Mark Harvey is the founder and music director of the Aardvark Orchestra and is a composer, arranger, trumpeter, pianist, and conductor. As a composer, he has created more than one hundred original works and received commissions from the Meet the Composer/Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Commissioning Program, the Organization of American Kodaly Educators, the 15th Annual John Coltrane Memorial Concert, and the MIT Wind Ensemble. Several commissions from the MIT Festival Jazz Ensemble have included compositions written for and premiered by Joe Lovano and Steve Turre.

As a trumpeter, he has performed with Gil Evans, Vinny Golia, Sheila Jordan, Howard McGhee, Rajesh Mehta, Paul Lovens, Claudio Roditi, and George Russell, among others, and serves as music director for FiLmprov, programs of improvisation with the films of Kate Matson. He has appeared as a guest conductor with the Jazz Composers Alliance Orchestra, the Vinny Golia Large Ensemble, the Walter Thompson Big Band, the Amarillo College Jazz Ensemble and the MIT Festival Jazz Ensemble. He has performed at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., the Southern California Institute of Architecture, Santa Monica, CA, the Village Gate, Public Theater, and Saint Peter’s Church, all in New York City, the Left Bank Jazz Society, Baltimore, MD, the Baja State Theater, Mexico, and the Berlin Jazz Festival, Germany.

He may be heard on twenty recordings, including eight CDs of his original compositions and with the Aardvark Jazz Orchestra on the Leo, Leo Lab, Nine Winds, and Aardmuse labels. As a sideman, his work includes with George Russell’s Orchestra [The African Game and So What, Blue Note Records] and with Baird Hersey’s Year of the Ear [ Lookin’ for that Groove and Have You Heard?, Arista/Novus Records]. With small ensembles, he has improvised soundtracks for the DVD collections of historic silent films Treasures from American Film Archives and More Treasures from American Film Archives, produced by the National Film Preservation Foundation, and released two recordings of collectively improvised free jazz.

He has given lectures, papers, and workshops on music, religion, and culture with an emphasis on jazz, particularly the sacred music of Duke Ellington, throughout the United States and in Europe. These include national meetings of the American Academy of Religion, the American Studies Association, and the Society for the Arts, Religion, and Contemporary Culture, conferences such as Music in American Religious Experience at the University of Chicago and the 17th International Duke Ellington Society Conference, as well as presentations at Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of California, San Diego, the Andover Newton Theological School, the Brown Lectures at the Boston University School of Theology, and a lecture at the Boston Public Library in conjunction with the Smithsonian Institution’s traveling exhibition Beyond Category: the Life and Genius of Duke Ellington.

His essays have appeared in anthologies such as Jazz in Mind [1991] and This is How We Flow:Rhythm in Black Cultures [1999] as well as in journals such as Black Sacred Music, Religion in Intellectual Life, Soundings, and Theology Today.

In addition to these activities, Dr. Harvey teaches jazz studies at MIT, is a United Methodist minister, and has been active for many years with the Boston jazz community. He founded and directed the Jazz Coalition which produced concerts, educational programs, including Arni Cheatham’s JazzEd program during the desegregation of the Boston public schools, presented jazz in community settings, and served as an advocate for jazz artists and the jazz art form.