Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify The incredible journey of Alex Acuna has seen the renowned percussionist travel from his small rural hometown in Peru to being a first-call session drummer in the country’s capital of Lima, then touring the U.S. with mambo king Perez Prado, gigging in Las Vegas with Elvis Presley …
Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify Steve Turre was passed the jazz torch early in his career by some of the music’s greatest masters—Art Blakey, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Woody Shaw and Ray Charles, among others. In recent years he’s kindled the same flame in a younger crop of musicians. On his new album, …
Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and SpotifyDrummer, activist and educator Terri Lyne Carrington has published a groundbreaking new lead sheet book of 101 jazz compositions written exclusively by women, from Mary Lou Williams and Alice Coltrane to Esperanza Spalding and Maria Schneider and beyond. A companion album, “New Standards Vol. 1,” is the …
Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and SpotifySince arriving in the U.S. from Cuba in 1999, Dafnis Prieto has honed his forward-looking musical vision across a range of styles and formats. In the process, he has become equally known for his composing and arranging brilliance and electrifying drumming, comfortably exploring a wide spectrum of …
Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify Chris Cortez is a busy man. The number of jobs he performs suggests the presence of more people. Guitarist, composer, vocalist, bandleader, arranger, producer, engineer, label head, entrepreneur, and community leader, to name a few. In 2015 he paused his Houston-based Blue Bamboo record label to return …
Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify To observers of the jazz scene in the late 1940s, Dodo Marmarosa would have seemed a safe bet to join the pantheon of bebop pianists alongside the likes of Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk. He had worked in bands led by most of the major swing-era bandleaders, …
Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify Approaching 80 years of age is occasion enough for anyone to take a moment and look back on a life well lived. For legendary drummer Al Foster, those eight decades have been more memorable than most, filled with exhilarating sounds and encounters with some of …
Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify As fans of Ranky Tanky well know, drummer-producer-composer Quentin Baxter thrives on having one foot in tradition and the other in the future. The Grammy-winning ensemble, which he co-founded in South Carolina in 2016, takes an exuberant approach to Gullah, the music created by descendants of the …
