Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify
The Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” has been hailed as a milestone, considered one of the band’s best at the time of its release, and ranked “the greatest album of all time” in Rolling Stone’s list of the top 500 rock albums. When bassist Leon Lee Dorsey and drum legend Mike Clark were tossing it back and forth one night, they got to musing about that incredible time period and what recordings represented the essence of that time and place, and the Beatles place in that time. They recruited Michael Wolff, a piano stylist unrivaled in his uncanny interpretation of popular songs of that era, and he brought the concept home. “Wolff Clarke Dorsey Play Sgt. Pepper” features eight exuberant and swinging renditions of the album’s finest tunes.
Since his world-beating 2013 Blue Note Records debut, “Liquid Spirit,” which won the Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Album, Gregory Porter hasn’t let down his legion of fans. He’s the world’s bestselling soul/jazz artist with over three million world-wide album sales. He scored another Grammy for 2016’s “Take Me to the Alley” and told his life story through Nat King Cole’s songbook on his 2017 release. Porter now unveils his sixth release, “All Rise,” returning to his beloved original songwriting—heart-on-sleeve lyrics imbued with everyday philosophy and real-life detail, set to a mix of jazz, soul, blues and gospel.
Also this week, multi-award winning London-based saxophonist and composer Nubya Garcia unveils her debut CD, “Source,” blending soul, dub-step, cumbia and calypso while never losing her deep jazz foundation;
trumpet legend Eddie Henderson is joined by pianist Kenny Barron, drummer Mike Clark and saxophonist Donald Harrison on his new disc, “Shuffle and Deal”;
and guitarist Grant Gordy, known as a force on the bluegrass-and-beyond music scene spending six years in mandolin legend Dave Grisman’s quintet, explores a program of jazz standards on “Interpreter.”