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Jazz/Blues

Bluegrass Pioneer Jake Schepps Releases New Album 'Entwined' with Matt Flinner, Marc Mellits, Matt McBane and Gyan Riley; to Play Show at SubCulture in February

Jake Schepps, banjo pioneer and trailblazer in the contemporary bluegrass scene, will release his latest album "Entwined" Jan. 27, to be performed live on his North American tour.The latest album will features bold, new work by ingenious classical composers written for the quintessential bluegrass combo of banjo, mandolin, guitar, violin and bass and will be performed at an intimate evening show at Subculture in New York City Feb. 4. The show will highlight the album’s all-acoustic work by Schepps from contemporary-classical composers Marc Mellits, Matt McBane and Gyan Riley, as well as mandolinist-composer Matt Flinner.Schepps reached out to musicians who have compelled him in the hopes that "Entwined" would make a big statement. The musicians all responded in their own unique ways.Mellits’s reckless and highly rhythmic eight-part Flatiron and McBane’s five-movement Drawn translates traditional bluegrass instrumentation into the age of electronica. Riley’s Stumble Smooth combines free jazz, bluegrass, gypsy music and jagged modernism, which Schepps calls “the burliest piece of music I’ve ever worked on in my life.” Flinner rounds out the group with bluegrass-infused, classically-inspired modernism. The result is an album with beautiful Appalachian tones but also bold, thrilling, new textures.
By Jaime Prisco

  • Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra Presents 'Birth of the American Orchestra' with Wynton Marsalis: Includes Music by Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, Don Redman and More

    Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra will present a pair of concerts exploring the "Birth of the American Orchestra" Jan. 9 and 10 at the Frederick P. Rose Hall, home of Jazz at Lincoln Center, in New York City.Bebop pioneer Dizzy Gillespie once told JALC’s managing and artistic director Marsalis something that would forever change his perception of big bands: "One should not consider it an achievement to lose one's orchestral tradition.”According to the Lincoln Center website, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis delves into this American phenomenon through the syncopated dance beats of New Orleans, innovative ensemble virtuosity and the monumentality of swing and the blues. They will also explore the roles of orchestral instrumentation and the expansion of harmonic prospects, the evolution of the rhythm section and the distinctiveness of the master composers and arrangers involved.This show is partly inspired by Marsalis’s September 2013 Harvard University lecture "Setting the Communal Table: The Evolution of the Jazz Orchestra.”The JLCO is expected to perform the music of Don Redman, Fletcher Henderson, Bill Challis, Duke Ellington, Benny Carter, Eddie Durham, Chico O’Farrill and Gil Fuller. These jazz architects, along with Gillespie’s mantra, are the foundation of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra — an orchestra with an astonishing concentration of talented musicians and a collective regarded as the “finest big band in the world today,” said the website.
    By Jaime Prisco

  • New Ornette Coleman Album, 'New Vocabulary,' Features New Talents and a New Space for the Alto Sax Player

    A new Ornette Coleman album is definitely news worth making note of. The 84-year-old alto sax player and jazz innovator is set to participate on the new disc New Vocabulary, which features fresh material dating back to 2009.
    By Ian Holubiak