Jazz singing superstar Kurt Elling this week releases his new CD, “Passion World,” and embarks on a world tour for it at Birdland, the New York club.
In addition to his regular quintet, Elling also works on the album with guest collaborators, including Cuban trumpeter Arturo Sandoval; German trumpeter Till Bronner; French accordion virtuoso Richard Galliano; the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra; and the WDR Big Band and Orchestra from Germany.
As a boy of 10 living outside Havana, jazz artist Arturo Sandoval picked up a trumpet because it “has a strong personality,” he recalled. “A trumpet can whisper very soft, very tender — and it can create a huge noise.”
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ARTURO SANDOVAL ON TKA
When Catherine Russell sings, heads turn. She approaches singing the way someone behind the wheel of a very fast car might approach driving — by accelerating from zero to 100 mph in just a few seconds.
But Russell does not rush her craft. She nurtures it and coaxes it, polishing it like a pearl. She zeroes in on nuances in tone and texture and timing, then unleashes it all on her audience. Some musicians fire up a fury with a loud electric guitar. Russell torches her audience with her voice.
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Catherine Russell on TKA
“In terms of what we do relating to the audience, it’s to make sure we’re passionate about what we’re doing onstage, delivering joyous music that includes everyone. It’s a party regardless of whether there’s 10 people or a thousand people out there.”
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Red Baraat on TKA
David Greenwald for THE OREGONIAN
Béla Fleck’s made a career out of bringing the banjo where it wasn’t expected. The musician, informed by the three-finger bluegrass tradition of Earl Scruggs and others, has walked ably between jazz, classical and world music both alongside greats such as Chick Corea and Edgar Meyer and his own group, the Flecktones, whose 20-plus-year career has been on hiatus since 2012.
Fleck’s latest conquest is the symphony orchestra. After testing his classical chops with “Perpetual Motion,” an album that relied on the compositions of Bach, Beethoven, Chopin and others, his first such foray as a composer is banjo concerto “The Imposter,” a work he’ll bring to the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall on Saturday, Sept. 13, with the Oregon Symphony. We talked about the piece’s Oregon origins, the Flecktones’ likely return and why the banjo’s status is changing.
I hear you’re out at Cannon Beach this week.
Béla Fleck: I am, yeah. I’ve been coming out here for quite a while, in fact. My wife’s family has a place out here — kind of a hideaway for us, we try to get here every summer for some part of it. And actually I did some of the first writing for the banjo concerto here, I came out here myself for two weeks and had my first intensive writing experience here.
Read more at The Oregonian
Bela Fleck on TKA
Lisa Fischer speaks with friends, family and inquisitive journalists over the phone before a tour, but once out on the road she keeps her spoken words to a minimum. The vow of silence is one of several rules that Fischer, a vocalist with stratospheric range and immense power, puts into practice to save her voice for the demands of performing.
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Lisa Fischer on TKA
James Cotton was honored with the B.B. King Award by the 2015 Festival International de Jazz de Montréal for being a pioneer in the blues genre for the past seven decades. Since his career started, he has gone on to record 30 albums and has solidified his status as a legend in blues.
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James Cotton on TKA
Jazz Fest Concert Review: Jesse Cook at Maison Symphonique July 2, 2015. When Canadian guitarist Jesse Cook stepped on the Maison Symphonique stage that night, there was a brief moment of confusion among audience members: either an imposter had sauntered in or his characteristic wavy long locks had been trimmed.
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Jesse Cook on TKA
Ivan Hewett for THE TELEGRAPH
The jazz orchestra is a notoriously expensive beast, which is why relatively few jazz composers choose to work with it. Composer and band leader Maria Schneider is one of those few. Over several decades she’s defied economic logic to work exclusively within the medium, refining her art as composer and arranger to the point where she now has few if any peers. Her latest album, some 10 years in the making, shows just what a supple and powerful instrument a jazz orchestra can be. The title refers to a farm owned by some family friends in the South-West corner of Minnesota, near where Schneider was raised herself. It’s unspectacular country, apart from those occasions when a storm boils up on the horizon, but Schneider loves it deeply. The eight numbers on the album, all composed by Schneider, evoke its quiet, unspectacular beauty. The liner notes are an indispensable part of the
experience, picturing the landscape and its wildlife through Audobon’s bird paintings and photographs of country lanes that to a British viewer look remarkably familiar – until you turn the page and encounter another image, which shows this landscape is on an altogether vaster scale.
Read the full article at The Telegraph
Maria Schneider on TKA
On the heels of a high-profile two-week gig at New York’s Cafe Carlyle, Bettye LaVette is returning to the Washington area this week, where she played at the old Howard Theatre in 1962, the Kennedy Center Honors in 2008 and President Obama’s first inauguration celebration at the Lincoln Memorial, where she sang “A Change Is Gonna Come.”
Read the full article on The Washington Post
Bettye LaVette on TKA