“Think of all the creative people I’m going to meet and a whole other way of thinking about music and a challenge of singing completely different material than I would have sung otherwise to my highest level in dedication to the moment,” Elling says about his Broadway run.

“[That’s] the thing of the beboppers,” Bradford said. “These guys were important for not only playing that wonderful music, but they knew a sort of social stance, you see?”

Pat Metheny will perform with his Side-Eye III ensemble at ​Big Ears 2026 in Knoxville, Tennessee, next March.

​Esperanza Spalding closed an audacious Chicago Jazz Festival set with “Endangered Species.”

Trio aRT with its avalanche of instrumentation: from left, Pheeroan akLaff, Scott Robinson and Julian Thayer.

Don and Maureen Sickler serve as the keepers of engineer Rudy Van Gelder’s flame at Van Gelder Studio, perhaps the most famous recording studio in jazz history.

“It’s energetic,” says Brittany Davis of feeling the spirits of the ancestors. “It’s interpretive. It’s a dance of sound and vibration. It’s a memory, it’s a wash. It’s washing over you.”

Mark Masters, right, with Billy Harper.

“What I got from Percy was the dignity of playing the bass,” Buster Williams said of Percy Heath.

“I’m not getting any younger, and in my later years I want to make sure my own visions can be realized,” says pianist George Colligan.