Branford Marsalis has always tackled every musical challenge head on – be it playing arenas with Sting, freewheeling improvised rock with the Grateful Dead, primetime US television shows or leading one of the hottest quartets in contemporary jazz.
Right from her student days at Boston’s Berklee College of Music, when she also recorded her debut album Brain, Hiromi Uehara always stood out from the crowd with her molten mix of classical technique, compositional daring and rock-edged-fusion, all delivered with sky-high energy levels.
Beginning in an unlikely way in New York in the year World War II broke out with a boogie-woogie record, by the 1960s Blue Note had created an identifiable sound which has to this day continuing relevance in a world where most music is forgotten about just weeks after release.
Jacob Collier is a virtuoso multi-instrumentalist whose YouTube videos have gained him a huge online audience.
Mercurial and mysterious as ever, the saxophonist talks to Stuart Nicholson about how his deep past connections are now shaping his present, and future, conception of music, and what lies beyond! Saxophonist Wayne Shorter has long been acknowledged as a major figure in jazz.
Robert Glasper’s recent double Grammy Award wins for his two Black Radio albums have capped an 11-year career that has not just seen him break through to the mainstream like few other jazz artists today, but has also seen Glasper forge deep bonds between today’s jazz, R&B and hip-hop scenes.
With parallel careers spanning the last two decades saxophonist Joshua Redman and piano trio The Bad Plus have forged equally acclaimed, but distinctly separate paths in contemporary jazz.
Bassist Avishai Cohen has in the last decade of his prolific, high-level 20-year career, moved from bass hero and bandleader, into the echelons of significant stylistic innovator and powerful musical mentor.
To say Malcolm John ‘Mac’ Rebennack Jr, aka Dr John, has lived a colourful life would be something of an understatement: from spells in jail, being shot in the hand, scoring drugs and his upbringing in deepest, darkest New Orleans, he is the very embodiment of the Crescent City’s rich gumbo soul.
Diana Krall has often walked a fine line between consummate jazz performer and canny crossover artist, not least with her recent vaudeville, jazz and blues inspired album Glad Rag Doll, and now even more so with Wallflower – her classy new, string-laden record peppered with songs by The Mamas & the Papas, Paul McCartney and Bob Dylan.
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