News of Past Guests, Summer 2016 Edition

Jazz critic Kevin Whitehead has a smart appreciation of Matt Wilson's Big Happy Family on NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross:


And in other drummer news: Allison Miller talks with Drew Miller about Otis Was a Polar Bear on his Wing Walker Music podcast.

RJA veterans included in DownBeat's July feature story, "25 for the Future" include saxophonist Melissa Aldana; drummers Marcus Gilmore (Vijay Iyer Trio), Tyshawn Sorey (Myra Melford's Snowy Egret), Justin Brown (Ambrose Akinmusire Quintet) and Mark Guiliana (Donny McCaslin Group); and guitarist Matthew Stevens (Linda Oh's Sun Pictures).

Meanwhile, as usual, our past guests are well represented in the 64th annual DownBeat International Critics Poll, whose winners include Vijay Iyer (Jazz Artist of the Year), Ambrose Akinmusire (Trumpet), Anat Cohen (Clarinet), Regina Carter (Violin), and Cécile McLorin Salvant (Female Vocalist). "Rising Stars" include Tim Lefebvre (Electric Bass), Mark Guiliana (Drums), and Liberty Ellman (Guitar). 142 writers, journalists, and critics from around the world participated in the poll.

On August 12, Réne Marie stopped into the NPR studios in Washington to perform a set for the Tiny Desk Concert:

Finally, in album news: guitarist Charlie Hunter assembled a new quartet with Kirk Knuffke, trumpet; Marshall Fowlkes, trombone; and Bobby Previte, drums, for a CD on the GroundUP Music label entitled Everybody Has a Plan Until They Get Punched In the Mouth. Here's a track:

And Entertainment Weekly,  Rolling Stone, and Pitchfork are among those touting Donny McCaslin's forthcoming album, Beyond Now, due out in October, which will include two Bowie covers, "Warszawa" and "A Small Plot of Land." You can read an interview with Donny (and hear "Small Plot") at EW, and you can pre-order the album from Motema.

News of Past Guests, May 2016 Edition

Okay, sure: we'll start this post in the traditional way, with news about past guests.  For instance, over at Jazz Speaks (the weblog of New York City's venerable performance space, the Jazz Gallery), bassist Linda Oh talks about her upcoming album (and playing with Pat Metheny).

Then there's Matt Wilson (below), who has a beautiful new album, Beginnings of a Memory, with a group he's calling Big Happy Family.



The "memory" is of Wilson's beloved wife Felicia, who died in 2014, and the "family" are a dozen members of his three working bands--Felicia's favorite players, who came together to play some of her favorite tunes. Wilson talks about the album in the June issue of DownBeat. Here's the title track:



There are other albums out, too (or coming out soon), by Rez Abbasi, with a new ensemble called "Junction":



by the Claudia Quintet:



--and by Phronesis bassist Jasper Høiby:



Plus, vocalist Rene Marie has just released a full album of her own compositions:

And if you'd like to hear Chris Lightcap's Bigmouth, Allison Miller's Boom Tic Boom, and/or the Vijay Iyer Trio again, then you might be interested in WNYC's New Sounds podcast, since they all appear on the same episode devoted to "Groove-Based Jazz":



Otherwise, though, our news this month isn't about past guests, but about old friends from closer to home. To wit:

Last month, longtime jazz fanatic and radio programmer (at KZYX in Fort Bragg) Doug Moody was named a "Jazz Hero" by the Jazz Journalists Association.  A co-owner (and Senior Vice President for Marketing) of North Coast Brewing Company, Doug has also been one of the RJA's most stalwart supporters since the very beginning of our ten-year existence.  As beneficiaries of his largesse, we're in good company: North Coast supports jazz presenters, performers, and educators all over California and all across the country, not least through its sales of its "Brother Thelonious" abbey-style ale:

These days, Doug and North Coast are presenting jazz, too, at their "Sequoia Room" in Fort Bragg. Road trip, anyone?

Finally, bassist Shao Way Wu left Arcata a couple of years ago for the bright lights of Portland, where he's been illuminating that city's own local jazz scene. He's got a new album, Canvas Sky, with his bass-piano duo "Tar Beach."  You can buy it on Bandcamp after you listen to it here:

(You can also find albums by the PDX incarnation of his Coconino Trio and tracks by his bass-guitar duo "Day In the Sun.")

News of Past Guests, March 2015

It's been awhile.  So without any further ado:

Antonio Sanchez's arresting score for the Oscar-winning Birdman was disqualified--on an ill-conceived technicality--from consideration for a well-deserved award.  Still, you can buy a copy of the score for yourself and appreciate it all you like.



In better news: the results of the 2014 Expanded Jazz Times Critics Poll came out in the March 2015 issue, and who should we find at the top of the list?  Best New Artist: Melissa Aldana.  Artist of the Year: Miguel Zenón.  Farther down: Best trumpeter: Ambrose Akinmusire.  Tenor Sax: Mark Turner.  Alto Sax: Miguel Zenón again.  Clarinet: Anat Cohen.  Violin: Regina Carter.  Drums: Brian Blade (Joel Harrison).  Female Vocalist: Cécile McLorin Salvant.  Podcast: A Noise From the Deep with Dave Douglas.  We'll try not to break our arms patting our own backs--but you gotta admit, we do know how to pick 'em.

And elsewhere:

Joel Harrison, who organized the Alt Guitar Summit in New York in February, speaks with guitar god Nels Cline on the latest episode of his podcast, Say What You Mean.

Also in February, René Marie was Michael Feinstein's guest on NPR's Song Travels, performing duets with Michael and talking about Eartha Kitt.

On March 4, Anat Cohen performed on NPR's Jazz Night in America with her group Choro Aventuroso, which plays the improvisatory Afro-Brazilian instrumental music known as "choro." You can stream that program by following the link above, and you can order the band's new album, Luminosa, at the Anzic Records Bandcamp store (and preview three tracks from the album right here):



And speaking of new albums, trumpeter Eddie Henderson (The Cookers) and The Vijay Iyer Trio both have new releases.  (The New York Times says Iyer's album, Break Stuff, "confirms his stature in jazz's contemporary vanguard, along with the dynamic excellence of his working trio.") The new incarnation of Harris Eisenstadt's "Golden State" features Trio M's Mark Dresser and Humboldt's own Michael Moore on Golden State II (you can stream two tracks and download one at the Songlines Records website.) Dafnis Prieto's Sextet--who played maybe the most exciting set we heard at this year's WinterJazzFest in New York--has some terrific new tunes on Triangles and Circles. And guitarist Rez Abbasi, the subject of a feature in the March issue of DownBeat, has a fantastic new record with his Acoustic Quartet. With a nod to the late, great Bill Dixon, he entitled it Intents and Purposes. It's available from all the usual suspects: iTunes, Amazon, eMusic, etc.--and, if you're an audiophile, at HD download sites like Pro Studio Masters and Qobuz. Here's the Video EPK:



Chris Lightcap's Bigmouth just released Epicenter on the always hip Clean Feed label.  The title track and two others are available for streaming:





Finally, to our great shame, we never got around to plugging what was probably our favorite album of 2014, Michael Blake's brilliant, swinging tribute to Hawk & Prez, Tiddy Boom:

News of Past Guests, May 2014 Edition

René Marie is back in the spotlight.  This time it's a leisurely 10-minute interview, studded with plenty of song samples, on NPR's All Things Considered.  The link just now will take you to the full transcript of the story (which is beguilingly entitled "On Singing, Sex, and the Importance of Being Eartha"), but you can also listen to it below:

Meanwhile, saxophonist Matt Bauder (Harris Eisenstadt's Canada Day) has a new album that's garnering justifiably strong reviews.  It's called Nightshades, and you can stream it on Spotify at the website of Matt's record label, the forward-thinking Clean Feed.

Finally, on The Jazz Breakfast, Peter Bacon interviews Phronesis bassist Jasper Høiby.

News of Past Guests, March 2014 Edition

New albums:

• Vijay Iyer's ECM debut features music written not for his longtime trio but for piano, electronics and string quartet.  It's called Mutations.  Nate Chinen has a profile of Iyer in the Sunday, March 9 edition of the New York Times, and Chinen and fellow jazz critic Ben Ratliff discuss Iyer and the new album in the latest Times "Popcast."
• Ambrose Akinmusire's second Blue Note release, the imagined savior is far easier to paint, will be out on March 11th, but it's currently streaming (in preview) courtesy of NPR Music's "First Listen." (We hear tell It's official: Ambrose also graces the cover of the April DownBeat.  AND he was recently interviewed on NPR's All Things Considered.)
• And even though Omer Avital's new one, New Song, won't be out on CD in the States until summer, the digital-download version is available now from all the usual suspects (iTunes, Amazon, Google Play)--and, for audiophiles, in 24-bit/88.2 kHz "Studio Master" format from Qobuz.
• On his latest release, Multiplicity: Leave the Door Open, the prolific guitarist Joel Harrison co-leads a group with Indian sarod master Anupam Shobhakar. The rest of the band: Gary Versace (Miles-Versace-Royston, John Abercrombie Organ Trio), Hans Glawischnig (Miguel Zenon Quartet), and Dan Weiss (David Binney Group, Rez Abbasi's Invocation Quintet), plus special guests including David Binney.
• Finally: everybody's talking about the new album, Southern Comfort, by our final guest this season (in a co-presentation with Center Arts), violinist Regina Carter.  NPR ran a feature on All Things Considered, and the Wall Street Journal did a long review (well, okay--it's a double-review, of Southern Comfort and Vijay Iyer's Mutations).

Speaking of Omer Avital: it was great to see Friend of the RJA Bob Doran show up with the "big" camera slung over his shoulder for the first time since...oh, you know.  The preliminary evidence is right here.  (And here's hoping there'll be more!)

Rene Marie is always busy.  This time it's an appearance on NPR's Jazz Set with Dee Dee Bridgewater, as part of the vocal trio "Two Skirts and a Shirt," with Allan Harris and Carla Cook.

News of Past Guests, January 2014 Edition

Is the 26th of the month too late to wish you a Happy New Year?  Probably.  Our excuse: we're still recovering from our second annual Jazz Connect-slash-WinterJazzFest trip to New York, where we hobnobbed with musicians, writers, and assorted jazz geeks, and heard (are you ready?) the Kurt Rosenwinkel New Quartet, The Cookers, the Melissa Aldana Crash Trio, Ryan Truesdell's Gil Evans Project, Nate Wooley's Seven Storey Mountain, a few minutes of the Mary Halvorson Septet, Chris Lightcap's Bigmouth, Ben Goldberg's Unfold Ordinary Mind, Ryan Keberle and Catharsis, Theo Bleckmann & Ben Monder, Darcy James Argue's Secret Society, Ralph Alessi's Baida Quartet, Slavic Soul Party doing Duke Ellington, Mark Helias Open Loose, Mostly Other People Do The Killing, a few minutes of Henry Threadgill's Butch Morris tribute, the Miguel Zenon Quartet, the Oran Etkin Quartet, the Fred Hersch Trio, Regina Carter's Southern Comfort, Rudresh Mahanthappa's Indo-Pak Coalition, and the Torben Waldorff Quartet.  (Tired yet?  So were we.)

The very nature of WJF--where brilliant music is happening in six different places at once--is that unless you're multidimensional or come equipped with a Calvin and Hobbes "Duplicator," you end up passing on a whole lot of fantastic stuff.  (Hence the occasional "few minutes" qualifiers above.) Among the sets we most hated missing:  René Marie and her trio, augmented by the horns of Etienne Charles and Wycliffe Gordon, at the impossibly tiny Zinc Bar. René's December 2013 Jazz Times cover story is now available to read online.

Otherwise, January is a slow jazz-news month.  We'll keep our news-feed tuned to tonight's Grammys to see how Donny McCaslin and Fred Hersch (both nominated for "Best Instrumental Jazz Solo") fare.  [Update, January 29: darn that Wayne Shorter!] And we'll look forward to February, when drummer Matt Wilson--who we hear is planning big things for his 50th birthday this year--begins hosting Playdate on Newark's WBGO, one of the premiere jazz stations in the country. (The idea behind Playdate?  To uncork some of the hundreds of hours of vintage live performances that have been ageing in WBGO's caves.  We can't imagine a more delightful curator/sommelier than Matt.  All the programs will be archived as free podcasts, just like the excellent Checkout.)

Matt's Quartet (with Jeff Lederer, Kirk Knuffke, and Chris Lightcap, with special guest John Medeski) has also just released the first must-buy album of the new year, Gathering Call.  Two words:  it swings.  Okay, four:  it swings like hell.  Samples at Amazon & iTunes, but if history is any guide, it should soon be available for purchase & streaming at the Palmetto Records website.

Also out with a new album--his first, incredibly enough, as a leader:  everybody's-go-to-drummer Rudy Royston, who's visited Humboldt County in the company of trumpeters Ron Miles and Tom Harrell, and who currently holds the drum chair in Dave Douglas's quintet.  303 (the area code for Denver, where Royston lived in his formative years) is out on Douglas's Greenleaf Music label. Rudy is also the guest on the latest Greenleaf Music podcast, "A Noise from the Deep."


And last (for now) but not least in the "New Album" Department: Phronesis, whose new disc, Life to Everything, recorded live at last fall's London Jazz Festival (just weeks after their appearance at the Morris Graves), drops in April, but can be pre-ordered now.

News of Past Guests, December Edition

Happy, Happy.  (You know: holidays.)

Notice anything funny about the sky last night? Ben Allison's new album, The Stars Look Very Different Today (with Steve Cardenas, guitar; Brandon Seabrook, guitar and banjo; and Allison Miller, drums), is out today, and you can buy it and stream it on Ben's website.  The band played live on WNYC's Soundcheck last Tuesday, November 26th (player embedded below), and they were featured on NPR's All Things Considered on December 1st.  "Audacious sci-fi jazz," the Denver Post calls this music.

Elsewhere on the airwaves: saxophonist Noah Preminger was in the studios of Newark's WBGO a few weeks ago, playing and promoting his latest album, Haymaker, on The Checkout.  You can hear the show by clicking that link just a few words back, and you can hear the entire album at the Palmetto Records website.  Anat Cohen (see last month's post) came to the same studio a few weeks later with her brothers Avishai and Yuval to perform live selections from their new album Tightrope.

We've already told you about René Marie's new stunner--it will almost certainly top our "Best of 2013" list--but you should go back/scroll down and have a look-n-listen for yourself if you missed our previous post. René lights up the cover of the December issue of Jazz Times, and if history is any guide, that cover story should be available on the JT website in a few weeks.

Every month, WBGO and NPR Music team up to broadcast/podcast Live at the Village Vanguard. Several past RJA guests have been featured on the program since it started up a few years back (if you check out our artist web pages, you've probably heard some of those performances already), and coming up on December 10th at 5:30 Pacific Time, it's drummer extraordinaire Brian Blade, who came to the Arcata Playhouse last spring as part of Joel Harrison's Spirit House, and who will appear on LATVV with his long-running Fellowship Band.  As you can well imagine, the show has an awesome archive.

The Grammy nominations are out, and while cats in the jazz world often complain that the people who make those nominations don't know much about jazz, this year, at least, they got one thing right, nominating Donny McCaslin in the "Best Improvised Solo" category for his burning solo on "Stadium Jazz," from his latest album Casting for Gravity. 

News of Past Guests, November Edition

If we'd been keeping up with WBGO's excellent program, The Checkout (one of the places we go regularly to, um, check out what's new in contemporary jazz), we'd have known when we last posted that Ralph Alessi had been featured on the September 25th episode, talking about his new album, Baida, and about illustrious bandleaders with whom he's worked as a sideman. Listen to the segment by following the link above.  And while you're there, why not subscribe to The Checkout's podcast?


Phronesis appeared at Finland's Pori Jazz Festival last summer, and YLE Radio 1 has just posted an audio stream of their 59-minute set.  Listen to it right here until November 21.

Drummers Ches Smith (Chris Lightcap's Bigmouth) and Gerald Cleaver (Michael Formanek Quartet) are both profiled in the November issue of Jazz Times, which typically puts much of the content from its print edition online after a lag of several weeks. The Jazz Times website is also a good place to go for archived articles and breaking news, like this report of Vijay Iyer's imminent ECM debut and the debut performance of Myra Melford's "Language of Dreams," commissioned by the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and featuring her new group "Snowy Egret."

Speaking of online content: Dave Douglas's "Listening Test" (from Jazz Times' October issue) has just gone live. Dave shows off his good ears and his broad knowledge of jazz history.

Remember that René Marie Eartha Kitt tribute we told you about last month, I Wanna Be Evil?  It's out, and we're pretty sure it's her best album yet.  (RJA bump? She penned the liner notes just days after her date at the Graves.)  You can find a couple of short video teasers for the album on YouTube, along with this full-length performance of "I'd Rather Be Burned As a Witch," the scorcher that opens the album (as always, we recommend changing the video quality to 1020 HD and watching in full-screen mode):

René talks about making the album on the November 12th edition of Jeffrey Siegel's "Straight No Chaser" podcast (don't be thrown by the two-minute silence after the theme music).  And speaking of podcasts, here's something we didn't mention earlier: this past summer, René did a 19-episode podcast for Jazz Times where she talked frankly and off the cuff about music and...well, all kinds of stuff with Lee Mergner. It's a lot of fun, and you can download every 'cast for free at the iTunes store.

The 3 Cohens--Anat, Avishai, and Yuval--have a new album out on the Anzic label called Tightrope.  You can download it at Anzic's Bandcamp store.  Pianist Fred Hersch joins the Cohen on several tracks, including this one:

Anat is also the guest on the latest edition (November 8) of NPR's Piano Jazz.

[Added November 14th:] Trumpeter Tom Harrell's new album on High Note is called Colors of a Dream. Regular members of his quintet are joined by also saxophonist Jaleel Shaw and second bassist Esperanza Spalding, who adds some airy Portuguese vocals to Harrell's classic "Sail Away":

Multi-reedist Marty Ehrlich, meanwhile, has a new album of works for jazz orchestra called A Trumpet in the Morning.  Members of his "Large Ensemble" include several other RJA visitors: pianist Uri Caine and bassist Drew Gress (Uri Caine Trio), trumpeter Ron Horton (Ben Allison's Man Size Safe), and drummer Matt Wilson.

And speaking of Ben Allison: Ben will be performing with his new quartet (which comprises Steve Cardenas, guitar; Brandon Seabrook, guitar and banjo; and Allison Miller, drums) on WNYC's Soundcheck on Tuesday, November 26th, in support of the band's new album, The Stars Look Very Different Today, due out December 3d (and available in digital format on iTunes and Amazon now).  In the meantime, the Soundcheck blog is streaming a track from the album, "D.A.V.E. (Digital Awareness Vector Emulator)":