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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
November marks a double anniversary for Gentle Jazz, the longest-running jazz show in all of Iowa. Bob Naujoks has been hosting a soft jazz show on Eastern Iowa radio since 1978. The original Gentle Jazz began on 96.5 WMT-FM in that year, the height of the disco era. A jazz fan on the WMT staff …
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 …
Short List with host Bob Naujoks Monday – Friday at 8:35 AM and Saturdays at 7 AM Cats on the Keys: Paul Bley Canadian pianist Paul Bley more than a hundred albums over his five decade career. When a teenager Bley filled in for Oscar Peterson in a Montreal jazz club, and over …
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 …
