Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify

Woodlawn Cemetery is a National Historic Landmark in the Bronx, New York, that is known throughout the world as the final resting place of many celebrated jazz musicians, including Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Lionel Hampton, Max Roach, Ornette Coleman, Cootie Williams and Jackie McLean. The Woodlawn Conservancy commissioned saxophonist and composer Victor Goines to write “The Woodlawn Suite,” with the goal of honoring notable figures through music. Goines called upon his colleagues from the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, his former students from Juilliard and Northwestern University, and longtime friends to be part of the full jazz orchestra on the project.

Celebrated musician, composer and educator Maddie Vogler announces the release of her highly anticipated debut album, “While We Have Time.” A fixture on the Chicago music scene, she’s an in-demand performer, as well as a Luminarts Jazz Fellow through the Luminarts Cultural Foundation. Having completed her studies in  music education at the University of Illinois-Champaign, Vogler currently shares her knowledge and passion for music as a teacher at Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Illinois. The nine original songs on the CD are idiomatically anchored in modern jazz while freely exploring Vogler’s relationship with her Cuban roots.

Also this week, saxophonist Chrisopher Merz, who directs the Jazz Studies program at the University of Northern Iowa, has created a new ensemble, Shorter Stories, to perform his arrangements of the music of Wayne Shorter on “New Juju”; trombonist/composer Audrey Ochoa, a fixture on the Canadian jazz scene, unveils her fourth album as a bandleader, “The Head of a Mouse”; and drummer Richard Baratta takes an inspired set list of lesser-known works by some jazz masters and brings them back into their well-deserved spotlight on “Off the Charts.”

             

Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify

Trumpet legend Eddie Henderson celebrates the 50^th anniversary of his debut album as a leader, 1973’s “Realization,” with the exhilarating new release, “Witness to History.” The stellar quintet on this album bridges that half-century of music, starting with lifelong collaborator George Cables returning once again to the piano bench. Henderson’s colleague in the Cookers, alto saxophonist Donald Harrison, and his more recent collaborator bassist Gerald Cannon, have also appeared on the trumpeter’s recent string of releases for Smoke Sessions. They’re joined by legendary drummer Lenny White, who has reunited with Henderson in the studio for the first time since that 1973 disc.

The celebrated Cuban-Canadian composer and piano master Hilario Duran brings the full scope of his artistry and the depth of knowledge of musical genres to his new release, “Cry Me a River,” his first big band recording in 17 years. Leading his nineteen-piece ensemble and special guests Paquito D’Rivera and Horacio “El Negro” Hernandez, the Grammy-nominated and Juno Award-winning Duran actively throws overboard melodic, harmonic, and structural hooks that have become expressly blunted through overuse, building big band charts that bloom in color and texture and atmospheric beauty.

Also this week, effervescent pianist Miki Yamanaka and her stellar New York trio mates Tyrone Allen and Jimmy Macbride are fortified by saxophonist Mark Turner on “Shades of a Rainbow”; Eastern Iowa guitarist and composer Dan Padley’s quartet on his new project, “The Walking Hills,” includes Nolan Schroeder, Blake Shaw, and Christopher Jensen;  and Cuban-born pianist and composer Harold Lopez-Nussa collaborates with Snarky Puppy’s Michael League on “Timba a la Americana.”