In talking to Qwest TV, Carla Bley laughs a lot as she sifts through some of her significant historical moments of melody-making and free improvisations and even dredges up a memory that she has never talked about before.
In the festival’s 40th anniversary year, both Ménard and Simard are retiring from active roles in rallying the party. Qwest TV spoke with Ménard about the festival’s history, his role as artistic director and what his highlights were.
Saxophonist Branford Marsalis doesn’t mince words. He tells Qwest TV all about The Secret Between The Shadow and the Soul, the newest album by his 30-year-old quartet.
Wadada Leo Smith salutes Civil Rights hero Rosa Parks, questions the word improvisation in jazz, and discusses bad soup.
Chick Corea is Qwest TV's guest of the month. Here is a selection of eight must-listen albums of his long and rich career.
Celebrating the iconic composer, arranger, bandleader, pianist Carla Bley, the trio album Around Again fascinates as a quiet beauty of playful mystery and soulful contemplation.
The longtime rising star of the drums in critics' polls has become a bona fide, go-to drum maestro who’s in the midst of a creative bonanza of music. The leader of her adventurous ten-year-old ensemble, Boom Tic Boom, Allison Miller doesn’t flinch at the assessment. “We’re jazz people,” she says. “We’re in the moment.”
They made our year! Here is a shortlist of the albums chosen by Qwest TV's journalists amongst the best releases of 2018.
There’s no keeping Joe Lovano idle on the recording front. After nearly three decades as the preeminent star on Blue Note Records, the tenor saxophonist has found a new home at ECM Records as a leader with Trio Tapestry, a sensitively lyrical interplay with pianist Marilyn Crispell and his longtime colleague drummer Carmen Castaldi.
From the first measures on pianist/keyboardist James Francies’ spirited Blue Note Records debut album, Flight, you sense there is something atypical about to unfold. There’s nothing predictable the rest of the way—straight-up lyrical beauties, r&b drives and three divergent vocal tracks—which is what the 23-year-old Houston-born leader wanted his first album to achieve.
