Author's posts
New Music Monday for March 4, 2019
Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify. Caesar Frazier is a true keeper of the B-3 grail, assuming the mantle of the great organists such as Jimmy Smith and Brother Jack McDuff and building upon their legacy to become one of today’s finest exponents of the instrument. From his years with Lou Donaldson through …
New Music Monday for February 25, 2019
Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify. Composing music inspired by painting dates back as far as the 12th century and, in jazz, Duke Ellington’s “Degas Suite” comes to mind along with Branford Marsalis’s “Romare Bearden Revealed.” But with his new album, “Jeremy Pelt the Artist,” trumpeter Jeremy Pelt may be the …
New Music Monday for February 18, 2019
Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify. Pianist and composer Ellen Rowe is professor of jazz and contemporary improvisation at the University of Michigan. Her new CD, “Momentum—Portraits of Women in Motion,” brings together an ensemble of nationally-lauded female jazz artists, including saxophonists Tia Fuller, Lisa Parrott and Virginia Mayhew, trumpeter Ingrid Jensen and …
New Music Monday for February 11, 2019
Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify. Over the past ten years, Allison Miller’s Boom Tic Boom has established itself as one of the most consistently inventive and hardest working bands in modern jazz. Fronted by the extraordinary drummer and composer Allison Miller and featuring violinist Jenny Scheinman, cornetist Kirk Knuffke, clarinetist Ben …
New Music Monday for February 4, 2019
Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify. If not for trumpeter John D’earth, Kait Dunton might never have become a professional musician. The two met in 2001 at the University of Virginia. She’d been playing piano for 15 years but had no sense of turning her love of music into a career. …
New Music Monday for January 28, 2019
Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify. Though she originally studied and performed in the classical field, the past few years have found bass trombonist Jennifer Wharton in many more diverse situations, especially in the world of jazz. She is a regular in the Broadway pit orchestras of New York City and is also a …
New Music Monday for January 21, 2019
Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify.A protégé of Quincy Jones, who took him under his wing when he defected to the U.S. in 2009, pianist Alfredo Rodriguez was schooled in the rigorous classical conservatories of Havana. His riveting artistry is informed as much by Bach and Stravinsky as it is by his Afro …
New Music Monday for January 14, 2019
Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify. Juno Award-winning saxophonist, composer and arranger Allison Au was born to a Chinese father and Jewish mother, and was raised in the multicultural metropolis of Toronto. Exposed to a wide array of musical styles growing up, Allison was captivated by the unhinged freedom of jazz, which became …