“Man, there is no other gig like this,” Jon Batiste declares buoyantly, settling onto a sofa in his New York office. It’s a little after 11 a.m., and the Louisiana-born musician has just arrived for ...

The pairing of an eminent jazz artist with an equally distinguished author isn’t unprecedented. Nine years ago, Nobel Prize-winning novelist Kazuo Ishiguro shaped several artful … Read More “Renee ...

Jazz and headphones are both around 100 years old. But while jazz is codified to the point that four players who’ve never met can play a standards gig together with no rehearsal, the audio industry is ...

Life looks good in La Jolla, California. The bay where it sits, 12 miles north of San Diego, has the white sand beach of your … Read More “Review: Tord Gustavsen Trio Live in La Jolla at the Athenaeum ...

The last of Tony Williams’ fusion albums, The Joy of Flying was the drummer’s first since the mid-’60s without some form of the Lifetime name attached to his band. It’s a far-flung effort with a large ...

Benny Goodman (third from left) with some of his former musicians, seated around piano left to right: Vernon Brown, George Auld, Gene Krupa, Clint Neagley, Ziggy Elman, Israel Crosby and Teddy Wilson ...

Perhaps you’ve read my commentary on Pat Metheny’s new Side-Eye album. But there’s more guitar this season. As a start, here are four releases from the first quarter of 2026 that set the bar high and ...

Jazz singer Andy Bey, who died at 85 on April 26, 2025, was a striking vision at the piano: a compact, muscley, mahogany-skinned man, half-smiling and lost in his own inscrutable world. Bey’s midnight ...

The pianist Vijay Iyer has a mathematical mind; in his compositions there is much to take in. Structurally, they’re complex. Iyer is rarely satisfied with one rhythm or one harmony within a tune. Add ...

We’re heading toward the end of 2025 and tallying up lists, which might take a few different forms here as December unfolds. But this first list is mine — no committee, no poll, just my subjective ...

Charlie Rouse was long known as the muscular, melody-favoring, bop-swing tenor saxophonist in Thelonious Monk’s quartet, working within the pianist’s curiously angular language. But there was another ...

Because James Moody’s career coincides precisely with the history of modern jazz, where you came in on one is where you came in on the other. For this reviewer, it was the Jazz Workshop in San ...