Straight No Chaser - A Jazz Show

Performer! Producer! Musical Director! Arranger! Composer! Educator! Ulysses Owens Jr checks all the boxes as he continues to develop and grow his career in jazz.  Since his graduation from Juilliard as a member of its jazz inaugural class in 2001, he has been in demand as drummer and musical director. You are likely familiar with his contributions to recordings with Christian McBride's Trio and B...

No album title in recent memory was more to the point than the Branford Marsalis Quartet's 2012 release Four MFs Playin' Tunes . That CD was filled with the kind of great give and take that only musicians steeped in tradition, and heady enough to work off and with each other could make. The core of the band – Saxophonist Marsalis, bassist Eric Revis and pianist Joey Calderazzo – has been together...

I first fell in love with the music of Joey DeFrancesco  twenty years ago, when I booked him on an epic Organ Summit triple bill with the late Charles Earland and Dr. Lonnie Smith for the Greater Hartford Festival of Jazz.  What an evening that was! Significantly younger than the other greats sharing the stage that night, he more than held his own, and seemed as excited as any fan in attendance to...

Almost exactly two years ago, I spoke with French singer Cyrille Aimee about her second album for Mack Avenue, Let's Get Lost . It had been recorded with her long-time collaborators, the Surreal Band, and carved out a spot for her as a new voice to be reckoned with on the jazz scene. Fast forward two years, and like most artists worth their salt, Cyrille has grown and changed. Breaking with the ba...

Fifty years ago today – February 18, 1969 - Miles Davis and a group of musicians entered Columbia Studio B in New York City for a three hour session that eventually became his first true "electric album", In A Silent Way . It's fair to say that the album remains one of the most startling and influential jazz albums of all time, one of the first times that electric instruments met truly adventurous...

This is Part Two of my conversation with bass great Larry Grenadier. Part One was primarily about the release of his first solo bass album, The Gleaners on ECM Records. This podcast allows me to get into some stories about the many great recordings and bands he has played with over the past thirty years. For most of his career, Grenadier has been one third of the Brad Mehldau Trio, first with Jorg...

If you make a list of the top bass players in the business today, Larry Grenadier needs to be at, or near, the never top. A consummate sideman, he has been an important member of a who's who of bands over his more than three decade career. From early days as a prodigy playing with sax icons Joe Henderson and Stan Getz to what has been decades performing alongside pianist Brad Mehldau; from extende...

This year, I've decided to post my annual Valentine's Day podcast a few days early, so you can have time to get in the mood. Heaven knows it's a little harder these days, with the state of the world seemingly going toward hate rather than love. Curious about the origins of Valentine's Day as a day to publicly celebrate romance? Check this out : The day first became associated with  romantic love w...

The connections between guitarists Kurt Rosenwinkel and Pedro Martins is the stuff of movie scripts. Growing up in Brazil, Martins studied Rosenwinkel' s recordings. A chance meeting with his idol shortly thereafter pushed Pedro to continue his jazz studies. In 2015, Martins participated in the Socar Guitar Competition at the 49th Montreux Jazz Festival which was judged by – Kurt Rosenwinkel. Winn...

Much like was said about Bruce Springsteen 15 years earlier, it sometimes seems that if Joshua Redman had not existed, the jazz press would have had to make him up. The story is too perfect – the son of noted African-American jazz saxophonist Dewey Redman and dancer/librarian Renee Shedroff  who was, the daughter of Polish Immigrant Jews, picks up the clarinet and saxophone before his tenth birthd...

The story of The Seasons , Ben Wendel's fine CD released late last year, is absolutely fascinating. It's a story of artistic discovery and whimsy, and it ends with a top-notch band playing top-notch music. It begins in 2015, when saxophonist-bassoonist-composer Wendel heard a set of twelve piano pieces written and released in a music magazine each month by Tchaikovsky in 1876. Inspired by this ide...

After pianist Alfredo Rodriguez arranged to get percussion master Pedrito Martinez to appear on a few tracks of his 2014 Mack Avenue release The Invasion Parade , it seemed inevitable that they would collaborate further. Both born and raised in Cuba, Pedrito is a decade older than Alfredo, but they displayed a natural feel for playing together, and bring out the best in one another.  Duologue is t...

For the past five years, we've had a rare chance to hear the music of a kinder, gentler Jamie Saft. The prolific keyboardist-composer-producer-entrepreneur is known for his long association with the downtown aesthetic of John Zorn and Tzadik Records, and for bringing the sound of everything from death metal to dub into the jazz scene. Recording primarily for the RareNoise label for the past few ye...

I have always associated Joe Lovano with the Blue Note label. For 25+ years, he recorded as a leader with that august label, primarily due to his friendship with the late Bruce Lundvall. But at the same time, Lovano was a fixture at ECM, recording as sideman for John Abercrombie, Paul Motian, Marc Johnson and Steve Kuhn.  The results are many of my favorite jazz recordings of the past few decades....

1959 has always been one of my favorite years. It gave us "Ben-Hur", the Guggenheim Museum, Disney's "Sleeping Beauty" and "The Twilight Zone".  John Kennedy started his campaign for President. Heck, I was BORN in 1959. It was an auspicious year for jazz recordings as well. Before the new decade started, classics such as Kind of Blue , Giant Steps , Time Out , The Shape of Jazz to Come , Mingus Ah...

It's the time of the year when all the "Best Of" lists start to appear, and Straight No Chaser is no exception. Well, maybe a little exception, since I prefer to call this Podcast "A Few of My Favorite Things 2018." I decided a few years back that it wasn't prudent to compare a new release by say, Kamasi Washington to an archival release by say, Dexter Gordon, and say which is "better."  Instead,...

As promised, this is the second Christmas Jazz podcast of 2018. As I began choosing tunes, I realized that if you poke around enough, you can find some lesser known Christmas songs, whether they are from artists writing an original tune for their Christmas album;  perhaps something from the gospel or liturgical canon; or a jazz version of an R&B or Pop classic. In any event, I kept looking until I...

Christmas jazz, Christmas jazz. You love it, you hate it. But this time of year it's ubiquitous, and we at Straight No Chaser embrace it as a seasonal joy. This year we bring you two different Christmas Jazz podcasts to give you uninterrupted holiday music as you go about your fa-la-la-ing and dashing through the snow. The first is a collection from some of my favorite Christmas jazz albums, inclu...

The story of Hanukkah is one of revolution and miracles: Greek influence over the Jews in the Land of Israel was getting out of hand. Hellenism was spreading, an affront to Jewish culture and religious practice. When the Greek ruler of the time, Antiochus, forbade Jewish religious practice, a small group of Jews, the Maccabees, revolted. The Maccabees were successful and, as a first order of busin...

Jazz musicians are always looking for new and different ways to create sounds and textures to create music. One way is to use a non-traditional musical lineup – think Gerry Mulligan's drummer-less quartet or recent groups sans bass like the Paul Motion-Joe Lovano-Bill Frisell or Vijay Iyer-Steve Lehman-Tyshawn Sorey trios. For six years, Sound Underground has used the unconventional lineup of saxo...

"Voodoo" as a term brings to mind New Orleans witches, animal sacrifices to raise the dead and other bogus representations of a serious spiritual following. With Spiritwalker , a wonderful mix of jazz, Haitian folk, hip-hop and dance music, Haitian-American singer-songwriter Malou Beauvoir goes a long way to setting the record straight about "Vaudou". And you can dance to it! First a businesswoman...

One of today's masters of the vibraphone, Joe Locke continues to record albums that go beyond mere technical artistry. Sure, he can play the vibes with the best of them, but his last two albums, 2015's Love is a Pendulum and the just released Subtle Disguise , allow him to find new and interesting ways to write, play and record his music. While Love is a Pendulum had a structured five-movement sui...

Today is the 75th birthday anniversary of Joni Mitchell, one of my musical idols. I've done several podcasts of jazz versions of Joni's music in the past, most notably on her 70th birthday (see Podcasts   389 , 390 , 391 ). Well, here's one more. What is it about her music that lends itself to jazz interpretation? Perhaps it's her unusual (open) tunings and use of chords that attract jazz musician...

The passing of Roy Hargrove this past weekend at the age of 49 comes as an unwelcome shock. Hargrove, who died of cardiac arrest brought on by kidney disease, had carved out a spot for himself in the jazz world with music that was particularly important to me. His loss to the music world is virtually immeasurable. As one of the young lions that followed the arrival of Wynton Marsalis on the scene,...