With the arrival of Memorial Day 2011, some KCCK staffers’ relatives, who are no longer with us, are being remembered for their service during war-time.

George Dorman’s father, Jack Dorman, was in the U.S. Army for nearly four years during World War II. Most of that time was spent in northern Africa, where he was a crytopgrapher, encoding and decoding secret messages.

Bob Stewart’s dad, Allan, served in the Army in Panama during WWII.

Craig Kessler’s father, Donald F. Kessler, was a bombardier in the 15th Air Force in WWII (Italy, Germany).

And, student producer Tim Johnston’s uncle, Lucien Levesque, was a paratrooper in the Korean conflict.

In his colorful and wide-ranging career, Alphonse Mouzon has long been considered one of the most skilled and versatile drummers in the music business. He was a member of the original versions of Weather Report and Larry Coryell’s Eleventh House, and worked with Gil Evans, McCoy Tyner, Herbie Hancock, Miles Davis and Jean-Luc Ponty. He’s led a couple dozen of his own recording sessions ranging from funk to fusion, smooth to straight ahead. Yet it is doubtful that he’s ever spent as much time on a project as on “Angel Face”, which took him 11 years to complete. Mouzon wrote and arranged all of the songs and gathered together a summit of musical giants including Cedar Walton, Kenny Barron, Christian McBride, Bob Mintzer, Arturo Sandoval and Wallace Roney.

Eric Alexander is the rarest type of jazz artist: one who garners critical acclaim from every corner while firmly establishing his own voice within the illustrious bop-based jazz tradition. He has trained and toughed it out with some of the best musicians in the business, and is a player possessing both accessibility without condescension and intelligence without alienation. For his latest CD — “Don’t Follow the Crowd” — Alexander was once again in Rudy Van Gelder’s studio with his long-time collaborators Harold Mabern, Joe Farnsworth and Nat Reeves for a program of originals, standards and not-so-standards delivered with the prerequisite imagination and daring that has earned him a place among the elite jazzmen of today.

If you’ve spent any time at all in a movie theater or in front of a TV set during prime time over the past four decades, chances are good you’ve encountered Dave Grusin along the way. In addition to a formidable body of work as a jazz recording artist, the pianist, composer, arranger, and winner of 10 Grammys and an Oscar has scored some of the most entertaining and enduring films and TV series of the past half-century. Grusin steps out from behind the various machinations of film and television work to take center stage on “An Evening with Dave Grusin” — a live recording that captures him conducting and performing with a host of stars and backed by a 75-piece orchestra. The list of guests includes Gary Burton, Patti Austin and Nestor Torres.

Uniting their mutual love for both jazz and Brazilian music, two acclaimed stylists, guitarist Ron Ben-Hur and bassist Nilson Matta, have found common ground on “Mojave” — their first recorded collaboration. With expert support from drummer Victor Lewis and Brazilian percussionist Café, Ben-Hur and Matta have conjured up a project that blends original tunes from all four players with compositions from some Brazilian masters. The pair are virtuosos thoroughly entrenched in the bebop idiom, yet both men are just as obviously in thrall to the rhythms and sophisticated melodic and harmonic shapes of classic Brazilian music.

“James Farm” is a collaborative band featuring saxophonist Joshua Redman, bassist Matt Penman, drummer Eric Harland and keyboardist Aaron Parks. The band uses traditional acoustic jazz quartet instrumentation for its song-based approach to jazz and incorporates the members’ myriad influences: rock, soul, folk, classical and electronica, among many others. The quartet has received critical acclaim since its debut at the 2009 Montreal Jazz Festival, where they played to rave reviews. Although this is the first time the quartet members have performed and recorded together in this exact configuration, Redman, Harland and Penmen have performed together in the past as part of the SF Jazz Collective.

Gretchen Parlato’s 2009 breakthrough CD signaled the arrival of one of this generation’s most inventive modern jazz singers. The recording garnered international acclaim, being voted onto year-end, “best-of” polls for Jazz Times, the Boston Globe, the Village Voice and NPR among others. Now with the release of her follow-up — “The Lost and Found” — Parlato demonstrates that she has staying power. It exposes a broad dynamic range in the young singer’s repertoire, which features her original compositions paired alongside interpretations of material ranging from that of Simply Red and Mary J. Blige to Wayne Shorter and Miles Davis.

The 2011 edition of the Corridor’s longest-running jazz series will include one of the most talked-about young jazz performers in the country, the legendary Blue Band, and more in four exciting August concerts.

For the 24th consecutive year, we’re proud to present Jazz Under The Stars in Cedar Rapids Noelridge Park.

Here’s the lineup:
•August 4 – Ariel Pocock
•August 11 – Funk Daddies
•August 18 – Dennis McPartland and The Jazz Underground
•August 27 – Bob Dorr and The Blue Band

For ten years, saxophonist, pianist and Grammy-winning composer/arranger Gordon Goodwin has been driving a train that won’t stop. He first assembled his Big Phat Band in 2000-an ironic starting point for an 18-piece big band, given that the fleeting neo-swing craze of the late ’90s was just winding down. In the decade since their ambitious beginnings, the Big Phat Band has burned up stages and studios with an eclectic, intelligent and high-energy brand of music that marries the best elements of Ellington, Basie, John Barry and other big-band and orchestral jazz giants of the past 70 years. Their new CD — “That’s How We Roll” — is a ten-song set of all-original material, save for an intriguing rendition of Gershwin’s classic “Rhapsody in Blue.”

If you lived in the greater Philadelphia area around 1980, you knew the name Papa John DeFrancesco. He was the dean of the Hammond organ at that time and an overlord of Philly’s hard-bop-and-deep-groove bar-jazz scene. Famously, Papa John put aside his playing career to watch over his progeny, Joey DeFrancesco, who by age 17 would start touring as a member of Miles Davis’ band. But by the mid-’90s, with Joey grown and on his own, not only did Papa John resume his nights out behind the B-3, he started recording. He’s made another trip to the studio for “A Philadelphia Story” — not only bringing Joey along for the ride on trumpet but also with his guitar playing son John.

This Thursday and Friday, Iowa’s Jazz Station takes you to the French Quarter with two afternoons of live broadcasts from the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.

For guitarist Steve Khan, his new release — “Parting Shot” — marks the first time since 1994 that he has reunited his band Eyewitness, with Anthony Jackson on bass, Dennis Chambers on drums, and Manolo Badrena on percussion. This time there is something different, though. They now combine the looseness of their improvisations while adhering to the tenets of Latin music and the clave. To achieve this end, Khan also brought aboard dear friends and masters of the idiom, percussionists Marc Quinones and Bobby Allende. The program of music offers seven new Khan originals and inventive interpretations of tunes by Thelonius Monk and Ornette Coleman.

Norwegian trumpeter Mathias Eick made his first appearance on ECM Records as a sideman at the age of 23. From the outset, critics responded very positively to his vaulting melodic improvisations, often drawing comparisons to one of his main influences, Kenny Wheeler. His new disc — “Skala” — extends the concept and the panoramic sweep of his 2007 debut as a leader. It calls upon the services of more musicians and there is more detail in the arrangements. The disc pools new and older compositions written by Eick inspired, he says, by music from classical to pop.