StLJN Saturday Video Showcase: Winter/spring 2017 jazz preview, part five

Today, it's time to wrap up StLJN's winter/spring 2017 jazz preview with the fifth installment in the series, which features videos of jazz and creative music performers who are coming to St. Louis over the next few months. The posts cover those acts in chronological order, and if you've missed earlier installments, you can catch up by clicking through to parts one, two, three and four.

Picking up in April, today's chapter begins with the musicians performing at the 2017 Greater St. Louis Jazz Festival, the public portions of which will be held Friday, April 21 and Saturday, April 22 at the Touhill Performing Arts Center.

This year's GSLJF will feature trumpeter Terell Stafford and trombonist Wycliffe Gordon playing with the UMSL Jazz Ensemble on Friday, and trumpeter Jon Faddis and friends "Celebrating the 100th Anniversary of Dizzy Gillespie" on Saturday.

In the first clip up above, you can see Stafford playing flugelhorn on the ballad "Everything Happens To Me" as recorded last March in the studios of KNKX radio in Tacoma, WA.

After the jump, the second clip features Gordon singing and soloing on Fats Waller's "Honeysuckle Rose" at the 2015 New York Hot Jazz Festival, with help from clarinetist Adrian Cunningham, drummer Alvin Atkinson Jr, bassist Jennifer Vincent, and pianist Ehud Asherie.

Below that, you can see Faddis featured with pianist Mike Longo's big band, playing Longo's arrangement of "A Night in Tunisia" as part of an event commemorating Dizzy Gillespie's birthday in November 2015 at the NYC Baha'i Center.

The week after the GSLJF, the SFJAZZ Collective will return for a series of performances starting Wednesday, April 26 through Saturday, April 29 at Jazz at the Bistro.

The Collective each year features new arrangements of music from a single composer, and this season, they're spotlighting the works of Miles Davis, which should prove to be a strong audience draw pretty much everywhere, but especially so here in St. Louis.

To get an idea of how they're approaching Davis's music, check out the next video featuring trumpeter Sean Jones' arrangement of "So What" as performed last October at the SFJAZZ Center in San Francisco. In addition to Jones, the current lineup of the Collective includes alto saxophonist Miguel Zenon, tenor saxophonist David Sanchez, trombonist Robin Eubanks, vibraphonist Warren Wolf, pianist Edward Simon, bassist Matt Penman and drummer Obed Calvaire.

A couple of weeks later, organist Joey DeFrancesco, will be performing starting Wednesday, May 10 through Saturday, May 13 at the Bistro. DeFrancesco is seen today's fifth clip with guitarist Dan Wilson and drummer Jason Brown playing a full set recorded in August 2016 at Dizzy's Club in NYC's Jazz at Lincoln Center.

Next up, it's bassist Christian McBride, who's bringing his New Jawn Quartet here to play Wednesday, May 24 through Saturday, May 27 at the Bistro. With trumpeter Josh Evans, saxophonist Marcus Strickland, drummer Nasheet Waits but no pianist, guitarist or vibraphonist to fill out the ensemble, this group represents something of a new sound for McBride, but unfortunately, they're so new that there doesn't seem to any representative video of them online as of yet.

They're playing the Village Vanguard next week, so perhaps some video of that will surface before spring, but in the meantime, in the penultimate clip you can check out McBride's trio, which played the Bistro last year, performing "Sand Dune" in a session last July at KNKX radio.

Today's final video features singer, pianist and occasional guitarist Norah Jones, who will be coming to St. Louis for a concert on Tuesday, June 6 at the Peabody Opera House. Jones' most recent album Day Breaks offered something of a return to the jazz-oriented sound with which she began her career, including a version of Horace Silver's composition "Peace" that she performed in December on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

That finishes StLJN's 2017 winter/spring jazz preview, though if any future performances of interest subsequently are announced, you'll find the news here. You can see the rest of today's videos after the jump...