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In her self-titled debut album, Samara Joy approaches tunes immortalized by Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, and Carmen McRae with such maturity and erudition, you wouldn't guess that she never really studied, or performed any of their repertoire, until she enrolled in SUNY Purchase’s jazz program just four years ago.
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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.
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It was 2008 when I authored the biography, "HAZEL SCOTT: The Pioneering Journey of a Jazz Pianist from Café Society to Hollywood to HUAC." At that time, Hazel Scott’s name conjured fond but distant memories among an older generation.
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The South Bronx Story is the third solo release from Carlos Henriquez, best known for his work over the past two decades as the principal bassist for the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra (JALCO). JALCO’s maestro, jazz kingmaker Wynton Marsalis, plucked Henriquez for his septet shortly after the latter’s graduation from LaGuardia, New York City’s storied performing arts high school.
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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.
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On Deciphering the Message, Chicago-based drummer, producer, and sound-engineering savant Makaya McCraven bends space/time in a way that takes one of music’s most intriguing hypotheticals and removes it from the realm of the speculative.
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Terence Blanchard became the first Black composer to premiere an original opera at The Metropolitan Opera in 2021. Fire Shut Up in My Bones—an adaptation of New York Times columnist Charles Blow’s bestselling memoir about childhood trauma and its layered emotional fallout—opened the Met’s 2021-2022 season. Hear it on WRTI, Saturday, January 8th at 1 PM.
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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.
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Despite the challenging year we've all had, music has endured—elevating our lives during the darkest days and the brightest ones. Here's what our classical and jazz hosts/producers have selected as the best of the best for 2021. Check out picks from: Melinda Whiting, John T.K. Scherch, Mike Bolton, Kevin Gordon, Zev Kane, Susan Lewis, Bob Perkins, Matt Silver, Bobbi Booker, Maureen Malloy, and J. Michael Harrison.
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There is a space of time between sunset and the finality of night’s darkness where the diffusion of sunlight through the atmosphere and its dust serves as a stubborn and beautiful last gasp of day. It’s called twilight.