Tonight, Nicholas Payton performs a free show with his trio supported by the Tulane University Big Band at Dixon Hall on the Tulane campus at 7 p.m. Payton is the Jazz Artist-in-Residence at Tulane, and he recently ruffled the feathers of the jazz world when he declared that jazz died in 1959 in a blog [...]
Tag Archives: trumpeters
Poncho Sanchez & Terence Blanchard, Chano y Dizzy (Concord Jazz Records)
November 1, 2011 – 12:45 am
The meeting on record of Poncho Sanchez and Terence Blanchard risks a collapse under the weight of names. Not just their own, but the corresponding heroes that inspire the collaboration. Chano Pozo was the first percussionist to join Dizzy Gillespie’s band, an original spark of influence in what became known as Latin jazz, a movement [...]
Ricky Riccardi, What a Wonderful World: The Magic of Louis Armstrong’s Later Years (Pantheon Books)
August 1, 2011 – 12:21 am
A friend I know as intellectual and a roots music aficionado waved off Satchmo, saying the man’s main interests “were pot and Swiss Kriss.” When I told her that the late Louis Armstrong gave Eisenhower the finger, metaphorically, she lightened up a bit: “I would have given him the finger too.” For those who don’t [...]
Locking Horns: When Miles Davis Met Wynton Marsalis
August 1, 2011 – 12:15 am
In hip-hop, they call it “beef.” Someone’s slight at a summer festival leads to another’s mixtape verse and the next thing you know, the Internet bubbles, posses squabble, and spectators pick sides to make art into sport. A mini-industry swirls around “beef,” generating album sales, DVDs, and entire careers out of he said/he said narratives. [...]
Ricky Riccardi’s One Armstrong
August 1, 2011 – 12:03 am
Ricky Riccardi’s book What a Wonderful World: The Magic of Louis Armstrong’s Later Years focuses on the largely unexamined later years of Armstrong’s career. Riccardi, 30, is an archivist at the Louis Armstrong House Museum and fell in love with Armstrong’s work 15 years ago. “My argument is that there is no such thing as [...]
Stefon Harris, David Sánchez, Christian Scott, Ninety Miles (Concord Picante Records)
July 1, 2011 – 12:53 am
Ninety Miles is the distance between Miami and Havana, the closest points in the US and Cuba. This project, the companion CD to a documentary due later this summer, comes from New Orleans-born trumpeter Christian Scott, Puerto Rican saxophonist David Sánchez, and New York vibraphonist Stefon Harris. It’s the latest in a long line of [...]
Lionel Ferbos: The Century Mark
July 1, 2011 – 12:15 am
On Sunday, July 17, the incomparable Lionel Ferbos will be one hundred years old. In order to maintain his chops, he still practices his horn from 45 minutes to one hour every day. Musically, Ferbos goes back to another time, that critical formative era when jazz as we know it was beginning to take shape. [...]
James Andrews, The Big Time Stuff (Independent)
June 1, 2011 – 12:59 am
Over Jazz Fest, I got to thinking about the increased prevalence of adrenaline in contemporary New Orleans music, particularly the brass department. Bullish young bands, trombonist dynamos, trumpeters who rap—they crackle in rhythm with the new generation’s manic attention span. Every era deserves its own sound but, I wondered, where’s that lowdown growl and shuffle, [...]
Nicholas Payton: His Song
June 1, 2011 – 12:10 am
“I want to embark on another journey that will include the music of my own generation,” Nicholas Payton said over coffee at Café Luna on Magazine Street in 2009. “I want my music to reflect all the records I listen to, not just the jazz records. When I went to the stereo as a kid, [...]
