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…
Trombonist Roswell Rudd will release Keep Your Heart Right, his fourth release with Sunnyside Records, on June 24. The drumless quartet features vocalist Sunny Kim, pianist Lafayette Harris and bassist Bradley Jones.
Keep Your Heart Right revisits some of Rudd’s older compositions with tracks like “Bamako,” here given English lyrics, and the title track, composed with saxophonist Archie Shepp in 1965. The album features several other gospel-tinged, New York-inspired tracks like “Suh Blah Blah Buh Subi” and “All Nite Soul,” the latter dedicated to the late Reverend John Carcia Gensel of New York City’s St. Peter’s Church.
“This horn player is definitely a frustrated singer whose playing has in turn been influenced more by singers than by other instrumentalists, such as Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Al Hibbler,” Rudd wrote in the album liner notes. “The songs came of necessity out of experiences, people, things that I read or heard, and the songs were piling up—always a part of my musicality.”
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…
As Ted Nash, left, departs the alto saxophone chair for LCJO, Alexa Tarantino steps in as the band’s first female full-time member.
Mar 4, 2025 1:29 PM
If only because openings for JLCO’s 15 permanent positions appear about as frequently as sub-freezing days on the…
Larry Appelbaum with Wayne Shorter in 2012.
Feb 25, 2025 10:49 AM
Larry Appelbaum, a distinguished audio engineer, jazz journalist, historian and broadcaster, died Feb. 21, 2025, in…
