I listen to all the jazz-for-kids recordings that come in, with hope they’ll generate future audiences, and for my own kicks. Now, the most groovingly joyous of all the recordings I’ve heard has arrived: Randy Sandke’s Jazz for Juniors on Mat Domber’s Arbors Records, where Domber has often reminded us how much fun jazz can be.
Trumpeter-composer-leader Sandke, a global performer, tells me he’d been thinking about “exposing this current generation of young people to jazz since they’ll be the ones to keep this [music] alive,” when a critical development impelled him to gather Wycliffe Gordon, Wayne Escoffery, Ted Rosenthal, John Riley, Jay Leonhart, Ken Peplowski, Howard Alden and Chuck Wilson to play music (with lyrics and drawings) that would answer the question, “What is jazz?”
