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"We play all kinds of music," says Jonathan Batiste, seated at the piano of Moldy Fig, a smartly renovated Lower East Side jazz club. The place is named for so-called jazz...
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For decades, the term "New York jazz festival" was defined by George Wein. His Festival Productions began its storied Manhattan run in 1972, and quickly established an...
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Near the end of Donald Harrison Jr.’s Congo Square Stage set on the opening Friday of this year’s New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, after the saxophonist segued...
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When the steel door to Kennedy Airport’s Gate 8 slammed shut, Arturo O’Farrill was on the wrong side. With his wife, sons, and mother in tow one Monday in December,...
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"I guess people are going to do whatever they're going to do," Sonny Rollins tells me over the phone. "Say whatever they're going to say as loud as they want to say it, even...
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In a New York June filled with jazz festivals, the sincerest sound was silence. Ten minutes of it, at the Abrons Arts Center, halfway into the Vision Festival, to honor tenor...
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On a recent Wednesday night, 19 musicians fit snugly into the far end of the FB Lounge on 106th Street, just off Third Avenue in Harlem. Trombone slides abutted one wall; a...
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'Price was twelve, bruh.'
'Say bruh. Them twelve hundred was for eight pieces.'
A deal's going down, yeah. But not the sort we're used to witnessing between black men on a...
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The large, multicolored image hanging high above the Abrons Arts Center stage to commemorate the 14th annual Vision Festival looked like a fish when viewed from the right....
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New Orleans inspires even inveterate Twitterers and Facebook correspondents to release their thumbs and touch real life. Except the guy at the bar of a club called DBA one...
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When Juan de Marcos González brings his 14-piece Afro-Cuban All-Stars to Town Hall on March 28, they'll include residents of eight countries, from Mexico to Sweden,...
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Why not hit a jazz club or two on Election Day, especially when you're rooting for the first black man to make a serious run at the presidency—a guy who still puts up a...
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Before the presidential campaign devolved into a Sarah Palin literacy course, there was this idea, promoted by McCain's handlers and stolen in fact from Hillary Clinton's...
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Back in May of 2007, Irma Thomas gave a gripping performance at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. She'd been "camping out," as she put it, in her mostly renovated...
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Kidd Jordan felt something stir deep down inside. He just had to let it out. That's the way the tenor saxophonist explained it during a Vision Festival pre-concert discussion...
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"This record ain't mad as it coulda been," Dr. John told me recently, sitting in his Harlem office. Fan-pleasing funky grooves aside, City That Care Forgot seems angry...
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"It's amazing how much joy and hope these beads and feathers bring."
The Sunday before Mardi Gras in New Orleans, Donald Harrison Jr., Big Chief of the Congo Nation, son of...
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The white sneaker on the left foot of Bennie Pete, tuba player and leader of the Hot 8 Brass Band, carries an inscription: "Brooklyn in Da House." Spike Lee scrawled it, less...
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It's been more than 20 years since Antoine "Fats" Domino traveled to New York as an inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's inaugural class. It's been nearly 60 since...
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My jam-band friends returned from the String Cheese Incident's Beacon Theater shows in July singing the praises of "that guy from New Orleans" who stepped onstage with a...
