Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify.
On November 24th, 1980, Dizzy Gillespie invited five jazz legends—Milt Jackson, James Moody, Hank Jones, Ray Brown & Philly Joe Jones—to join him onstage in Montreal to pay tribute to the legendary Charlie Parker. A limited quantity bootleg LP of the concert soon appeared and then disappeared from the marketplace and the tapes lay dormant for over thirty years. Now, “Concert of the Century—A Tribute to Charlie Parker” has been fully re-mastered and is once again available. The music, ranging from beautiful ballads to rollicking blowfests, demonstrates an adventurous modernism that kept these stalwarts in the forefront of the music throughout their careers.
Multiple Grammy nominee and Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellow Miguel Zenon is one of a select group of musicians who have masterfully balanced and blended the often-contradictory poles of innovation and tradition. Widely considered one of the most groundbreaking and influential saxophonists of his generation, Zenon has also developed a unique voice as a composer and as a conceptualist, concentrating his efforts on perfecting a fine mix between Latin American folkloric music and jazz. His new CD, “Tipico,” is above all a celebration of his longstanding quartet. “I was thinking about what this band and the guys in the band mean to me as I was writing the music,” he explains. “I kept going back to this idea of us developing this common language that identifies us as a band.” That language has been developing for more than a decade. Pianist Luis Perdomo and bassist Hans Glawischnig have been with Zenon since the turn of the millennium; Henry Cole joined the band in 2005.
Also this week, the U.S. Army Blues Swamp Romp, representing the United States Army Band “Pershing’s Own” and featuring Iowa City’s own MSG John DeSalme, drop their newest CD, “Voodoo Boogaloo”.
Award-winning bassist, composer and vocalist Brandi Disterheft unveils “Blue Canvas,” joining forces with veteran pianist Harold Mabern and drummer Joe Farnsworth.
Saxophonist Jeff Rupert and pianist Richard Drexler, faculty members of the University of Central Florida’s acclaimed jazz studies program, are in a duo setting for “Imagination.”