Originally published on Tue July 31, 2012 11:16 am
By editor
Credit Erik Jacobs for NPR
As a child in Azerbaijan, Amina Figarova loved the piano at first sight. She would arrange all her dolls around her and play for them. "Nobody could stop me," she told an interviewer at All About Jazz. "I would sit and play and play." Figarova studied classical music and heard jazz at home, especially Herbie Hancock.
We're in a guitar world, from Pakistan to Brazil and from steel strings to nylon, as the Rez Abbasi Acoustic Quartet and Trio da Paz play in turn at the Newport Jazz Festival.
At the Newport Jazz Festival, we're visiting the Quad and Harbor Stages, where the first rows of audience sit snug up to the performer. With her understated style, love of the lyric and freedom, Gretchen Parlato makes that closeness work. Everyone leans in and listens.
It started in 1966 as a three-week agreement among composer and conductor Thad Jones, drummer Mel Lewis and Max Gordon, the proprietor of The Village Vanguard in New York. And it continues, gloriously.
Drummer Jeff "Tain" Watts comes from Pittsburgh, and trumpeter Sean Jones lives there now. On this episode of JazzSet, each brings a high-energy band to the Detroit Jazz Festival, held every Labor Day Weekend. We'll get back to Pittsburgh in a minute.
Named the JJA Guitarist of the Year in June 2011, Russell Malone hails from Albany, Geo. Malone grew up absorbing music from his bedrock, the church, as well as popular blues and country tunes on radio and TV. For his golden-toned melodies played in octaves (try that some time!) and more, Malone is heavily influenced by Wes Montgomery.
Originally published on Thu February 21, 2013 3:51 pm
By Becca Pulliam
Credit John Rogers for NPR / johnrogersnyc.com
It began with the crisis on Wall Street in 2008. Alexis Cuadrado, from Barcelona and now Brooklyn, remembered the poetry of the surrealist Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936), whom all Spanish students study in school.
Originally published on Thu September 13, 2012 1:02 pm
By editor
Credit Cole Thompson
For arranger Gil Evans' centennial, we celebrate a concert from the 2011 Monterey Jazz Festival. Evans was born on May 13, 1912. In three collaborations in the late 1950s, two friends — Evans and Miles Davis — steered their projects into a new era for jazz.
Their first album was Miles Ahead. Named in its honor, this concert is "Still Ahead," with music from the pair's second and third records, Porgy and Bess and Sketches of Spain.
Download 'Touch And Go: The Studs Terkel Project' By The Moshier-Lebrun Collective
This year, Chicago is celebrating the Studs Terkel centenary — the life and work of the actor, radio host, author, historian and, in the words of the Chicago Historical Society, "ennobler of his fellow man." There will be a re-dedication of the Studs Terkel Bridge, a 100th birthday party at the Newberry Library, a museum exhibit, readings and a film and video festival.
