Jazz this week: Jeff Lorber Fusion, Lotte Anker & Okkyung Lee, and more

This week's jazz and creative music offerings in St. Louis run the gamut from fusion to free improvisation, with plenty of mainstream sounds as well. Let's go to the highlights... 

Wednesday, February 18
Keyboardist Jeff Lorber and the latest iteration of his Fusion group featuring bassist Jimmy Haslip and saxophonist Eric Marienthal (pictured, top left) will begin a four-night engagement continuing through Saturday at Jazz at the Bistro. You can see a video preview of the performances here, and Lorber, Haslip and Marienthal also are featured in this week's "Music Education Monday" post.

Also tonight, Cabaret Project St. Louis presents their monthly "Open Mic Night" at the Tavern of Fine Arts.

Thursday, February 19
Saxophonist Kristian Baarsvik plays a free concert for the Jazz at Holmes series at Washington University; The 442s will perform in the "community room" at St. Louis Public Radio in Grand Center; and singer Feyza Eren returns to Nathalie’s.

Friday, February 20
Trumpeter Randy Holmes' quintet with singer Kim Fuller will present "A Tribute to the Music of Billie Holiday" at Voce; Second Generation Swing will play for dancers at the Casa Loma Ballroom; singer Joe Mancuso, guitarist Dave Black and bassist Willem von Hombracht will perform at Element STL; and the Midwest Jazz-tette will bring their West Coast "cool jazz' sound to Cigar Inn.

Saturday, February 21
New Music Circle presents a double bill featuring cellist Okkyung Lee (pictured, center left) and saxophonist Lotte Anker at the "house concert" venue Joe’s Cafe.  You can see some performance videos of Lee in this Saturday video showcase post (which also has a link to an earlier post about Anker.)

Elsewhere around town, Sarah Jane and the Blue Notes will return to Evangeline's; guitarist Tom Byrne and clairnetist Scott Alberici will duet at Thurman Grill; and The Wire Pilots will play original jazz-fusion compositions at Focal Point.

Sunday, February 22
St. Louis musicians from a variety of genres will join together in a benefit concert for bassist Phil Burton (pictured, bottom left) at BB's Jazz, Blues & Soups. Burton has played with numerous rock, blues and jazz bands around town since the 1980s, and also works as a musical instrument and audio repair technician at Winston Electronics. He recently suffered a heart attack, and the performance will raise funds to help with some of his expenses while he recovers.

Monday, February 23
Trumpeter Byron Stripling will be featured in a free "Happy Hour" of music and conversation with Jazz St. Louis' Phil Dunlap at the Tavern of Fine Arts;  the Webster University Jazz Collective will perform music by Charles Mingus, Horace Silver and more in a Black History Month concert at Winifred Moore Auditorium on the Webster campus; and saxophonist "Blind" Willie Dineen and the Broadway Collective will play their monthly date at BB's Jazz, Blues & Soups.

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.)

StLJN Saturday Video Showcase: Getting to know cellist Okkyung Lee

Today, our video spotlight falls on cellist and composer Okkyung Lee, who will be making her St. Louis debut in a New Music Circle concert on Saturday, February 21 at Joe's Cafe, 6014 Kingsbury Ave.

Lee, who's originally from Korea, came to the United States in 2000 and settled in NYC, where she has collaborated on performances and recordings with well-known improvising and experimental musicians including John Zorn, Jim O'Rourke, Vijay Iyer, Nels Cline, Christian Marclay, Thurston Moore, Laurie Anderson, Butch Morris, Evan Parker, Wadada Leo Smith, and many others.

For her St. Louis show, she'll be on a double bill with saxophonist Lotte Anker, with each doing an individual set. (Of course, given the penchant of many improvisors for promiscuous collaboration, it's possible they might end up playing together for a bit as well, but there are no guarantees. Anker also performed here in 2013 in a concert for New Music Circle, and you can check out some of her work in the Saturday Video Showcase that ran not long before that show.)

As for Lee, we start out today with an video excerpt from her solo set last November at Le Guess Who? Festival in Utrecht, The Netherlands. After the jump, you can see four more clips from solo shows of hers, in February 2014 at the Rumor Festival, also in Utrecht; at the Latvian experimental music festival Skaņu Mežs, also in 2014; in April, 2012 in Cork, Ireland; and an undated clip from the Music Unlimited festival in Austria.

Just to round things out, we've also included a couple of videos of Lee improvising with other musicians. In the sixth clip, she's seen with saxophonist John Butcher in 2013 at the Next Festival in Bratislava, Slovakia. The seventh and final video shows an excerpt from a set with turntablist Christian Marclay in May 2010 at NYC's Cafe Oto.

For more about Okkyung Lee, check out this 2014 interview with her from Radio Panik; this one she did with the music blog Flowers In A Gun; this 2013 conversation with Fluid Radio; and this interview that ran in 2011 in the Village Voice.

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

StLJN Saturday Video Showcase: Winter/spring 2015 jazz preview, part 3

Today, it's part three of StLJN's preview of touring jazz and creative music performers who will be coming to St. Louis in the first part of 2015. (You can see parts one and two, covering January and the first part of February, here and here.)

Our first two clips feature cellist Okkyung Lee and saxophonist Lotte Anker, who will be performing separate sets in a concert presented by New Music Circle on Saturday, February 21 at Joe’s Cafe, 6014 Kingsbury Ave.

The video up above is from Lee's performance at the High Zero 2014 festival, held in September at a venue called Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood in Baltimore. After the jump, you can see Anker perform a rather unusual piece for saxophone and bow, recorded October 21, 2014 at Jazzhouse in Copenhagen, Denmark. (For lots more of Anker, see this previous video showcase posted before her appearance here in St. Louis in March, 2013.)

After the edgy improvisations of Lee and Anker, you can enjoy some more traditional sounds courtesy of trumpeter Byron Stripling, who will perform for one night only on Saturday, February 28 at Jazz at the Bistro. Stripling played here in St. Louis most recently in May 2014, doing his "Gospel According to Swing" show with the St. Louis Symphony. 

In this clip from 2013, he's fronting the Naples Jazz Orchestra in a version of the standard "Bourbon Street Parade." For more of Stripling, see this post, which ran before last appearance at the Bistro in 2012.

The next video features singer Rene Marie, who was a familiar face in St. Louis in the early 2000s. She made a number of live appearances here while signed to the locally based label MAXJAZZ, for whom she recorded five albums between 1999 and 2004. She'll return for the first time in a decade to perform Wednesday, March 4 through Saturday, March 7 at Jazz at the Bistro.

Those gigs likely will feature some material from I Wanna Be Evil (With Love to Eartha Kitt), her most recent recording released in 2013 on the Motema Music label. This live-in-the-studio clip of "I'd Rather Be Burned As a Witch" from that album features a band including trombonist Wycliffe Gordon and trumpeter Etienne Charles.

The following week, New Music Circle will present On Fillmore, aka percussionist Glenn Kotche and bassist and Belleville, IL native Darin Gray, in a concert on Saturday, March 14 at The Stage at KDHX.

The duo have made four albums and a couple of soundtracks together since first joining forces in 2000, and gained additional notice in 2013 when they toured with "Apocalyptical," a live show produced by the makers of public radio program "Radiolab." In this clip, recorded in 2013 at Audio Rebel in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, they're playing a piece called "Complications."

Today's sixth clip features Kneebody, who will be making their St. Louis debut with performances from Wednesday, March 18 through Saturday, March 21 at Jazz at the Bistro. Band members Adam Benjamin (keyboards), Shane Endsley (trumpet), Ben Wendel (tenor sax) and Kaveh Rastegar (bass) first met in the late 1990s while they all were students at the Eastman Conservatory.

With drummer Nate Wood, they formed Kneebody in 2000 and since then have recorded nine albums of eclectic instrumental music that touches on styles from jazz to punk rock to the compositions of Charles Ives. In this clip, they're playing "Cha Cha" from their 2013 album The Line in a gig at the Blue Whale in Los Angeles.

Today's seventh and final video features the Dizzy Gillespie Afro-Cuban Experience, who will be in St. Louis to perform on Saturday, March 21 at the Sheldon Concert Hall. The tribute group is led by bassist John Lee, who played with Gillespie for many years, and also includes percussionist Mario Grillo, aka "Machito Jr," son of the famed Latin bandleader Frank "Machito" Grillo.

The band's front line features trumpeter Freddie Hendrix, who's played frequently with former St. Louisan Oliver Lake, and saxophonist Sharel Cassity, with guitarist Yotam Silberstein and drummer Robby Ameen completing the lineup. They're seen here in an excerpt from a show in 2013 in Sofia, Bulgaria, playing "Manteca," the seminal Latin-jazz number composed in 1947 by Gillespie, percussionist Chano Pozo, and Gil Fuller.

Look for part four of StLJN's winter/spring 2015 jazz preview in this space next week. You can see the rest of today's videos after the jump.

New Music Circle 2014-15 season to include Roscoe Mitchell & Craig Taborn, Tim Berne, Thumbscrew, and more

New Music Circle has announced their 2014-15 season, with seven concerts featuring what looks to be an intriguing mix of edgy jazz and improvised music, electronics, and contemporary composition.

The schedule kicks off with a concert by Thumbscrew, featuring guitarist Mary Halvorson, bassist Michael Formanek and drummer Tomas Fujiwara, on Friday, September 12 at Joe's Cafe, the "house concert" venue at 6014 Kingsbury Ave in the Central West End.

All NYC-based, Thumbscrew's members first worked together as the rhythm section for trumpeter Taylor Ho Bynum's sextet, and decided to continue performing together as a trio, with the group serving as an outlet for each member's original compositions as well as improvisation.

The Bynum sextet played St. Louis in an NMC-sponsored show in November 2012, but that date included Ken Filiano on bass rather than Formanek. So, along with the welcome return of Halvorson, one of the more original guitarists to emerge in the last decade, this will be the first chance local listeners will have to hear the three of them together.

They'll be followed a double bill featuring separate sets by another NYC-based musician, drummer and sound artist Eli Keszler, and Berlin electronic musician Rashad Becker on Saturday, November 8 at the new location of The Luminary at 2701 Cherokee St.

Keszler's solo music and installations are said to draw inspiration from sources including free-jazz drummer Han Bennik and composer Conlon Nancarrow, while Becker, known for his work as a recording and mastering engineer as well as his own music, "utilizes realtime synthesis and sampling techniques that set into motion intricate sonic worlds that recall the complexities of human speech and various exotic aural phenomena."

Next up, multi-instrumentalist Roscoe Mitchell (pictured, top left) and keyboardist Craig Taborn will team up for a duo performance on Friday, December 5 at The Stage at KDHX, which is part of the station's new HQ at 3524 Washington Ave. in Grand Center.

Mitchell, a founding member of the Art Ensemble of Chicago and the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), is considered one of the cornerstone players of the 1960s free-jazz movement. His highly influential 1966 album Sound was one of the first records to showcase the mix of composition and collective improvisation, on both traditional and non-traditional instruments, found in much of the subsequent work by the Art Ensemble and other AACM-affiliated groups.

Mitchell subsequently has led other bands including the Creative Arts Collective, the Sound Ensemble, and Note Factory; and also began teaching, most recently at Mills College in Oakland, where he's been the Darius Milhaud Chair of Composition since 2007.

Meanwhile, Taborn (pictured, center left) has gained a reputation as one of the more versatile keyboardists of his generation, playing piano, electric piano and organ with jazz artists including Chris Potter, Dave Holland, and James Carter as well as with Mitchell's Note Factory and other experimentally inclined players such as saxophonists Lotte Anker, David Binney, and Tim Berne; drummers Gerald Cleaver and Susie Ibarra; and many others.

After the holidays, the schedule resumes in January with the annual "NMC Showcase," which at this point is mostly TBA, though NMC's Jeremy Kannapell tells StLJN that St. Louis pianist Johanna Ballou, a graduate of the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama who specializes in music by contemporary composers, will be one of the featured performers.

The following month, Lotte Anker, who played with Taborn and Cleaver in an NMC-presented concert here in February 2013, will return to perform on a split bill with cellist Okkyung Lee on Saturday, February 21 at Joe's Cafe.

Lee has collaborated frequently with visual artists and choreographers, as well as with musicians including Christian Marclay, Thurston Moore, Laurie Anderson, Ikue Mori, Jim O'Rourke, John Zorn, Chris Corsano, Leo Wadada Smith and Vijay Iyer. For more about Anker, check out this video showcase post that ran before her 2013 gig here.

St. Louis' own Darin Gray will be featured in the next concert, as the bassist, known for many years as a prolific and peripatetic improviser and more recently as sideman to alt-rocker Jeff Tweedy, will team with drummer Glenn Kotche in their duo project On Fillmore to play Saturday, March 14 at The Stage at KDHX.

The final concert of the 2014-15 season will feature saxophonist Tim Berne's quartet Snakeoil on Friday, May 8, also at The Stage at KDHX.

Known early in his career for drawing significant compositional and improvisational inspiration from former St. Louisan, Black Artists Group and World Saxophone Quartet co-founder Julius Hemphill, Berne has continued to champion Hemphill's legacy while carving out a musical identity of his own via his label Screwgun Records.

Snakeoil (pictured, lower left) which also includes Oscar Noriega (clarinet, bass clarinet), Matt Mitchell (piano), and Ches Smith (drums, percussion), serves as a vehicle for Berne's original compositions, and has released two albums on the ECM label.

In addition to their concert performances, Keszler, Becker, Mitchell and Taborn, and Gray and Kotche all will take part in some sort of workshop or educational program while they're here, though the details on those events have yet to be finalized.

So what's the takeaway here? As with any season schedule, one can quibble with individual selections, but as a fan of Halvorson and Taborn - neither of whom can be said to be exactly over-exposed - I'm happy to have them back, even if they did play here relatively recently. As for Mitchell, as best I can tell, the last time he performed in St. Louis was in the mid-1980s with the Art Ensemble, so his return is long overdue.

Add in the local debuts of the others and the return Berne - who's been a noteworthy presence on the music scene for decades now but hasn't played here since a 1990s gig at Wash U's notoriously atrocious sounding room, the Gargoyle - and all in all, it's shaping up to be the sort of season that induced Calvin Wilson of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch to name New Music Circle as the "Best Place to Hear Jazz" in the paper's recent "Go! List" issue. While other local presenters may have considerably more resources to work with, NMC continues to offer fans of adventurous music one of the best bangs for the buck in St. Louis.

All performances are scheduled to start at 7:30 p.m.. Single tickets are $20 for general admission, $10 students, for all shows except Mitchell and Taborn, which has a ticket price TBA.

(Edited after posting to correct the date on the Keszler/Becker concert, and to note Tim Berne's previous St. Louis appearance.)

Jazz this week: Dan Hicks, John Clayton & Gerald Clayton, Lotte Anker Trio, Danny Fox, and more

With a bit of spring in the air this week in St. Louis, there's also plenty of live jazz and creative music happening around town to get out and enjoy over the next few days. Let's go to the highlights...

Tonight, singer-guitarist Dan Hicks returns to the St. Louis area for a performance at the Wildey Theatre in Edwardsville.  Hicks' mix of Gyspy jazz, swing, country, blues and folk has been entertaining audiences for nearly fifty years now, and continue to draw appreciative crowds even when he doesn't have a new recording to promote. For more on his colorful career and some video samples of him and the the current edition of his band, the Hot Licks, in action, see this post from last Saturday.

Also tonight, the father-son team of bassist John Clayton and pianist Gerald Clayton (pictured, with drummer Jeff Hamilton) returns to open a four-night stand of duo gigs at Jazz at the Bistro. The two last appeared here in October 2011 as part of Clayton Brothers Quintet, which also includes John's sax-playing sibling Jeff Clayton. Since then, Gerald Clayton's star has continued to rise. He's now signed to Concord Records, and the label will release his debut for them, Life Forum, next month. The younger Clayton also can be heard on Cover Art, Concord's recently released album by the Next Collective, which is an eclectic group of 20-something musicians assembled by label exec Chris Dunn.

Tomorrow night, New Music Circle presents Danish saxophonist Lotte Anker in a concert at 560 Music Center. Teamed for this show with keyboardist Craig Taborn and drummer Gerald Cleaver, Anker is known here in the USA mostly as an improvisor, but also has a compositional sensibility that helps provide a sense of structure to many of her improvised flights. For more about Anker, and some video samples of her performing, check out this post from a couple of weeks ago.

Also tomorrow night, singer Erin Bode and band return to Crave coffeehouse on the south side.

On Friday, saxophonist Tim Cunningham will settle in for what's projected as a recurring weekly gig at Troy's Jazz Gallery,  saxophonist Jay Hutson is at Robbie's House of Jazz; singer Joe Mancuso performs for the first of two nights at Chaser's Lounge in the Chase Park Plaza Hotel; and saxophonist Austin Cebulski's quartet is at the Cigar Inn.

Then on Saturday, the trio of NYC-based pianist Danny Fox will be in town for a performance at Robbie's. Fox, a Harvard grad, has toured with drummer Max Weinberg's big band and the Tommy Dorsey "ghost band," among others. The trio's debut album The One Constant was released in 2011, and you can hear samples on Fox' website.

Also on Saturday, Two Times True with pianist Carolbeth True will perform at the south side house-concert venue Kinda Blue, 6101 1/2 Idaho; and Sarah Jane and the Blue Notes bring their swing and jump blues sound back to Venice Cafe.

On Sunday, a group billed as the SIUE Jazz Faculty Ensemble, led by guitarist Rick Haydon and saxophonist Jason Swagler, will play a free concert presented by St. Louis Jazz and Blues Vespers series at Second Baptist Church.

Looking beyond the weekend, on Monday pianist Kim Portnoy's ensemble will perform at Webster University's Winifred Moore Auditorium; and on Tuesday, the weekly swing dance presented by Lindy Hop St. Louis at the Grandel Theatre in Grand Center will feature live music from The Sidemen.

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.)

StLJN Saturday Video Showcase: Spotlight on Lotte Anker

This week, our video spotlight shines on Danish saxophonist and composer Lotte Anker, who will be making her St. Louis debut Thursday, March 14 in a concert presented by New Music Circle at 560 Music Center.

Though Anker seems to be known in this country more as a improvisor, in Denmark she also has composed music incorporating jazz and contemporary classical influences for a variety of groups and projects. Anker works most frequently in Europe, and collaborates with a number of different musicians from her home country, but in St. Louis she'll perform with a trio featuring two Americans, drummer Gerald Cleaver and keyboard player Craig Taborn.

Taborn, whose notable credits include Chris Potter's Underground, Dave Holland's quartet Prism, and the bands of saxophonists James Carter, Roscoe Mitchell, and Tim Berne, is widely regarded as one of the top electric keyboard players in jazz today. Cleaver has worked with many notable musicians, too, including Mitchell, guitarists Joe Morris and David Torn, bassist Miroslav Vitous, and many others.

Anker was born in 1958 in Copenhagen and studied music at Copenhagen University. She formed her first quintet with pianist Mette Petersen in 1988, and has developed many other musical associations over the years. With pianist Marilyn Crispell, she serves as one of the co-leaders of the Copenhagen Art Ensemble, and Anker also has worked frequently in various groups with percussionist Marilyn Mazur.

Other key collaborators have included guitarist Hasse Poulsen, bassist Peter Friis-Nielsen, and trombonist Ture Larsen. Anker has worked with many other European and American musicians as well, and also has written music for several theater and dance productions. In addition to recording as a side musician and co-leader, she has made four albums as a leader, plus three more with Taborn and Cleaver, the most recent being 2009's Floating Islands.

While many of the videos of the Anker/Taborn/Cleaver trio that are available online are short snippets, just a minute or two long, there is one longer clip, a half-hour excerpt from a concert in 2011 at Barbes, a performance space in Brooklyn, NYC. That's today's first video, in the embedded window up above.

Down below, there's are five more clips showing Anker playing with various other combinations of musicians, starting with an excerpt recorded at a Danish jazz festival in 2010. It features her with pianist Søren Kjærgaard, saxophonists Jesper Løvdal and Nils Bo Davidsen, bassist Peter Friis Nielsen, and drummers Kresten Osgood and Claus Bøje.

The next clip also is from 2010, and shows Anker, electronic musician Iku Mori (who played in St. Louis last year with the Mephista Trio) and drummer Steve Noble at a gig in the UK. Below that, there's video from a 2012 duo performance by Anker and Mori.

The last two videos feature Anker with two more larger ensembles. In the fifth position, you can see her with fellow Danish musicians Sture Ericson and Jeppe Højgaard on saxophones, Jeppe Zeberg on piano, Tapani Toivanen and Jesper Thorn on basses, and Mads Forsby and Magnus Jochumsen on drums and percussion.

The sixth and final clip show Anker performing in Copenhagen with the What River Ensemble, a multi-national group of improvisors and composers that includes Mori, Chris Cutler, Phil Minton, Fred Frith, Garth Knox, Anna Klett, and Jesper Egelund.

For more about Lotte Anker, check out this profile, written in 2009 by Celeste Sunderland for AllAboutJazz.com.

StLJN Saturday Video Showcase: Winter/spring 2013 jazz preview, part 2

This week, we continue with part 2 of our look at some of the touring jazz and creative musicians who will be coming to St. Louis during the first few months of 2013. (You can see part 1 of the preview here.)

Today's first clip features Sachal Vasandani singing "Take The B Train" in a show this past April at Joe's Pub in NYC. Vasandani, acclaimed as one of the top young male vocalists in jazz, will come to St. Louis for his first performances as a headliner starting Wednesday, February 13 through Saturday, February 16 at Jazz at the Bistro.

Down below, you can see The Seventh String: The Life and Tales of Bucky Pizzarelli, a short documentary about the veteran guitarist, who will be in St. Louis on Friday, February 15 to perform with singer Denise Thimes at the Sheldon Concert Hall.

Next, you can see a clip that combines musical excerpts and a short interview with pianist Kris Davis/ The video was made in October 2012 in conjunction with a solo piano gig Davis played for the Hot Clube de Portugal. She'll be in St. Louis with her quartet to play a concert presented by New Music Circle on Saturday, February 16 at 560 Music Center.

The fourth video features trumpeter Chris Botti, who's become a familiar face to St. Louis audiences thanks to numerous appearances here in recent years. In this clip, recorded on December 1 at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco, Botti and pianist Geoffrey Keezer offer a rather abstracted take on "My Funny Valentine," with a bit of "The Christmas Song" added at the end. Botti will return to St. Louis to perform on Saturday, February 23 with the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra at Powell Symphony Hall.

Next up is another familiar face, singer Kurt Elling, who's also done several headlining gigs here over the last decade, most recently in November of last year at Jazz at the Bistro. Elling's latest album 1619 Broadway: The Brill Building Project features his interpretations of pop and rock songs from the 1960s written at that storied NYC address. Here, he's seen performing his version of the Drifters' "On Broadway" in May at the Maison des Cultures du Monde in Paris. Elling will be back to perform Wednesday, February 27 through Saturday, March 2 at the Bistro.

The sixth clip features singer, songwriter, guitarist and sometimes drummer Dan Hicks, as usual bringing a touch of humor to this 2011 performance of "I Don't Want Love" on Conan O'Brien's show. Hicks and the current edition of His Hot Licks will play here on Wednesday, March 13 at Old Rock House.

Today's last video features the Danish improvising saxophonist Lotte Anker, seen here with trumpeter Eivind Lønning and drummer Kresten Osgood in an excerpt from a performance last February in Copehnhagen. Anker will lead a trio in a show presented by New Music Circle on Thursday, March 14 at 560 Music Center.

Look for part 3 of StLJN's winter/spring 2013 jazz preview next week...