Taylor Rae’s recent from NPR’s Mountain Stage will be broadcast to over 280 NPR stations starting this Friday, May 13th, 2022. See below for local airtimes and stations.

Singer/songwriter Taylor Rae walks through life projecting a calm self-awareness. And, while there is an aura of purposeful intent in every stride she takes, every note she sings and every chord she plays, there is also a sense of natural ease in every action. This is some still water – and it runs deep.

It all began in California with Taylor Rae Vencill’s birth in Santa Cruz. Raised in nearby Ben Lomond, her eclectic musical journey initially took her from the Central Coast to Los Angeles. Taylor played legendary venues Moe’s Alley, Kuumbwa Jazz, the Catalyst and Hotel Cafe, and earned spots at popular area festivals, including DIO Fest (Boulder Creek) and Redwood Mountain Faire (Felton).

In 2017, Taylor won Santa Cruz NEXTies Musician of the Year Award and the next year she struck out for Texas, landing in the musical wonderland of Austin. Since then, Taylor has performed at the legendary Austin nightspot Stubb’s second stage, Nashville’s renowned Bluebird Café, Lexington’s The Lyric Theatre and the Asheville, NC Isis Music Hall. She has shared the stage with a variety of artists including Brandy Clark, The Stone Foxes, Kristian Bush and Reggae musician Mike Love.

Check local airtimes and stations on NPR

Taylor Rae on TKA

Latin-music pianist and bandleader Eddie Palmieri recorded his two-volume album set “Live at Sing Sing” in the early winter of 1972 — 50 years ago this year. Before an enthusiastic audience of mostly Black and Latino inmates, the event’s emcee, radio DJ and native Puerto Rican Francisco “Paquito” Navarro, spoke to the politics of their performance in the sequestered confines of the New York State Department of Correction.

“For all mankind!” he shouted over the courtyard loudspeaker, saying there should be “no walls,” “no fears” and “only one thing in life: liberty in the coming years.” Palmieri’s show at Sing Sing reflected a moment when popular discourse around systemic oppression had reached peak levels in the cultural mainstream, just as many Americans were first encountering an exciting, aggressive and youth-driven Latin music genre — salsa. Socially conscious musicians of that era, in expressing prisoner solidarity — or simply acknowledging prisoners as human beings worthy of love, empathy and entertainment — raised public awareness about prison conditions and critiqued mass incarceration as an unconscionable stain on U.S. society. This work continues today.

Not by coincidence, Palmieri’s performance at Sing Sing, Upstate New York’s notorious maximum-security men’s correctional facility, emerged on the heels of the Attica prison riot of September 1971, also in Upstate New York — an event became a flash point in modern U.S. history. More than 1,200 inmates seized control of the prison in a four-day standoff. In a manifesto, the prisoners called on the state to recognize their most basic human rights, including legal representation and adequate medical attention. Gov. Nelson Rockefeller (R) refused their demands and ordered the state police to “retake” the prison. The resulting assault left 10 hostages and 33 prisoners dead and more than 100 wounded.

Palmieri, a Bronx-born Nuyorican already immersed in the politics of social and racial justice, was expanding his activist focus to the plight of the incarcerated. Bemoaning the “barren creativity” of contemporary Latin musicians, Palmieri told Billboard magazine in May 1973 that he was conscientiously bound to continue performing free prison concerts, insisting that the imprisoned should be “given a chance to grow” and “not just stagnate in their cells.” Palmieri also played gigs at Rikers Island and Attica (twice) and continued playing prisons throughout the decade.

Read the full article in The Washington Post

Eddie Palmieri on TKA

Blues guitar veteran Walter Trout has announced a new full-length studio album, Ride.

Set for an August 19 release via Provogue/Mascot Label Group, Ride is Trout’s 30th solo effort, and was written and recorded in Los Angeles and produced by Eric Corne.

In tandem with the announcement of the album, Trout premiered the LP’s stinging opener and lead single, Ghosts. Fittingly named, the high-gain rocker shows the guitarist wrestling with his troubled past, and is highlighted by a pair of piercing, top-tier solos, packed with some big-time bends and awe-inspiring displays of vibrato. You can hear it below.

As Trout explained in a statement, Ghosts originally began as a poem. “It starts off with the lyric, ‘Sometimes I hear a familiar song and it brings back memories’ – that’s the truth,” Trout said. “I’ll be riding in my car, a song comes on the radio and I have to pull over and sob for a while. Ghosts sums this album up, y’know?”

Read the full article on Guitar World

Walter Trout on TKA

Until 2006, when Catherine Russell released her first solo album, Cat, she was known for more than two decades as a versatile backup singer and multi-instrumentalist for a genre-spanning list of musicians that includes David Bowie, Cyndi Lauper, Dr. John and Madonna. Yet with that album and the six that followed, the last two nominated for Grammy awards, Ms. Russell became a star in her own right—a commanding bandleader, and in the top rank of singers working in the fertile territory where traditions of jazz, blues and popular song meet.

She continues to perform in many contexts. In late March, she sang Duke Ellington classics at Carnegie Hall, with pianist Marcus Roberts’s trio and the American Symphony Orchestra. Earlier this year, as showcased on trumpeter Steven Bernstein’s album Good Time Music (Community Music, Vol. 2), she re-envisioned a half-dozen blues classics through inventive new arrangements. She has continued to tour with Steely Dan.

Ms. Russell has a particular fascination with early- and mid-20th-century songs—primarily forgotten hits and overlooked gems—that she invests with a freshness that comes from her sensitivity to the lyrics, and her sheer power. Her new release, Send for Me (Dot Time Records), contains 13 such tracks that should further elevate her profile as they deepen listeners’ appreciation for this repertoire. Few singers alive can express the nuances of blues feeling and swing phrasing that course through American songs as correctly and gracefully as can Ms. Russell, or with as much expressive range.

She sounds declarative, punctuating her vocal with handclaps, on the title track, which was a crossover hit for Nat King Cole in 1957. Her singing burns with longing on “Make It Last,” which Betty Carter memorably recorded in 1958; it is coyly teasing on “If I Could Be With You,” written in 1926 by Harlem stride-piano hero James P. Johnson and lyricist Henry Creamer. Her version of “Did I Remember” is slower than Billie Holiday’s 1936 version, but it carries the same relaxed phrasing. Her bluesy, gospel-tinged singing on “In the Night” invites comparison to vintage Aretha Franklin for its glistening resonance.

Read the full review on The Wall Street Journal

Catherine Russell on TKA

TKA congratulates Béla Fleck, who won Best Bluegrass Album for My Bluegrass Heart at the 64th Annual Grammy Awards.

“They nearly always come back,” said Béla. “All the people that leave bluegrass. I had a strong feeling that I’d be coming back as well.” 

My Bluegrass Heart is that return the now 15-time Grammy winner is talking about – the third chapter in a decades-spanning trilogy which, by his counting, started with 1988’s Drive and continued with The Bluegrass Sessions, released eleven years later. Over the long and lauded course of his unique creative run, Fleck – the world’s premier banjo virtuoso and a celebrated musical adventurer – has both dug deep into his instrument’s complex global history and unlocked the breadth of its possibilities. My Bluegrass Heart is a homecoming in sound, to be sure. 

And when you travel, you bring home something new. When the endlessly curious Fleck prepared to make The Bluegrass Sessions, for example, he contemplated some other musical wanderers: “It was ten years after the Drive album, and I had been doing the Flecktones for all that time; I was coming back thinking hmm… what have I learned that I can bring back to bluegrass?” he said. “It resonated with me how Coltrane and Charlie Parker, after studying a lot of music from outside of the jazz world, brought some truly great things back to it from the outside.” 

In some ways, Béla Fleck has always thought of himself as coming from the outside of bluegrass. “I don’t come from the South, and I always felt like there were people who were more truly focused on doing that bluegrass thing really well. What I tended to want to do more was expand the banjo’s role and look for new things to do with it. Despite that, I was always a bluegrass guy first and foremost. That was certainly the root of my musical soul.”

Béla Fleck on TKA

Cécile McLorin Salvant has been busy since the release of her last album, 2018’s Grammy-winning The Window. Later that year she premiered Ogresse, a “musical fable in the form of a cantata” that begins: “There’s a woman / lived in the woods on the outskirts of town / her skin was chocolate brown / upon her head she wore a crown / of bones, human bones.” (The woman goes on to devour her lover.) The piece, which she premiered to a packed audience at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium and went on to tour across the country, was central in the MacArthur Foundation’s description of her work when the program awarded her a “genius” grant in 2020. 

This month she released her soaring sixth album, Ghost Song (Nonesuch Records), with a track list that opens on a hauntingly pared back, addictive cover of Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights,” and includes original (and personal) songs like the musing, Blossom Dearie–esque “I Lost My Mind,” which crescendos into an ambient, electronic repetition of “I lost my mind, can you help me find my mind?” Here, she shares her inspirations.

Novels about “people living with different kinds of ghosts, dealing with their memories” and “struggling with their ambitions” fed the album, including Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, Middlemarch by George Eliot, and In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust.

Salvant has befriended the artist Robyn O’Neil, whose podcast, Me Reading Stuff, feeds her creative practice. “I love her drawings, her composition notebooks, her taste in poetry and the letters she writes.”

Read the full interview on Vanity Fair

Cécile McLorin Salvant on TKA

It’s impossible to avoid using some keywords when labeling the Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio’s instrumental sound. The adjectives funk, soul, jazz, and even psychedelic, appear in almost every review tagging the three-piece’s approach. Regardless of the repetition, all are accurate descriptions trying to move the reader closer to the deep, often intense groove these guys effortlessly craft on the album and especially live.

Existing fans will be thrilled to learn there are few changes, other than a new drummer (Dan Weiss whose name the band features in the disc’s pun-happy title), on the outfit’s third platter. Organist Lamarr keeps the focus centered with his active, always in the pocket work recalling greats of the instrument like Booker T., Brian Auger, Jimmy Smith, John Medeski, and Jack McDuff. Guitarist Jimmy James urges on the attack, laying back and sometimes exploding in a shower of fretboard sparks, and drummer Weiss keeps the rhythm snug, crisp yet loose enough to allow Lamarr and Jones to blast off when needed.

The key is the chemistry generated when this bass guitar-free (Lamarr handles those parts with pedals) collective connect on open, uncluttered arrangements that keep the six-legged machine from overpowering each other, or the riff-based material. Not surprisingly Lamarr is often the center of musical attention but his dramatic, flexible playing is never showy or hyperactive. The tendency is for the musicians to strut their stuff and push into extended jam heavy improvisations, but each restrains themselves. Most cuts like the vibrant “Slip ‘N Slide,” clocking in at a conservative 2:37, and the Motown strut of “I Wanna Be Where You Are” (pushing just past 3 ½ minutes), keep the playing time tidy and taut.

Read the full review on American Songwriter

Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio on TKA

Catherine Russell is, among many other delightful things, a certifiable party-starter. We’ve known this for some time now — certainly as far back as a decade ago. That’s when she was part of the gang that won Best Compilation Soundtrack at the Grammy Awards, for Boardwalk Empire Volume 1: Music from the HBO Original Series.

As a singer and bandleader, Russell has often drawn from an adjacent wellspring of throwback swing. It’s a bounding style that is her birthright. Her father, influential pianist and orchestrator Luis Russell, counted King Oliver and Louis Armstrong as contemporaries. Her mother, Carline Ray, was a guitarist and singer in the trailblazing International Sweethearts of Rhythm, and a mentor to generations behind her.

But Russell took a circuitous path to claiming her own perch in the jazz tradition. She recorded countless pop sessions as a backup singer, and touring with David Bowie and Steely Dan. Her bond with Levon Helm provides the subtext of a fine new album with Steven Bernstein’s Millennial Territory Orchestra.

Russell has her own high-spirited new release on the near horizon: Send For Me, named for an Ollie Jones tune made famous by Nat “King” Cole. The first single from the album is another chestnut, “At the Swing Cats Ball.” Here is an accompanying video featuring Russell and her band in the studio; first premiered on WBGO.

Read the full article on WBGO

Catherine Russell on TKA

Looking back at the last 50 years, you’d be hard-pressed to say the world has gotten a lot more harmonious since then — not figuratively, in the geopolitical sphere, and certainly not literally, in a popular music world that’s become a slave to the rhythm, and to singers’ disinterest in sharing a mic, much less a spotlight. But you can’t fault the Manhattan Transfer for not doing their part — and just about everyone else’s, too — to keep the spirit of harmony alive ever since the group formed in 1972.

At their modern-day shows, attendees may not know whether to weep or to literally get a buzz on from the actual physiological oscillation produced by four master voices meticulously coming together. (A combination of both responses is, of course, allowable.)

“Getting a little philosophical here,” says Transfer co-founder Alan Paul, “we live in a very dis-harmonic world. There’s a lot of clashing that’s going on, and when things harmonize together, people, when they hear it, it affects them.” Agrees Janis Siegel, the other member with a 50-year pedigree: “The sound of harmony always did something to me, viscerally. It released endorphins. The sound of voices singing in harmony provides a vibration that does that to most people — it’s a physical fact, I think.”

But what were the odds of endorphins overcoming ego, and personal harmony trumping any collective’s inevitable obsolescence, to keep a group like the Manhattan Transfer together and thriving for a half-century? As Cheryl Bentyne (the “new girl,” who’s only been in the group for 45 years) says: “It’s a ridiculous milestone!”

Read the full article on Variety

The Manhattan Transfer on TKA

Congratulations to all the winners and finalists of the 2021 JazzTimes Readers’ Poll! We’d like to highlight all the artists on our roster who were recognized for their incredible work. Winners are displayed in bold.

Artist of the Year

– Pat Metheny

New Artist

– Nicole Glover (ARTEMIS)

New Release

– Pat Metheny SideEye NYC (V1.IV)

Vocal Release

– Kurt Elling SuperBlue

Acoustic Small Group/Artist

– Wynton Marsalis

– Bill Charlap Trio

Electric/Jazz-Rock/Contemporary Group/Artist

– Pat Metheny Side-Eye

Trumpeter

– Wynton Marsalis

Clarinetist

– Anat Cohen (ARTEMIS)

Tenor Saxophonist

– Chris Potter (SFJAZZ Collective)

Soprano Saxophonist

– Ravi Coltrane

– Chris Potter (SFJAZZ Collective)

Flutist

– Charles Lloyd

Guitarist

– Pat Metheny

– John Pizzarelli

Male Vocalist

– Kurt Elling

Female Vocalist

– Cécile McLorin Salvant

Composer

– Pat Metheny

Arranger

– Wynton Marsalis

Misc. Instrumentalist

– Béla Fleck (Banjo)

Vocal Group

– The Manhattan Transfer