It’s not that regional big bands are making a comeback. Regional big bands—with top-notch musicians, imaginative compositions, and unique sounds—have never gone away. Many of them, like Count Basie’s Kansas City band or King Oliver’s New Orleans band, moved to bigger cities, where larger audiences and more lucrative opportunities existed. …

Chiaroscuro: illumination and darkness. Saxophonist Noah Preminger has always explored sonic contrasts of brightness and shadows to explore human emotions—not to the rigid extreme of tenebrism, but instead, through investigations of the shades in between. Ever since Preminger released his first album, Dry Bridge Road, soon after he graduated from …

In the booklet contained within Elemental Music’s package of Sun Ra’s recordings in Chicago, Marshall Allen, one of the musicians who succeeded Ra in leading his orchestra, states that “Rawas preparing the band for the 21st century.” Well, now is the 21st century. And a new generation of listeners is …

Unexpectedly, the pause in their plans to record Sanctuary was beneficial, as violinist Jason Anick and pianist Jason Yeager later realized. The hard stop that the COVID pandemic imposed upon the world allowed the two musicians to rethink the project and to observe the catastrophic ways that the first-in-a-century epidemic …

The mission of Resonance Records encompasses not only first-time releases of forgotten recorded performances by acknowledged jazz masters like Sonny Rollins or Wes Montgomery. It also provides opportunities for the current generation to discover jazz greats who didn’t attain comparable levels of public awareness. Guitarist Emily Remler eminently deserves appreciation …

One would expect a jazz master like Delfeayo Marsalis to spread his influence beyond the borders of his hometown, New Orleans, to capture the world’s attention, as have his brothers Branford, Wynton, and Jason. As has had jazz itself. When in the nineteenth century Louis Armstrong and other New Orleans …

Appropriately released during the college football season, the Visions Jazz Ensemble’s Across the Field re-imagines 13 college fight songs traditionally performed by college and university marching bands. No doubt, many of the members of these marching bands—and members of many many others throughout the country who take to the fields …

Michael Sarian is a musician who has continued to evolve artistically throughout not only his career, but also throughout his life. Ultimately, the explorative jazz musicians—such as Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, and Herbie Hancock, for example—compiled/compile discographies that, from beginning to end, documented/document never-ending …

Despite numerous challenges, big-band jazz continues to offer original compositions, rewarding musical experiences, and exciting recordings. The transition from dance-hall big bands of the thirties and forties started with the introduction of advanced harmonies, flowing lines of rhythm, more muted hues, longer thematic compositions, and Impressionistic influences by forward-thinking leaders …

Ordinarily, I don’t use words to describe a musician’s physical appearance. My assignment is to describe the elements and the quality of the universally inspiring art form of music, the potentially eternal purity of which exists at a level higher than the finite characteristics of the human body. However, Orrin …