Artistic pursuits of jazz artists continue with worthy awards, new recordings, live performances and more.
Congrats to the 2024 Jazz Grammy Award winners. On February 4 at the Crypto.com Arena in downtown Los Angeles, the 66th Grammy Awards ceremony took place. Here’s a list of the winners in the jazz categories:
Best Jazz Performance winner: “Tight”—Samara Joy
Best Jazz Vocal Album winner: “How Love Begins”—Nicole Zuraitis
Best Jazz Instrumental Album winner: “The Winds of Change”—Billy Childs
Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album winner: “Basie Swings The Blues”—The Count Basie Orchestra Directed by Scotty Barnhart
Best Latin Jazz Album winner: “El Arte Del Bolero Vol. 2”—Miguel Zenon & Luis Perdomo
Best Alternative Jazz Album winner: “The Omnichord Real Book”—Meshell Ndegeocello
Jazz happenings
On February 9 and 10, the Minnesota Orchestra at Orchestra Hall gave its first performances of Grammy-award-winner pianist Billy Childs’ “Diaspora,” a saxophone concerto featuring soloist Steven Banks. Banks played alto and soprano sax. The encore was “The Lord’s Prayer.” Childs discovered Banks via YouTube.
The daily line-up for the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival in New Orleans on April 25-May 5 is out now, and single-day tickets are on sale.
Expect to see Jon Batiste, Preservation Hall Jazz Band, Big Chief Donald Harrison Jr., Queen Latifah, and Samara Joy, among others. For more details, visit nojazzfest.com.
Happy birthday to master double bassist Rufus Reid who turns 80, born on February 10, 1944.
Happy birthday to the late great pianist Joe Sample, born February 1, 1939, in Houston, TX, a founding member of “The Jazz Crusaders,” who would have been 85 years old.
Out soon from Resonance Records: “Freedom Weaver: The 1959 European Tour Recordings,” featuring 25 tracks of Sonny Rollins with bassist Henry Grimes and drummers Pete La Roca, Kenny Clarke and Joe Harris.
Saxophonist Melissa Aldana has announced a new Blue Note Records album, “Echoes of the Inner Prophet,” out on April 5 that follows her Grammy-nominated Blue Note debut “12 Stars.” If you’ve seen her perform at the Twin Cities Jazz Festival as I have, then you know you have experienced joy.
Vibraphonist Joel Ross’ “nublues” is available now on vinyl, CD & digital at joelross.Ink.to/nublues.
Aldana’s labelmate deals with the blues-imbued musical spectrum of originals by John Coltrane (“equinox” & “central park west”) & Thelonious Monk (“evidence”).
Charles Lloyd graces the March cover of “Jazzwise” magazine, jazzwise.com/magazine. Also on Blue Note Records, the saxophonist’s new double album of studio recordings, “The Sky Will Be There Tomorrow,” featuring Jason Moran, Larry Grenadier & Brian Blade, comes out March 15.
Jazz at Lincoln Center’s music label Blue Engine Records has released a never-before-heard, live recording of “The Love Suite: In Mahogany” by the late trumpeter Roy Hargrove at age 23 in 1993 at Alice Tully Hall.
The live album that was commissioned by Jazz at Lincoln Center is available on all major streaming platforms now. It honors Hargrove’s musical legacy and is a remarkable listening experience. He sounds soulful and strong on his horn. Hargrove passed in 2018.
Vijay Iyer concert review
In an intimate one-night-only, long anticipated Dakota debut on Jan 19, pianist Vijay Iyer
connected with an audience that he said he could tell was cultivated. It’s true, as I can attest by the fact that the person sitting next to me was rockin’ out to his music the entire night. Iyer’s musicality, I find, has an otherworldly intelligence with lyrical rhythms that showcase his excellent mental acuity and elasticity of language. His musical strategy like poet Pablo Neruda, summarized in three words, simplicity, honesty, and conviction.
Iyer had released his second trio album with bassist Linda May Oh and drummer Tyshawn Sorey entitled “Compassion,” (ECM Records) which includes nine Iyer originals and is repertoire that Jeremy Dutton on drums and another longtime Iyer bandmate Harish Raghavan on bass, tackled at the Dakota, along with music from his “Uneasy” album.