Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify 
The release of Harold Mabern’s new album, “Mabern Plays Mabern,” is the source of a mixture of pride and sorrow. Pride because Mabern’s 27^th recording as leader, culled from the same three January 2018 nights at Smoke Jazz Club in New York City that generated his 26^th, documents the legendary pianist, then 81, in prime form. Sorrow because the release is posthumous—Harold died in September at the age of 83. For this engagement, Mabern convened long-standing band-mates Eric Alexander on tenor sax, John Webber on bass and Joe Farnsworth on drums, augmented by trombonist Steve Davis and trumpeter Vincent Herring on alto. All members rise to the occasion on repertoire that spans 51 years of Mabern’s six decades as a recording artist, leader and sideman.

     Trumpeter Carl Saunders started his career on the road with Stan Kenton in 1961 and then settled back in Las Vegas where, during the next 20 years, he played with a countless number of bands, including lead trumpet for Ella Fitzgerald, Tony Bennett and Frank Sinatra. He also traveled with such bandleaders as Harry James, Maynard Ferguson and Benny Goodman and worked in the big bands of Bill Holman, Gerald Wilson and Bob Florence. While widely recognized as one of the greatest jazz trumpeters in the world, it often surprises people to find that he’s also a prolific composer who has written hundreds of original compositions. Several of those are showcased on Carl’s new release, “Jazz Trumpet.”

Also this week, Pearl Django, a longtime favorite in the Pacific Northwest and one of the best known Gypsy jazz style groups around the world, unveils its fifteenth recording, “Simplicity”;

vocalist Kurt Elling teams up with pianist Danilo Perez for his latest, “Secrets are the Best Stories”;

and pianist and composer Connie Han offers up her second release as a leader, “Iron Starlet.”

    Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify 
 The origin story of jazz has been debated and mythologized. The first jazz players interviewed often attributed their knowledge and sound to one man: Buddy Bolden. There have been many attempts in the past century to reenact concerts of Bolden’s heyday, yet most attempts to bring his sound to life have been doomed from a lack of available information regarding that specific period in music history. Grammy Award-winning trumpeter Derrick Shezbie has partnered with historian Charles Tolman in an effort to capture the spirit of Buddy Bolden with “The Ghost of Buddy Bolden.” The album is the culmination of heavy research and a reincarnation of the circumstances that Bolden would have created music in, and features an array of accomplished African American New Orleans musicians.

     Hailed by the Vancouver Sun as “one of Canada’s premier drummer-composer-bandleaders,” Toronto-based Ernesto Cervini has proven restlessly creative at the helm of the Ernesto Cervini Quartet, his innovative Turboprop sextet, his co-led trios MEM3, Myriad3 and Tunetown, and his Radiohead cover project Idiotech, among other efforts. With “Tetrahedron,” Cervini flips the script once again, undertaking his first project with an electric bassist (Rich Brown) and an electric guitar (the acclaimed Nir Felder). Together with them and the marvelous Cuban-born, Toronto-based alto saxophonist Luis Deniz, Cervini reveals still new facets to his musical imagination.

Also this week, another Canadian ensemble, the award-winning Emie R Roussel Trio, unveils its fifth album, “Rhythme de Passage”; 

 Denver jazz icon and saxophonist Keith Oxman collaborates with revered veteran Houston Person on “Two Cigarettes in the Dark”;

and Special EFX featuring Chieli Minucci are joined by “All Stars” including Eric Marienthal, Gerald Veasley, Regina Carter and Nelson Rangell on their latest release.