The members of the Mack Avenue Superband represent a diverse range of generations and styles. It offers a rare opportunity, for instance, to hear NEA Jazz Master Gary Burton engage with a group of younger players with more of a hard-bop focus than he usually encounters in his own more modern-leaning bands. “This is …
Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify Eric Olsen has crafted an outstanding career in both classical and jazz music, as a pianist and organist, composer, and conductor. He’s recorded seventeen stylistically varied albums, for classical solo, as accompanist with opera singer Kevin Maynor, as well as jazz recordings as a leader …
Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify. Trombonist Wycliffe Gordon has spent the last three years touring the country with his quintet, as a soloist with college and university jazz ensembles, as well as with professional big band jazz orchestras all over the world. He wanted his next release to be with a …
Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube, Spotify, and SoundCloud. Considering vibraphonist Tom Collier performed his first concert at age 5, it’s safe to say most memories of his youth contain powerful musical imagery. For his latest recording, “Across the Bridge,” Collier is paired with two of the most important guitarists in jazz, Bill Frisell …
Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify. Coinciding with celebrating its 80th anniversary, the legendary Count Basie Orchestra continues to make music history with the release of “A Very Swingin’ Basie Christmas.” The first full-length yuletide album in the expansive Basie discography, the disc boasts classic holiday songs, rendered in quintessential Basie style, …
Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify. Bruce Forman entered the 21st century as one of the strongest swinging bebop and mainstream jazz guitarists around. Since then, he has taken a confident virtuoso walkabout through other genres and formats, both adjacent to and distant from his earlier career. Now Forman gives us a …
Listen to this week’s playlist on Youtube and Soundcloud. It’s rare for one man to change the face of an instrument, and before he turned forty, but Joey DeFrancesco has been performing since he was a child, following a lineage of jazz musicians. A seasoned musician by his teen, having already shared the stage …
Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify When Patrick Williams assembles a band for a new album, it’s like old home days, as some of the musicians have been playing for him for decades. In late March, eighteen of Los Angeles’ finest players gathered to tackle eight new charts by the Grammy-winning musical …
