Articles by Kofi Adjepong-Boateng

Live Review

The Tension Is Where the Music Lives: Miles Davis at 100, Part 3

by Kofi Adjepong-Boateng
August 26, 2026

Herbie Hancock Celebrates Miles Davis Hollywood Bowl Los Angeles, CA August 19, 2026 The Hollywood Bowl began as a picnic ground called Daisy Dell, a canyon chosen for its acoustics, willed into being largely by women, chief among them Artie Mason Carter, a music teacher who believed music was for everyone and priced every seat at a quarter. It opened in 1922 and still seats around 17,500 under the open sky; the audience still arrives ...

Interview

‘I Thought I Composed That’: Terence Blanchard and the Inheritance of Jazz

by Kofi Adjepong-Boateng
August 4, 2026

Cadogan Hall, where Terence Blanchard and I met, was built in 1907 as a church in the Byzantine Revival style. When its congregation dwindled, the Cadogan Estate reopened it in 2004 as an arts venue, preserving Arild Rosenkrantz's stained glass and stone while the purpose was reimagined--a fitting room in which to discuss “inheritance" and “creation" in jazz, how new ideas are built within old walls. We have barely sat down, hours before he takes the stage with Ravi Coltrane, ...

Live Review

Kenny Garrett at Ronnie Scott’s: The Ancestors in the Room

by Kofi Adjepong-Boateng
July 24, 2026

Kenny Garrett Ronnie Scott's London July 17, 2026 There are jazz clubs and there is the basement on Frith Street. Kenny Garrett, whom Miles Davis heard and hired nearly forty years ago, is back, and at the first notes of 'Haynes Here' the room understood this would be not a night of repertory, but where the repertory comes from. The band is worth naming slowly, a lesson in transmission before a note sounds. ...

Big Band in the Sky

Alan Greenspan, 1926–2026: The Reedman Who Conducted the Economy

by Kofi Adjepong-Boateng
June 26, 2026

He kept the clarinet. Sixty years after he last played for money, the central banker still had the instrument from his dance-band days; when a television crew trooped in, he turned it over in his hands but would not play it, remembering too well how it was supposed to sound. Alan Greenspan, who died on 22 June 2026 aged 100, chaired the Federal Reserve for nearly nineteen years and was canonised as “the Maestro," a pun before it ...

Big Band in the Sky

Abdullah Ibrahim: 1934–2026

by Kofi Adjepong-Boateng
June 18, 2026

Abdullah Ibrahim , the South African pianist, composer and bandleader, died in Bavaria, Germany, on 15 June 2026. He was born Adolph Johannes Brand in Cape Town on 9 October 1934. Frail but undimmed, Ibrahim last performed on 27 March at the Cape Town International Jazz Festival, in the city that made him. He grew up around District Six, the inner-city quarter--mixed, Muslim, musical--that the apartheid state would later try to erase. As a boy he ...

Live Review

The Tension Is Where The Music Lives: Miles Davis At 100, Parts 1 & 2

by Kofi Adjepong-Boateng
June 9, 2026

Celebrating Miles Davis's birthday with back-to-back concerts leads to insightful observations. The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra chose to play a set of Davis's performances, remaining faithful to the original arrangements, but with a fresh take that only an accomplished orchestra could master. Terence Blanchard, with guest Ravi Coltrane, chose to celebrate him by treating us to music he had inspired, not least compositions by Blanchard himself. These two performances capture in a few hours the essence of Miles: what ...

Live Review

South African Freedom Day! McCoy Mrubata And Siyabulela With Special Guest Steve Turre at Dizzy's Club

by Kofi Adjepong-Boateng
May 12, 2026

McCoy Mrubata And Siyabulela With Special Guest Steve Turre Dizzy's Club New York, NY April 25, 2026 Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York was the venue for McCoy Mrubata and his band for the recent South Africa 'Freedom Day' celebrations hosted by Dizzy's Club. Mrubata, the 66-year-old South African jazz grandmaster, was on stage with his impressive band, Siyabulela. For this concert Siyabulela featured Steve Turre, one of the world's most eminent ...