via KPBS

Premieres Friday, Sept. 29, 2023 at 8 p.m. on KPBS 2 / PBS App

Celebrate the recipients of the 36th annual Hispanic Heritage Awards. The evening commemorating Hispanic Heritage Month includes performances and appearances by some of the country’s most celebrated Hispanic artists and visionaries.

The 36th Annual Hispanic Heritage Awards, hosted by Leslie Grace (“In the Heights”), premieres Friday, September 29. The awards, created by the White House to commemorate the establishment of Hispanic Heritage Month, are among the highest honors by Latinos for Latinos and are supported by 40 national Hispanic-serving institutions. The awards ceremony was held and taped for broadcast on Thursday, September 7, at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. 2023 marks the ninth consecutive year the awards have been presented on PBS.

Acclaimed Dominican American singer, songwriter and actress Leslie Grace will also perform, with additional musical performances by honorees Omar Apollo and Café Tacvba, a special return performance by Alejandra Guzman, and a special centennial tribute to the legendary Tito Puente featuring Tito Puente, Jr., Milly Quezada, Alec Cuba and Pedrito Martínez.

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Pedrito Martínez on TKA

via The Hollywood Times

“I am a jazz singer, that’s in my blood. I thought an art form was dying and chose to dedicate myself to it.”
— Dee Dee Bridgewater on Returning to Her Roots as a Jazz Singer

Although nobody was smoking cigarettes, pouring red wine from decanters, or sipping whiskey from highball glasses at Royce Hall on Friday night, it felt like all this and more should be happening. After all, Dee Dee Bridgewater and Bill Charlap transported the audience back to the jazz age of Duke Ellington and Cole Porter when the music was wild, and the people were refined.

Indeed, it was a magical night of music that is so rarely heard, and it felt a bit like watching a fading flower, wanting desperately to capture its beauty and hold onto it forever. The Center for the Art of Performance UCLA (CAP UCLA) remains one of the bastions of championing the finest cultural offerings in Los Angeles.

Read full article on The Hollywood Times

Dee Dee Bridgewater on TKA

Bill Charlap on TKA

via The Times

Jazz is renowned for its constant transformation, so it’s odd that Afro-Cuban jazz has barely changed since Dizzy Gillespie, Machito and others developed it in the 1940s. The Cuban pianist Harold López-Nussa here spectacularly puts that to rights. To the classic clave pattern he has added danzon and bata drumming, then fused it with modern song structure and improv. Listening to it, you’ll wonder why no one has tried it before.

It doesn’t stop there. López-Nussa and his producer, Michael League of Snarky Puppy, pack in keyboard sounds and styles as tightly as the meat in a mixto sandwich: Rhodes on the wistful Mal du Pays, Moog and Mellotron on the yearning Tumba la Timba and synths on the flamboyant Funky. The last of these has the leader pushing his piano into postbop territory as the dance rhythms catch fire. Radical, but kind of inevitable too.

Read the full review on The Times

Harold López-Nussa on TKA