Ernie Watts

Performing at the Theatre on San Pedro Square at 8 and 9:30 PM. 

“The virtues we’ve come to associate with Watts include fertile harmonic imagination, a beautiful Trane-soaked-in-wine tone, the blowtorch cry, rippling cadenzas and the ability to swing at any tempo.”
Kirk Silsbee / LA CityBeat

Two-time Grammy Award winner Ernie Watts is one of the most versatile and prolific saxophone players on the music scene.

In a diverse career that has spanned more than 40 years, he has been featured on over 500 recordings by artists ranging from Cannonball Adderley to Frank Zappa, always exhibiting his unforgettable trademark sound.

Watts’ eclectic mix of career activities includes current work with vocalist Kurt Elling in a tribute to Johnny Hartman and John Coltrane with string quartet. He has taken part in Jazz at the Kennedy Center for Billy Taylor, and recently toured Australia with Billy Cobham and orchestra.” A typical year finds Watts touring Europe with his own quartet, in Asia as a featured guest artist and performing at summer festivals throughout North America and Europe, often with Charlie Haden’s Quartet West. He gives back to the music by conducting student clinics and master classes. Watts has also compiled a collection of orchestral arrangements for guest soloist appearances with symphonies. And there is the occasional “hometown gig” with the Ernie Watts Quartet in Los Angeles, where he is still based.

The joy he found in jazz as a youth, now enriched by experience, still is his today. Watts sums it up; “I see music as the common bond having potential to bring all people together n peace and harmony. All things in the physical world have vibration; the music I choose to play is the energy vibration that touches a common bond in people. I believe that music is God singing through me, an energy to be used for good.”

Ernie and the West Valley Orchestra will be headlining one of the jazz stages at the Theater on San Pedro Square on Friday, May 15th.