Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify. Singer Jane Monheit has had plenty of milestone moments in establishing herself as one of today’s best and most important vocalist-musicians. With her new CD, “The Songbook Sessions: Ella Fitzgerald”—the first to be released on her own Emerald City Records—the Long Island native has surprised …
Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify. Any chance that one has to hear a master musician in his or her preferred setting is a gift. For all the one-offs and ensemble-by-committee type of gigs that spring up, it is the reunion with familiar collaborators for a stint of a few nights that really …
Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify. On a cold February evening in 1966, jazz fans lined up around the block waiting for the doors to open at the famed Village Vanguard to catch a new big band formed by Thad Jones and Mel Lewis. Vanguard founder Max Gordon had invited the orchestra to …
Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify. For more than four decades, drummer Peter Erskine has proven among the most consistently innovative and reliable masters of his instrument. The Grammy Award-winner has appeared on over 600 albums and film scores, more than 50 of those discs as leader or co-leader. He has collaborated with …
Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify. “A true and modern arrangement!” is how composer Claude Bolling refers to American composer/arranger Steve Barta’s new “Symphonic Arrangement: Suite for Flute and Jazz Piano.” Bolling’s 1975 recording enjoyed a lengthy stay on the Billboard charts to become a standard in the jazz and classical worlds. …
Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify. Dr. Lonnie Smith not only stands as the preeminent Hammond B-3 organist in jazz today, but at the age of 73 he’s still progressing as an artist, as witnessed by his remarkable new CD, “Evolution.” Teeming with his trademark accent marks, finesse caresses, bright sparks and jagged …
Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify. Jerry Weldon is one of today’s leading proponents of soul jazz who represents the bar walkin’, hard-blowing tenor legends of the American jazz scene. His tenure with the Lionel Hampton Band in the early ‘80s allowed him to develop his performance skills and create within him …
Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify. Always one to seek out new ways to express his musical vision, pianist Bill O’Connell has throughout his career embraced a broad stylistic swath of jazz, Latin and Brazilian idioms while experimenting with equally diverse orchestral formats, from a duo to unconventional trio settings and ensembles of …
