Patrick Jarenwattananon

There's no one person responsible for creating music festivals — or for making them such a huge part of how we witness live performances today. But starting in 1954, one person developed a recipe for their secret sauce.

George Wein still goes to his signature event every year, checking out ...

Alto saxophonist Phil Woods, a leading jazz performer since the 1950s, died Tuesday afternoon. The cause was related to emphysema, his longtime agent, Joel Chriss, confirmed. Woods was 83.

As a teenager, Woods would commute to New York City for lessons with pianist Lennie Tristano, then check out ...

New episodes of Jazz Night In America are released on Thursday mornings. Every week, a one-hour program is sent to public radio stations throughout the U.S. (and archived online). Every other week, a concert documentary video, a companion to that week's radio program, is released online. Check your local listings ...

Hi! We're back.

Today, we launch a new season of Jazz Night In America. We've spent our summer making a better version of the show, and we're excited to share it with you. In fact, our first episode, featuring Wayne Shorter with the Jazz at Lincoln ...

Wayne Shorter is a living legend — a saxophonist, composer and lifelong original thinker. He's never been afraid to be different, which is perhaps why he's accomplished so much. Among his accomplishments:

• Music director for Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers
• Member of the Miles ...

For years, the trumpeter Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah has been operating under a rubric he calls "stretch music": his own vision of a modern, genre-agnostic, hybrid jazz. Stretch Music is also what the New Orleans native calls his new album. The unrelenting intensity remains, but here it's fulfilled with a ...

It's 2015, and jazz singing is weird. Right? Its conventions seem almost antiquated: the smarmy stage presence thing, the scat improvisation thing, the singing 50-year-old songs from forgotten musicals thing. In an age when singing the blues has been so thoroughly subsumed and reconfigured within other American pop-music traditions, when ...

When he started to make the music that appears on his new album, trumpeter Terence Blanchard wasn't thinking of Eric Garner, Michael Brown or any of the other recent high-profile police killings of African-Americans. He was thinking of desired collaborators: Donald Ramsey, a bassist and high-school classmate; Oscar Seaton, ...

You know how some older "legacy" artists program their concerts like a greatest-hits collection? Duke Ellington did some of that as he was getting older — people wanted to hear the Maestro lead "Satin Doll" and "Mood Indigo," after all — but he never stopped writing new music, ...

For this year's edition of Make Music New York, we come not to praise the dead, but to sing the blues and create a new "exquisite corpse."

This Sunday, June 21 at 4 p.m. ET, join NPR Music and regulars at Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola at Jazz at Lincoln ...

"Gingerbread Boy" is a fetching blues head by Jimmy Heath that became a jazz standard pretty much immediately after it was first recorded. Usually, its melody is played in call-and-response: the horns play a line, the piano or guitar replies with a specific riff, repeat. And when the Miles Davis ...

Even if you don't know anything about jazz, it's quite possible you've heard the music of saxophonist Kamasi Washington: That's him on the latest albums by Kendrick Lamar and Flying Lotus. But that's only the very tip of his iceberg. His new album The ...

Bruce Lundvall, the longtime President of Blue Note Records who supported many top jazz artists over the last four decades, died yesterday, May 19. The cause was complications of Parkinson's Disease, according to a Blue Note statement. He was 79.

Born in 1935, Lundvall began his career in the music ...

It begins with meandering clarinet and clipped, four-on-the-floor percussion. A little bit later comes a countermelody, and the image that comes to mind is something from early New Orleans, or perhaps a Mediterranean folk song. It's even called "Putty Boy Strut" — that could be an obscure Jelly Roll ...

Vijay Iyer is probably best known as a pianist and bandleader in the African-American creative improvisational tradition — most say "jazz" for short — though he's also several other things in music. He's a composer of chamber, large-ensemble and mixed-media works; a Harvard professor; a student of Indian classical ...

The word "epic" sits cheerily amid the most overused hyperbole of our age. Teenage bros proclaim their recent "pretty epic" mild successes; sports commentators call anything which ends dramatically an "epic game"; the Internet-literate are quick to point out an "epic FAIL." But what else do you call a three-CD, ...

The late, distinctively melodic jazz composer Kenny Wheeler was also a great trumpet player, though, being famously self-effacing, often declined to toot his own horn about his talents. Many musicians sang his praises, though, and when he died in 2014, saxophonist Steve Treseler and trumpeter Ingrid Jensen were inspired to ...

From huge auditoriums to tiny basements, living legends to rising stars, watch highlights of the webcast, featuring Wynton Marsalis, Pedrito Martinez, Robert Glasper, Johnny O'Neal and Lou Donaldson.

The SFJAZZ Collective, an all-star octet representing the SFJAZZ institution in San Francisco, has an intriguing approach to repertoire. Each year, each member writes a new piece for the Collective, and also rearranges a composition by a modern jazz master. For the 2014-15 season, that master was tenor saxophone titan ...

When trumpeter and composer/arranger Steven Bernstein first met the virtuoso pianist Henry Butler, he says he was floored. "This is it," he recalls thinking. "This is like the music that I always imagined. Everything you ever loved about music, all being in one place, but now it's all coming from ...