Artist Bios - Ravi Coltrane
Ravi Coltrane Quartet: Centennial Celebration
Performers
Ravi Coltrane, saxophones
David Virelles, piano
Dezron Douglas, bass
Johnathan Blake, drums
About Ravi Coltrane
GRAMMY-nominated saxophonist, bandleader, and composer, Ravi Coltrane has established himself as a creative force in jazz over the course of his thirty-plus-year career. With six acclaimed albums to his name as a bandleader, Ravi has toured the world with his ensembles and collaborated with some of the top names in jazz.
Ravi’s six album releases include: Moving Pictures, From The Round Box, Mad 6, In Flux, Blending Times, and Spirit Fiction. He’s also been featured on countless collaborations, from Seraphic Light with Joe Lovano and David Liebman to In Movement with Jack DeJohnette and Matthew Garrison, and The Blue Note’s 70th Anniversary recording Mosaic: A Celebration of Blue Note. Among his many other credits, include tours, performances, and recordings with the likes of Elvin Jones, Terence Blanchard, Kenny Barron, Steve Coleman, McCoy Tyner, Jack DeJohnette, Matt Garrison, Jeff “Tain” Watts, Geri Allen, Joanne Brackeem, and The Blue Note 7.
Born in Long Island, the second son of John Coltrane and Alice Coltrane, Ravi was named after Indian sitar legend Ravi Shankar. He was raised in Los Angeles where his family moved after his father’s death in 1967. His mother, Alice Coltrane, was a significant influence on Ravi and it was he who encouraged Alice to return to performance and the recording studio after a long absence. Subsequently, Ravi produced and played on Alice Coltrane’s powerful, Translinear Light, which was released in 2004.
Ravi lives in Brooklyn, NY and maintains a fast-paced touring, recording, composing and performance schedule. He leads the effort to restore the John Coltrane Home in Dix Hills, Long Island and presides over important reissues of his parent’s recordings.
This performance is part of Ravi’s centennial celebration of his father, John Coltrane.
About the Performers
David Virelles is a pianist, composer, and scholar whose work emerges from deep engagement with tradition. Raised in a musical family in Santiago de Cuba, he was immersed from an early age in Afro Caribbean musical lineages alongside Western classical training. In 2001, Virelles relocated first to Toronto and later on to New York City, where he became an integral voice in the city’s creative music community.
Although Virelles often describes his work as “one hundred percent traditional,” his music resists categorization. Rather than fusing styles, he draws from multiple historical lineages to form a highly personal and syncretic language, one shaped by continuity, research, and lived experience. This artistic vision was showcased in ORO, his interdisciplinary work commissioned by Carnegie Hall and premiered there in 2024, as well as his recent premiere Vaivén, commissioned by the Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin in 2026.
His recorded output reflects a wide artistic scope. His debut album Continuum (2012) was named the #1 album of the year by The New York Times. His ongoing series The Singer’s Grove honors the musical history of Santiago de Cuba; Volumes I and II were recorded in Santiago with local masters and named Best Latin Jazz Album by NPR in 2018. His latest release, The Singer’s Grove Vol. III, continues his exploration of archival Cuban material alongside original compositions for piano and synthesizers, recorded to wax cylinders. Virelles is a Steinway Artist, a Guggenheim Fellow and a professor at the Zürich University of the Arts.
Bassist, composer, bandleader, and educator Dezron Douglas has established himself as a major force in contemporary creative music. A protégé of the great Jackie McLean, the Downbeat Magazine 2019 Rising Star is known for his work with Pharoah Sanders, Ravi Coltrane, Cyrus Chestnut, David Murray, Louis Hayes, Enrico Rava, Stefon Harris, George Cables, Eric Reed, Mulgrew Miller and Benny Green. In 2021, he joined the Trey Anastasio Band.
Dezron has recorded on more than 150 albums, contributing to the artistry of numerous bandleaders and maintaining an integral presence in the sounds of his peers. He is an active music educator, currently on the Jazz Studies faculty at NYU Steinhardt. He has released six albums as a lead artist and maintains a variety of projects that he uses as platforms for his compositions.
Dezron's most recent release, Atalaya (International Anthem) has been widely lauded by critics and fans alike.
For Johnathan Blake, music has always been a family affair. The drummer and bandleader’s previous Blue Note album, Passage (2023), was an homage to his father and chief mentor, the late jazz violinist John Blake Jr. The album cover features a sepia-toned snapshot of father and son, taken by his godfather, Eugene Wood. On his label debut Homeward Bound (2021), Blake honored the memory of Ana Grace, daughter of his longtime friends, saxophonist Jimmy Greene and flautist Nelba Marquez-Greene, on the eponymous track, who succumbed during the Sandy Hook massacre.
In 2017, Blake was awarded a commission from The Jazz Gallery as part of their annual Fellowship program. Now, with his newest album My Life Matters, Blake delivers what may be his most personal effort yet. “Right around that time when I was writing this music, it seemed like every other day I was watching or listening to the news, and it was another person of color — another Black and Brown person — being taken away from us at the hands of people that were supposed to serve and protect us,” says Blake. “I didn’t want to become numb to the things that were unfolding in front of me. I wanted to speak up through my music.” While Blake never set out to make a protest album in the vein of Max Roach’s We Insist! Freedom Now Suite, he will gladly take up the charge established by his predecessors as part of this music’s continuum. “Those musicians set the bar very high for us to follow. If we’re not following their lead, then we are doing them a disservice.”
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