Dillon Vado

Dillon Vado is a professional drummer and vibraphonist in the San Francisco Bay Area, and a graduate of the California Jazz Conservatory in Berkeley. He grew up in San Jose, where he played many small club gigs on drums and marched snare drum for the Santa Clara Vanguard. He has recorded at Fantasy Studios, and played with many musicians at The Freight and Salvage, Yoshi’s, and the SF Jazz Center. He has also performed overseas at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland and the Umbria Jazz Festival in Italy. Dillon has performed with Art Lande, Hafez Modirzadeh, Royal Hartigan, Marcus Shelby, Erik Jekabson, Jeff Denson, Alan Hall, Jovino Santos Neto, Marcos Silva and Kate McGarry. In 2014, Dillon won 1st place in the Jazz Search West soloist competition on vibraphone. Dillon was also acknowledged as the Most Promising Young Jazz Artist of 2017 from the Buddy Montgomery Jazz Legacy Awards. He can be heard playing both drums and vibes on recent recordings with Alan Hall’s Ratatet, The Jeff Denson Quartet, and Erik Jekabson’s Electric Squeezebox Orchestra and leads several of his own projects, including Never Weather, The Table Trio, and Beyond Words: Jazz and Poetry. Blissonance by Never Weather is his debut album as a band leader and was just released in January on Bay Area Label, Ridgeway Records.

Awards

1st Place, Jazz Search West (soloist competition) 2014 Most Promising Young Jazz Musician: Buddy Montgomery Jazz Legacy Awards 2017

Carmen Staaf: Sounding Line

Read "Sounding Line" reviewed by Vic Albani

by Vic Albani
December 16, 2025

Carmen Staaf è una forza emergente della scena musicale di New York e, più in generale, del panorama jazz internazionale. Pianista originaria di Seattle--allieva di Danilo Perez--ha suonato e registrato con alcuni dei musicisti più influenti della nostra epoca. È stata ascoltata al Village Vanguard, al Blue Note, allo SFJAZZ e in numerosi festival di primo piano in tutto il mondo, tra cui Newport, Monterey, Montreux e il North Sea Jazz Festival, pur rimanendo per lungo tempo poco citata da ...

Album Review

Carmen Staaf: Sounding Line

Read "Sounding Line" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan

by Dan McClenaghan
October 22, 2025

Thelonious Monk (1917 -1982) was often grouped with the bebop pianists of the late 1940s and early 1950s. But he was not bop. He was a pianistic world unto itself. Quirky, dissonant, often playful. Mary Lou Williams (1910 -1981) did not fit the bop category either. She came in before bop's advent. Her music was stylistically closer to Duke Ellington's eloquence, sass and swing. Bop aside, pianist Carmen Staaf heard a musical kinship between these two 20th-century contemporaries. ...

Album Review

Never Weather: Blissonance

Read "Blissonance" reviewed by Jerome Wilson

by Jerome Wilson
June 21, 2020

Drummer and vibraphonist Dillon Vado is a Bay Area musician whose group, Never Weather, has produced a debut CD that shows a lot of versatility. The band uses a lineup that features, trumpet, saxophone and guitar to create music full of sudden twists and that sometimes straddles the line between jazz and rock. Guitarist Justin Rock, saxophonist Aaron Wolf and trumpeter Josh D. Reed make a forceful and springy front line that delivers a punchy unison charge on ...

"Oakland Drummer/Composer Dillon Vado Unleashes Exquisite Brain Storms With Blissonance, the Debut Album by His Quintet Never Weather" -Andy Gilbert: Mercury News

"These compositions take us into the creative mind and experimentation of Vado as a composer. They also explore opportunities for the ensemble players to express themselves in unique and improvisational ways." -Dee Dee McNeil: Musicalmemoirs Blog

"A snapshot of an evolving ensemble, Blissonance is the work of restless intelligence and bountiful heart." -Andy Gilbert: Mercury News

"No piece better captures the group’s poise and attention to detail than “Always Setting,” a spacious, attenuated melody connected by a mobile bass line. It’s an intricate piece of chamber jazz that gradually gains gravity without density. -Andy Gilbert: Mercury News