In late August, the pianist Lafayette Gilchrist was recovering from a week-long stint in Kaliningrad, Russia, the city that hosted the 2018 FIFA World Cup. He had performed at a jazz festival alongside saxophonist David Murray, drummer Hamid Drake, and bassist Jaribu Shahid, which amounted to a reunion of Murray’s Black Saint Quartet. At home,…Read More
Most of these tracks are pretty chill. More to the point, though, they’re tracks that I like to chill to. Some of them are tracks that meant a lot to me a long time ago; some of them are things that I’m listening to right now. Some of them are really pushing the bounds in…Read More
A sturdy lead trumpeter, ensemble-juggling bandleader, writer of renown, and longtime head of the jazz program at Lehigh University, Bill Warfield, 66, seems to embody the ideal of the musical multi-hyphenate. But it all could have turned out so differently. A little over 50 years ago, two car accidents derailed Warfield’s progress on the trumpet.…Read More
At a time when information and media are conveyed almost instantly, it’s easy to forget that in the not-too-distant past, a remote music lesson meant something very different from what it does today—and it was a painfully slow and tedious process. Greg Fishman, a saxophone and woodwind player, educator, and writer based in Chicago, Ill.,…Read More
The Monterey Jazz Festival, held this year from Sept. 21 to Sept. 23, is a quaint little village that exists for two and a half days in mid-September with a diverse population base decked out in obscure instrumental band T-shirts and at least three other layers of clothing. During the day, the sun scorches. The fog, Monterey Bay’s greatest…Read More
The release of Tony Bennett and Diana Krall’s first full-length album together, Love Is Here to Stay, got us thinking about the art of the vocal duet, which has a long and rich history in jazz. And so we asked Christopher Loudon, one of our favorite writers when it comes to the subject of jazz…Read More
Closing out the the opening night of the 2018 Vision Festival on May 23 at Roulette in Brooklyn, 34-year-old tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis played an hour-long collective improvisation set with masters of the form: drummer Andrew Cyrille, bassist William Parker, pianist Dave Burrell (the nominal leader), and the group’s senior member, the omnivorously avant-garde…Read More
For those of us who grew up on rock and pop, and then graduated to jazz, one of the major transitions is in the approach to the bass. Rock and pop basslines are often riff-oriented; jazz tries to find a way to keep the same groove and feel but does so while staying constantly in…Read More
JazzTimes is pleased to premiere “Gone Too Soon,” the closing track of Stefon Harris + Blackout’s upcoming album, Sonic Creed, which will be released by Motéma Records on Sept. 28. This version of a song first recorded by Michael Jackson in 1991 is premiered here in memory of what would have been Jackson’s 60th birthday on…Read More
Piano, bass, and drums make up a basic unit, an essential building block of jazz. In this classic three-piece format, there’s both no place to hide and no limit on the imagination. And when a piano trio is performing at its best—as is the case on the 10 recordings listed below—nothing is better. For this…Read More
