Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify
World-renowned guitarist and vocalist John Pizzarelli has dedicated many of his albums to the great songwriters and performers who have helped to establish the Great American Songbook and the pop music canon: Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, Paul McCartney, Richard Rodgers, and Duke Ellington, to name a few. With his new album “Stage & Screen,” which is a celebration of the 40^th anniversary of his debut album, John and his new trio find inspiration in classic songs from Broadway musicals and Hollywood films, with the repertoire spanning nearly a century.

The hard bop recordings of Horace Silver, Hank Mobley, Lee Morgan and Art Blakey were highly regarded for a reason—catchy horn lines and incredible musicianship combined with Rudy Van Gelder’s impeccable engineering skills. The Jazz Defenders, led by one of the UK’s most formidable jazz pianists, George Cooper, is a group that defends the legacy of those recordings whilst creating its own identity and distinction. The music they produce together on their new CD, “Scheming,” is a modern soul jazz slant on this classic hard bop, effortlessly channeling the spirit of the golden Blue Note era of jazz.

Also this week, Eastern Iowa’s own 3 Dogs and a Bone, with Rich Medd, Steve Grismore, James Dreier, and Scott Barnum, unveil their debut release, “Dig It!”;

trombonist and composer Nick Finzer and his long-running sextet explore the role of the muse in creative inspiration on “Dream, Visions Illusions”;

 and young alto sax phenom Nick Green boasts a big, warm & robust tone on his wonderfully swinging debut disc, “Green on the Scene.”