Patrick Jarenwattananon

A Brian Blade Fellowship concert feels a bit like a family reunion. Its core — drummer Blade, pianist Jon Cowherd and bassist Chris Thomas — has played together for more than 20 years, and its horn players have stayed loyal to the operation, too. Its repertoire feels rooted in ...

The saxophonist and flutist Frank Wess, whose time in the woodwind section of the Count Basie Orchestra propelled a long career, died Wednesday afternoon at age 91. The cause was kidney failure, according to Sara Tsutsumi, his longtime partner.

Born in 1922, Wess spent his teenage ...

Perhaps you know Dave King as the drummer in The Bad Plus, or any number of avant-improv/indie-rock/Americana/electronic experimental bands rooted in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. But somewhere in that mix is a deep fondness for the jazz tradition, and recently, he made it a point to say so ...

There's an element of Gregory Porter's singing that feels like a welcome throwback, though he doesn't spell it out precisely. It's in the way he leans heavily into and erupts "Hey!" without fear of coming up short. It's in his coat-and-tie handling of an audience, well-mannered but without quaint mannerisms. ...

About a month before she died last week at age 76, Sathima Bea Benjamin finally properly celebrated her debut album. That's a bit of a complicated claim, of course, because depending on how you count, the South African vocalist either made her debut album in 1959, 1963, 1976 or 1979.

The sight of saxophonist Joshua Redman raising his foot at the apex of a gritty solo has become common to Newport Jazz crowds — and always entirely welcome too. His latest record, Walking Shadows, is a collection of ballads, but this program from the main stage isn't quite so calm. ...

The drummer Jimmy Cobb is 84 — which, even if you didn't know his name, would signal that he's been around the jazz scene for a while. But he's been more than around: He was the drummer when Miles Davis recorded his late-'50s and early-'60s masterpieces, and then ...

Cedar Walton, one of the top jazz pianists to emerge in the aftermath of bebop, died Monday morning at his home in Brooklyn, N.Y., according to his wife, Martha. Walton was 79.

The pianist and composer/arranger rose to eminence after an early-1960s spell in drummer Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, and ...

Few musicians today are as versatile as Marcus Miller: bassist, keyboardist, bass clarinetist, film composer, producer and more. He does jazz, rock, jazz-rock, pop, R&B, smooth jazz — anything that black musicians have invented in the last half-century. He was in Miles Davis' last band, and the ethos of that ...

Should you ever meet Donny McCaslin, you'll encounter an imposingly tall fellow who's one of the nicest guys you'll shake hands with — and who wields a sax like few others. His band has gone electro-funk with fuzz-dub bass, analog synths and hard grooves. One of his newer tunes is ...

A 20-something singing pianist of the New Orleans virtuoso tradition, Jonathan Batiste has a natural entertainer's charisma and chops to match. He now lives in New York — he met his band in school at Juilliard — and can do "modern jazz" with a metropolitan attitude. But Stay Human is ...

One of the original new-school New Orleans brass bands, a Dirty Dozen show guarantees a good time. This year actually marks three dozen years since the first incarnation of the group coalesced to resurrect a then-disappearing tradition — and infuse it with both bebop and funk. As with many a ...

One of the finest guitar players in jazz history — who made all those classic records with Sonny Rollins, Bill Evans, Ron Carter and so on — is still at it at age 82. Fittingly, Jim Hall's rhythm section at Newport is top-shelf international caliber: Scott Colley (bass) and Lewis ...

Eddie Palmieri has earned the right to be confident: He's been leading Latin jazz and salsa bands for more than 50 years, and playing in them even longer. "I don't guess I'm going to excite you with my band," he's been known to say. "I know it." For a performance ...

Wayne Shorter is among the most influential jazz composers of all time. His performances are relatively scarce, but he's turning 80 this year and he's returned to Newport to celebrate. His quartet of more than a dozen years tears apart and reconstructs his tunes — and some other pieces — ...

One gets the sense that pianist Robert Glasper feels completely at ease with his Experiment band, running his right hand in circles, cracking jokes and switching directions on the fly. Along the way, he's cracked the mold of how jazz might approach the hip-hop and R&B of today. The breakout ...

Guitarist Rez Abbasi's new electronics-enhanced trio is driven by what its leader calls "textural surprise." As heard on the 2012 album Continuous Beat, the Pakistani-born guitarist's newest repertoire was inspired by the late drummer Paul Motian. On wax, that's a point of departure to explore material as diverse as tunes ...

Take a New-Orleans-style brass band, then cram it into a Volkswagen Golf: That's the general principle of how trombonist Ray Anderson's band makes a joyful noise with only four members. Matt Perrine is the sousaphonist of choice for many a New Orleans group; his bass line supports the trombone-trumpet free-for-all. ...

Amir ElSaffar grew up around Chicago as something of a trumpet prodigy, in both jazz and classical. He was winning competitions and beginning to make a go of it in New York. Then he started investigating his Iraqi heritage in music, and studying the hammered dulcimer and the modes of ...

Berklee College of Music graduate Ali Amr grew up in the Palestinian territories, where music was literally what kept him off the streets. He's translated that into a prepossessing command of the 72-string instrument called the qanun, and at Berklee, he's found a way to blend it into in a ...