Marcia Ball is a piano-playing neck-breaker from Orange, Texas, who tickles the ivories in a raucous barrelhouse style. Her voice has just enough of that roadhouse weariness to make her all the more enchanting and legit as her band summons the crowd with its boss back beat and shuffle. But Ball isn’t boastful when it […]
Artist Feature
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Featured Artist: Manuel Valera
Manuel Valera is a tough man to get a hold of. When I finally caught up with him by phone, he had just returned to his home in New York City on a red-eye flight from the West Coast. But he didn’t have a lot of time: he was getting ready to leave later that […]
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Featured Artist: Donny McCaslin
When Donny McCaslin went to parties as a teenager in the early 1980’s, there was one record that was sure to be played: “Let’s Dance” by David Bowie. “I especially liked ‘Modern Love’ and ‘China Girl,’” says McCaslin of two of the album’s most popular songs. “I always describe it as the soundtrack of my […]
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Featured Artist: Binker and Moses
It seems to me that the jazz greats — the truly great ones, like Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, et al. — have elements to their sound that are there to confound for the listener’s own betterment. And it seems the more you train your ear in the direction of these passages, the more you begin […]
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Featured Artist: Tierney Sutton
When Tierney Sutton was a junior in high school, she performed a disco song in her school’s talent contest. Her dad was in the audience and, Sutton recalls, he had some advice for her: “You shouldn’t sing that crap,” he said. “You should sing Gershwin.” So, in her senior year, Sutton sang George and Ira […]
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Featured Artist: Barbra Lica
Toronto chanteuse Barbra Lica serves up vocal jazz that effortlessly shifts from seriously sensuous to quirky and Lauper-esque charming. Lica’s delicate phrasing offers a promise as if she’s unwrapping a sweet gift, slowly revealing the song to the audience. Her voice, the way she works in and out of a song, and her sense of […]
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Featured Artist: Holophonor
Spoiler alert: there will be no holophonor on stage when the group of the same name performs at the Xerox Rochester International Jazz Festival. Viewers of the television show “Futurama” may be disappointed, but lovers of progressive jazz will be just fine. In “Futurama,” a holophonor is a 31st century musical instrument akin to an […]
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Featured Artist: Miguel Zenon
Growing up in a working class family in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Miguel Zenón was studying classical saxophone at a performing arts high school when his world suddenly opened up. “My friends were passing around tapes of Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane, and I became really interested in improvisation,” Zenón says. “Up to […]
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Featured Artist: Postmodern Jukebox
Have you ever caught yourself in mid-dance gesticulation thinking something like “If only this music had a little swing to it?” The hoi polloi likes its pop, its accessibility, and its simple fun. But what if there was one band to scratch both itches? Postmodern Jukebox is that band. Postmodern Jukebox is your band. Formed […]
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Davina and The Vagabonds
Proving that rock ‘n’ roll can still thoroughly thrive without the guitar, Davina and The Vagabonds lay it down with a vintage instrumentation — piano, horns, bass, and drums —and hi-tone retro ambition.
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Junior Brown
Junior Brown’s playing is a hybrid blur of chicken pickin’ prestidigitation and salaciously slick slide. It’s as if he was channeling Jimmy Bryant and Speedy West simultaneously and couldn’t decide which one to pick. Flummoxed by the dilemma, Brown came up with an instrument that can do both — an instrument that can be played […]
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John Abercrombie
Fusion music didn’t exist when guitarist John Abercrombie plied his craft at a Boston supper club in the late 1960’s.
