UW Blue Note Ensemble, Afro-Cuban Jazz Ensemble

media release: Join us this Friday for a performance in our 2025-2026 academic year Friday Jazz Series, featuring students from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Mead Witter School of Music's Jazz Studies Program under the leadership of Johannes Wallmann. This Friday's performance will feature the Blue Note Ensemble, directed by Mitchell Shiner, and the Afro-Cuban Jazz Ensemble, directed by Nick Moran.

Come enjoy some music, tour our printmaking studio to see the current projects our collaborative printmakers are working on with our artists, and view our current exhibition, Pathways, by our curatorial graduate student, Alexandra Riesco.

For those that can’t join us in person, these jazz concerts will be live streamed again this year. To view concerts online, visit tandempress.wisc.edu/live. Live streaming of each of the concerts in the Friday Jazz Series is brought to you by Audio for the Arts and Microtone Media.

Click here to watch recordings of past performances in the Friday Jazz Series on the Tandem Press YouTube Channel

About Tandem Press: Tandem Press is one of only three professional printmaking studios and press affiliated with a university in the United States. Tandem Press is a self-funded entity housed within the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. As a printmaking studio, Tandem Press hosts international renowned artists (such as Suzanne Caporael, Jim Dine, Sam Gilliam, David Lynch, Maser, Judy Pfaff, Alison Saar, Sean Scully, Mickalene Thomas, and many others) in their studio space, assisting them as they create fine art prints and produce editions of these artworks. As a gallery, Tandem Press represents, promotes, and sells the artworks created in their studio both locally through exhibitions in the Tandem Press Apex Gallery and nationally through participation in several art fairs (in Chicago, New York, Miami, San Antonio, San Francisco, and others) throughout the year. As a non-profit educational institution, Tandem Press partners with other departments at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to offer artist lectures, tours, printmaking workshops, and other special events to serve both the student and public community. Many graduate and undergraduate students from UW-Madison come to Tandem Press to work alongside the curators, the master printers, and the visiting artists through which they are immersed in a unique learning experience that is unmatched anywhere else. Prints created at Tandem Press are included in many prestigious collections throughout the United States and Europe, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, The Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., and the British Museum, to name a few.  

About the UW-Madison Mead Witter School of Music: Since 1895, UW-Madison’s Mead Witter School of Music has lived out a commitment to a rigorous, student-centered musical education. One of the largest departments within the College of Letters & Science, the School of Music offers flexible programs with innovative and global approaches to music study. The school’s teaching, research, and performances reflect the university’s progressive history of creating change through innovation and exploration. Public programming, diverse student ensembles, artists in residence, and prestigious faculty demonstrate how the Mead Witter School of Music embraces “The Wisconsin Idea,” the university’s ethos of sharing what we do with the broadest audience possible. The University of Wisconsin-Madison Mead Witter School of Music is accredited by the National Association of Schools of Music (NASM) and has been an institutional member of NASM since 1966.  

About Dr. Johannes Wallmann: Dr. Johannes Wallmann, the John and Carolyn Peterson Chair in Jazz Studies, joined the University of Wisconsin-Madison Mead Witter School of Music as Director of Jazz Studies in the fall of 2012. A veteran of the New York and San Francisco Bay Area jazz scenes, he has performed extensively as a bandleader and as a sideman in local, national, and international venues. Prior to joining the Mead Witter School of Music faculty, Wallmann taught jazz piano, improvisation, and music theory at California State University East Bay, New York University, and at the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music. He has released five critically acclaimed CDs including The Johannes Wallmann Quartet (1997), Alphabeticity (2003), Minor Prophets (2007), The Coasts (2010), and Johannes Wallmann Quintet: The Town Musicians (2015).  

The Tandem Press Friday Jazz Series is made possible with support from the John and Carolyn Peterson Family Foundation.