The Playboy Jazz Festival celebrated its 40th anniversary at the Hollywood Bowl this year, and since its inauguration, much has changed. The lineup in 1979, as listed in the Los Angeles Times on June 2 of that year, included Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Sarah Vaughan, Joe Williams, Harold Land, and a special tribute to Charles Mingus…Read More

If the contemporary concert experience offered by most famous baby-boomer guitar heroes evokes an upscale sports bar—you know the place: Budweiser in those strange aluminum bottles, flat-screen TVs like wallpaper—then Ry Cooder’s current tour is more like a family-run coffeehouse. Hopefully you’ve been there too, with its farm-to-table snacks, old upholstered furniture, and interesting books…Read More

Fifty years ago, pianist Dave Burrell first announced his presence as a leader on disc with High Won-High Two. The album revealed an artist whose training at the University of Hawaii, Berklee College of Music and in the bands of Archie Shepp, Pharoah Sanders and Marion Brown had already made him the consummate “inside/outside” player,…Read More

At an event before the 49th New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, producer Quint Davis announced that Jazz Fest would not be focusing on a particular country as part of its booking theme this year. In honor of the city’s tricentennial, he said, “New Orleans is the country we’re celebrating.” Given the obsessively self-referential culture…Read More

Three times during a two-hour concert at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on April 18, Abdullah Ibrahim sat alone at the piano, gently coaxing melodies from the keys that were by turns rhapsodic and elegiac. Each time, the South African bandleader’s wanderings incorporated strains of the same simple, hymn-like tune, familiar yet maddeningly difficult to…Read More

The themes of intergenerational support and the power of community rang loud and clear throughout the celebration of the 2018 class of NEA Jazz Masters, held at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., on April 16. The recipients—pianist Joanne Brackeen, guitarist Pat Metheny, vocalist Dianne Reeves and impresario Todd Barkan—basked in the glow of a…Read More

Subscribe to JazzTimes magazine and receive reviews, news, profiles and more! Shortly after arriving in New York, in the early 1960s, Chick Corea had the opportunity to attend “Thelonious Monk University” for three weeks, as he explained to a packed house at Philadelphia’s Academy of Music on Sunday night. Actually, it was a three-week stint at…Read More

Subscribe to JazzTimes magazine for the latest news, reviews, and more!  On Monday night, at the Brooklyn venue Roulette, a fantastic two-hour-plus tribute show was bookended by the same interview footage from the documentary Open Land – Meeting John Abercrombie (which sees DVD release this summer). In it, the guitarist is talking about what constitutes…Read More

You know you’re at the Big Ears Festival when Nathan Bowles, banjo and bones player for the old-time string band the Black Twig Pickers, enthusiastically shouts out Milford Graves, the sage of avant-garde jazz percussion. “I got my wig flipped!” Bowles said of Graves’ solo set, which took place on the same stage just hours…Read More

For Dave Douglas, the art of the tribute has never been about the act of strict repertory theatre. In saluting undersung trumpeter Booker Little, honoring trailblazing pianist-composer Mary Lou Williams, nodding toward Lester Bowie’s Brass Fantasy (with his own Brass Ecstasy) and highlighting the importance of any number of horn heavies through his role as…Read More