New Orleanian musician Terence Blanchard is known for many things. Recently named a 2024 National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master and appointed the artistic director of SFJazz, Blanchard launched his career over 40 years ago as a member of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. He served as the band’s music director until 1986, then established himself as a bandleader. Meanwhile, he began to work in the world of film composition, famously providing the soundtracks to many of Spike Lee’s masterpieces. Through it all, Blanchard has steadily maintained his presence as a forceful musician and educator ..read more

From the outside, late on a Tuesday night, the downstairs of Whitlow’s DC looks like any other restaurant in town: fairly empty and quiet. Step inside, though, and you’ll hear the magic coming from above. This isn’t a speakeasy —  it’s something much better. Welcome to the Sonic Lifeline’s Jam Session at Whitlow’s DC, tucked discreetly into a second-floor space on the busy corner at 9th and U Streets NW. Once you walk upstairs, you enter a much different space than what greets you on the ground floor. The music and crowd are vibrant and energetic, with colorful LED’s illuminating the ..read more

Happy Jazz Appreciation Month! A key moment on the nation’s capital’s jazz calendar, JAM gives D.C. the chance to connect with its rich history of jazz and creative music, which have survived and eked out a strange, vital existence in the shadows of the halls of power for more than 100 years. This April, if you know where to look, you’ll find a moveable feast of music from across the “jazz” idiom served up throughout the city. You could kick off JAM by seeing D.C. saxophonist Antonio Parker’s tribute to hometown legend Andrew White at Blues Alley on April 3, part of a trio of shows co-presente ..read more

Rhizome DC, home base for the city’s DIY arts community, has announced plans to purchase an empty storefront in Shepherd Park, thanks in part to a large city grant. The news seemed to answer longstanding questions about the future of this precarious Takoma Park venue — but it comes with uncertainties of its own: namely, whether the venue’s supporters will be able to raise the remaining money it needs to buy the new home. The fate of Rhizome’s current Takoma Park location has been in limbo since 2020, when the building’s owners announced that a contract was in place to sell the building — and i ..read more

Jazz has always tended to be an unfortunately dude-centric vocation. Although women often appeared prominently as instrumentalists in New Orleans during the music’s early years, and while there have been standouts in the decades since — like Alice Coltrane, Mary Lou Williams and Esperanza Spalding — too few women have achieved success as jazz bandleaders performing original music. Women musicians have always populated the genre, but their male contemporaries tended to keep an iron grip on industry gateways, and soak up too much shine. There have been big changes in the past decade as young fem ..read more

The Kennedy Center’s Hip Hop & … Festival arrives this week with a series of remarkable sessions and concerts exploring the multifaceted intersections between hip-hop and jazz. Created in honor of the late Meghan Stabile, the genre-blurring impresario, who founded and ran the influential Revive Music Group in New York, continues in the flow of Stabile’s genius by connecting innovators and creatives under the broad aegis of jazz, hip hop and improvisation. “Meghan was a creative visionary,” said Simone Eccleston, the Kennedy Center’s director of Hip Hop Culture & Contemporary Music.&nbs ..read more

For the members of D.C.-based pyrotechnic rock trio the Messthetics and luminary tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis, the question was not “will” or “can” we collaborate, but “when?” As bassist Joe Lally put it in a recent conversation, “How could we not?” Made up of Lally and drummer Brendan Canty — both alumni of the legendary postpunk quartet Fugazi — along with guitar virtuoso Anthony Pirog, the Messthetics were already linked to the Brooklyn-based Lewis, via Pirog. The saxophonist and the guitarist had met as part of a group that was put together by the legendary drummer William Hooker ..read more

Artist. Producer. Educator. Author. Connector of dots. One man encompasses all this and more: KOKAYI, a virtuoso emcee who came up on D.C.’s underground hip-hop scene, collaborated with jazz royalty as far back as the ’90s, and has become one of the District’s standard-bearing creative voices. The CapitalBop team is psyched to announce that this legend-in-the-making will be headlining our first show of 2024, at Songbyrd Music House. KOKAYI is probably the only emcee today who’s a first-call collaborator with such a wide swath of jazz virtuosos: Terri Lyne Carrrington, Melvin Gibbs, Nate Smith ..read more

The DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities will put its support behind collecting the 2024 DC Area Music Census, a citywide canvass that aims to gather demographic data on the region’s various music professionals and artists. The commission will hold a launch event on Tuesday night for this year’s census at Songbyrd Music House in Northeast D.C. The 2024 canvass builds upon the 2019 DC Music Census, a combined effort of Georgetown University and the DC Office of Cable, Television, Film, Music and Entertainment (OCTFME), which gathered responses from over 2,500 musicians that year. The 2024 D ..read more

The DC Jazz Festival has announced headliners and other highlights for this coming September’s 20th-anniversary celebrations. Samara Joy, the 24-year-old phenom whose deep voice and fabulous command of the standards earns her constant comparisons to Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan, will be the lead headliner for the festival’s programming at the Wharf. This comes as a follow up to the “best new artist” Grammy-winning vocalist’s performance at last year’s DCJF, where she held down a primetime slot on the main pier stage on Sunday evening. The DCJF’s other big-name draws this September wi ..read more