* Organizers of the Nevermore Jazz Ball have announced the event's dates for 2018. The annual celebration of swing dancing and music will take place from Thursday, November 1 through Sunday, November 4 at various venues around town, with tickets going on sale on a date this summer TBA.
* North County is getting a new musical instrument store in a familiar location, as Low Key Music will open next Monday, April 9 at 6235 N. Lindbergh, the former site of Dale's Music. The store's Facebook page also has announced an "open house" for musicians and band directors from 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. tomorrow (Saturday, April 7).
* Voting is now open for the next group of prospective inductees to Jazz at Lincoln Center's Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame, and one of this year's 10 nominees has a local connection. That would be the innovative bassist Jimmy Blanton, who gained fame playing with Duke Ellington's orchestra before his tragic death from tuberculosis at age 23. Blanton's very first professional job was in St. Louis, playing with the Jeter-Pillars Orchestra for a year before joining Ellington.
You can see the whole list of nominated musicians and cast your vote here. Voting ends at 11:59 p.m. EDT on Saturday, April 28, and the three nominees who receive the most votes will be inducted in 2018.
* Keyboardist and Metro East native David Garfield, best known for his work with guitarist and singer George Benson, has a new tune on, of all places, the country charts. According to a press release, “I Lied,” a "power pop" ballad written by Garfield with Motown's Smokey Robinson and sung by vocalist J. Paris, has reached No. 60 on the Music Row singles chart this week and gained New & Active status on the Billboard Indicator chart. The song will appear on Garfield’s upcoming album Vox Outside the Box, release date TBA.
It's a busy week for live jazz and creative music in St. Louis, with performances in styles ranging from cabaret to vintage jazz to fusion to experimental intermedia and beyond.
Let's go to the highlights...
Wednesday, April 4
Singer, actor and St. Louis native Ken Page, now living back in his hometown after a distinguished career on Broadway and in film, will perform his cabaret show for the first of two nights at Jazz at the Bistro .
Page (pictured, top left), whose resume includes the original casts of Ain't Misbehavin' and Cats, will be making his debut at the Bistro with these shows, and the demand for tickets should be high, so advance reservations are strongly suggested.
Also on Wednesday, the weekly "Grand Center Jazz Crawl" features saxophonist Austin Cebulski and guitarist Tom Byrne at The Stage at KDHX; the jam session led by bassist Bob DeBoo at the Kranzberg Arts Center; and trumpeter Kasimu Taylor's band at The Dark Room.
Friday, April 6
DrummerAllison Miller, trumpeter Riley Mulherkar and saxophonist Chad Lefkowitz-Brown wrap up a week-long educational residency for Jazz St. Louis with the first of two evenings of performances at Jazz at the Bistro. (As with past occasions when JSL has assembled an ad hoc band from among visiting clinicians, the three NYC-based musicians presumably will be supported by local players on bass and piano or guitar, but as of this writing Jazz St. Louis hasn't shared any information as to who they'll be.)
Tuesday, April 10
Clarinetist Anat Cohen brings her Tentet to McKendree University's Hettenhausen Center for the Arts in Lebanon, IL (which, for those contemplating the drive, is roughly the same distance from the Gateway Arch as Chesterfield.)
For more jazz-related events in and around St. Louis, please visit the St. Louis Jazz Notes Calendar, which can be found on the left sidebar of the site or by clicking here. You also can keep up with all the latest news by following St. Louis Jazz Notes on Twitter at http://twitter.com/StLJazzNotes or clicking the "Like" icon on the StLJN Facebook page.
(If you have calendar items, band schedule information, news tips, links, or anything else you think may be of interest to StLJN's readers, please email the information to stljazznotes (at) yahoo (dot) com. If you have photos, MP3s or other digital files, please send links, not attachments.)
This week, StLJN's winter/spring 2018 jazz preview continues with part five in a series of posts featuring videos of jazz and creative music performers who will be coming to St. Louis in the first few months of the new year. (If you missed the previous installments, you can see part one here, part two here, part three here, and part four here.)
Continuing in chronological order from where last week's post left off, the first video up above features singer and St. Louis native Ken Page, the St. Louis native and star of Broadway and film who will bringing his cabaret act to Jazz at the Bistro on Wednesday, April 4 and Thursday, April 5. Page, who's known for his roles in the original casts of musical theater megahits such as Ain't Misbehavin' and Cats, as well as for his voice characterization of Oogie Boogie in Tim Burton's animated film The Nightmare Before Christmas, is seen here in a demo reel compiled to showcase his talents for potential bookings.
Page will be followed on the Bistro stage by drummer Allison Miller, trumpeter Riley Mulherkar and saxophonist Chad Lefkowitz-Brown, who will be in town that week to do an educational residency for Jazz St. Louis and will cap it with performances on Friday, April 6 and Saturday, April 7 at the Bistro.
As with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Group that's here this week at the Bistro, Miller, Mulherkar and Lefkowitz-Brown (and presumably a local support musician or two) will be joining forces specifically for this gig, so the only available footage to show you is of them performing individually.
Miller can be seen in the first video after the jump with her band Boom Tic Boom, performing "Fuster," the opening track from their album Otis Was a Polar Bear, at a gig in May 2016 in Philadelphia. (Along with the leader on drums, Boom Tic Boom includes pianist Myra Melford, violinist Jenny Scheinman, cornetist Kirk Knuffke, clarinetist Ben Goldberg, and bassist Todd Sickafoose.)
After that, you can see Mulherkar playing Duke Ellington's "Echoes of Harlem" in a jam session last April at the Kranzberg Arts Center right here in St. Louis, accompanied by bassist Bob DeBoo and drummer Montez Coleman, followed by a clip of Lefkowitz-Brown playing Charlie Parker's "Yardbird Suite" with his quartet, which includes Takeshi Ohbayashi on piano, Tamir Shmerling on bass, and Bryan Carter on drums.
Next up at the Bistro will be "Songs of Freedom," a show developed by drummer Ulysses Owens, Jr that will be performed by a group led by him and featuring vocalists Alicia Olatuja and Joanna Majoko starting Wednesday, April 11 and continuing through Saturday, April 14 at the Bistro.
First presented at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City, "Songs of Freedom" is based on the music of what the promotional copy calls "three iconic voices of the 1960s--Joni Mitchell, Abbey Lincoln and Nina Simone--and the complex ways in which they call out to each other."
Unfortunately, none of the previous performances seem to have been recorded on video and put online, so instead in today's fourth clip you can see a full set of Owens leading a band with bassist Reuben Rogers, vibraphonist Joel Ross, and singer Vuyo Sotashe last August as Dizzy's Club in NYC.
That's followed by a clip of Majoko singing "Bye Bye Blackbird" recorded a couple of years ago at UMFM studios in Winnipeg, MB, Canada, accompanied by Jocelyn Gould (guitar), Carter Graham (keyboard), Karl Kohut (bass), and Curtis Nowosad (drums). (St. Louis native Olatuja can be seen in last week's post, which previewed, among others, her solo shows in February at the Bistro.)
The same night that Owens and company wrap up at the Bistro, pianist Abdullah Ibrahim and his band Ekaya will be in town to perform on Saturday, April 14 at the Sheldon Concert Hall.
Ibrahim originally was scheduled to be joined by trumpeter Hugh Masekela for a program recounting the history of the Jazz Epistles, South Africa's first bebop band, of which both men were members.
However, Masekela's health issues have caused him to cancel all his live shows for the first part of 2018, so as of this writing, the concert is still set to go on, but no replacement trumpeter has been announced yet.
It was announced this past week that the estimable Wadada Leo Smith will be performing with Ibrahim for dates next month at SFJAZZ in San Francisco, which ought to make for a very interesting collaboration. And Ibrahim has worked with some other very capable trumpeters, too, as in the next clip, which shows him and Ekaya plus special guest Terence Blanchard in a full set recorded last July at the Jazzaldia festival in Donosti, Spain.
The One O'Clock Lab Band, which is UNT's top student ensemble, can be seen in the penultimate clip performing "Harlem Nocturne" in a show last November on campus. That's followed by a video of a full show from the Big Phat Band, recorded in November 2015 at the Los Angeles College of Music.
Look for part six of StLJN's winter/spring 2018 jazz preview next week in this space. You can see the rest of today's videos after the jump...
* The deadline for applications for Regional Arts Commission's Artist Support Grants for this year is Thursday, October 12. RAC is presenting a free workshop on how to apply on Monday, October 2; for more on that, and details on the grant program, go to https://racstl.org/grant/artists-support-grants/.
* Composer and flute player Fred Tompkins is offering free downloadable and streamable music, both previously unreleased and from his back catalog, via a new Bandcamp page.
* The Gateway Jazz Festival, a day-long smooth jazz event that debuted this July at Chesterfield Amphitheater, has announced a date for 2018. The fest will return for a second year on Saturday, July 21, 2018, and discounted "early bird" tickets are on sale now at http://www.gatewayjazzfest.com/.
* The Riverfront Times' annual "Best of St. Louis" issue is out this week, and the winners in the annual Readers' Choice poll include the Broadway Oyster Bar for "Best Restaurant" and Record Exchange for "Best Record Store". You can see all the results of the RFT's Readers Choice poll here.
This week's calendar of live jazz and creative music events in St. Louis features a little cabaret, a little tap-dancing, a tribute to one of the most influential drummers and bandleaders in jazz, and more. Let's go to the highlights...
Wednesday, September 27
Singer and actor Kyle Dean Massey, a Missouri State University graduate who's appeared on Broadway and in ABC-TV's show Nashville, performs a cabaret-style show for the first of two nights at Jazz at the Bistro.
Also on Wednesday, violinist Alex Cunningham performs music from his latest release atop a bill of experimental and improvisational musicians at Foam.
Friday, September 29
Montez Coleman, saxophonist Ben Reece, trumpeter Danny Campbell, bassist Bob DeBoo and pianist Adam Maness will join forces at Jazz at the Bistro for the first of two nights of "The Art of Blakey," paying tribute to the hard bop sound of the legendary drummer/bandleader and his Jazz Messengers.
Saturday, September 30
Dance St. Louis kicks off its 2017-18 season with the first of two performances of "TAP Dynamics" at the Grandel Theatre. The show features dancers Jason Samuels Smith, Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards, and Derick K. Grant performing with a live jazz trio - music director and drummer Allison Miller(pictured, top left), pianist Carmen Staaf and bassist Noah Garabedian - playing original music and "favorite selections from Miles Davis." The program repeats on Sunday afternoon.
For more jazz-related events in and around St. Louis, please visit the St. Louis Jazz Notes Calendar, which can be found on the left sidebar of the site or by clicking here. You also can keep up with all the latest news by following St. Louis Jazz Notes on Twitter at http://twitter.com/StLJazzNotes or clicking the "Like" icon on the StLJN Facebook page.
(If you have calendar items, band schedule information, news tips, links, or anything else you think may be of interest to StLJN's readers, please email the information to stljazznotes (at) yahoo (dot) com. If you have photos, MP3s or other digital files, please send links, not attachments.)
