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 world of salsa and swing collided. The arrangements for “Una Noche con Ruben Blades” were done by the Orchestra’s bassist Carlos Henriquez, whom Downbeat magazine has called “an emerging master in the Latin jazz idiom.” “His music was one of my earliest influences,” Henriquez says. “The music I arranged…sounds like Panama, New Orleans, and New York all mixed into one.”
Tony Bennett and Diana Krall celebrate their shared love of the music of George and Ira Gershwin on their new collaborative album, “Love is Here to Stay.” The pair have been friends for over 20 years. They toured together in 2000 and recorded duets for two of Bennett’s CDs, but this marks their first full album project together. The disc was released just in time for the 120th anniversary of George Gershwin’s birthday. It was recorded with the Grammy award winning Bill Charlap Trio and the stunning result is a subtle, sophisticated and beautifully rendered love letter to the Gershwins’ music and their status as one of the premiere songwriting teams of the American popular standard.
Also this week, “New Originals for the Green Lady” is the fourth release by the Kansas City-based organ jazz trio OJT;
“Fearless and Kind” is the second album by the roots-jazz collective Way North, a cross-border mash-up of Canadian and American artists formed in Brooklyn in 2014;
and Michaeal Dease is joined by fellow trombonists Conrad Herwig, Marshall Gilkes and Gina Benalcazar on his latest recording, “Bonafide.”