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 …
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 …
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 …
Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify. Richie Cole is an internationally recognized jazz legend who began his career as the lead altoist in the Buddy Rich Big Band. He later started his own quintet and toured worldwide popularizing bebop and his Alto Madness style. He has recorded over 50 albums as a leader. …
Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify. Jazz sensibility comes naturally to pianist Benny Green, the New York City-born son of a jazz saxophonist. At a young age, Green’s ear became fine-tuned to the art form, and he soon found himself invited to perform alongside jazz icons like Betty Carter, Freddie Hubbard and Ray …
Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify. Pianist Aaron Goldberg was introduced to drummer Leon Parker’s singular playing alongside keyboard icons including Kenny Barron, Brad Mehldau and Jacky Terrasson in the early 1990s. Parker was a trailblazer on the kit, intent on developing a distinct language and sound all his own. The pair had …
Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify. The music of Joel Harrison stubbornly defies categorization. From haunting psychedelia to rollicking Afro-Appalachian grooves, from the complex poly-everything of Charles Ives to the deceptively simple re-imagining of American folk ballads, Harrison is perhaps the most imaginative, inventive and inclusive artist in contemporary jazz music. The …
