Jazz Album of the Week

(Originally published on 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.

Kendrah Butler-Waters' love for jazz, composition, arranging, and performative musicality shines throughout her debut solo album, Faith Walk."I always say that [this album] was a labor of love because it took me a really long time to release it," Kendrah said as she wrapped up a day with students. "I recorded Faith Walk three years ago when I was pregnant with my first son."

Whether it’s hosting a jam session at Chris’ Jazz Café or winging up to the Village to play at Smalls until 2 AM before driving the 90 miles back down to Philly to teach the next day at Temple University, bassist Mike Boone doesn’t stop; he’s always playing, always teaching, and like every great bass player, always listening.

America’s cultural divide has reached an inflection point, a time where society has no choice but to seriously reckon with issues of race, class, civil rights, opportunity, and dignity in a way it hasn’t since Nina Simone first sang protest songs.

Multi-instrumentalist Joe Chambers made his name as a drummer on some of Blue Note Records’ most celebrated albums of the mid-to-late 1960s. But it’s his vibraphone playing here—bobbing and weaving in a synchronized courtship with pianist Brad Merritt worthy of David Attenborough narration—that’s foregrounded on Samba de Maracatu, his first release as a leader for the famed jazz label since 1998’s Mirrors.

I was 17 and the omnipresent song in America was "Don't Know Why," the hit single from Norah Jones' 2002 debut album, Come Away with Me. To this day, that record conjures senior year hangouts in friends’ basements and torturously long slow dances at the prom where I said “yes” to the wrong girl before I could summon the nerve to ask the right one.

If there’s one thing that all the great jazz masters agree on, it’s that mimicry is not jazz, at least not good jazz. Maybe it’s part of the developmental process, but it’s the antithesis of what you strive to present to an audience. Saxophonist Mark Zaleski learned this almost as soon as he began studying at the Dave Brubeck Institute in California in the early 2000s

Among the myriad small pleasures that make life worth coming back to day after day—a well-struck golf shot, a pull-through parking spot, bottomless chips and salsa—is an album that turns out to be way more enjoyable than you expected.

If you’re not ready to go all white tie and tails in an auditorium full of strangers who may or may not be vaccinated, allow me to present a relatively risk-free alternative: The Count Basie Orchestra’s (CBO) latest release, Live at Birdland.

Physicists have long postulated time travel as possible, at least theoretically. But why live in theory when you can now pick up a copy of Erroll Garner’s Symphony Hall Concert and instantly transport yourself back to Boston’s Symphony Hall in January 1959.