It’s a given nowadays: When you hire a bass player, they ask, “Do you want upright or electric?” It’s understood that they have to play both. That was not the case when Max Bennett started. There was an abrupt transition to electric bass in popular music during the ’60s, and Bennett was one of the first…Read More
I don’t have a precise memory of meeting Wesla Whitfield. In the ’80s, I got to see Whitfield in the Plush Room in San Francisco, and she was just amazing, and I would see her at the Algonquin in New York. Years later we performed in Tucson, Arizona—my first time singing in Tucson, where I…Read More
Though it’s been a part of jazz from its early days—Fats Waller recorded on it in 1926—the organ occupies a distinctive niche within the music. All the more so since the invention of the electric organ, which Laurens Hammond began marketing in 1935 and which caught on in jazz in the 1950s. Once a certain…Read More
I was a teenager in Warsaw, working in a jazz band with [drummer] Michal Miskiewicz and [bassist] Slawomir Kurkiewicz, and Tomasz Stanko heard about us and invited us to play. We were very nervous: Slawomir and I were 18, and Michal was just 16! But we did our best, and the first concert—the eighth of…Read More
It was a difficult task for me to pick my 10 favorite Roy Hargrove tracks. He meant the world to me as a friend and as a musician, but he meant the world to everyone who knew him, so part of me felt like I should try to pick a “universal 10.” However, that would be…Read More
When I went to college, I became a jazz fanatic—this was back when you could get LPs for $3.99—and I saw this guy who looked interesting and I bought his record, a reissue of his first one [Devil May Care], on Bethlehem. I immediately fell in love with his voice, then fell in love with…Read More
JazzTimes is honored to present the premiere of the John Pizzarelli Trio’s new video for “Straighten Up and Fly Right,” a track that appears on their latest album, For Centennial Reasons: 100 Year Salute to Nat King Cole, released by Ghostlight Deluxe on Feb. 8. For this new version of the Cole classic—credited to the singer/pianist…Read More
JazzTimes is honored to present the premiere of Aubrey Logan’s new video for “Understand,” the first single from her upcoming album Where the Sunshine Is Expensive, to be released Mar. 22 on Resonance Records. This is the singer and trombonist’s second album as a leader, in addition to the work she’s done over the last…Read More
Years ago Rebecca opened for the Manhattan Transfer in Boston, and she blew my mind. She blew the audience away; she blew us away. We hung out a bit at the show, but then I wasn’t in contact with her for many years, not until the Christmas before she passed. I saw her do a…Read More
On the eve of his 75th birthday, singer/songwriter/pianist Ben Sidran decided to release a three-CD compilation of performances spanning the last 40 years or so. Ben There, Done That, released on Sunset Boulevard Records, features an engrossing range of live cuts from 1975 to 2015, with cameos from David “Fathead” Newman and Phil Woods. Go…Read More
