Articles by K. Shackelford

Interview

Vicente Archer: 150 Albums, Grammys And An Unrelenting Pursuit of Music

by K. Shackelford
January 8, 2025

An instrument created in the 1500s, the acoustic bass has become a medium of harmonic and rhythmic sonority for bassist Vicente Archer. Over the past 30 years, he has bellowed out numerous melodic and harmonic narratives through the colossal instrument--gracing each improvisational moment with imagination and curation of timbre. Elicited by top names in music, Archer finds himself on approximately 150 albums, and 15 as the sole bassist to date. Even with these massive accomplishments, when ...

Interview

Jose Antonio Diaz On 2025 JEN Conference

by K. Shackelford
December 26, 2024

The 2025 Jazz Education Network Conference will take place in Atlanta, Georgia from January 8-11, 2025, at the Hyatt Regency. This is the 16th year of this transformative music experience, where jazz educators, musicians, enthusiasts, curators, researchers and others gather together to learn, connect and discover. Last year, the organization drew over 4,000 national and international attendees. JEN President Jose Antonio Diaz shares that there will be approximately 100 events within the 4-day conference. On the website, the ...

Interview

Lonnie Davis: Lighting Up Charlotte with Jazz

by K. Shackelford
October 19, 2024

In the '90s, fierce jazz curator, flutist, and educator Lonnie Davis found herself as the only female in The University of New Orleans jazz program. Prior to that, she studied under jazz patriarch Ellis Marsalis while a high school student at the highly selective and musically rigorous New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. The brilliant music program would matriculate a coterie of modern jazz greats such as Terrence Blanchard, Jon Batiste, Wynton and Branford Marsalis and Christian Scott. (Think about ...

Interview

Imani-Grace Cooper and Her Vocal Art

by K. Shackelford
October 12, 2024

Imani-Grace Cooper is a vividly impressive vocal talent. Although she lends her voice to diverse musical genres, she has an ethereal execution of jazz that charmingly raises the eyebrow and puts a pleasurable smirk on her listener's face. Musicians dig her a lot. You can see them smiling when she's singing--she understands the idiom of jazz, inside and out, which rewards them with clever musical interplay. Several years ago, the Howard University graduate received praise from legendary artists ...

Live Review

Branford Marsalis at the Knight Theater

by K. Shackelford
June 7, 2023

Branford MarsalisRomare Bearden Revealed Knight Theater Charlotte, North CarolinaMay 16, 2023 On September 3, 2003, Grammy Award winning saxophonist, Branford Marsalis released Romare Bearden Revealed. The album was a collaborative effort with the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. The gallery's exhibit, The Art of Romare Bearden, was a homage to Bearden (1911-1983), whose birthplace is Charlotte, North Carolina. The City of Charlotte also named a park after Bearden in 2013, located ...

Catching Up With

Jonathan Barber: Blazing Forward

by K. Shackelford
May 11, 2023

Jonathan Barber is a force to be reckoned with. Pulling out a drum solo with just one high hat, making it an artful and meaningful rhythm to the composition at hand with intentional rhythmic sonority is rare. Yet this is one example of the ways that Jonathan Barber pulls out a surfeit of ideas from his drum set, which is a distinctive feature of his musical caginess. He's also taking jazz into a futuristic, digimodernism path. Recently, Barber ...

Interview

The Baylor Project: A Brand New Day

by K. Shackelford
May 24, 2019

Marcus Baylor's coalescence of various American music styles into his playing has already secured him a spot in the history of post-modern jazz drummers. In the book, The Jazz Book: From Ragtime to the 21st Century (Chicago Review Press, 2009), authors Joachim-Ernst Berendt and Günther Huesmann cite Baylor as one of an exclusive list of drummers that shaped jazz drumming in the nineties through inventive polyrhythms and genre syncretism in their techniques.Baylor's affinity for the drums started early, ...

Album Review

Kobie Watkins: Movement

Read "Movement" reviewed by K. Shackelford

by K. Shackelford
May 18, 2018

Solidifying a musical 'voice' could take five years, or it could take 15 years. Yet when an artist's 'voice' or style comes, well, you just know it. The result is work with musical moves that are distinctive and ideas that are au courant. Drummer/Composer/Bandleader Kobie Watkins' voice resounds with artistic certainty and savoir faire on his second album entitled Movement (Origin Records, 2018), featuring the Kobie Watkins Grouptet. Watkins, a Chicago native, has toured and recorded as a ...

Live Review

Christmas with Kirk Whalum and Friends at the Halton Theater

by K. Shackelford
February 1, 2018

Kirk Whalum's Sixth Annual A Gospel According to Jazz Christmas Tour Halton Theater Charlotte, NC December 15, 2017 It is a special experience to watch musicians who have a deep musical and personal relationship perform together. These relationships arouse a performance synergy that produce musical conversations with depth. Attendees of Grammy Award winner Kirk Whalum's Sixth Annual “A Gospel According to Jazz Christmas" tour, were able to witness such an experience at ...

Interview

Damión Reid: On Drum Artistry, The Robert Glasper Trio, and Beyond

by K. Shackelford
July 25, 2016

International drummer Damión Reid has crafted a style that is inimitable without sacrificing the ardor of modern jazz and its traditional stylistic approaches to drumming. Listening to Reid is like a history lesson on the drum--he can play everything with artful dexterity from Be-Bop to Hip Hop. Adrian Kirchler, owner of AK drums, was so impressed by Reid's performance at a concert that it inspired him to create a snare drum entitled, “The Damión Reid Signature Model." However, ...