Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify.
Reedman Adrian Cunningham celebrates the music of iconic composer Frederick Loewe this fall with “Adrian Cunningham & his Friends Play Lerner & Lowe,” featuring pianist Fred Hersch, bassist John Hebert and drummer Eric McPherson along with special guests Randy Brecker on trumpet and Wycliffe Gordon on trombone. Cunningham began the process with research. “I watched all the movies, “My Fair Lady,” “Camelot,” “Brigadoon” and Paint Your Wagon,” he explains. “I knew the songs in the basic repertoire, but I wanted to go deeper, do some detective work, present songs that perhaps hadn’t been widely known. I am happy to create something fresh with vintage material. So much great American music can continue to be reborn and reshaped into something new.”
A Florida native who landed in North Carolina in 2002, trumpeter, educator and bandleader Rich Willey has been around the block. Starting in the early 1980s, he cut his teeth in the jazz clubs of Philadelphia, Atlantic City, New Jersey and New York City before stints on the road with Maynard Ferguson and the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra. Between recording sessions with his Boptism bands, he continues to compose music and write books. He follows his Boptism Big Band release of this past summer with his new Boptism Funk Band release, “Conspiracy.”
Also this week, guitarist Joshua Breakstone celebrates the 100th anniversary of Art Blakey’s birth date by presenting music composed by members of the Jazz Messengers, including Wayne Shorter, Lee Morgan, Cedar Walton, Hank Mobley and others, on “Children of Art”;
Gordon Goodwin’s Big Phat Band offers up another batch of incredible charts on “The Gordian Knot”;
and Los Angeles-based singer Gretje Angell debuts on disc with “In Any Key.”