Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify.
Throughout the past 40 years, Antonio Adolfo has had a very busy career as a pianist, composer and arranger. Born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, his teachers included Eumir Deodato and Nadia Boulanger. Adolfo has worked with such major singers as Elis Regina, Flora Purim and Milton Nascimento and has recorded more than 25 albums as a leader. He has long considered it a major goal to someday record an album with a larger ensemble, a big band with a full understanding of both Brazilian music and jazz. “Encontros—Orquestra Atlantica” is the realization of that dream. After having seen a performance in Rio by Orquestra Atlantica, a Brazilian orchestra founded in 2012, Adolfo invited the group to be a major part of his new recording. The result is an exciting set comprised of nine of his originals plus Miles Davis’ “Milestones.” The inventive arrangements mix together the sound of big band jazz with such Brazilian styles as samba, bossa nova, baiao, frevo, and the afoxe.
When saxophonist Cory Weeds gets an idea for a project and decides to pursue it, chances are it’s going to happen. Case in point: “Explosion” by the Cory Weeds Little Big Band. The idea to form a little big band—so named because there are eleven musicians in the ensemble and not 16 or 17, the typical number in big band—came to Weeds after he looked at the liner notes for two classic albums he hugely admires by the Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis Big Band (“Trane Whistle”) and Gene Ammons (“Late Hour Special”). He was shocked to see that neither tenor-led recording from the early 1960s used a full big band, yet both have an impactful big band sound. Weeds curated a dream lineup of top players from Vancouver, Edmonton and New York, and was equally ambitious in commissioning two of Vancouver’s best big band arrangers—Jill Townshend and her husband Bill Coon—to create the charts.
Also this week, “Nightconcert” is a never-before-released performance by the Erroll Garner Trio from 1964 at the Royal Concertgebouw in Amsterdam.
The Scott Gwinnell Jazz Orchestra delves into the compositions of the late pianist Mulgrew Miller with “Mulgrew-ology”.
Drummer Bobby Sanabria and his Multiverse Big Band present a new treatment of a timeless Leonard Bernstein masterpiece with “West Side Story Reimagined.”
Non-Profit will perform at First Friday Jazz at the Opus Concert Cafe Friday, August 3, at 5 p.m. The first set will be broadcast live on KCCK. The First Friday Jazz Series features an eclectic mix of jazz, Latin, contemporary music and more in an intimate, upscale environment. For a $12 cover, enjoy live music and drink specials at the Opus Concert Café bar the first Friday of every month. 
Short List with host Bob Naujoks 
Jazz Night in America with host Christian McBride
Bassist/composer and New Zealand native Matt Penman has spent much of the past decade developing and presenting music for the illustrious SFJazz Collective and the fantastic James Farm collective. That had left a gap between solo recordings that he felt it was time to abate. The ensemble that Penman assembled for “Good Question” features regular collaborators and friends, including saxophonist Mark Turner, pianist Aaron Parks and drummer Obed Calvaire. There are also guest appearances by guitarist Nir Felder, saxophonist Will Vinson and percussionist Rogerio Boccato. “The music on this recording is a series of questions I posed to my bandmates over two days,” Penman explains, “that I might get their input on a range of subjects that interest me…I wrote these tunes in the hopes of starting a dialogue that could provoke reactions, new angles and corollaries that were unforeseen, yet welcome.”
A powerhouse player who is equally conversant in jazz and funk, Indianapolis-based saxophonist Rob Dixon joins forces with a couple of heavyweights in 7-string guitar marvel Charlie Hunter and drumming legend Mike Clark on “Coast to Crossroads.” This slamming affair finds the tenorist knee-deep in Clark’s signature Oakland funk beats and irrepressible Texas shuffles alongside Hunter’s grooving, syncopated bass lines and distinctive organ-styled comping on his hybrid axe. Trombonist Ernest Stuart, a former member of the Brooklyn-based bhangra party band Red Baraat, provides close harmonies on the front line, playing Fred Wesley to Dixon’s Pee Wee Ellis. “The album is called ‘Coast to Crossroads’ because I’m based in Indiana, the Crossroads state, but I also work a lot on the West Coast and East Coast,” says Dixon, who hails from Atlanta but settled in Indy in 2003 after spending several years on the New York City jazz scene.
Also this week, two-time Grammy winning composer and saxophonist Ted Nash releases his first concert recording in over 25 years, “Live at Dizzy’s Club Coca Cola”. 
