The 2026 Durham Jazz Festival welcomes The Pete Roth Trio (PRT), featuring Pete Roth on guitar, Mike Pratt on bass, and the incomparable Bill Bruford on drums offers a near-jazz experience that is intimate, improvised, and deeply interactive.
The music unfolds as a conversation between players and audience, where every performance becomes a unique exploration of sound, texture, and connection.
PRT strives for an intimate, relatively unscripted music that thrives in small places and dark corners. Jazz, funk, contemporary classical, Dvořák. Nothing is sacred.
It’s not retro. It’s not comfortable. It’s just brilliantly unruly.
Roth’s original compositions, such as Dancing with Grace, the Trio’s collaborative works like Part of the Charm and Looking Forward to Looking Back, or their reinterpretation of masterworks such as Dvořák’s Largo from Symphony No. 9, offer just a few gateways into the creative world of the Pete Roth Trio, a world that will likely reshape your perspective on what the guitar trio format can achieve.
Guitar: Pete Roth
Bass: Mike Pratt
Drums: Bill Bruford
