Jazz this week: Kurt Elling, Nicole Mitchell, Lubambo, Alves & Ribeiro, and more

This week's calendar of live jazz and creative music in St. Louis brings sounds from all over, including two prominent performers who each got their start in Chicago, one who made his name on Broadway, and three coming from Brazil via NYC. Let's go to the highlights...

Wednesday, March 13
Singer Kurt Elling - one of the aforementioned Chicagoans, though he now lives in New York - performs for the first of five nights, continuing through Sunday at Jazz St. Louis.

Elling (pictured, top left) returns here for the first time since the release in 2018 of his most recent album The Questions, so it seems likely that a good portion of material from that recording will be part of his sets here. You can see videos of live performances of several of those tunes, and find out more about what Elling has been up to more recently, in this post from last Saturday.

Elsewhere around town, clarinetist and former St. Louisan Chloe Feoranzo, now residing in New Orleans, will be back in town for a concert with her quartet at Focal Point, and guitarist Brian Vaccaro leads a trio at Evangeline's.

Thursday, March 14
Pianist Jim Hegarty returns with his quintet to the The Dark Room; guitarist Dave Black and singer Erika Johnson perform at The Pat Connolly Tavern; and pianist Adam Maness' trio is back at Thurman's in Shaw.

Friday, March 15
Pianist, singer and Tony Award-winning musical theater composer Jason Robert Brown performs in concert at the Grandel Theatre; and the Original Knights of Swing play for dancers at Casa Loma Ballroom.

Saturday, March 16
Flute player and composer Nicole Mitchell’s Liberation Narratives, featuring poet Haki Madhubuti, performs in a concert presented by New Music Circle at Xavier Hall on the St. Louis University campus.

A composer and conceptualist with wide-ranging interests, Mitchell (pictured, bottom left) is a past president of Chicago's Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians and recently was appointed head of the jazz program at the University of Pittsburgh, succeeding the late Geri Allen.

Mitchell has been involved in a constantly evolving variety of musical projects over the years, with her latest collaboration with poet Haki Madhubuti offering "an unabashed take on the state of the nation" via her compositions and the poet's spoken word performances.  For a bit more about that, plus some videos of Mitchell performing in various contexts, see this post from a couple of Saturdays ago.

Elsewhere around town, pianist Peter Martin's Open Studio will present a concert of Brazilian jazz featuring guitarist Romero Lubambo, pianist Helio Alves, and drummer Edu Ribeiro, along with St. Louis' own Bob DeBoo on bass.

Also on Saturday, the Coleman Hughes Project celebrates six years as a band with a gig at Lowes Entertainment; and trumpeter Jim Manley and keyboardist Chris Swan will play at One 19 North Tapas & Wine Bar.

Sunday, March 17
Friends have organized a benefit for saxophonist Fred Walker, who no longer can perform due to recent health issues, for late Sunday afternoon at BB's Jazz, Blues & Soups, with announced performers including Walker's former band Mystic Voyage, saxophonist Kendrick Smith, blues singers Kim Massie, Eugene Johnson, and Lady J Huston, and more.

Monday, March 18
Pianist Carol Schmidt and saxophonist Paul DeMarinis will team up for a concert of duets at Winifred Moore Auditorium on the Webster University campus.

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.)

Jazz this week: Harry Connick Jr., St. Louis Cabaret Festival, Russell Gunn with Montez Coleman, and more

It's looking like a good week to get out and hear some live jazz and creative music in St. Louis, particularly for fans of vocalists.

With three headliners performing for the St. Louis Cabaret Festival, plus the opening of a locally produced show paying tribute to a legendary singer, plus the much-anticipated return of one of today's most popular crossover performers, and more, there are plenty of options from which to choose. Let's go to the highlights....

Wednesday, July 22
Marilyn Maye (pictured, top left), considered by many to be the grande dame of cabaret singers, begins the concert portion of the St. Louis Cabaret Festival with a performance of her show "Sinatra Her Way" at the Sheldon Concert Hall.

Produced by Cabaret Project of St. Louis, the festival is the performance portion of their annual St. Louis Cabaret Conference, and continues through Saturday night. You can find out more and see videos of Maye and the festival's other headliners in this post from last Saturday.

Also tonight, guitarist and singer Tommy Halloran's Guerrilla Swing will perform for the World Chess Hall of Fame's music series, and Dizzy Atmosphere returns to The Shaved Duck.

Thursday, July 23
The St. Louis Cabaret Festival continues with a performance by singer, songwriter and pianist Jason Robert Brown at the Sheldon, while a couple of blocks away at Jazz at the Bistro, Jazz St. Louis will be presenting "Swingin’ for the Fences: Big Bands & Baseball," the first in a series of three free events over the next two weeks highlighting the connections between jazz and baseball. 

Also in the Grand Center district, the tribute show "Sinatra at 100" with singer Joe Scalzitti and the St. Louis Big Band begins a three-week run at the Kranzberg Arts Center.

Elsewhere around town, the Wire Pilots will play a free concert for the Jazz at Holmes summer series at Washington University; Franglais returns to Howard's in Soulard; and singer Erin Bode will perform in a free outdoor concert at  Kirkwood Station Plaza in downtown Kirkwood.

Friday, July 24
It's an East St. Louis reunion in Grand Center, as trumpeter Russell Gunn (pictured, center left) comes back from his current home in Atlanta to join drummer and fellow Lincoln HS alum Montez Coleman and his group for a weekend of shows at Jazz at the Bistro.

While Gunn's recent album Electric Butterfly showed a heavy rock influence, with songs built on distorted, riffing guitars, the musical menu for this weekend's collaboration with Coleman remains undisclosed, as Jazz St. Louis' promo for the show has been light on specifics. But regardless of whether they're playing Gunn's funk and rock-oriented material, swinging jazz, or a mix, the gig definitely should be worth hearing.

Also on Friday, the Cabaret Festivial continues with a performance by Christine Ebersole at the Sheldon Concert Hall, and pianist Carolbeth True, her band Two Times True and singer Christi John Bye will play a concert at St. Peter's United Church of Christ in Ferguson.

Elsewhere around town, singer Joe Mancuso leads a quartet at Nathalie's; Wack-A-Doo will play swing, hot jazz and Americana at Thurman Grill; and the Original Knights of Swing perform for dancers at the Casa Loma Ballroom

Saturday, July 25
The St. Louis Cabaret Festival wraps up with a showcase for Cabaret Conference participants at the Kranzberg Arts Center; Miss Jubilee plays for dancers at Casa Loma Ballroom; and saxophonist Tim Cunningham will be at Troy's Jazz Gallery.

Sunday, July 26
Gaslight Square veterans Trio Trés Bien emerge for a rare public live performance, joined by singer Danita Mumphard for a free outdoor concert at Ivory Perry Park, 800 N. Belt.

Monday, July 27
"Blind" Willie Dineen and the Broadway Collective are back for their regular monthly gig at BB's Jazz, Blues & Soups.

Tuesday, July 28
Singer and pianist Harry Connick Jr. returns to St. Louis to perform at the Peabody Opera House. The New Orleans native (pictured, lower left), who has enjoyed wide attention the past couple of years as a celebrity judge on TV's American Idol, released his most recent album Every Man Should Know back in 2013.

He last performed here in March 2014 as headliner for Variety's "Dinner With The Stars," also at the Peabody, and though that gig was well-received by all accounts, no doubt fans will be looking forward this time to the full-length version of his touring show.

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.)

Music Education Monday: Songwriting with Jason Robert Brown, and more

This week's St. Louis Cabaret Conference includes a number of workshops and master classes presented by visiting artists, some of whom also will be performing in public concerts later in the week.

One of those visitors is Tony Award winning Broadway songwriter, singer and pianist Jason Robert Brown (pictured), best known for his scores for the musicals Parade, The Last Five Years, The Bridges of Madison County, and others.

Registration for the educational part of the conference is closed - concert tickets are still on sale here - but thanks to a video produced by The Dramatists Guild of America, you can see a master class in songwriting from Brown for free via the embedded YouTube player below.

Note that though a lot of what he says pertains to songs with lyrics, and more specifically Broadway songs, much of it also can be applied to instrumental compositions. And from a jazz musician's perspective, it's worth remembering that Broadway shows were the original sources for much of what has come to be known as "The Great American Songbook," and a better understanding of their construction can have plenty of benefits for instrumentalists and vocalists alike.

If you're looking for more on the craft, the website Coursera has a free online course in songwriting, taught by Berklee College of Music professor Pat Pattison. The class has six units, totaling nearly 15 hours of instruction, and to access the material, all you have to do is create a free Coursera account (if you don't already have one) and sign up.

Some other potentially useful resources include the websites of the magazines American Songwriter and Performing Songwriter, which both have plenty of free content, as does the songwriter's website Muse's Muse once you drill down into its old-school user interface.

Also worth a look, though suffering from a bit of age-related linkrot, are the lists of songwriter resources compiled by the promotion company Taxi and the website Songwriting.net; and "50 Great Lyric Writing Resources," from the online tutorial site TutsPlus.

You can see the video of Jason Robert Brown after the jump...

StLJN Saturday Video Showcase: 2015 St. Louis Cabaret Festival

Today, let's take a look at some video clips featuring the stars of next week's St. Louis Cabaret Festival. Produced by Cabaret Project of St. Louis, the festival serves as the performance portion of their annual St. Louis Cabaret Conference, a week-long event offering educational programs, professional development, networking, and other activities for aspiring and established cabaret performers.

Three of the best-known singers involved in the conference will headline public performances at the Sheldon Concert Hall. The concerts begin with Marilyn Maye, who's still remarkably spry and vocally sharp at age 87 and considered by many to be the matriarch of contemporary cabaret. She was a main attraction at last year's conference and will return this year to perform a program of songs associated with Frank Sinatra on Wednesday, July 22 at the Sheldon.

In the first video up above, you can see Maye singing "Here's to Us" at the 2014 Manhattan Association of Cabarets & Clubs (MAC) Awards, where she was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award.

After the jump, there's a clip of Maye performing "The Man That Got Away," recorded in March 2014 at The Allen Room by Jazz at Lincoln Center, with assistance from her musical director, pianist Billy Stritch, along with bassist David Katzenberg and drummer Daniel Glass.

Next up is singer and pianist Jason Robert Brown, who will perform on Thursday, July 23 at the Sheldon. Known more as a composer and songwriter than a performer, Brown has won two Tony Awards for writing the scores for Parade and The Bridges of Madison County.

But though he may spend most of his time behind the scenes, Brown also is quite capable of capturing an audience's attention on stage, as you can see in the third video, which features him performing "When You Say Vegas" from the short-lived Broadway musical Honeymoon in Vegas. Brown is backed by Charlie Rosen's Broadway Big Band in the clip, which was recorded last October at 54 Below.

In the fourth video, you can see Brown talking for a couple of minutes about the process of making changes in a new show during previews, and then performing a solo piano/vocal version of "Being A Geek," which was written for, and then cut from, the musical 13.

The festival's final headliner is Christine Ebersole, who will perform on Friday, July 24 at the Sheldon. Ebersole is a two-time Tony Award-winning actress and singer who has had many roles in TV and film and has starred in Broadway shows such as 42nd Street, Grey Gardens, Dinner at Eight, and Blithe Spirit.

Ebersole also is a veteran concert and cabaret performer, and the fifth video embed shows her singing "Something There" from her album Strings Attached in a show last year at the NYC venue 54 Below. In today's final clip, she can be seen performing "After All," from the musical Ever After, in May of this year on an episode of Sirius/XM radio's theater-talk show Seth Speaks.

In addition to the concerts by the three headliners, the festival also will include a showcase performance by conference participants on Saturday, July 25 at the Kranzberg Arts Center.

For more about the St. Louis Cabaret Festival and the Cabaret Conference, you can listen to an interview with Marilyn Maye and Tim Schall, producer and co-founder of the conference, from yesterday's “Cityscape” program on KWMU/St. Louis Public Radio.

You can see the rest of today's videos after the jump...

The Sheldon offering discount tickets for Cabaret Festival performances

The Sheldon Concert Hall and the St. Louis Cabaret Festival are offering discounts on tickets to three festival performances next month.

With the discount, ticket buyers can get $10 off of the regular $45 orchestra level ticket price for the concerts at the Sheldon featuring Marilyn Maye on Wednesday, July 22; Jason Robert Brown on Thursday, July 23; and Christine Ebersole (pictured) on Friday, July 24. All three concerts start at 8:00 p.m.

To get the ticket discount, go to http://metrotix.com/, select the concert(s) of your choice, and when prompted, enter the promo code SHELDON.