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…
Kurt Elling’s upcoming album, The Questions, features songs combining the singer’s own writing with well-known poems.
(Photo: Anna Webber)Vocalist Kurt Elling has a new disc, The Questions, slated for release March 23 on the OKeh imprint. Today, he debuts “A Happy Thought,” which prominently features Chicago-bred pianist Stu Mindeman.
The track finds Elling in a contemplative mode with supple, tasteful backing from drummer Jeff “Tain” Watts. Mulling over death and fear, the singer slowly moves through the composition, arriving at the conclusion that maybe there’s really not too much to worry about.
Elsewhere on The Questions, Elling’s joined by genre stalwarts like saxophonist Branford Marsalis and trumpeter Marquis Hill. For more information about the album, as well as upcoming tour dates, visit Elling’s homepage. DB
“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.
Jan 2, 2025 10:50 AM
On Musho (Intakt), her recent duo album with pianist Alexander Hawkins, singer Sofia Jernberg interprets traditional…
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…
