The 15th annual Winter Jazzfest in New York opened on Friday, Jan. 4 at Le Poisson Rouge with “Thing Called Life: Prince Reimagined,” a concert by the festival’s artist-in-residence Meshell Ndegeocello. It was a risky move, for it recalled the bad old days when the Kool Jazz Festival toured the nation with such headliners as…Read More

Helsinki in December looks ominous when your plane touches down. At noon, the world is dim in the fog. Black sky descends to the ground. On the train into town from the airport, all the buildings are the same shade of gunmetal gray. The train station is a landmark designed by famous Finnish architect Eliel…Read More

There came an aha moment at the NEC Jazz Orchestra’s Dec. 6 concert in Jordan Hall that doubled as a reminder of why it was worth the time during this busy season of the year to brave the cold and venture into this venerated space. The moment arrived during the third number, Ran Blake’s “The…Read More

The Art Ensemble of Chicago in full cry, especially on a 50th-anniversary tour, is a powerful way to kick off a jazz festival. That said, if you have just flown in to Milan from the west coast of the United States and have not slept for 27 hours, the AEC can sound a little harsh.…Read More

The idea of the avant-garde has always been built around the shock of the new, the unceasing urge to push further, reinvent, or question what’s come before. All of which can make it somewhat disconcerting to realize just how long some of our most challenging artists have been stretching those boundaries, and how many have…Read More

How to play a chord that feels like Toni Morrison writing, “I didn’t fall in love with you, I rose in it”? How to play a melody with that feeling? These are the kinds of questions that Danilo Pérez, Avishai Cohen, and Chris Potter were mulling over in the leadup to the debut performance of…Read More

Nicole Mitchell’s Mandorla Awakening II: Emerging Worlds, which her Black Earth Ensemble performed at the Pritzker Pavilion on the first day of the 2018 Chicago Jazz Festival, is a visionary Afrofuturistic fable of new beauty arising from old—“merging,” as Mitchell has said, “the chalice with the blade, the urban with the earth-focused, the electronic/electric with…Read More

In Switzerland, a snowman effigy called a Böögg is burned and exploded at the stake as a way of marking winter’s end and predicting the fortitude of the upcoming summer. Native American elders have been known to speak to tornadoes in hopes of diverting them. The ancient Greeks spent an inordinate amount of time and energy…Read More

Apparently, it was a total coincidence that Red Bull Music scheduled its Chicago “round robin” improvisation during the Chicago Jazz Festival. Perhaps also by coincidence, none of the 16 musicians participating at Thalia Hall on Aug. 30 were headliners at the festival in Millennium Park—although each of them, capped by the legendary saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell,…Read More

Now in its 29th year of operation, geographically and artistically positioned between the SFJAZZ season and the Monterey Jazz Festival, San Jose Jazz Summer Fest (which ran from Aug. 10-12 in downtown San Jose, Calif.) presented a balanced roster of jazz, blues/New Orleans, and Latin-oriented artists on 12 outdoor and indoor stages. For the most…Read More