Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify
Woodlawn Cemetery is a National Historic Landmark in the Bronx, New York, that is known throughout the world as the final resting place of many celebrated jazz musicians, including Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Lionel Hampton, Max Roach, Ornette Coleman, Cootie Williams and Jackie McLean. The Woodlawn Conservancy commissioned saxophonist and composer Victor Goines to write “The Woodlawn Suite,” with the goal of honoring notable figures through music. Goines called upon his colleagues from the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, his former students from Juilliard and Northwestern University, and longtime friends to be part of the full jazz orchestra on the project.
Celebrated musician, composer and educator Maddie Vogler announces the release of her highly anticipated debut album, “While We Have Time.” A fixture on the Chicago music scene, she’s an in-demand performer, as well as a Luminarts Jazz Fellow through the Luminarts Cultural Foundation. Having completed her studies in music education at the University of Illinois-Champaign, Vogler currently shares her knowledge and passion for music as a teacher at Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Illinois. The nine original songs on the CD are idiomatically anchored in modern jazz while freely exploring Vogler’s relationship with her Cuban roots.
Also this week, saxophonist Chrisopher Merz, who directs the Jazz Studies program at the University of Northern Iowa, has created a new ensemble, Shorter Stories, to perform his arrangements of the music of Wayne Shorter on “New Juju”; trombonist/composer Audrey Ochoa, a fixture on the Canadian jazz scene, unveils her fourth album as a bandleader, “The Head of a Mouse”; and drummer Richard Baratta takes an inspired set list of lesser-known works by some jazz masters and brings them back into their well-deserved spotlight on “Off the Charts.”