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2 weeks ago | 
downbeat.com | Phillip Lutz
By Phillip Lutz I Apr. 8, 2025 On Tuesday, April 8, tenor saxophonist Javon Jackson will bring to the Village Vanguard a tribute to his late performing partner, poet Nikki Giovanni. For the Vanguard, it will recall a bygone era when the club, and many other spots throughout Greenwich Village, regularly served as venues where poets and jazz musicians mixed.
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3 weeks ago | 
downbeat.com | Phillip Lutz
News, Vijay Iyer, Wadada Leo Smith By I Apr. 1, 2025 On March 20, the night before the release of Defiant Life, the new Vijay Iyer-Wadada Leo Smith duo album from ECM, the label was throwing what their invitation termed a “private listening party” at Bang & Olufsen, the high-end electronics store on Madison Avenue in New York. Fully nine years had elapsed since the duo’s first release, A Cosmic Rhythm With Each Stroke.
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1 month ago | 
downbeat.com | Phillip Lutz
By Phillip Lutz I Feb. 25, 2025 In Brooklyn’s tight-knit community of socially committed musical improvisers, Amirtha Kidambi is a particularly compelling voice. As a singer and soldier in the fight against injustice, she has collaborated closely with such stalwarts of the movement as Muhal Richard Abrams and William Parker. Her own protest group, Elder Ones, has won acclaim.
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Dec 16, 2024 | 
downbeat.com | Phillip Lutz
By Phillip Lutz I Dec. 17, 2024 Martial Solal, whose irrepressible wit and incomparable wizardry at the piano captivated and confounded listeners for 70 years — and who made an indelible mark in the world of film, having composed a suitably breathtaking score for director Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 debut, Breathless — died Dec. 12 at the age of 97.
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Nov 26, 2024 | 
downbeat.com | Phillip Lutz
By Phillip Lutz I Nov. 26, 2024 Art and activism have historically met through the medium of jazz. But rarely have those meetings yielded works that plumbed the depths of social despair with more emotional and intellectual complexity than Golden City, alto saxophonist Miguel Zenón’s disquieting disquisition on displacement in San Francisco.
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Nov 7, 2024 | 
downbeat.com | Phillip Lutz
Interview, From the Magazine, John McLaughlin By Phillip Lutz I Nov. 7, 2024 In the aftermath of World War II, the deprivations felt throughout the United Kingdom were particularly acute in John McLaughlin’s native Kirk Sandall, a tiny village in the north of England where a munitions factory that had dominated the local economy was struggling to reorient itself in peacetime. But to the 5-year-old McLaughlin, all that mattered little.
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Oct 22, 2024 | 
downbeat.com | Phillip Lutz
Interview, From the Magazine, Bill Charlap Trio By Phillip Lutz I Oct. 22, 2024 Hunched over a round table in the Algonquin Hotel — where, a century ago, New York’s reigning wits famously gathered — Bill Charlap, a modern-day musical wit out of Manhattan’s East Side, was thumbing through his photos. In just a few hours, he was due to play a date down 44th Street at Birdland. So he thumbed quickly.
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Aug 13, 2024 | 
downbeat.com | Phillip Lutz
Interview, From the Magazine, Ryan Truesdell By Phillip Lutz I Aug. 13, 2024 For more than a decade, Ryan Truesdell has been winning acclaim by excavating the lesser-known gems of big-band composer and arranger Gil Evans and presenting them to the public. So it was hardly a surprise that, as he took a break to chat amid a late-May run conducting Evans’ music at Birdland, he was in good spirits.
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Jun 25, 2024 | 
downbeat.com | Phillip Lutz
By Phillip Lutz I Jun. 25, 2024 On Oct. 8, 2022, Etienne Charles reopened Lincoln Center’s newly renovated David Geffen Hall with San Juan Hill, a lacerating new work he had written for the New York Philharmonic. The composition, a complex depiction of a culturally rich neighborhood displaced by a new cultural landmark, brilliantly integrated elements of Afro-Caribbean music with stride, swing, disco, funk — and more.
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May 29, 2024 | 
downbeat.com | Phillip Lutz
Live, From the Magazine, Stefon Harris By Phillip Lutz I May. 29, 2024 Seated on steeply inclined risers and packed in like sardines, a community of concertgoers gazes down expectantly, if less than comfortably, on a floor-level stage. Its wide expanse is eerily dark, save for the faint outline of unmanned musical instruments, a bank of digital hardware and a large movie screen on which the partial image of an otherworldly molten sphere brightly glows.
