virtual encyclopedia of jazz greats, including Ahmad Jamal, Joe Henderson, Kenny Burrel, Milt Hinton, Toots Thielemans, Pharoah Sanders, Paquito D’Rivera, Jimmy Heath, and the Marsalis Brothers.
