Patrick Jarenwattananon

Subway entertainers are a mixed bag, but in the arts mecca of New York City, they're often overqualified — so much so that bands and other musical acts need to audition to even set up underground. And those are just the "official" performers.

Gregory Porter has the ...

The band Sexmob specializes in a distinct strain of deconstructionist improvised music: jazz that aims at fun by bouncing off the walls. The quartet has tackled James Bond music, rock covers, Duke Ellington, the Macarena and exotica, plus originals from leader Steven Bernstein. The antic trumpeter, who brings ...

Drummer Allison Miller, a go-to choice for jazz heavies and arena-level singer-songwriters alike, has made time to cultivate her own working band in the past few years. Boom Tic Boom features some of her favorite female instrumentalists in pianist Myra Melford and violinist Jenny Scheinman, as well as ...

Comparisons have always helped me appreciate jazz. An artist plays a tune fast; another does it as a ballad. A trumpeter finishes his solo, and a saxophonist takes that closing phrase and morphs it in a different direction. A musician revisits a composition years later with a new arrangement and ...

The composer Darcy James Argue has a little bit of the archetypal indie rocker in him. He's a white guy from Canada who moved to Brooklyn and started a band there. His new album is filled with deliberate suggestions of dance-punk; of Eastern European brass bands and carnival ...

This week — when many of us at NPR rushed to file our U.S. federal income-tax returns, then moved to a new headquarters — I'm reminded of a moment in jazz history. Namely, the mid-1940s, when a new style called bebop came into popularity.

As a recent

The drummer Jeff Ballard has a band called Fairgrounds. Well, he doesn't have a band as much as he has lots of bands, and knows lots of people to fill them — which might be expected of someone who has been a drummer for Chick Corea, Ray Charles and Brad ...

The 12th official Jazz Appreciation Month began when April did. But today, the Smithsonian Museum of American History, which founded the JAM campaign, kick started its own celebration with a series of performances, discussions and ceremonies.

A morning gathering for invited guests was highlighted by the official delivery ...

Every year, an all-star assemblage of today's jazz musicians called the SFJAZZ Collective picks a different all-time-great jazz composer to feature. The band then applies its own arrangements to that composer's tunes.

This season, it's pianist Chick Corea, whose "Spain" proves a barnstorming choice to close out the opening-night concert ...

At 66, the jazz trumpeter Tom Harrell is as busy as ever: His current band has released five excellent albums since 2007 alone. (It performed for this concert series in 2009.) He's so prolific that he's been writing and arranging music for other ensembles all the ...

One of the giants of Cuban music, pianist and composer/arranger Bebo Valdés, died Friday in Sweden due to complications from pneumonia, according to his wife and manager. He was 94.

Ramón Emilio "Bebo" Valdés Amaro was born in 1918 in a village outside Havana. Trained at conservatory, and having absorbed ...

Bassist Todd Sickafoose is heard often in two cities — his native San Francisco Bay Area and his adopted New York City. Ani DiFranco fans know his sound, too, as he worked with the singer-songwriter for the better part of a decade. In 2008, he released Tiny Resistors, ...

Stephan Crump's low-end theory will be familiar to fans of the world-renowned Vijay Iyer Trio, where Crump has discharged bass responsibilities for many years. Apart from his globetrotting and other sideman duties, he's also a composer, both for film and for his own bands. Of late, his best-known ...

If you've put an ear to some of the most talked-about jazz bands of the last few years, you've likely heard saxophonist Walter Smith III. He's kept the tenor chair in the Ambrose Akinmusire quintet, the Terence Blanchard quintet and Eric Harland's Voyager band, ...

I've been listening to two very good new albums led by drummers. After learning that both men are in their early 70s, I can't help but wonder how I process that fact in what I hear.

"Killer" Ray Appleton (b. 1941) and Barry Altschul (b. 1943) practice different styles. But ...

Today, when you see a saxophonist and a trumpeter in front of a jazz group, it's par for the course. It's a particular combination that's defined many landmark recordings: Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry, John Coltrane and Miles Davis. Done ...

Banjo player Earl Scruggs, who helped define the sound of bluegrass, died Wednesday morning. Scruggs, who began playing the banjo when he was four years old, just after his father died, and would go on to become a member of some of the most influential groups in bluegrass. ...