Joel LaRue Smith comes from Boston to the Half Note stage with Eleni Arapoglou.

A magical pianist and composer born in New York, he has appeared on major stages around the world in the genre of jazz and Afro-Latin music. He has collaborated with renowned musicians such as Mario Bauza, Tito Puente, Ron Carter, and Kenny Burrell. His music is a rich blend of empowering jazz and Afro-Caribbean rhythms and harmonies. His songs and compositions bring Cuban dance rhythms such as timba, mambo, songo, Mozambique, cha-cha and rhumba, as well as bebop, hard bop, and swing melodies. His music creates vibrancy and a serenity with his sweet improvisations. A recording and performing artist as well as a speaker, professor and Director of Jazz Studies at Tufts University, where he met Eleni Arapoglou as Director of the Tufts Jazz Orchestra.

His record, "Motorman's Son" inspired by his father who was a railroad driver in New York, was described by Downbeat Magazine as "a vibrant, powerful and hardgrooving release". Together with Eleni Arapoglou in the voice with which they will remember favorite standards played in Boston for years, with Grigoris Theodoridis on bass and Jason Wastor on drums, they will travel the world with the latest compositions from the band "Testimony" "!