USA: Kendrick Scott-A Wall Becomes A Bridge(Blue Note Records 2019)

Kendrick Scott Oracle returns April 5 with the release of A Wall Becomes A Bridge, an inspiring new 12-song cycle about overcoming obstacles both personal and collective. The album was produced by Derrick Hodge, and find’s Scott augmenting his long-running quintet with the addition of turntablist Jahi Sundancewho joins guitarist Mike Moreno, pianist Taylor Eigsti, reedist John Ellis, and bassist Joe Sanders to expand Oracle’s palette. The lead track “>>>>>>>>>>>Mocean” is available today to stream or download.

Kendrick Scott lays out his vision for the album in his artistic statement:

“Walls are easier to build than bridges. We are often quicker to stack bricks built of fear than we are to weave a cable of empathy and reach across a divide. Where I see walls, then, I see an admission of our fundamental fragility - of vulnerability. So the question that I began to ask myself was how I personally, and we collectively, can use those vulnerabilities not as points of separation, but as points of convergence?

BLUE NOTE

USA: New Bedford JazzFest 2019

Over 35 musicians will get you up on your feet. Southcoast Jazz Orchestra, Alan Bernstein New Bop Revue featuring Marcelle Gauvin, Grupo Sazon and Scruffy Aristocrats represent talent from Boston to Providence, big band to latin jazz to New Orleans grooves.

Save the date: It’s a celebration of “jazz that will make you move “ - Saturday, June 15th, from 2 to 7 p.m. , when the eighth annual New Bedford JazzFest moves onto Pier 3 with art, food, drink, and non-stop live jazz featuring the best the region has to offer. p, and produced by and for the benefit of New Bedford’s own Your Theatre, Inc.

You have only until June 1st to order $20 advance tickets which maybe reserved through the Your Theatre box office 508-993-0772 or purchased online at https://newbedfordjazzfest.wordpress.com or https://www.yourtheatre.org. 

After June 7th and the day of the festival, tickets are $25. Multiple parking options available. For more information, check New Bedford JazzFest on Facebook.

USA: #JAZZ "Transitions," New CD from the Marcus Shelby Orchestra, Set for June 7 Release by MSO Records

                                                                    

Marcus Shelby Places Suite Exploring Negro League Baseball At the Heart of "Transitions," Set for June 7 Release by MSO Records Bassist-Composer-Bandleader's Latest   Features Four-Part Suite,   Seven Standards Performed by His 15-Piece Big Band, Special Guests Mads Tolling & Tiffany Austin Performances as Resident Artistic Director At SFJAZZ, 5/23-26         April 26, 2019 Bassist, composer, and bandleader Marcus Shelby brings together three of his greatest passions -- African-American history, baseball, and big-band jazz -- on Transitions, the latest work by his 15-piece Marcus Shelby Orchestra, set for a June 7 release on his own MSO Records. While the album offers Shelby's lush arrangements of classic tunes by Charles Mingus, Duke Ellington, and Cole Porter, its centerpiece "Black Ball: The Negro Leagues and the Blues" is an original four-part suite inspired by the history of Negro League Baseball. It also features superb work by two special guests, violinist Mads Tolling and acclaimed vocalist Tiffany Austin. Shelby's work to date has established his penchant for deep musical dives into African-American history and culture. Transitions is not a full-length opus like his 2007 oratorio Harriet Tubman or 2011's Soul of the Movement: Meditations on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., but it is unquestionably on the same ambitious path as those two works. It's also a natural choice of subject matter for San Francisco-based Shelby, a self-described baseball aficionado who (when he's not on the bandstand) can often be found cheering on his beloved San Francisco Giants. "I did a whole theatrical project that premiered last September at the Yerba Buena Gardens Festival," he explains. "It re-created the environment of a Negro League baseball park. This suite was inspired by the research I did for that project. But it's more about these four cities -- Pittsburgh, New York, Chicago, Kansas City -- that were very central to the Negro Leagues."     Those were also central to the development of jazz, and Shelby's pieces reflect the parts they played in that development. The suite's opening "Transition 1 (Pittsburgh)," a nod to two powerhouse teams (the Pittsburgh Crawfords and the Homestead Grays), also reflects the city's blues tradition and the hard swing generated by native-son drummers from Art Blakey to Jeff "Tain" Watts. Its finale, "Black Ball Swing (Kansas City)," celebrates the Kansas City Monarchs -- "the best known, most respected team of all time in the Negro Leagues," Shelby says -- with both the riff-driven style of the Count Basie Orchestra and the supercharged bebop of Charlie Parker, both Kansas City exports. Transitions also includes one composition each by Charles Mingus and George Shearing, along with two by Cole Porter and three by the grand master of big band writing, Duke Ellington. It's "an album that mirrors a live performance," he says. "It's like seeing one of our concerts. It felt good to break away from doing programmatic music to playing some straight-up blues and swing and standards." The Duke's gorgeous but rarely played "On a Turquoise Cloud" is a feature for guest violinist Tolling, while his "Mood Indigo"and "Solitude," along with Shearing's "Lullaby of Birdland"and the two Porter tunes, are vehicles for Tiffany Austin's vocals.    Marcus Shelby was born February 2, 1966 in Anchorage, Alaska, moving to Sacramento, California at the age of five. He played the bass as a teenager, but his real passion was for baseball and basketball, earning a college scholarship in the latter. At 22, however, a concert by the Wynton Marsalis Quartet reignited his love of music, and he returned to school at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in Valencia, where he studied with Charlie Haden and James Newton. First gaining attention in Los Angeles as a cofounder (with drummer Willie Jones III) of the hard-bop band Black/Note in the early 1990s, Shelby relocated to San Francisco in 1996. He quickly established himself as an essential creative force on the Bay Area arts scene, leading both the Marcus Shelby Trio and the Marcus Shelby Jazz Orchestra and earning increasingly prestigious commissions from dance companies, theatrical productions, and presenters. Shelby opened a new chapter with the release of 2006's Port Chicago (Noir), a major orchestral work inspired by the World War II incident that saw 50 young black seamen convicted in the largest mutiny trial in U.S. naval history. Since then he's focused his creative energy on a series of meticulously researched, hard-swinging works exploring African American history, like 2007's Harriet Tubman (Noir) and 2011's Soul of the Movement: Meditations on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (Porto Franco). Marcus Shelby will perform as Resident Artistic Director at SFJAZZ, 201 Franklin St, San Francisco, Thursday 5/23 through Sunday 5/26. The four-night run will feature the artist in collaborations literary (with Daniel Handler, aka Lemony Snicket), political (with Angela Davis), and Ellingtonian (with Faye Carol, Kenny Washington, and Mads Tolling), along with an evening dedicated to the performance of "Black Ball: The Negro Leagues and the Blues."    Remember Rockefeller at Attica - Marcus Shelby Jazz Orchestra     Web Site: marcusshelby.com          Media Contact: Terri Hinte 510-234-8781 hudba@sbcglobal.net terrihinte.com

USA/ISRAEL: Rising Israeli Jazz Pianist/Composer Guy Mintus To Release Ambitious New Album on 2/15

New York-based, Israeli jazz pianist-composer Guy Mintus is set to issue a new trio album, Connecting the Dots, scheduled for worldwide release on February 15, 2019 on France's Jazz Family label.  Mintus is a learned, well-traveled and much honored musician.  His awards include the Prix du Public at the Montreux Jazz Festival's solo piano competition, two  ASCAP Foundation/ Herb Alpert Young Jazz Composer Awards and, in 2018, the ASCAP Foundation Leonard Bernstein Award.  In addition, the Mintus Trio's debut album, A Home In Between, was selected as a DownBeat "editor's pick." DownBeat's Brian Zimmerman called Mintus "an artist of prodigious talent and boundless ambition.  In reviewing A Home in Between, All About Jazz said it is an "outstanding piano trio disc that heralds the arrival of a significant talent and a superb band." And New York Music Daily raved, "best trio album of 2017 by a mile, so far."

A descendant of Polish, Iraqi and Moroccan Jews, Mintus has made New York his home for the past six years and has taken his music to locales as varied as India, Turkey, Brazil, Canada and many European cities.  He has collaborated and/ or shared the stage with such artists as Jon Hendricks, Trilok Gurtu, the Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra and ska-punk band Streetlight Manifesto.

The ambitious new Connecting the Dots collection touches on a broad variety of musical worlds and is a musical summation of Mintus's ethnic and musical heritage and his experiences and interests.  It wanders easily from the hard bop of Horace Silver's "Yeah!" to the floridity of "Little Italy," a Mintus original, to the carefree strut of another Mintus original, "Nothing New Under the Sun."  Most striking, perhaps, are the performances that evoke the exoticism and spirituality of Mintus's native Middle East.  A poem, "Hunt Music," by the mystical 13^th Century Persian poet, Rumi, is given an inspired musical setting by Mintus, with an English translation of Rumi's words sung by Israeli vocalist Sivan Arbel.  An arrangement of the traditional Jewish High Holy Day prayer, "Avinu Malkeinu" features a haunting sax solo by jazz veteran Dave Liebman.  And, to celebrate his own Mizrahi Jewish heritage, Mintus performs (and sings) a Hebrew language hit associated with the late Israeli Yemenite singer, Zohar Argov. The other members of the Mintus Trio are bassist Dan Pappalardo and drummer Phillipe Lemm.

Aside from his work with the Trio, Mintus has been busy with an array of other projects.  He recently performed Gershwin's" Rhapsody in Blue" with the Bayerische Philharmonic and premiered his own full-length work, a piano concerto inspired by the journey of the Jews of Arab origins immigrating to Israel in its early days, for the Israeli Chamber Orchestra.  He has been commissioned to compose works by the American Composers Orchestra, the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, and the Jerusalem East & West Orchestra, In addition, he has contributed original music and piano interpretations to Fiddler, a forthcoming documentary about Fiddler on the Roof, directed by Emmy-nominee Max Lewkovicz. In the spring of 2019, Mintus will make his theater debut, starring as an aspiring young pianist in a new musical at Tel Aviv's Carmeri Theater.Audio Preview

Website

USA: John Butcher / Joe McPhee- At The Hill Of James Magee (TROST RECORDS (Austria) 2019)

SWEDEN: Introducing World Music's Marius Billgobenson

Introducing World Music's Marius Billgobenson

New Album Out December 2019 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Stockholm Sweden - May 15, 2019 - Just two years ago Marius Billgobenson gave the world his debut, The Sum of My Pardon. An album All About Jazz's Jim Olin called "an intriguing musical journey." Now after a couple of years of promoting and playing, Marius Billgobenson is ready to deliver the much anticipated follow up, December 2019's Tribes In Mind. Jazz Corner was not wrong when they lamented Marius Billgobenson "exudes charisma and positivity" on The Sum of My Pardon. Taking the best that jazz, blues, and African has to offer and melting it into one pot and stirring it ever so slightly until everything has come together cohesively and tastefully, Marius outdid himself on his debut alongside the likes of Jens Stenbo (drums), Markus Enghag (piano), Everart Araujo Lucio (bass), Patric Skog (guitars), Karolina Karner (vocals), Teresa Perrelli (vocals), and Kabara Kabamba (kongas). Now he plans to do it all over again with his November 2019 release, Tribes In Mind. As the release of Tribes In Mind nears, Marius Billgobenson will be booking local performances for the late fall and early winter of 2019 into early 2020. He'll then continue to book a full-fledged tour in May 2020. Those interested in interviewing Marius Billgobenson, or reviewing his album this fall can reach out via the information provided below. ### About:Marius Billgobenson is a renowned and respected World Music musician with a new album out December 2019 titled Tribes In Mind. Contact:Marius Billgobenson +46-70-519-6728 marius@billgobenson.com Links:Official Site: https://www.billgobenson.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/marius.billy.1 Twitter: https://twitter.com/billgobenson Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/billgobenson/ SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/billgobenson

JAZZ BOOKS: From Baroque to Bop and Beyond | THE ART MUSIC LOUNGE

From Baroque to Bop and Beyond: An extended and detailed history of the intersection of classical music and jazz By Lynn René Bayley

From Baroque to Bop and Beyond | THE ART MUSIC LOUNGE From Baroque to Bop and Beyond: An extended and detailed history of the intersection of classical music and jazz By Lynn René Bayley Quite possibly the best book you will ever read on the cross-influence of classical music and various forms of jazz from the ragtime era to the present. Lynn Bayley leave no stone… artmusiclounge.wordpress.com Quite possibly the best book you will ever read on the cross-influence of classical music and various forms of jazz from the ragtime era to the present. Lynn Bayley leave no stone unturned in her pursuit of the best and most interesting cross-influences of each era. Here are some professional testimonials: “What an epic tome! Very detailed and precise!”—Miles Osland, Director of Jazz Studies and Professor of Saxophone at the University of Kentucky “Hats off! to Lynn René Bayley for her history/study of the combining, conflicting, enhancing relations between the music called Classical and the music called Jazz. Eminently informative, interesting, and enjoyable reading.”—Alonzo Levister, composer ofManhattan Monodrama, Slow Dance, Blues on the Subway and The Happy Hypocrite “I think the book is great! You should be very proud of it.”—Byron Olsen, composer ofSketches of Miles and Sketches of Coltrane “I can’t get enough of your book! Most of the chapters have so much interesting information, are so well written, and are coupled with such astute observations and interesting opinions that I want to read them more than once!”—Charles Ruggiero, classical-jazz composer, Professor of Composition and Music at the Michigan State University College of Music “There is so much here that I don’t know but that I should know, and want to know more about.”—David Balakrishnan, violinist-composer, founder of the Turtle Island String Quartet “There are things in the book that I can relate to, both artistically and historically, it’s an interesting read!  As I am a big fan of Ragtime, New Orleans jazz, Mingus, Monk, Latin jazz, Cuban jazz etc. but I am ALSO a fan of dissonant modern classical music at the same time and I am AS WELL indeed very crazy about flamenco and world & folk music.”—Sophie Dunér, jazz composer and singer “As for your glorious book, I am still reading segments – they are dense with fascinating information – I’m amazed at your scope of research, intriguing details and enjoy your occasional wry comments!”—Bunny Beck, jazz pianist and composer “It is an encyclopedic labor of love. You have a unique perspective on this material based on your wide listening experience, and you are quite outspoken in your opinions.”—Bruce Wolosoff, jazz-classical composer and pianist 01 – Chapter List 02 – Preface 03 – I. Why Search for Consensus 04 – II. The First Wave _1916-1925 05 – III. The Second Wave _1926-1935 06 – IV. Liberal-Communist War on Jazz 07 – V. Swing-Good Bad and Commercial _1935-1944_ 08 – VI. Meanwhile Back at the Ranch 09 – VII. The Emergence of Bop _1945-1953_ 10 – VIII. Jazz Concertos, Cool Jazz, Modern _1954-1962 11 – IX. Surviving Free Jazz _1962-1974_ 12 – X. George Russell 13 – XI. Charles Mingus 14 – XII. Fighting Against Fusion _1974-1990_ 15 – XIII. Revivals and Recreations – Sociology of Ja… 16 – XIV. Hanging in There _1990-2005_ 17 – XV. Nikolai Kapustin 18 – XVI. Moving On _2005-2015 19 – XVII. Daniel Schnyder 20 – XVIII. Conclusions and Observations 21 – Index 22 – The Recordings