Nouveau Jazz Showcase

March 22, 2021. Many of us have spent the last week reminiscing about what it was we were doing exactly one year ago. Memories are popping up on our social media accounts about the shutdown and the search for hand sanitizer, and we look at them and try to figure out how an entire year has passed. So much has happened, and composer, guitarist and Philly native Monnette Sudler has managed to touch on the many moods of the past 12 months on Stay Strong. 

March 15, 2021. With a grand stroke of prescience, NEA Jazz Master Maria Schneider crafted a double album about being polarized by the demands of a digital society and longing for human connection, all before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

March 1, 2021. WRTI is celebrating women bandleaders and their music to commemorate Women’s History Month. This week we're shining the spotlight on The Path by Chien Chien Lu, a Taiwanese vibraphonist whose own path led her to Philly’s University of the Arts for grad school to study with vibe master Tony Miceli. This is her debut album as a leader.

On WRTI, regardless of the month, you can always count on hearing music by composers who are women, and performances by women artists. But during Women’s History Month we’re turning up the volume to showcase women in classical music and jazz in more specific ways.

It feels strange calling Robert Glasper’s R+R=NOW a “supergroup” because every group Glasper leads seems worthy of that appellation. Yet, there is something particularly relevant right now about this one, which was named out of Glasper’s desire for the group’s music to be both an accurate reflection of the times and an effective and immediate response to them.

Jazz and community. Jazz and activism. Jazz and family. These aren’t just words for West Philadelphia drummer, composer, and educator Justin Faulkner. They’re life lines, ideas on which to act, interact and intercede, to work toward, play with, and pray for.

The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation (DDCF) has announced that WRTI has been chosen to participate in the Jazz Media Lab, a newly launched public media collective comprising five dynamic and forward-thinking nonprofit jazz radio stations.

January 25, 2021. The most recognizable tunes on saxophonist Cory Weeds latest, O Sole Mio! Music from the Motherland, are synonymous with the great Italian tenors of the 20th century. Which is ostensibly curious. Weeds isn’t an opera star; he’s a saxophonist. And most of the time his go-to instrument isn’t even the tenor but the alto.

It was quite a place to grow up for a young man. His home at 1927 Federal Street in South Philadelphia was the place for musicians to hang and jam with his much older brothers: saxophonist Jimmy Heath and bassist Percy Heath. Young Albert Heath, named “Tootie” by his grandfather for tutti-frutti ice cream in his youth, was also named a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master.