Dizzy’s Club first opened in 2004, which for a jazz club is an impressively long time ago to still be around. Soon after it opened, Sherrie Maricle brought her big band, The DIVA Jazz Orchestra, into Dizzy’s. This year, from March 30 to April 2, the band will make its annual appearance there to celebrate its 30th anniversary, also an impressively long time to still be around. The leader has three reasons why she is especially fond of this gig: “It’s a small setting, very intimate where the band is close and tight to each other and the audience. When I was young and heard big bands like Buddy ..read more

As a bassist, Kenny Davis has played and recorded with some jazz giants such as vocalist Cassandra Wilson, pianist Geri Allen, and flugelhornist Art Farmer. He performed on Wilson’s 1993 Grammy Award-winning Blue Note album, Blue Light Til Dawn. On Allen’s 2010 Motema album, Geri Allen & Timeline Live, John Fordham of The Guardian praised Davis’ “warm bass variations” on a medley of George Gershwin’s Embraceable You and Lover Man (Jimmy Davis/Roger ‘Ram’ Ramirez/James Sherman).  Davis appeared on three Arabesque Farmer albums: The Company I Keep, with Tom Harrell (1994), The Meaning ..read more

NEA Jazz Master Wayne Shorter died March 2, 2023, in Los Angeles at the age 89. A member of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers in the 1950s and Miles Davis’ quintet in the ‘60s, Shorter won 12 Grammy Awards, was a Kennedy Center honoree, was named to the DownBeat Hall of Fame, and was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Thelonius Monk Institute of Jazz and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. A detailed look at his life and career will appear in the April issue of Jersey Jazz Magazine. The post Wayne Shorter, 1933-2023 appeared first on New Jersey Jazz Society ..read more

When Kenny Brawner was about 13 years old, growing up in Augusta, GA, he heard Ray Charles on the radio. His two favorite albums are Ray Charles at Newport, from his 1958 appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival; and Ray Charles in Person, recorded live at Morris Brown College in Atlanta in 1959. Both were on the Atlantic label. Since then, Brawner has been captivated by the music of Ray Charles. “When I was at Howard University,” he recalled, “there was a piano in one of the common rooms of my freshman dormitory. I would just sit and play Ray Charles’ music. The guys that came around starte ..read more

Stanley Clarke transformed the electric bass from its accompanying role and showed the world its possibilities as a solo instrument. He is also a virtuosic double bass player and an accomplished film composer. Clarke is a five-time Grammy winner, with 15 nominations. Three of his Grammys were for his solo efforts, one for the Stanley Clarke Band, and one with the groundbreaking, Return to Forever band, for which he was a founding member. In April of last year, he was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master (Jersey Jazz, March 2022)               ..read more

There are lots of familiar names among the local winners in the 15th annual Charles Mingus High School Competition & Festival, held February 18-19 at The New School of Jazz and Contemporary Music in New York. Among the Outstanding Soloists: Combo Categories were three student musicians who appeared at the New Jersey Jazz Society’s Jersey Jazz LIVE! concert in August: Ginger Meyer, Mendham, alto saxophone; Alvaro Caravaca, Mount Olive, trumpet; and Mecadon McCune, Newark, drums. (See photo above of Caravaca (at the piano) and Meyer. The fourth member of the quartet that played that day ..read more

There are certain performers who take themed shows to a special level thanks to their assiduous research about and emotional involvement with their subject.  Melissa Errico attained that with her February 10-14 Birdland Theater show based on her recent highly acclaimed album, Out of the Dark: The Film Noir Project (Three Graces Music: 2022). Errico’s commentary gave her audience background on the concept of film noir, the feelings that the darkness of the story lines evoke, how it translates into life experiences, and why it had an attraction for her.  She selected songs, some fro ..read more

Vocalist Jazzmeia Horn’s Empress Legacy album, Dear Love, was the Number 1 recording on JazzWeek’s 2022 Year End chart. It spent 25 weeks on the chart, peaking, of course, at Number 1.  Horn was one of the performers in the 2021 return to Princeton of the McCarter Theater’s Jazz in June festival (Jersey Jazz, June 2021). This was the last festival produced by Bill Lockwood, McCarter’s Director of Special Programming, who has retired; and it was Horn’s first appearance at Jazz in June. “In terms of singers,” Lockwood told Jersey Jazz’s Schaen Fox, Horn “covers the waterfront from El ..read more

On the Cover: Milt Jackson, Chuck Redd, Gary Burton, Warren Wolf  ARTICLES/REVIEWS Jazz Education: NJJS Scholarship; Jersey Jazz LIVE! Sarah Partridge; Jazz History: Milt Jackson; Jazz at Smoke: Billy Harper; Suncoast Jazz Festival; Jazz Education: The New School; Rising Star: Anthony Ware; Big Band in the Sky.   COLUMNS All That’s Jazz; Editor’s Choice; Dan’s Den; Not Without You.   VIEW DIGITAL ISSUE      The post January 2023 appeared first on New Jersey Jazz Society ..read more

When Kenny Brawner was about 13 years old, growing up in Augusta, GA, he heard Ray Charles on the radio. His two favorite albums are Ray Charles at Newport, from his 1958 appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival; and Ray Charles in Person, recorded live at Morris Brown College in Atlanta in 1959. Both were on the Atlantic label. Since then, Brawner has been captivated by the music of Ray Charles. “When I was at Howard University,” he recalled, “there was a piano in one of the common rooms of my freshman dormitory. I would just sit and play Ray Charles’ music. The guys that came around starte ..read more