Vocal doyen Nona Hendryx commanded the stage at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art on Feb. 29, bedecked in a silver, winged spacesuit and dark helmet. “Welcome to this Afrofuturistic-cala-fragilistic evening,” she told the crowd that assembled for Nona Hendryx and Disciples of Sun Ra in the Temple. “We are here to honor Sun Ra.” (Read more…)

For a while now, singer/composer Fay Victor has had a residency at 55 Bar, the spunky, stalwart jazz club in Greenwich Village, a relaxed room perfectly suited to her avant-garde songwriting and experimental vocalizations. Victor developed the seven songs for her latest release, Barn Songs, under its roof. (Read more…)

Singer-songwriter Michael Doucet doesn’t want you to think that his new band, Michael Doucet avec Lâcher Prise, plays Cajun music. Instead, call it Southwestern Louisiana music, he says. (Read more…)

Kurt Elling’s work as a vocalist and poet-cum-lyricist always has exerted depth; vocal frippery isn’t his style. So, it comes as a surprise that he digs even deeper into eloquence on Secrets Are The Best Stories, a new disc set for release on April 3. (Read more…)

When saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin finished the fourth song of her set, “Pursuance: The Music of the Coltranes,” at Le Poisson Rouge in Manhattan on Jan. 11, a techie gave her a time warning. The amped-up crowd expressed dismay. “Don’t tempt me,” she quipped into the mic. “Any woman who made a Coltrane album will play all night.” (Read more…)

A few years ago, actress Glenn Close and saxophonist Ted Nash started to toss around ideas for a new collaborative project. They were fresh off the success of Nash’s Grammy-winning recording, Presidential Suite: Eight Variations On Freedom , which had featured Close’s spoken word, and Nash had just received a commission from Jazz at Lincoln Center for another such inspired work. (Read more…)

Trombonist Delfeayo Marsalis’s new release as leader of the 16-piece Uptown Jazz Orchestra, Jazz Party opens with New Orleans singer Tonya Boyd-Cannon asserting a salty blues riff on the title tune. Boyd-Cannon, a top-20 finalist on the popular TV show The Voice, has one of those instruments that can do most anything, it’s so powerful. (Read more…)

Dominican operatic tenor Francisco Casanova, recognized for his ringing, bel canto vocal style, died on 26 September 2019, in Providence, Rhode Island, at the age of 61. He had been undergoing treatment for gallbladder and liver cancer for several months before his death from complications related to this illness. (Read more…)

In 1997 Seattle musicians Matt Jorgensen and John Bishop birthed Origin Records, an independent label “run by musicians for musicians.” An instrumentalist-led jazz label was a daring concept 23 years ago, when players had few recording options aside from those that the majors provided. But Origin was nothing if not daring. (Read more…)

On the first day of recording From This Place, guitarist Pat Metheny’s new album on Nonesuch, the 20-time Grammy-winner heard something that wasn’t there. “It was on the second take of the first tune,” he recalled in a recent interview in midtown Manhattan. “I thought, ‘Oh, I know what to do with this.’” (Read more…)

Bronx-native Samara McLendon, a vocal jazz student at SUNY-Purchase, claimed first place in the eighth annual Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition on Nov. 24. The competition, held at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center on Sarah Vaughan Way in Newark, N.J., throws a spotlight on talented up-and-coming vocalists from around the globe, helping them to advance their developing musical careers. (Read more…)

The ambient melodiousness of singer Theo Bleckmann’s 2019 release with keyboardist Joseph Branciforte, LP1 serves as a catalyst for probing introspection. On the album’s four improvised tracks, the co-composers stack barely voiced tones, subtle clicks, and oozing looped sounds to create a supernal mood—a mood that only barely obscures the album’s substrata of deep emotion. (Read more…)

Jazz horn quartets—wind ensembles that work without a rhythm section—are tricky. They flout accepted rhythmic and harmonic conventions. They don’t have much of their own repertoire. They’re latecomers to jazz, relatively speaking, and don’t conjure up a readily identifiable sound in listeners’ imaginations.

Clear vinyl. Artful designs. A shiny, luxe collector’s box. No question, Newvelle albums are beautiful to the eye. The story could end there, with these records sitting as vanities on a shelf somewhere. But you’ll want to take them down. They sound as gorgeous as they look.

From the 1970s to the 1990s, most of Keith Jarrett’s extended improvisations—a marvel of the jazz world—were long, clocking in at about 30 to 45 minutes apiece. But in the 2000s, his solo pieces became shorter, hardly ever topping 15 minutes, and mostly hitting well below that mark. This stylistic shift called attention away from the capaciousness of Jarrett’s extemporaneous playing and focused it instead on his freakish ability to improvise sonata-like movements on the fly.  

On a video from the 2015 International Jazz Day, filmed in Paris, clarinetist Oran Etkin and keyboardist Herbie Hancock are joking around. “I wanna say hi to all the Timbalooloo kids,” says Hancock, Jazz Day founder, directly to the camera. “Thank you so much for being part of this program and thank you for doing my music. Maybe I’m the Watermelon Man!”

Nat King Cole (1919-1965) achieved international fame for his romantic crooning in the 1950s and 1960s—he was, in fact, the biggest-selling pop artist of his generation, writes Will Friedwald, music journalist and co-producer of Resonance Records’ retrospective on the artist, Hittin’ the Ramp: The Early Years (1936-1943), in the liner notes. But “only a few older fans and critics remembered that he had been one of the greatest pianists in the whole history of American music”, Friedwald continued. The new album, released last month in honor of the 100th anniversary of Cole’s birth, helps to redress this oversight. 

The most revealing portion of Eri Yumamoto’s new work, the seven-part Goshu Ondo Suite, lies at the beginning of Part III, when the pianist/composer plays alone for three thrilling minutes. In those minutes one hears succinct stepwise motion in the left hand, against fluid improvisation and vivid chords in the right, all leading to a decisive rhythmic motif—the same motif that reappears in strategic spots throughout the piece. In this riveting solo, Yumamoto touches on each of the elements that, when blown up large, make for a radiant concerto.

The newly launched box set, The Fred Hersch Trio: 10 Years/6 Discs, on Palmetto Records, captures this landmark ensemble in the studio, on the road, and at its spiritual home, the Village Vanguard in Greenwich Village. Two of the albums’ six discs were session gigs and the remaining four recorded live. Curiously, Hersch assigned impressionistic titles to the studio dates—Whirl (PM 2143) and Floating (PM 2171)—while the live dates received more pragmatic treatment: Alive at the Village Vanguard, Discs 1 and 2 (PM 2159); Sunday Night at the Vanguard (PM 2183); and Live in Europe (PM 2192).

Piano superstars Chucho Valdés and Chick Corea had never played together before they squared off across two grand pianos in the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center on Nov. 15. This four-handed performance was the first of two consecutive evenings for the duo, with Valdés as the headliner and Corea as his special guest.