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 …
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 …
