Patrick Jarenwattananon

It'd be inexact to describe Matthew E. White as a reluctant frontman, but up until the advent of Fresh Blood, his excellent second album, "rock star" wasn't exactly how he saw his future in music. His plan was more quixotic than becoming a successful singer-songwriter: He was starting ...

The jazz clarinetist and saxophonist Anat Cohen comes from Israel, studied and lives in the Northeastern U.S., and maintains a deep affinity for Brazilian music. Specifically, she's a specialist in the Afro-Western, improvisatory, instrumental music known as choro — an analogue of early jazz in the U.S. — where her ...

The pianist Marcus Roberts rose to prominence as a gifted performer — first with the Wynton Marsalis and Jazz at Lincoln Center bands for years, then with his own trio and as a classical soloist. Along the way, he's become a mentor to many younger musicians, training many on the ...

Pianist and composer Jason Moran is known for the scope and scale of his works: a dance party based on the music of early virtuoso Fats Waller, a multimedia presentation reconfiguring the 1959 Town Hall concert of Thelonious Monk, a suite inspired by the quilting tradition of Gee's Bend, Ala. ...

The artists featured on this week's Jazz Night In America Wednesday Night Webcast are, by a fair margin, the least-known performers we've had on the program. Their names don't travel far outside the underrated musicians' community of the mid-Atlantic — specifically, Washington, D.C. — but not for lack ...

The Washington, D.C. area trombonist Reginald Cyntje speaks English with an accent — it's a patois from the U.S. Virgin Islands, where he grew up. He also plays jazz with a Caribbean accent, where hard bop vocabulary meets reggae and calypso rhythms. His group draws from a rich regional talent ...

Blue Note Records celebrated its 75th anniversary last year, marking three-quarters of a century issuing music by the biggest names in jazz history. The company continues to aspire to that standard, with a contemporary roster ever on the lookout for today's movers and shakers. The supergroup Our Point ...

Henry Butler comes from a line of New Orleans piano geniuses, virtuosi who command any style under the syncopated sun. Steven Bernstein comes from a career of collaboration, blowing a slide trumpet all over downtown New York and writing arrangements for just about any medium and context. Both share a ...

If you've ever gone to the NYC Winter Jazzfest — specifically, the marathon of overlapping sets in roughly adjacent venues that sometimes lasts more than eight hours per night — you know that you're bombarded with choices. Stay in one theater where it's warm, or graze for three songs and ...

As a pianist and bandleader, Marian McPartland was a decorated jazz artist, recording and performing for well over half a century. At the same time, she was one of the music's great champions, as host of NPR's Piano Jazz for 33 years.

On what would have been her 96th birthday, ...

By necessity, the early jazz pioneers knew how to make music for revelers. So it made sense that the tunes of Jelly Roll Morton and King Oliver were on the bill for the New Year's Eve bash of Jazz at Lincoln Center. Morton was an accomplished arranger, Oliver a virtuoso ...

It started as a bongo beat — a nod to James Brown, just after his death in late 2006. Then came a few signature riffs. And an ecstatic response from the crowd. Before long, the Godfather of Soul was permanently embedded in the Evolution Ensemble's repertoire. For leader Dee Alexander, ...

Jon Batiste has a way with exits, as musicians from New Orleans tend to. Days before his day-ending set at the 2014 Newport Jazz Festival, the pianist and singer walked out of The Colbert Report's theater with a studio audience and a dancing Stephen Colbert in tow. And following ...

In the dead of January in the Northeast, New York City's Winter Jazzfest manages a minor miracle. Over the course of two marathon nights, it brings crowds in the thousands out to jam-packed theaters and clubs to see dozens of varied and sundry bands.

On the eve of Winter Jazzfest ...

Every year, NPR Music invites a handful of the world's top keyboard players to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. We ask them to play some of their favorite holiday music for the audience — solo — and the recording becomes the public radio special A Jazz ...

Ellis Marsalis is a father figure of modern jazz — in quite a few ways. As a pianist, he was among the first generation of musicians to bring bebop to New Orleans, and even worked with Ornette Coleman before the saxophonist recorded his landmarks of free jazz. As an educator, ...

What would it sound like if someone bridged the gap between big band jazz and classic hip-hop anthems? Between Oliver Nelson and A Tribe Called Quest; between Freddie Hubbard and J. Dilla? One answer is offered by producer/emcee Brian "Raydar" Ellis and trumpeter Igmar Thomas. Between originals, standard jazz repertoire ...

Jon Batiste is from New Orleans, where a street parade might assemble around the corner on any given day. Evidently, he likes a good walkabout: He's liable to lead his band at a guerrilla concert in the New York City subway, or out of a venue, or — as he ...

People in jazz circles often talk about complexity, and often as an accusation. That guy's music is too complex! It's too far removed from the blues! It sounds like math! Bah!

If you went under the hood, you could probably level some of those charges at alto saxophonist Miguel ...

When Miles Davis returned to performing in the early 1980s, he asked his former bandmate and master composer, Wayne Shorter, to write something for him. What came out was a large ensemble work too unwieldy for Davis, and Shorter put it back on his shelf. "I asked him ...