Paul McCartney will forever be identified with The Beatles, but jazz guitarist John Pizzarelli has attempted on a new album to revive some of the legend’s lesser known solo tracks. Pizzarelli, a popular guitarist known both for his own songs and collaborations with other artists, said the ex-Beatle himself came up with the idea for the album, Midnight McCartney, which will come out on September 11.
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John Pizzarelli on TKA
When a leading London daily, the Independent, tags Mali’s Bassekou Kouyaté and Ngoni Ba as “the best rock and roll band in the world”, you know there’s something very special about the seven-piece outfit and its leader.
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Bassekou Kouyate on TKA
If the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the words “classical music” is stuffy older folks politely clapping for elevator music, you may want to reconsider. Chargaux, a Brooklyn-based duo that play the violin and viola, are using classical string arrangements in bold, soulful ways, and incorporating stunning visuals to help you see their sounds.
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Chargaux on TKA
With their natural sisterlike chemistry and their innate way of finishing each other’s sentences, it would seem implausible that Margaux Whitney and Jasmin “Charly” Charles, the two women behind the classically trained string instrument duo Chargaux, haven’t known each other for a lifetime.
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Chargaux on TKA
Saxophonist Jeff Coffin recently launched a Kickstarter project to help fund the release of his big band album, “Inside of the Outside,” which he recorded with Caleb Chapman’s Crescent Super Band and several other guest musicians. Proceeds from the album will benefit the Cuba National School of the Arts.
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Jeff Coffin & the Mu’tet on TKA
Side Up, the latest album from saxophonist Jeff Coffin and his Mu’tet, is an eclectic mix of musical styles, influences and instrumental combinations reflecting the ensemble’s embrace of the idea that stasis-the same old, same old-is poor soil for musical growth. Music thrives when it pushes boundaries.
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In the mid-1980s, Gary Burton was just entering middle age, but he’d had experiences as a jazz player to fill several lifetimes. Duke Ellington had treated him with kindness, Milt Jackson with suspicion, Miles Davis with a death threat. Burton’s memoir, “Learning to Listen,” tells these stories and situates its author’s own major contributions in jazz’s history.
Burton’s memoir, “Learning to Listen,” tells these stories and situates its author’s own major contributions in jazz’s history. After leaving Getz in 1966, Burton — with guitarist Larry Coryell and others — pioneered jazz-rock fusion and played venues like the Fillmore in San Francisco. As a player, he brought his four-mallet technique and “Burton grip” to the vibraphone and marimba, expanding the potential for those instruments in both lead and support settings. As a bandleader, he spotted and mentored the likes of Pat Metheny.
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Gary Burton on TKA
Gary Burton plays an instrument rarely heard in Nashville recording studios — the vibraphone. In fact, the scarcity of this instrument is the reason Burton got his first break towards becoming a professional musician.
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Gary Burton on TKA
Looking every inch a silver-maned patriarch of Biblical grandeur, Sonny Rollins, the 84-year-old genius of the jazz tenor saxophone, was especially elated last weekend to receive an honorary doctor of music degree from the University of Hartford at graduation ceremonies on its West Hartford campus.
Sure, the Grammy Award-winning Rollins probably already has a warehouse full of prestigious awards earned over his remarkable, nearly seven-decade career in which he has clearly established himself as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, most exultantly celebratory, thematic improviser in jazz history. Among Rollins’s countless coveted prizes is the Medal of Arts, the nation’s highest honor for artistic excellence, awarded to him personally by President Barack Obama in a ceremony at the White House.
But this new UHart award, with its honorific title, Dr. Rollins, is not merely another personal honor. It is also, in Rollins’s heartfelt view, a way to celebrate the memory of his longtime close friend and fellow jazz great, Jackie McLean, who was 74 when he died at home in Hartford after a long illness in 2006. A renowned alto saxophonist and innovative educator, McLean, Rollins’s boyhood buddy from their early Harlem years, founded the widely-acclaimed jazz studies program at UHart’s Hartt School, now known as the Jackie McLean Institute of Jazz.
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Sonny Rollins on TKA
Rollins doesn’t see the recognition as any kind of trophy or happy ending. It simply allows his work to go on. “I might get better jobs so I can continue my life and what I’m doing,” he says of receiving the Kennedy Center award. “Pursuing that musical thing that I’m looking for and, at the same time, representing this great music that is so much bigger than I am.”
It’s a pursuit that has no endpoint.
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Sonny Rollins on TKA