Author's posts
New Music Monday for September 25, 2017
Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify. The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra’s 2016-2017 season opened with a program entitled “Handful of Keys: A Century of Jazz Piano,” kicking off a year-long celebration of the many artists, styles, and movements encompassed in the century-long jazz continuum. The concert was an “encapsulated history” exploring the many rich traditions …
New Music Monday for September 18, 2017
Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify. “Wobbly Dance Flower” is the newest project by the versatile, multi-talented John Daversa, the internationally respected trumpeter, composer, arranger, producer, bandleader, and educator. Daversa is one of the leading forces of large ensemble jazz today but is adept at writing and arranging for bands of any size. For …
New Music Monday for September 11, 2017
Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify. Critically acclaimed and one of the top flute players on the modern jazz scene, Gerald Beckett is a skilled and versatile improviser within the jazz tradition. He’s travelled the world, with a focus on the U.S. coasts, playing some of the hottest jazz clubs. It wasn’t until …
New Music Monday for September 4, 2017
Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify. On July 3, 2016, the world changed forever for Mike Stern. The guitarist was hailing a cab outside his apartment in Manhattan when he tripped over some hidden construction debris, breaking both of his arms in the fall. Not only did Stern fracture both humerus bones, he was …
New Music Monday for August 28, 2017
Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify. When Carl Sandburg died in 1967, President Lyndon Johnson hailed the famed poet as “more than the voice of America, more than the poet of its strength and genius. He was America.” Fifty years after Sandburg’s passing, drummer/composer Matt Wilson pays tribute to the “poet of …
New Music Monday for August 21, 2017
Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify. A decorated veteran of the Betty Carter Trio, pianist Cyrus Chestnut came out of the experience relatively unscathed with a style and directive clearly his own It’s one steeped in the gospel church traditions of his native Baltimore, but also enlivened by an open ear aimed at a …
New Music Monday for August 14, 2017
Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify. Though he was only 43 years old when he passed away in 1975, Oliver Nelson left behind a body of work that is staggering in its breadth and depth. He’s revered for his work with Monk, Basie, Clark Terry and Jimmy Smith, his soundtrack work for television and …
New Music Monday for August 7, 2017
Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify. Two of John Pizzarelli’s greatest influences, Frank Sinatra and the Brazilian composer Antonio Carlos Jobim, joined forces in 1967 to present a softer, sultrier side of Sinatra. Sinatraphiles consider the disc, “Francis Albert Sinatra & Antonio Carlos Jobim,” one of Frank’s greatest, a meeting that found him in an …