Author's posts
New Music Monday for December 17, 2018
Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify. John Shifflett (1953-2017) was a beloved bassist, well-known as THE sideman in many of the San Francisco Bay Area’s foremost ensembles and for traveling jazz dignitaries. Born and raised in Dubuque, John got his start teaching at the University of Iowa, his alma mater. He played on …
New Music Monday for December 10, 2018
Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify. Jazz duo recordings can provide an exceedingly wide range of musical expression including, but not limited to, profundity, humor, tenderness, introspection and exuberance. This type of mercurial interplay is on full display on “Montreal Memories,” a previously unreleased live set from saxophonist Frank Morgan and pianist George …
New Music Monday for December 3, 2018
Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify. While it was captured over the course of a single night, there’s a rich lifetime’s worth of music packed into “The Iron Man—Live at Smoke.” If it’s a slight overstatement to say that the album represents an autobiography in song, that’s only because 82-year-old Harold Mabern tells …
New Music Monday for November 26, 2018
Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify. “Jazz Bata 2” marks a new peak for composer, pianist and bandleader Chucho Valdes, even as it revisits the small-group concept of his 1972 Cuban album “Jazz Bata.” The new disc is both rhythmic and lyrical at once. The six-hand complexity of the bata repertoire—the deep classical music …
New Music Monday for November 19, 2018
Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify. As a pianist, composer, and a fearless explorer of worldwide musical landscapes, Roger Davidson is uncategorizable, yet distinctive. Whether the music is classical, Latin, Brazilian, klezmer, sacred or jazz, he finds the common threads. Roger was born in Paris to a French mother and …
New Music Monday for November 12, 2018
Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify. Ruben Blades—the salsa giant and nine-time Grammy Award-winning singer, songwriter, actor and activist—collaborated with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis in 2014 for an extraordinary series of performances on the Jazz at Lincoln Center stage. On these very special style-straddling, Americas-spanning nights, the …
New Music Monday for November 5, 2018
Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify. Richie Cole is an internationally recognized jazz legend who began his career as the lead altoist in the Buddy Rich Big Band. He later started his own quintet and toured worldwide popularizing bebop and his Alto Madness style. He has recorded over 50 albums as a leader. …
New Music Monday for October 29, 2018
Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify. Jazz sensibility comes naturally to pianist Benny Green, the New York City-born son of a jazz saxophonist. At a young age, Green’s ear became fine-tuned to the art form, and he soon found himself invited to perform alongside jazz icons like Betty Carter, Freddie Hubbard and Ray …