DISCOVERY
The Spring 2021 Jazz Meets Hip-Hop Collection is an assemblage of the latest releases from the intersection where bebop meets the "boom-bap."
As a progenitor of progressive soul-jazz, saxophonist Gary Bartz has influenced generations of jazz and hip-hop musicians. Count among them multi-instrumentalist and producer Ali Shaheed Muhammad, who sampled Bartz’s music on recordings with his own boundary-breaking group, A Tribe Called Quest. So it’s unsurprising that Muhammad and his partner, musician and producer Adrian Younge, invited...
The members of the Brazilian jazz and funk trio Azymuth started out as session players in 1960s Rio de Janeiro, even as they were gaining acclaim on the city’s thriving nightclub scene. The group’s forward-looking aesthetic was apparent from their 1975 debut recording (under the moniker “Azimüth”), as they blended psychedelia with samba and created...
In a cry from the heart, Adrian Younge has crafted an intensely personal work that articulates the anguish, anger and frustration of Black America in 2021. The multi-instrumentalist, composer and producer’s recent release, The American Negro (Jazz Is Dead), closely examines racism and its roots, tackling subjects such as white supremacy; the psychological impact on...
Facing rejection in his native Brazil, ahead-of-his-time pianist and bossa nova pioneer João Donato moved to the U.S. in 1959. During the next 14 years, he blazed a trail as an in-demand sideman, recording with Latin jazz giants Mongo Santamaria, Tito Puente and Cal Tjader, and appearing on the crossover bossa classic The Astrud Gilberto...
Vibraphonist Roy Ayers was at the vanguard of 1970s soul-jazz. His deeply sensual albums with Roy Ayers Ubiquity made waves beyond the jazz world, as groove-centric tunes such as “We Live in Brooklyn, Baby” and “Everybody Loves the Sunshine” caught the ears of hip mainstream audiences. Championed by hip-hop heads such as Guru, who put...
Some of the most beautiful soul-jazz of the 1970s was crafted by organist Doug Carn and his then-wife, vocalist Jean Carn. A string of albums on the Black Jazz label, starting with the sublime 1971 release Infant Eyes, all but defined the genre. Solid grooves and a spiritual orientation underpinned Carn’s aesthetic, as he offered...
A seminal figure on the bossa nova scene, vocalist and composer Marcos Valle is celebrated as a pioneer in his native Brazil — and in London, where rare-groove aficionados revived his music in the 1980s — although he’s less well-known in the States. While he lived in Los Angeles in the 1970s, Valle never recorded...
Multi-instrumentalist Brian Jackson was a key collaborator of the late Gil Scott-Heron. Both compositionally and conceptually, Jackson helped Scott-Heron shape a musical persona that made him an underworld hero in his heyday and an icon who greatly influenced generations of hip-hop artists to come. When the team started releasing records with both of their names...
As opposed to recordings by Milt Jackson or Lionel Hampton, Roy Ayers’ music is less about the vibraphone than the vibe. This is certainly true of Ayers’ Jazz Is Dead recording (JID002), in which his instrument remains more of a color in the prism than the dominant hue. His minimalist approach is evident from the...
Saxophonist Gary Bartz has been communicating themes of Black liberation, unity and universal love for decades. Less of a firebrand than a healer, Bartz fused funk, soul, African rhythms and jazz into a palatable, hard-grooving blend that frequently conveyed powerful social statements, either overtly or contextually. Musician-producers Younge and Muhammad tap into that flow on...
Musician-producers Muhammad and Younge assembled their group The Midnight Hour in 2013, but they put the project on hold while they worked on the score for the Netflix series Luke Cage. Five years later, they finally released Midnight Hour’s eponymous studio album, which featured contributions from vocalists Raphael Saadiq, Marsha Ambrosius and Bilal; in 2019,...
Finding inspiration during challenging times can be difficult for any artist. But trumpeter and composer Tony Glausi rises to the occasion with his latest release, When It All Comes Crashing Down (Outside in Music), his music at once poignant and uplifting. The New York-based musician and educator assembled an excellent ensemble to help him realize...
Guitarist and composer Lyle Workman has enjoyed a long and varied career. His résumé is wildly diverse, including performance and recording credits with the disparate likes of Sting, Todd Rundgren, Tony Williams and Norah Jones — not to mention soundtrack work for movies such as Superbad and Forgetting Sarah Marshall. A demanding schedule kept him...
At the age of 30, tenor saxophonist Chad Lefkowitz-Brown has toured the world and performed at bucket-list venues such as Carnegie Hall and Madison Square Garden. Having studied at the Brubeck Institute, he performed frequently with the fellowship program’s namesake, and has toured and recorded with trumpeter Randy Brecker. And the New York native certainly...
South Korean native Jihye Lee enjoyed success as an indie pop singer in her homeland. Then, while studying at Boston’s Berklee College of Music, she discovered an affinity for arranging for large ensembles. While not an instrumentalist herself, Lee became skilled enough at writing arrangements to win Berklee’s Duke Ellington Prize; she went on to...
Pianist and composer Lafayette Gilchrist followed up his bravura 2019 solo release, Dark Matter, with a ripping trio recording, the aptly titled, self-released NOW. His first trio recording in more than a dozen years, the double-album at times has the urgency of journalism. “Assume the Position,” Gilchrist’s theme to the HBO series The Wire, remains...
The piano-and-violin team of Pete Malinverni & Juliet Kurtzman partially reference the name of a much-adored Gabriel García Márquez classic for their recording Candlelight — Love in the Time of Cholera (Saranac). Alluding to the undying passion of true love that drives the literary classic, as well as the COVID-19 lockdown conditions under which the...
The title of saxophonist and composer Dan Blake’s latest album Da Fé (Sunnyside) translates to “of faith,” a term many may link to the “auto da fé,” a particularly grim component of the Spanish Inquisition in which heretics were burned alive. Blake, a practicing Buddhist, hopes to reclaim the words and to gin up faith...
With touring on hold for the foreseeable future, Cowboys & Frenchman’s latest release, Our Highway (Outside in Music), seems almost nostalgic. The album was conceived of before the COVID lockdown, a project documenting in music and video the travels of the New York-based quintet as they traversed the country. Saxophonist Ethan Helm had come up...
As with many Northerners, Elise Morris is familiar with the winter doldrums. Her solution? Head south to a land with warmer climes and brighter colors, namely, New Orleans. “Don’t give me New York City,” she sings on “Mardi Gras,” the kickoff tune to her album Dancin’ With the Boys (Jazzbo), “I just want something pretty...
Among the many admirers of neo-soul singer, composer and keyboardist Jarrod Lawson count veteran percussionist Sammy Figueroa. A sideman with Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock and Chaka Khan to name a few, Figueroa was knocked out by Lawson’s 2014 debut recording, eventually tracking him down to let him know that he’d like to collaborate. The results...
Pianist Yoko Miwa had every reason to record an album of sorrowful music. During the pandemic, her home club, Les Zygomates in Boston — where she and her trio held a long-running Saturday night residency — was forced to close. Sessions for her next recording were put on hold. And, tragically, her father died. However,...
Singer-songwriter and Motéma label chief Jana Herzen leads a five-piece band on an album she recorded at Joe’s Pub in New York City in October 2019. With her husband, Charnett Moffett, on bass; Brian Jackson on piano and keyboards; Irwin Hall on saxophone and flute; and Corey Garcia on drums, Jana Herzen Live (Motéma) offers...
As a sideman with Freddie Hubbard, George Benson and Willie Bobo, pianist and keyboardist David Garfield learned how to inject plenty of excitement into his performance. And, naturally, he accrued a stellar Rolodex over the years, which came in handy when he started his Outside the Box series in 2017; the Chicago native and Los...
