Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify.
For the past five yea
rs, 29-year-old trumpeter Marquis Hill has been invigorating the Chicago jazz scene with his sleek approach to modern jazz, which often incorporates elements of spoken word and hip-hop. JazzTimes magazine praised his trumpet playing by stating, “His articulation, precise but unlabored, calls to mind the precedent of Clifford Brown, while his bravura phrasing suggests an equal immersion in Freddie Hubbard and Woody Shaw.” All of which surely helped his cause at the 2014 Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition, where he won first prize. Hill now splits most of his time between his hometown of Chicago and New York City—a decision that provides him a greater pool of jazz talent to help hone his musicianship. With the release of “The Way We Play,” his profile as a new commanding voice on the jazz landscape will undoubtedly rise. He’ll be appearing this year at the Iowa City Jazz Festival as well.
Although he remains rooted in the worlds of his early idols Louis Armstrong and Clifford Brown, trumpeter Dominick Farinacci has managed to create his own musical universe, aided my musicians of the highest caliber. He had already achieved enough stature by his mid-teens that Wynton Marsalis offered to help him set his sights on going to New York, and by 2001, Farinacci was one of only four trumpeters in the world to be selected as the inaugural students in The Julliard School’s first jazz curriculum. A short glance at the artists he brought together for his new disc, “Short Stories,” speaks for itself: Christian McBride, Steve Gadd, Larry Goldings, and Gil Goldstein for starters. The repertoire is as eclectic as it is stunningly interpreted, including pieces by Tom Waits, Cream, Horace Silver and Dianne Reeves.
Also this week, New Zealand-born organist Adrienne Fenemor unveils her first instrumental album, “Mo’ Puddin’,” which features Peter Bernstein and Willie Jones III.
Pianist Cyrus Chestnut is joined by the dynamic Lenny White on drums and the redoubtable Buster Williams on bass in breathing new life and vitality into the piano trio format on “Natural Essence”, and the Welsh singer/songwriter Ian Shaw has returned to working with that format on his new release, “The Theory of Joy.”