Jazz

Claude Bourbon Spanish Blues (Guitair and Vocals)

Bourbon plays an average of over 100 shows per year throughout the world, mainly the US and Europe and he will be performing at the Dahmen Barn this June. His most recent music contains a mix of folk, western, jazz and blues. Bourbon has played on stage alongside musicians who have been a part of Miles Davis’ group as well as Van Morrison’s group. More information can be found at the link provided below.

Jazz Concert

The WSU School of Music is hosting a Jazz Concert at Kimbrough Concert Hall. The concert is free and open to the public.

A Look Back At The 50th Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival

Photo Credit: The University of Idaho Photo Services
Preston Snyder

The Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival is held at the University of Idaho and is a festival inviting student musicians and school jazz bands from around the Pacific Northwest to compete for awards, participate in workshops and clinics put on by professional jazz musicians and experience concerts featuring famous musicians and bands. Started in 1967, this year marked the 50th anniversary of the festival. The University of Idaho made a promotional video commemorating the 50th anniversary:

The Saturday night concert started with the Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival Big Band, loud and proud, led by Vern Sielert. Featuring a variety of guests, including Jason Marsalis on Vibraphone, Claudio Roditi on trumpet, and Julia Keefe singing, the band played a variety of songs including a song called 50 and Counting written by Vern and closed with a loud and proud arrangement of Lionel Hampton’s Flying Home featuring Jason Marsalis, in the style of Hampton, and a dancing trumpet section.

The set then transitioned to the best student soloists from the day and each group played their best songs from their set. Then they all came together for a final group performance and one lucky soloist, Max Zhang from Semiahmoo Secondary School in Surrey, British Columbia, was named Outstanding Instrumental Soloist for bass and received a University of Idaho scholarship from Avista Utilities.

After a brief intermission, the stage was reset and, in an outfit far more colorful than the other two performances before her, Esperanza Spaulding took to the stage, had a casual conversation with the audience as she tuned her bass, and then began to play and sing. She was joined by Justin Tyson on drums and Matthew Stevens on guitar. She played a variety of different styles and genres from an Argentinian standard to a mash-up of Humpty Dumpty by Chick Corea and All The Kings Horses by Aretha Franklin because “Those songs just sound like they should go together.” Then Justin left the stage leaving Esperanza and Matthew to play a slow, free version of Have I Stayed Too Long At The Fair. Justin came back and the trio played a loud and engaging Endangered Species. Finally, after asking for some participation, Esperanza Spaulding led a rousing finale of Nina Simone’s Forbidden Fruit. The trio took their bows, the lights came up and as the they walked backstage that was the conclusion of the 50th Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival.

For more information about The Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival and The University of Idaho visit:

http://www.uidaho.edu/class/jazzfest

In Los Angeles, An Immigrant’s Dream Becomes A Jazz Hub

In the middle of recording his debut album, jazz vocalist Joon Lee received a phone call out of nowhere that made him stop, quite literally, in his tracks. A dark, run-down karaoke bar in the corner of a Little Tokyo strip mall was on the market — would he like to have a look?

It was the fall of 2009, and Lee was still a relative unknown in the Los Angeles jazz community. A Korean immigrant, he had been studying architecture in New York City when he heard a recording of pianist Chick Corea and vocalist Bobby McFerrin. He promptly quit school and moved across the country to study jazz singing.

Lee had also fantasized about opening a small performance venue, though initially he didn’t find the karaoke bar particularly captivating. “The only really attractive thing about it was that the elevator was really close,” he recalled. “That way, the musicians can bring their gear.” The timing couldn’t have been worse, either — it was, after all, the middle of a major economic recession.

But the appeal proved too powerful. He gave himself only two months to redesign the room. “I had so little time and so little money,” he said. “The only stuff that I bought was the ice machine, toilet bowls, stuff like that.” Even the elevator proved unreliable. Continue reading

Kate Bush, As Heard By This Dude Who Sings Jazz: A Conversation

The singular vocalist Theo Bleckmann released a new disc today dedicated to the songs of English singer-songwriter Kate Bush. In other words, it’s an album where one inimitable singer with a small but dedicated fan base reinterprets another.

There’s not much in the way of ding-ding-a-ling on Hello Earth! The Music of Kate Bush. But there is, perhaps, a jazz aesthetic: It grooves, and makes room for interactive improvisation from a talented band. Have a listen to the first track, “Running Up That Hill” (the full album is on Spotify too):

I sensed a number of sympathies between Bleckmann and Bush, starting with their mutual taste for gorgeous idiosyncrasy. But like many Americans, I wasn’t too familiar with the source material. So I wrote to a big Kate Bush fan who happens to be my colleague: the esteemed pop critic Ann Powers, of NPR Music’s The Record. Here’s the discussion we had, in four emails: Continue reading

Why A Jazz Festival Is Asking Musicians To ‘Do It Yourself’

The Undead Music Festival has grown every year. In 2012, it outgrew New York City.

This jazz festival typically seizes small pockets of Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan, building immersive urban playgrounds where largely young audiences flood venues with colored admissions bracelets. It is jazz as both heady experience and social happening. But on Friday’s Night of the Living DIY, the venues scatter across five Brooklyn neighborhoods, as well as a half-dozen cities across the U.S.

Still, the festival’s expansion — and its use of “do-it-yourself” spaces rather than traditional clubs — is really a way of asking audiences to think smaller, to look closer to home. To turn off (computers and stereos), tune out (from your MP3 collection) and drop in (on a snug, local gathering).

As the head of Capitalbop, an organization that seeks to engage local jazz audiences in Washington, D.C., and presents informal shows in service of that goal, I find this development exciting. Search & Restore, one of the groups responsible for Undead, has decided to feature living-room venues simply because they are already thriving: A quiet movement of artist-produced, anti-corporate jazz concerts is creeping across the country. Here are a few of the motivations that I’ve perceived for this idea, and for Undead’s decision to embrace it.

1. Jazz thrives in unmediated spaces. The venues at the Night of the Living DIY range from artist studios to musicians’ lofts. Some don’t have event permits, let alone liquor licenses. One, in Bedford-Stuyvesant, is the living room of Search & Restore director Adam Schatz’s friends. In these settings, “You’re just in a room with the music, and that’s what’s important,” Schatz told me earlier this week. “On the artistic side, that’s usually where it starts — people playing this music in their homes — and it’s kind of cool to perform it in a similar, raw setting. Not just physically raw, but emotionally raw: There’s a kind of vulnerability to [these spaces] that I think really magnifies the humanity of the music, which is what makes it so special.” Continue reading

Remembering Laurie Frink, The ‘Trumpet Mother’ Of The Jazz Scene

Sometimes, the most important musicians are the ones farthest away from the spotlight.

Laurie Frink was a great trumpet player. Great enough to tour with jazz big bands led by Benny Goodman, Gerry Mulligan (where she played lead) and Maria Schneider; to be one of the first female trumpet players on the Broadway pit orchestra circuit in New York. As a freelancer, she was known for her ability to execute just about anything, no matter the level of difficulty. Continue reading

5 Points Where Poetry Meets Jazz

Poetry and song were once the same: The first poems were recited to music played on the lyre. (It’s the source of the word “lyric.”) Today, poems are published in books and journals, while songs are heard but seldom read. The poet Robert Pinsky tells of a successful songwriter-singer who said, “A little poetry can really help a song, but too much poetry will sink a song.”

Surprisingly, we’re left with relatively few recordings of poetry sung by jazz artists. Speaking truth and emotion, sonic and rhythmic, structured and free, poetry and jazz seem like natural born partners. More often, we do hear poets read their writing to accompaniment by jazz musicians — a form of spoken-word performance. Others write poetry inspired, informed and shaped by jazz. (If you’d like to read some examples, take a look at Jazz Poems, edited by Kevin Young, or The Jazz Poetry Anthology by Sascha Feinstein and Yusef Komunyakaa, for starters.)

In honor of National Poetry Month, the world’s largest literary celebration, and Jazz Appreciation Month, which culminates with a global concert on International Jazz Day (April 30), this week’s Take Five samples the collisions between poetry and jazz.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

40 Years Of Mondays: One Saxophonist’s Addiction To The Fringe

I was an 18-year-old saxophone student at Berklee College of Music when my new best friend, a trumpeter named Willy Olenick, told me about The Fringe. “You’ve got to hear this band,” he said. “They’re an amazing trio. You can hear them any Monday night at Michael’s and you’re nuts not to go.”

Willy didn’t mention anything about what style they played, and I didn’t ask. I just took his advice and went.

Michael’s was a small, narrow bar behind Symphony Hall in Boston. There was a WPA mural on the wall. They only served beer and wine, and let’s just say a contingent of a few regulars might have been there just for the Rolling Rocks. (In fact, they may have been there all day for the Rolling Rocks.) A man named Bill was at the front door at night, collecting the $2 cover charge. Michael himself manned the bar.

Frankly, on first hearing The Fringe, I wasn’t sure what was happening. The trio took the stage, and I don’t think I was even sure when the set started. At some point, I realized that this music was not like the other jazz I had heard. Until that time, my jazz listening had been mostly big bands and straight-ahead, swinging jazz groups. Continue reading