Here’s another in a series of posts we’re trying to restart here, this time to introduce you to a new recording by popular local jazz artists Laura Dubin and her husband Antonio Guerrero—Laura Dubin Trio Live at the Rochester International Jazz Festival 2025.
Laura and Antonio have been playing music together since the day they met in the summer of 2011 while working in a jazz trio on a Holland America Line cruise ship. Since then, they have traveled and performed together all over the world and performing for appreciative audiences across Rochester (both as a duo and as the core members of the Laura Dubin Trio). They have recorded and released twelve albums together and performed five times at the Rochester International Jazz Festival.
Many were introduced to the two when they launched Laura & Antonio’s Virtual Jazz Club during the pandemic, which provided a (nightly!) dose of live jazz from a special room they set up in their home. They created a unique and highly personal musical concept that consistently delights audiences of all ages, which includes Laura and Antonio’s original compositions, arrangements of Great American Songbook tunes and jazz standards, and jazz versions of classical music. You can visit Laura Dubin’s website for more on their background.
Laura and Antonio recently released Laura Dubin Trio Live at the Rochester International Jazz Festival 2025 capturing their performance at this year’s RIJF, joined by bassist David Kluge, which had SRO crowds for both sets at the Inn On Broadway. Laura shared her thoughts about on the experience:
We had a wonderful experience at the festival this year and we felt so happy with how the performances went! We were also thrilled to have a packed house for both sets (standing room only!) and it felt really joyful to share our music with the audience and to feel their enthusiasm in the room. Each of our RIJF performances has been special and memorable in its own way, but we think this year’s was our best one yet!
The new recording is the entire performance from the festival, from start to finish, including both sets of music that evening (a different program each set). They just ended making a two-disc album with one set on each disc. Laura continued:
We were so happy with how the performance turned out overall, that we didn’t feel a need to cut any of the songs out of the album; we really wanted it to sound exactly like the audience had experienced it in real life! We feel that this is our best album to date because it truly encapsulates our joy, creativity and spirit in a way that can only be captured in a live performance, and we think it’s a wonderful document of our musical concept at this moment in time, which we’ve arrived at after all these years of playing together.
This was the Trio’s fifth time performing at Rochester International Jazz Festival. The first two times (in 2016 and 2017) included a variety of music from originals to arrangements of standards and classical music, while the two following performances each had a theme: the music of West Side Story in 2019, and a tribute to Marian McPartland in 2023. This year they wanted to do a variety format again, playing fresh arrangements of some of their favorite standards, as well as a few jazz pieces they love that are perhaps lesser known, several recently-composed original tunes, and arrangements of two well-known works by Chopin. The online news publication the Rochester Beacon includes a review of the 2025 performance by Alex Holly.
I asked Laura to walk us through one or two of their favorite tracks on the album and expand on what makes them special to them either musically or emotionally. Laura couldn’t limit herself to just two, noting “it’s hard to pick our favorites because each piece of music that we played definitely has some kind of special meaning for us,” but she picked a few that she thought stood out. Here are her thoughts on a few tracks, along with the YouTube video of the performance, for a taste of the full two discs of Laura Dubin Trio Live at the Rochester International Jazz Festival 2025:
One of the most unique arrangements would have to be our Revolutionary Rhumba, which is Chopin’s “Revolutionary Etude” (a notoriously challenging piano piece, especially for the left hand) merged with Chick Corea’s “Armando’s Rhumba.” The arrangement begins with me playing the actual Etude the way it was composed, but then the drums and bass enter and suddenly it has a Latin groove, and the melody is played again in this style; then it’s followed by an improvisation over the chord progression of “Armando’s Rhumba” which eventually leads into the tune itself; and then finally the Etude comes back to the original classical style, only this time with drums and bass in the mix as well!
Singin’ in the Rain was our opening number, and we thought it was a fitting way to start the show because it captures our trio’s vibe so well. It’s a completely original arrangement, but the idea was for it to sound like it could have been the way that the Oscar Peterson Trio–with an up-tempo swing feel, space for drum fills in between phrases of the melody, coordinated “hits” between all three instruments, and an overall joyful sound!
Antonio plays so many brilliant drum solos throughout the album, and one of his most extensive solos is on Tombo in 7/4, composed by the Brazilian drummer/percussionist Airto Moreira. There are so many creative ideas that Antonio plays throughout his solo, but one of my favorites happens around the 5:00 mark. As the title says, the piece is written in 7/4 time, but in this part of the drum solo Antonio plays phrases of 11/8 over the 7/4 groove . . . a concept which he likes to call “7-Eleven!”
There are three original tunes on the album, and they all happen to be about places we’ve been. Waltz of the Ringstrasse was inspired by our 2024 trip to Vienna. The Ringstrasse (Ring Road) is a boulevard in Vienna that goes all the way around the historic center of the city, and you can get the best tour of Vienna simply by walking or riding around it, which of course we did! The piece is definitely a tip of the hat to Strauss’s Blue Danube waltz (which, incidentally, we also recorded on our album Laura Dubin Trio in Vienna), a piece of music that’s basically synonymous with Vienna.
Montmartre is named for a section of Paris where historically many of the great artists, writers and musicians lived; it’s also extremely hilly, and you wind up having to climb up and down a lot of long staircases if you’re exploring Montmartre. (It’s totally worth it for the amazing views, though!) This piece is supposed to mimic the feeling of climbing up all those big hills. Not only is it the final track of our Jazz Festival album, but it was also recorded on our album Pieces of Paris (an album of original music inspired by our 2019 trip to Paris).
Kalamablues is an ode to a city where a piece of my heart will forever live: Kalamazoo, Michigan! I lived there for four years while I was in college at Western Michigan University. At first I was simply going to call the piece “Kalamazoo,” then decided “Kalamazoo Blues” would be even better…and then I realized that the two words were begging to be combined, and Kalamablues was born!
JazzRochester published a profile of Laura and Antonio in 2021 during the pandemic. Since that post was published, they have since released 4 albums and performed twice more at the RIJF. They have also performed at two jazz clubs in Europe in the summer of 2024: Jazzclub ZWE in Vienna, Austria, and Jazzbar Vogler in Munich, Germany. In 2023 they released two albums: Dear Marian: The Music of Marian McPartland, which was officially released at the RIJF performance that year, and then in the fall they released Baroque in Blue: The Music of Claude Bolling. In August 2024 they recorded Laura Dubin Trio in Vienna in Austria (before performing at the aforementioned jazz club later that night).
Laura Dubin Trio Live at the Rochester International Jazz Festival 2025 and the group’s other CDs can be ordered from the music store on Laura Dubin’s website, and they always have CDs available for purchase at live performances (and you can check our listings for those). You can also find their music on Apple Music, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, and other streaming platforms. Video of the entire RIJF performance is available on YouTube as well.
Note: For our email subscribers, this is the first time I’m embedding video in the post since moving to the new platform, so I don’t know yet whether it will play nice with my email program. If it doesn’t, just click through to the site and enjoy it there.
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