Dec 17, 2024 9:58 AM
Tabla Master Zakir Hussain, 73, Succumbs to Illness
Tabla master Ustad Zakir Hussain, one of India’s reigning cultural ambassadors and a revered figure worldwide…
Cassandra Wilson’s new album Thunderbird(Blue Note), a collaboration with producer T-Bone Burnett, will hit stores on April 4.
“Working with T Bone took the songs into a whole other place,” Wilson said. “He guided me into the deepest recesses of the material, and that attention to detail and nuance allowed me to delve into my own innermost emotions.”
This album, influenced by the ancient and magical myth of the thunderbird, offers new combinations of musical sounds, instrumentation, styles and different covers of songs that Wilson felt she had to do. “With ‘Easy Rider,’ I had always heard the ‘C.C. Rider’ version of this song covered, but never heard anyone do the Blind Lemon version, which resonated with me,” Wilson said.
The singer, whose past albums were defined by the sparse sounds of acoustic guitars, went in a different direction with Thunderbird, utilizing keyboardist Keefus Ciancia, who also coproduced the album.
Also playing on the album are Marc Ribot, Colin Linden, Mike Elizondo, Reginald Veal, Jim Keltner, Bill Maxwell and Jay Bellerose on drums.
“Watching people like Max Roach or Elvin Jones and seeing how they utilize the whole drum kit in a very rhythmic and melodic way and how they stretched time — that was a huge inspiration to me,” Hussain said in DownBeat.
Dec 17, 2024 9:58 AM
Tabla master Ustad Zakir Hussain, one of India’s reigning cultural ambassadors and a revered figure worldwide…
Gerald and John Clayton at the family home in Altadena during a photo shoot for the June 2022 cover of DownBeat. The house was lost during the Los Angeles fires.
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Roy McCurdy and his wife had just finished eating dinner and were relaxing over coffee in their Altadena home, when he…
Queen Latifah extols Harlem and the Apollo Theater at this year’s Kennedy Center Honors.
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Cuban-American jazz trumpet legend Arturo Sandoval and Harlem’s Apollo Theater were among the honorees at the 2024…
“With jazz I thought it must be OK to be Black, for the first time,” says singer Sofia Jernberg.
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The Old Country: More From The Deer Head Inn arrives 30 years after ECM issued the Keith Jarret Trio live album At The Deer Head Inn.
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Last November, Keith Jarrett, who has not played publicly since suffering two strokes in 2018, greenlighted ECM to drop…
