Jan 21, 2025 7:54 PM
Southern California Fires Hit the Jazz Community
Roy McCurdy and his wife had just finished eating dinner and were relaxing over coffee in their Altadena home, when he…
Dayna Stephens is set to release his first recording as the leader of a trio, Liberty.
(Photo: Paolo Soriani)It almost doesn’t feel like it, but Dayna Stephens has issued eight albums in just over a 10 years. His ninth, Liberty (Contagious), is due out Feb. 28, and it’s the first time the saxophonist has led a trio date. A video for “Loosy Goosy,” a cut off the upcoming album, premieres below.
The able rhythm tandem—bassist Ben Street and drummer Eric Harland—that joined Stephens on his 2007 leader debut, The Timeless Now, again convenes here, granting the saxophonist a sacrosanct landscape over which he roams, rhapsodizes and blows bottomless lines on a tune he refers to as kind of “squirrelly.” But check out Harland’s snare work.
“Balancing our multiple unique levels of diversity and world views with the awareness that we are all a part of a global community atop a spinning delicate crumb in space,” Stephens begins in a press release while discussing the album’s title, “has proven to be a persistent puzzle for our species that leaves me wondering if ‘Liberty’ is capable of being one of those vast fields of common ground it once seemed to be.”
The saxophonist also has a live quintet recording, Right Now: Live At The Village Vanguard (Contagious), with pianist Aaron Parks, Street and drummer Greg Hutchinson due out April 24.
For additional information about Liberty, visit the bandleader’s website. DB
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.
Jan 21, 2025 7:54 PM
Roy McCurdy and his wife had just finished eating dinner and were relaxing over coffee in their Altadena home, when he…
“She said, ‘A lot of people are going to try and stop you,’” Sheryl Bailey recalls of the advice she received from jazz guitarist Emily Remler (1957–’90). “‘They’re going to say you slept with somebody, you’re a dyke, you’re this and that and the other. Don’t listen to them, and just keep playing.’”
Feb 3, 2025 10:49 PM
In the April 1982 issue of People magazine, under the heading “Lookout: A Guide To The Up and Coming,” jazz…
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.
Jan 21, 2025 7:38 PM
Last November, Keith Jarrett, who has not played publicly since suffering two strokes in 2018, greenlighted ECM to drop…
“With jazz I thought it must be OK to be Black, for the first time,” says singer Sofia Jernberg.
Jan 2, 2025 10:50 AM
On Musho (Intakt), her recent duo album with pianist Alexander Hawkins, singer Sofia Jernberg interprets traditional…
“The first recording I owned with Brazilian music on it was Wayne Shorter’s Native Dancer,” says Renee Rosnes. “And then I just started to go down the rabbit hole.”
Jan 16, 2025 2:02 PM
In her four-decade career, Renee Rosnes has been recognized as a singular voice, both as a jazz composer and a…
