Home » Jazz News

Interview News

Timely announcements covering new album releases, tours, concert series, special events, job postings, crowdfunding campaigns and more. You can find more news by searching our website, viewing our news stream, seeing what's trending or reading our blog posts. Subscribe to our news RSS feed and/or embed AAJ news content on your website or blog. Learn about our news service here. Submit news here.

Interview

Jake Shimabukuro: Defying Genres to Bring the Ukulele Mainland and Mainstream

Source: Groove Notes
April 10, 2011

Jake Shimabukuro recently visited the KPLU performance studio. Below is the audio and photos from KPLU’s Nick Morrison, Abe Beeson, and Justin Steyer. CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO THE STUDIO SESSION KPLU was pleased to welcome ukulele virtuoso, Jake Shimabukuro, into our studios on March 29, 2011. Jake played before not only a record number of KPLU Leadership Circle members, but four young ukulele players from Foster High School we recently featured in an installment of Artscape, which explored the ...

Continue Reading

Interview

Latin Jazz Conversations: Alexa Weber Morales (Part 3)

Source: The Latin Jazz Corner by Chip Boaz
April 9, 2011

Musicians are tasked with tapping into the thoughts and feelings of the current social climate and finding relevant ways to reach people. Musical statements are meant to be shared, and the most effective expressions find a way to connect with an audience. They discuss topics that effect the audience's everyday life and they they relate to common experiences. These musical ideas reach people through communication paths that are both modern and traveled constantly. An artist that can share these types ...

Continue Reading

Interview

Something Else! Featured Artist: Emerson Lake and Palmer

Source: Something Else!
April 8, 2011

Emerson, Lake and Palmer somehow went from selling 40 million records early on to becoming one of the 1970s' more reviled rock bands by the end of that decade. The reasons were many. First, there was the emerging dumb-is-cool punk-rock movement—which gave way to the plasticine synth-scene of MTV, then to hair bands. ELP's interest in classical music probably didn't help. (Remember the Mussorgsky stuff included on Pictures at an Exhibition? Dude!) Emerson, Lake and Palmer, perhaps inevitably, disappeared for ...

Continue Reading

Interview

Interview: Ralph Carmichael (Part 3)

Source: JazzWax by Marc Myers
April 8, 2011

In the last years of Nat King Cole's life, he sounded comfortable in the arms of Ralph Carmichael's charts. Admittedly lighter and more commercial than Cole's earlier Capitol dates, these albums need to be put in context. Easy listening LPs like Touch of Your Lips; Lazy Hazy, Crazy Days of Summer and L-O-V-E were indeed lighter than earlier releases and silly in place, they remain period pieces—prime examples of an era when traditional pop was nearly exhausted and at the ...

Continue Reading

Interview

Latin Jazz Conversations: Alexa Weber Morales (Part 2)

Source: The Latin Jazz Corner by Chip Boaz
April 8, 2011

Musicians live a life filled with uncertainty, but one thing can be guaranteed—the journey towards musical fulfillment involves unexpected twists and turns. No one moves through their life on a straight road, but a musician almost certainly encounters a number of bumps along the way. Financial instability and the need for additional work can force a musician to re-evaluate their plans consistently. Cultural insights inspire reflection in an artist, often driving them to alter their creative direction. The ever-changing cast ...

Continue Reading

Interview

Something Else! Interview: Orrin Evans, Jazz Pianist, Composer and Bandleader

Source: Something Else!
April 7, 2011

By Nick DeRiso Orrin Evans arrived amidst a wave of new jazz performers in the early 1990s. Unlike many of those young lions, however, he managed to bob up from that era's ultimately empty retro-conservatism. “A lot of those guys, quite frankly," Orrin says, “just gave too much of a f—. And I never did." By that, Evans means he never cared that much about being careful, for convention. It hasn't sold him more records, nor made him a bigger ...

Continue Reading

Interview

Wynton Marsalis Spreads the Gospel of Commitment to Youth

Source: Greg Thomas
April 7, 2011

Practice. As in dedication. Also see: integrity. Every time he gets a chance, Wynton Marsalis lays a message on young people that requires no fancy instrument, just a solo commitment. The jazz and classical trumpeter and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer got that chance recently at a Passport to Manhood program in the gym of the Boys & Girls Club of New Rochelle. He shot some hoops—hitching up his suspenders and complaining that he hadn't worked on his game in the two ...

Continue Reading

Interview

Interview: Ralph Carmichael (Part 2)

Source: JazzWax by Marc Myers
April 7, 2011

Ralph Carmichael likes to arrange strings in clusters. This technique allows him to take the largest possible group of violins, violas and cellos and, by bunching them into groups and voicing them as mini ensembles, he ensures richness and clarity without clutter and sweetness. For Ralph, the goal always is to create a luminous frame for singers and not let the arrangement become cute or shmaltzy. In Part 2 of my three-part conversation with Ralph on his close relationship with ...

Continue Reading