Apr 7, 2026 1:21 PM
Reviews: Bucket o’ New Blue Note
Jazz and gospel are close blood relations. And fortunately, those Saturday night and Sunday morning worlds sometimes…
Walter Smith III joins a lofty group of new releases from Blue Note that includes recordings from Ron Carter, Bill Frisell and Immanuel Wilkins.
Apr 7, 2026 1:21 PM
Jazz and gospel are close blood relations. And fortunately, those Saturday night and Sunday morning worlds sometimes…
Bill Frisell and writer Ashley Kahn at this year’s North Sea Jazz Fest.
Dec 5, 2023 1:50 PM
Fortunate and few are the jazz headliners with options like guitar maestro Bill Frisell, who can choose to lead various…
Jul 19, 2022 2:17 PM
Remarkably comprehensive and exhaustively researched, Philip Watson’s Bill Frisell, Beautiful Dreamer (Faber Books) is…
Trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire performs with the trio Trefoil at this year’s Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee.
Apr 12, 2022 1:39 PM
During the opening concert of this year’s Big Ears Festival, a train roared by just as the Kronos Quartet leaned into…
Carla Bley (left), Steve Swallow and Andy Sheppard recorded Life Goes On for the ECM label.
Jan 5, 2021 7:54 AM
The list below is a roundup of the 5-, 4.5- and 4-star reviews that ran in the print edition of DownBeat during 2020.…
Vocalist Amirtha Kidambi is planning to stream a Thursday set.
Sep 21, 2020 8:51 AM
As performers look to replace income from lost gigs and regain a sense of community amid the coronavirus pandemic, a…
Allan Harris is among the performers planning to stream live sets this week.
Jun 22, 2020 8:54 AM
As performers look to replace income from lost gigs and regain a sense of community amid the coronavirus pandemic, a…
Harmonica player Grégoire Maret collaborated with pianist Romain Collin and guitarist Bill Frisell on Americana.
May 26, 2020 9:47 AM
The harmonica generally isn’t viewed as a supremely versatile instrument, steeped as it is in the blues tradition. But…
Terri Lyne Carrington and Social Science are among the groups planning to stream live sets this week.
May 21, 2020 9:50 AM
As performers look to replace income from lost gigs and regain a sense of community amid the coronavirus pandemic, a…
Guitarist Bill Frisell is now based in New York, following nearly three decades in Seattle.
Jul 6, 2020 3:07 PM
The latest reminder that guitar icon Bill Frisell remains a road warrior at 68 came in late September, when he…
Ted Nash revisits Bernstein and Sondheim for Somewhere Else: Songs From West Side Story.
Dec 27, 2019 9:07 AM
The list below is a round up of the 5-, 4.5- and 4-star reviews that ran in print editions of DownBeat during 2019. If a…
Egberto Gismonti flew to New York from his home in Brazil for ECM Records at 50, a Nov. 1 and 2 celebration of the imprint at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York.
Nov 8, 2019 1:50 PM
The curation for ECM Records at 50, Jazz at Lincoln Center’s tribute to the famed record label on Nov. 1 and 2 in New…
Fifty years ago, Manfred Eicher co-founded Edition of Contemporary Music, better known as ECM, and has issued more than 1,600 titles spanning jazz and classical sounds.
Oct 29, 2019 9:36 AM
A search for the heart of the ECM Records operation leads to a small, quiet space located on the second floor of a…
Rudy Royston leads his own uniquely assembled ensembles, and it’s pretty likely that you’ve heard his drumming on recordings by folks like Dave Douglas and Linda May Han Oh.
Sep 3, 2019 9:35 AM
Growing up in Colorado, drummer Rudy Royston kept busy, playing in church four nights a week and exploring the local…
Chris Stamey has written new material in the style of the Great American Songbook.
Aug 20, 2019 9:15 AM
Aging rock musicians from Rod Stewart to Bob Dylan have turned to the Great American Songbook to revive their creative…
Trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire (left) and saxophonist Joshua Redman join Gard Nilssen Acoustic Unity during a performance at the Molde Jazz Festival in Molde, Norway.
Jul 25, 2019 11:37 AM
Gard Nilssen’s Supersonic Orchestra—a juggernaut of an ensemble incorporating three rhythm sections of bass and trap…
For almost a decade, violinist Jenny Scheinman (right) and drummer Allison Miller have worked together in the latter’s Boom Tic Boom ensemble. Their new collaborative group is Parlour Game.
Jun 28, 2019 11:27 AM
Jenny Scheinman admits she’s led a charmed life, as far as her music career goes. The violinist is unlike a number of…
Mary Halvorson performs at JazzFest Berlin, which ran Nov. 1-4 in Berlin, Germany.
May 30, 2019 2:08 PM
A festival is supposed to be too much of a good thing. An overabundance, for example, of garlic in Gilroy, California,…
Myra Melford, shown here playing the 2015 Earshot Jazz Festival in Seattle, will perform at this year’s edition.
Sep 26, 2018 9:33 AM
Over the course of 30 years, Seattle’s Earshot Jazz Festival has earned a reputation as one of the premier U.S. jazz…
On Cuong Vu 4Tet’s Change In The Air (RareNoise), its namesake trumpeter ditches electronic effects.
Oct 1, 2018 12:12 PM
Despite pre-dawn airport pickups and scary midnight rides, bad food and worse sound engineers, there’s a romance to…
Francisco Mela contributes Ancestros to the current season of Newvelle releases.
Aug 2, 2018 3:50 PM
As collectible, multimedia art objects, few affordable things surpass the long-playing album. And few labels surpass…
Dr. Lonnie Smith performs at one of three sets on April 5 at the Savannah Music Festival in Savannah, Georgia.
May 1, 2018 9:26 AM
Although the Savannah Music Festival embraces all forms of American roots music, most of its jazz programming takes…
Saxophonist Joe Lovano (left), bassist Drew Gress, guitarist John Scofield and drummer Adam Nussbaum pay tribute to John Abercrombie at a recent performance in Brooklyn at Roulette.
Apr 30, 2018 12:22 PM
The line at Roulette went out the door, wrapped around the corner of Third Avenue and ran down Atlantic Avenue in…
Charles Lloyd performs during the Funchal Jazz Festival in Madeira, Portugal, on July 15.
Aug 2, 2017 2:24 PM
The 18th annual Funchal Jazz Festival, which transpired July 13–15 in the capital city of Madeira, a Portuguese island…
The progressive rock band King Crimson concludes its concert at the Montreal Jazz Festival on July 3.
Jul 23, 2017 5:10 PM
Of all the venues that present concerts during the Montreal Jazz Festival, none is more intimate than the 425-seat…
Matt Wilson’s new album Honey And Salt will be released August 25 on Palmetto Records.
Jun 2, 2017 10:20 PM
When Carl Sandburg died in 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson hailed the famed poet as “more than the voice of America,…
David Virelles (left) at Ravi Coltrane perform on Jan. 7 at Tishman Auditorium in New York City.
Jan 19, 2017 4:37 PM
Following a successful event at Winter JazzFest 2016, select artists from Manfred Eicher’s ECM label performed in an…
Gary Peacock (left), Lee Konitz, Joey Baron and Bill Frisell
Apr 15, 2020 8:38 PM
“OK, we’re gonna play some ‘terrible’ music,” joked iconic altoist Lee Konitz on Aug. 16, before he and the…
