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

Any single critic’s attempt to review Winter Jazzfest NYC comprehensively is predestined to fail, for reasons perhaps best explained by the title of an old Firesign Theatre album: How can you be in two places at once when you’re not anywhere at all? With 125 performances at 12 Manhattan venues—109 of them occurring over only…Read More

Introducing saxophone great Archie Shepp for a rare performance at Princeton University in early December, Rudresh Mahanthappa recalled his own college days, often spent huddling with friends to listen to John Coltrane’s Ascension into the wee hours. Lessons gleaned from the music of that era, he continued, instilled the idea that social activism was as…Read More

To compose a new score to Koyaanisqatsi, the breathtaking 1982 experimental film directed by Godfrey Reggio, is in many ways to remake the Mona Lisa. The first and best-known installment in Reggio’s dialogue-less Qatsi trilogy, it offers an interdependence of images, by cinematographer Ron Fricke, and music, by Philip Glass, that deserves comparison to milestones…Read More

In its 21st year, the Dominican Republic Jazz Festival has grown from an informal gathering at founder Lorenzo Sancassani’s beachfront pizza joint into a sprawling, weeklong affair that travels from one end of the island to the other. The majority of the concerts take place in towns along the resort-speckled north coast, all free of…Read More