Signature Series Presents Larry Klein Meets Berklee, with Madeleine Peyroux and Luciana Souza

Berklee’s Signature Series presents Larry Klein Meets Berklee—an evening with one of our generation’s most versatile and prolific musicians and producers on Thursday, February 21, 8:00 p.m. at the Berklee Performance Center, 136 Massachusetts Avenue, Boston. Tickets are available now at the Berklee Performance Center box office and online. 

Bassist, producer, songwriter, arranger, film scorer, and four-time Grammy Award winner Klein has worked with a stunning array of artists during his career, including Joni Mitchell, Wayne Shorter, Bobby McFerrin, Bob Dylan, Herbie Hancock, Randy Newman, Freddie Hubbard, Cher, and Roy Orbison, among others. All Music lists Klein as having participated in more than 700 recordings to date. 

Klein’s self-curated set weaves the audience through a vast and diverse discography performed by an international ensemble of students, alumni, and faculty bringing his songs to life in familiar and unexpected ways. Special guests include Madeleine Peyroux, jazz singer and songwriter, and Luciana Souza B.M. ’88, Grammy Award–winning jazz vocalist and composer. Brazilian singer Mirella Costa B.M. ‘18 will also share the spotlight.

The first half of the concert will feature songs Klein has produced, cowrote, and/or performed on by Leonard Cohen, Tracy Chapman, Robbie Robertson, and others. 

The second half will celebrate one of Klein’s best-known collaborations, Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now, which he produced in 2000. The concept album is an orchestral rendering of love songs between the 1920s and ‘70s, including Mitchell’s own “A Case of You” and “Both Sides Now.” It won two Grammy Awards in 2001 for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album and Best Instrumental Arrangement Accompanying Vocalist(s) for the album’s title track. Under the baton of Julius Williams, professor in the Composition Department, a student orchestra will take center stage to recreate the recording. 

“Joni and I decided to make an album that traced the arc of a relationship, from the inception of flirtation all the way through to the relationship turning back into a friendship. It followed the same arc as my and Joni's relationship, and we would laughingly come to refer to the series of songs as “the stations of the cross,” said Klein. “We enlisted our friends Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Billy Preston, and the great arranger Vince Mendoza in helping us in the task of making this standards album, and creating an album that we both love to this day.”

For Larry Klein Meets Berklee, Marty Walsh, assistant professor in the Ensemble and Music Production and Engineering departments, serves as musical director. Carl Beatty, assistant vice president of artist and music industry relations, is the concert’s producer. Maureen McMullan, concert and event producer, is the concert’s executive producer.