Miles Davis performed at Artpark in 1974 during the venue’s inaugural season — a fact that lends this July’s world premiere performance an unusually precise kind of historical resonance. Fifty-two years later, on the same Mainstage where Davis once stood, Legacy in Motion: Celebrating Miles Davis at 100 arrives as a centennial tribute, and it is not a nostalgia package. It is a genuine attempt to put something new in the room.
About the Performance
The production unites two Western New York-rooted forces. The Jon Lehrer Dance Company — founded in Buffalo in 2007 and now based in New York City — brings what critics have described as “athletic dance theater in perfection,” a company whose work blends modern and jazz idioms without reducing either to the other. Jon Lehrer’s choreography has earned attention in Dance Magazine and from European stages, and the company’s reputation for going “somewhere unexpected” suggests this is not a by-the-numbers tribute in tutus.
Anchoring the live music is John Bacon and Star People, an all-star Western New York jazz ensemble built around Miles Davis’s catalog. Bacon — holding a PhD in Music Composition from SUNY Buffalo and a 2013 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship — leads a band drawing from bebop, cool jazz, and fusion across Davis’s career. The ensemble’s repertoire pulls from Kind of Blue, In a Silent Way, and Amandla. The full band includes Tim Clarke on trumpet, Andy Weinzler on saxophone, George Caldwell on piano, Harry Graser on electric keyboards, and Joe Goehle on bass.
The evening will reconfigure the Mainstage into a club setting, with artists and audience sharing the stage and capacity deliberately limited. For a venue accustomed to large-scale summer productions, that is a meaningful shift in register — and it is the kind of intimacy that a Davis centennial demands.
About Artpark
Artpark sits in Lewiston, roughly 25 miles north of Buffalo in Niagara County, overlooking the Niagara Gorge. Its Mainstage Theater is one of the more historically significant performing arts spaces in the Buffalo / Western NY region — the 1974 opening season alone included a roster that would embarrass most contemporary festivals. The amphitheater holds up to 10,000 for conventional configurations, though this event’s club-style setup will make the experience considerably more intimate than a standard Artpark evening.
Tickets
Legacy in Motion: Celebrating Miles Davis at 100 is presented by Artpark with support from Woods Oviatt Gilman. Tickets are available through Ticketmaster, at artpark.net, or by phone at 716-754-4375. The limited capacity format is not decorative language — this is a genuinely small configuration for a venue of this size.