Terrason’s Gouache; Branker’s Uppity – Bob Stewart


Making a bold statement in the worlds of art or music demands the use of tools and mediums that strike the observer immediately. Painters like Henri Matisse have used gouache paint, a heavy opaque watercolor, for its strong, dynamic color and consistency for a striking visual effect. Highly regarded pianist and composer Jacky Terrasson has decided to mirror these pronounced effects with a well-selected assemblage of musical tools-songs and musicians-to appear on his new CD, “Gouache.” Terrasson performs a number of originals alongside classics by Erik Satie and Sonny Rollins, which contrast with new classics from Amy Winehouse, John Lennon and Justin Bieber.

Anthony Branker is director of Jazz Studies at Princeton University. As a composer, his music has been featured at festivals, concerts and clubs all over the world. All About Jazz describes him as “…a serious composer who does a lot more than write tunes…his music is steeped in the deeper sources of jazz.” While addressing such themes as intolerance, hate and prejudice, Branker’s new CD — “Uppity” — strives to remind us of the power and resiliency of the human spirit as we continue the struggle for a truly tolerant and color-blind society. Along with his band Word Play, Branker has created a thoroughly musical work that will certainly be considered one of his more important projects to date.

Alexander’s Ballads; Winkler’s Nyro Songbook – Bob Stewart


It may have been Charlie Parker’s alto that first brought the saxophone into the elite jazz club previously occupied by the trumpet, piano and drums but today it’s certainly the tenor sax that has equaled them in popularity and, in many ways, become the ‘glory instrument’. Thought of as hard driving and masculine thank to the pioneering work of Trane and others of his ilk, the instrument also has a softer side and is perfectly suited to rendering tunes at a slower tick of the metronome with sensitivity and tenderness. Eric Alexander makes his first foray into the hallowed halls of the ‘ballad record’ with “Touching” — joining the ranks of such tenor balladeers as Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Dexter Gordon and countless others.


“Mark Winkler discovers what Miles Davis, Roy Ayers and Carmen McRae knew back in the ’60s, that Laura Nyro wrote great songs, and he makes them hip all over again,” according to Brett Fox of LA Jazz Scene. Going where no one has gone before, singer Winkler tackles the songbook the legendary ’60s and ’70s icon on The “Laura Nyro Project”  featuring arrangements by Eli Bruegemann, current musical director of for “Saturday Night Live,” and jazz heavy hitters Eric Reed, Anthony Wilson, Bob Sheppard, Larry Koonse, Cheryl Bentyne, and even the Mills Brothers. Winkler covers Nyro’s more well-known tunes and some choice album tracks, revisiting her songs that are melting pots of jazz, pop and soul and taking them to the ‘jazz’ side.

Adolfo’s Masters; Art-Inspired Shaw – Bob Stewart


Pianist Antonio Adolfo grew up in a musical family in Rio de Janeiro and was a professional musician by age 17. His teachers included Eumir Deodato and the great Nadia Boulanger in Paris. During the ’60s he led his own trio and toured with singers Elis Regina and Milton Nascimento. His compositions have been recorded by the likes of Sergio Mendes, Stevie Wonder, Herb Alpert and Earl Klugh. And a musician and arranger, he’s released more that a dozen albums under his name. For his new CD — “Finas Misturas (Fine Mixtures)” — Adolfo combines a handful of originals with the compositions of some of his favorite jazz masters, including John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, Keith Jarrett and Bill Evans.


Hailed internationally for his work performing and touring both as a leader and as a long-standing member of the Roy Haynes Quartet (since 2005) and the Mingus Big Band (since 2000), saxophonist Jaleel Shaw is heard at the helm of his current quartet on “The Soundtrack of Things to Come.” Some of the music for the disc was written after the Rubin and Brooklyn Museums in New York commissioned Shaw in 2010 to compose music based on artwork in their collections. Other pieces were specifically composed with his new quartet in mind, with recent life experiences both sad and joyous as inspiration.

NY Voices Anniversary; Diehl’s Quartet – Bob Stewart



Celebrating their 25th anniversary this year, New York Voices is the Grammy Award-winning vocal ensemble renowned for their excellence in jazz and the art of group singing. Like the great groups that have come before, such as Lambert, Hendricks and Ross and the Manhattan Transfer, they have learned from the best and taken the art form to new levels. For their new disc — Live — they’re captured in a 2008 performance with the famed WDR Big Band of Cologne, Germany. The program is a collection of the group’s old favorites with a few never recorded and/or new arrangements. There are lots of featured solos from the big band that break up the usual vocal palette and make it an altogether different NYV experience.

Pianist Aaron Diehl is a 2007 graduate of the Julliard School where he studied with Kenny Barron and Eric Reed. He has performed with Wynton Marsalis, Hank Jones and Benny Golson, among others, and has been featured on Marian McPartland’s “Piano Jazz” radio program. His current quartet initially took shape in 2008 when he was asked to play a concert of John Lewis’ music. In April 2011, Diehl states, “I thought it would be wise to use the opportunity to document this ensemble. I decided to compose and arrange music in line with our own sound and conception, while using the strategies of bandleaders like Duke Ellington, who developed their music in line with the abilities of their personnel.” The result is his debut release with a quartet, “The Bespoke Man’s Narrative.”

Wednesday Night Special – Gordon



The Pat Smith Group at Kirkwood
Guitarist Pat Smith grew up in Chicago playing in various blues and rock bands. He attended Coe College for two years and finished his bachelor’s degree at Cornell College. After graduating, Smith moved to the San Francisco bay area and played with various blues bands including the fusion band Io. In 1993, he formed the Penguin Jazz Quartet, which recorded two CDs that are available on iTunes. The Penguin’s second CD, On Ice, went to No. 6 on Berkeley’s KALX FM in 1998, and made KCCK’s top 20 for 1999.

Smith was a co-founder of Nossa Bossa, a Brazilian jazz quartet garnering excellent reviews throughout the bay area. The band helped introduce the Bose PAS system, a new kind of amplification system. In 2008, Smith returned to Iowa and teamed with Bassist Richard Wagor. The duo recently released a CD called Iowa Duets.

7 p.m. following JazzSet.

The Power Trios of Wolff, Clark and Egan – Bob Stewart


When two of the best musicians around, Michael Wolf and Mike Clark, combine their talents to create a band without boundaries, the result is “The Wolff & Clark Expedition.” Pianist Wolff has performed and recorded with several jazz legends, including Nat and Cannonball Adderly and Sonny Rollins, and was exposed to a mass audience as bandleader for The Arsenio Hall Show. Clark has toured the world many times over, appearing with Herbie Hancock, Vince Guaraldi, Chet Baker, Joe Henderson and others, and is recognized as a true innovator on the drum set. Their first release together, also featuring bassist Chip Jackson, navigates tunes from Adderly to Zawinul, deconstructing and reconstructing each composition in their own compelling manner.


“Unit 1” is the debut release from the power trio of Grammy Award-winning bassist Mark Egan, multi-dimensional drummer Karl Latham and master guitarist John Hart. Embracing jazz, rock, Brazilian, funk and world music sensibilities, the trio takes the listener on a highly improvisational jamming journey creating modern interpretations of nine jazz standards reminiscent of Tony Williams Lifetime and Miles Davis’ Live Evil.

Lloyd/Moran Duo; Hiromi Explores Inner Voices – Bob Stewart


“Hagar’s Song” — the newest release from Charles Lloyd — is an interactive duo recording with Jason Moran, the star pianist who has been a key member of Lloyd’s latter-day quartet. The CD is a collection of intimacy and homage featuring pieces especially dear to Lloyd, ranging from compositions by Strayhorn, Ellington and Gershwin to those by Brian Wilson and Bob Dylan. The centerpiece of the disc is the title suite composed by Lloyd and dedicated to his great-great-grandmother, who was taken from her home in south Mississippi at age 10 and sold to another slave-owner in Tennessee. The disc comes in time to help mark the saxophonist’s 75th birthday on March 15.

On her 2011 album, Hiromi sought to capture people’s “inner voices” and strove to create what she called a “three-dimensional sound.” For that release, the Japanese pianist and composer assembled a trio that included two veteran players-bassist Anthony Jackson and drummer Simon Phillips. While on the road, Hiromi started writing music for the follow-up, “Move” “Because I had been playing with Anthony and Simon for quite a bit, I just started to understand their characteristics, and I could find a hidden gem in their playing,” she explains. “As a composer, I really wanted to write the songs especially for them, and I wanted to extract the unique beauty of their playing.”

Matta’s Black Orpheus; Goode’s Other Side – Bob Stewart


When Nilson Matta was a young child in his native Brazil, his father brought home an LP of the music from the play Orfeu da Conceicao by the playwright Vinicius de Moraes, which retells the Greek legend of Orpheus and Eurydice in the then-contemporary setting of Rio de Janeiro during Carnaval. Matta was entranced by the music composed by Antonio Carlos Jobim with lyrics by de Moraes. The burgeoning bassist’s attachment to the music only increased when the film version of the play, titled Black Orpheus, was released in 1959 with new songs by Jobim and Luis Bonfa. Five decades later, Matta’s long-time love affair with the music from both productions finds consummation with the new CD —“Nilson Matta’s Black Orpheus” — a jazz-flavored reimagining of the music featuring Randy Brecker, Kenny Barron and Gretchen Parlato.

Long known for his highly swinging recordings and performances, trumpet virtuoso Brad Goode also has his “other” side, first exposed on the 1988 release, “Shock of the New.”  Twenty-five years and 13 albums later, having established himself as a soloist of immediacy and warmth and a composer of striking originality, Goode is still stretching. With his culture-spanning band of Ghanian drummer Paa Kow, Brazilian bassist Bijoux Barbosa, Lebanese percussionist Rony Barrak, guitarist Bill Kopper and keyboardist Jeff Jenkins, “Chicago Red” also features Goode’s explorations in polytonal chord cycles-no less bold a break from standard procedure than fusion once was-to create an eclectic, electric and thoroughly grooving CD.