KCCK’s Special Thanksgiving Day Holiday Broadcast
Jazz Under the Stars 2015 – The complete Season
Thursday, November 26th 8:00am – 3:30pm (repeated 3:30pm-Midnight)
Shade of Blue at KCCK’s Jazz Under the Stars 2015
We have so much to be thankful for – including all the incredibly talented musicians who performed at KCCK’s Jazz Under the Stars concerts this past August. Join us when we bring you an entire season’s worth of awesome performances from Jazz Under the Stars 2015 on Thanksgiving Day beginning at 8:00am – over seven hours of some of the best live music that happened anywhere in the Cultural Corridor this year! Our line-up includes internationally known vibraphonist, composer, and UI professor of music Dan Moore performing as Dan Moore and Friends followed by Local on the 8s, a group of musicians from across Iowa with a compelling mixture of progressive rock, jazz, R&B, hip hop and funk music. Our holiday broadcast also features The Beaker Brothers who play alternative, progressive and ‘underground’ rock of Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Santana, the Allman Brothers and the Grateful Dead. We’ll wrap up our Thanksgiving Day special with a real tasty treat – a rare reunion performance by Shade of Blue, with their compelling combination of Blues, R&B, gospel, and jazz featuring the sultry and soulful vocals of Simone Green and Joan Ruffin performing the music of Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, Bill Withers and more.
Join Iowa’s Jazz Station for Jazz Under the Stars 2015 – the complete season, Thursday, November 26th at 8:00am for a terrific Thanksgiving Day and a splendid way to start the holiday season!
If you miss any of our performers, we’ll repeat all four concerts starting at 3:30pm during the second half of our special holiday broadcast.
Short List with Bob Naujoks
Monday – Friday at 8:35 AM and Saturday at 7 AM
The Short List: Jazz Clubs Live – Rainbow Room / Basin Street East (NYC)
Basin Street East in NYC
This week two jazz venues are featured. First the posh Rainbow Room high atop the RCA building, and the long passed Basin Street East. Each had their heyday: The Rainbow Room in the big band era and beyond; Basin Street from the mid-50s to the mid-60s. There were a number of good recordings made at Basin Street East in its short tenure, but only a few exist from the Rainbow Room. Perhaps they are little known now, but both are part of jazz history in a small way.
Jazz Profiles with Nancy Wilson
Monday at 6:00 PM
Duke Ellington: The Overview Part 2
Duke Ellington
Host Nancy Wilson picks up the Ellington story in the early 1930s. As America struggled through the depths of the Depression, Ellington’s star continued to rise. But his manager Irving Mills’s move to book Ellington and his band on a tour of the racially-segregated Deep South brought Duke to a career crossroads. Commentary includes biographer John Edward Hasse, former Ellington bandmates, and Ellington himself.
Jazz Corner of the World with Craig Kessler
Monday, 7:00 PM – 11:00 PM (follows Jazz Profiles)
“The Birthdate Anniversary Celebration for Tenor Sax Great, Coleman Randolph Hawkins”
Craig celebrates the 111th anniversary of the birth of the “father of the jazz tenor saxophone”, Coleman Hawkins (11/21/1904 to 5/19/1969), with a survey of “Hawk’s” pioneering career. We’ll hear him performing with Mamie Smith’s Jazz Hounds way back in 1921, all the way up to his final recordings in 1967. Craig will spin classic discs that feature Hawkins as a leader, as well as side-man performances with jazz giants like Thelonious Monk, Max Roach, Kenny Burrell, Randy Weston, and many others.
New Orleans Calling with George Ingmire
Tuesday at 6:00 PM
“NOCCA”
Ad for NOCCA
The New Orlean’s Center For the Creative Arts (NOCCA) was established in 1973 and has since served as a major educational resource for the area’s high school students aspiring to careers in the creative arts including music, writing, the visual arts, theater, digital media and more recently the culinary arts. Graduates of the NOCCA Jazz Studies Program include: Nicholas Payton, Donald Harrison, Jr., Terence Blanchard, Harry Connick, Jr., and Wynton, Branford, Delfeayo, and Jason Marsalis. 29 year old keyboarist/composer and singer Jon Batiste, who you see and hear lead the ”Stay Human” band on NBC’s The Late Show with Steven Colbert, is a NOCCA graduate. NOCCA has been instrumental in allowing these and other artists to travel the world and bring that unique New Orleans sound with them.
Jazz Night in America with Christian McBride
Wednesday at 6:00 PM
Sabertooth Saturday Night
Sabertooth Organ Quartet
Every year for about 23 years, one group has held a midnight to 5 a.m. time slot on Saturday nights. It’s a quirky band, co-led by saxophonist Pat Mallinger and Cameron Pfiffner, which swings hard (and a little off-kilter) among the hardcore fans, the rowdy drunks, the musicians coming off their own gigs. And it happens in the jazz haven of Chicago, in a club called the Green Mill which doesn’t look to have changed much since its days as a Prohibition-era speakeasy. Jazz Night in America follows Pat and Cameron to the gig, then stays up all night with the Sabertooth Organ Quartet.
Wednesday Night Special
7:00 PM (Follows Jazz Night in America)
Rudresh Mahanthappa Bird Calls at the 2015 Iowa City Jazz Festival
Iowa City Jazz Festival 2015: Rudresh Mahanthappa Bird Calls
Few musicians share the ability of saxophonist/composer Rudresh Mahanthappa to embody the expansive possibilities of his music with his culture. What has materialized is a sound that hybridizes progressive jazz and South Indian classical music in a fluid and forward-looking form that reflects Mahanthappa’s own experience growing up a second-generation Indian-American. The manifestations of that trajectory include the latest version of his quartet setting, currently named Gamak.
Mahanthappa has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and commissions from the Rockefeller Foundation MAP Fund, Chamber Music America and the American Composers Forum. He has been named alto saxophonist of the year for three years running in Downbeat Magazine’s International Critics Polls (2011-2013) and for five years running by the Jazz Journalists’ Association (2009-2013). In April 2013, he received a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, one of the most prominent arts awards in the world. This summer, shortly before his appearance the ICJF, it was announced that Rudresh won the Downbeat International Critics Poll in 3 categories: Album of the Year for Bird Calls, Alto Saxophonist of the Year, and Rising Star Composer of the Year.
Piano Jazz with Marian McPartland
Thursday at 6:00 PM
(Pre-empted this week for our special Thanksgiving Day Holiday broadcast – see above)
Jazz Corner of the World with Craig Kessler
Saturday, Noon – 4:00 PM and Monday, 7:00 PM – 11:00 PM
“The Birthdate Anniversary Celebration For Unheralded Jazz Master, Gigi Gryce” 
Craig celebrates the birthday of noted reedman, composer, arranger, and educator, George General “Gigi” Gryce (11/28/25 to 3/14/83) by spinning an impressive array of Gigi’s work as a leader, a sideman, and as a remarkable composer and arranger. Gigi worked with many of the biggest names in jazz in the 50s and 60s — Clifford Brown, Thelonious Monk, Teddy Charles, Art Blakey, Lee Morgan, etc., but remains relatively unknown. Tune in to catch a glimpse of why so many of his contemporaries thought so highly of him!!
Riverwalk Jazz
Sunday at 5:00 PM
Not Just Another Pretty Face: “Girl Singers” of the Big Band Era 
In the 1930s and 40s they were called “girl singers.” Giant talents like Helen Humes, Ivie Anderson and Billie Holiday first made their mark as the only female on stage singing with bands led by Duke Ellington, Artie Shaw, and Count Basie, among others. They went on to break the “just another pretty face” stereotype by becoming legendary vocalists in their own right.
Tropical Heat with Kpoti Accoh
Sunday, 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM
Featured Album: “Na Dre” by Dobet Gnahore 
http://www.allmusic.com/album/na-dre-mw0002623841/credits
Vocalist, dancer, and percussionist Dobet Gnahore has been hailed Africa’s leading star on the rise, compared to genre legends and cultural ambassadors like Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masakela by her mid-twenties. Brought up in a musical and artistic hot-house environment, Gnahore’s musical talent comes as no surprise. Her father, Boni Gnahore, a drummer, vocalist, and performer renown across the Ivory Coast, was a founding member of the artist colony Village Ki-Yi M’Bock, a community of more than 50 artists from multiple disciplines and backgrounds. Her first artistic turning point came when Gnahore was 12 and announced to her father that she wasn’t going to school anymore, but rather staying at the colony to learn.
KCCK’s Midnight CD
The Monday – Sunday Midnight CD for this week can be found at:
http://www.kcck.org/onair/midnight_cd.php
Every December for more than a decade, the critically acclaimed Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis and an all-star roster of guest vocalists have explored the canon of holiday standards to perform new and traditional arrangements of Yuletide favorites. These concerts have become a seasonal tradition among jazz lovers and families. Assembled highlights from these historical performances are now available on disc for the first time. Special guests on “Big Band Holiday” are some of today’s commanding voices in jazz including Rene Marie, Cecile McLorin Salvant and Gregory Porter.
Also this week, trumpeter Etienne Charles celebrates the Christmas season with classics from the Caribbean, American and European holiday 
songbooks on “Creole Christmas”; the Brian Setzer Orchestra unveils its fourth swinging holiday release, “Rockin’ Rudolph”; and saxophonist Doug Webb is “Home For Christmas” with his first holiday offering.
watching his four cousins playing in a brass quintet on the Ed Sullivan Show. Since heading to New York, he has played with everyone from Jaki Byard and Sam Rivers to Mike Longo and Tito Puente. Chamberlain introduced his Band of Bones in 2011, an ensemble inspired by the great group led by J.J. Johnson and Kai Winding, with a hint of the Basie Band. Bill Watrous has said of the band, “I am completely blown away by the overall excellence of this ensemble,” and Conrad Herwig calls the band “a swinging, sliding, sliphorn celebration.” For their third CD, “Stomp,” Chamberlain has brought aboard harmonica master Hendrik Meurkens as special guest.
twenty five years of the band Fourplay with “Silver”; guitarist Gaitano Letizia jams with legendary drummer Mike Clark and the brilliant bassist Wilbur Krebs on “Froggy and the Toads”; and the 
Canadian electro jazz ensemble Four80East unveils their seventh CD, “Positraction.”