Antoinette Montague

Pianist and Composer Mike Longo
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Antoinette was mentored by some great singers—Carrie Smith (“She inspired me to have a big voice on stage”), Etta Jones (“She could transport the audience”), Della Griffin (“She showed me laidback phrasing and how to use the comic side of my personality”) and Myrna Lake (“She let me sub for her and that’s when I learned to lead a band through three sets a night”). In addition, Montague has performed onstage with many top jazz and blues musicians including Jimmy Heath and the Queen’s Jazz Orchestra, Jon Faddis, Lou Donaldson, Red Holloway, Benny Powell, Earl May, Mike Longo, Tom Aalfs, Winard Harper, Wycliffe Gordon, Stan Hope, John J. DiMartino, Bernard Purdie, Victor Jones, Tootsie Bean,
Zeek Mullins, Paul Bollenback, Frank West, Tommy James, Payton Crosby, and numerous others. Montague also has recorded in the studio with Norman Simmons, Paul West, Joe Farnsworth, and Tom Aalfs.

Born and raised in Newark, New Jersey, Antoinette grew up listening to a lot of Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan.
In the fourth grade, Antoinette also would go to the local library and listen to albums by Duke Ellington,
Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, and Bessie Smith. Other influences were the R&B/soul of The Supremes, Aretha Franklin, Tina Turner,
The Jackson 5, Jackie Wilson, Stevie Wonder and Otis Redding; and singers as varied as Mahalia Jackson, Maime Smith, Paul Robeson, Nat King Cole, Mel Tormé,
Tony Bennett, Bob Marley, Jimi Hendrix, Little Willie John, Etta James, Patsy Cline, and Nancy Wilson. Antoinette went to Seton Hall University on a full academic Martin Luther King Scholarship and joined the college’s Voices United gospel choir which got to open for Walter Hawkins, Mighty Clouds of Joy, and the Soul Stirrers.
This led to her joining another gospel group, the Judah Chorale. Also during college Antoinette performed with an R&B group, sang in a blues band called Five Kings and a Queen, and took piano and voice lessons.

For 16 years Longo and his wife Dorothy hosted Jazz Tuesdays at the John Birks Gillespie Auditorium located in the New York City Baha’i Center (the religious Faith embraced by Dizzy Gillespie, James Moody and Longo) www.bahai.org. The series was dedicated to allowing artists to retain creative control of their work and providing students and the general public an opportunity to hear “world class jazz at affordable prices.”

For more details about Mike, please click here.

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