Drummer Joe LaBarbera has worked with Phil Woods, Art Farmer, Bob Brookmeyer, Tony Bennett and many other celebrated jazz greats, but it’s his work with pianist Bill Evans that he documents in his new book Times Remembered: The Final Years of the Bill Evans Trio, which he co-wrote with Charles Levin. This sensitive portrayal sheds light on the joys and challenges of the jazz world and the unique place that Bill Evans’ music and philosophy played within it.
Petra van Nuis
The early years of vocalist Petra van Nuis were filled with classical music, which led to her professional debut at age eleven, singing with the Cincinnati Opera Company and by age twelve she was on the road with her first national tour. Petra went on to study ballet in NYC and San Francisco and musical theater at the University of Cincinnati’s College Conservatory of Music. This career direction changed dramatically when she met guitarist Andy Brown in high school, eventually married him and began her love affair with jazz. Andy and Petra often perform and record together and their latest collaboration, Lonely Girl—I Remember Julie, celebrates another guitar/vocal duo, Julie London and Al Viola and their album, Lonely Girl.
Nate Najar
Guitarist/producer, Nate Najar’s new CD, Jazz Samba Pra Sempre celebrates the 60thanniversary of Jazz Samba, the landmark 1962 album by Charlie Byrd and Stan Getz, that launched the international Bossa Nova craze. Tenor saxophonist Jeff Rupert, bassist Herman Burney, drummer Chuck Redd and Najar’s wife, Brazilian vocalist Daniela Soledade, join him in this loving tribute to jazz and Brazilian music.
Jimmy Buffett & Frank Marshall
The New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival returned last month with a bang after a two-year pandemic hiatus. This joyful moment was followed by the release of the new documentary, Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story, which honors the festival’s 50 years of celebrating New Orleans music, food and culture. The film weaves together live performances and interviews from the 50th anniversary in 2019, along with historic footage from earlier days showing how the festival was created and how it grew to an eight-day event with 500 bands.
I talked with five-time Academy Award nominee Frank Marshall, who co-directed Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story with Ryan Suffern, and with Jimmy Buffett, who is an executive producer on the film, along with Quint Davis.
Frank Marshall and Jimmy Buffett met forty-two years ago at a memorable party at Harrison Ford’s Aspen home and became fast friends. Their shared love for music, guitar playing, and New Orleans made their collaboration on Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story, a natural.
Deanna Witkowski Two
Pianist/composer/vocalist Deanna Witkowski’s second appearance on Jazz Inspired celebrates one of her favorite musicians, Mary Lou Williams, with a new CD of Williams compositions, Force of Nature, and Mary Lou Williams: Music for the Soul, her biography of Mary Lou Williams.
Mary Lou Williams transcended a difficult life of racism, sexism and financial difficulty to become one of the most respected jazz musicians of her time. She wrote and arranged for Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman, and mentored and taught Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Tadd Dameron, Bud Powell, Dizzy Gillespie and many others.
Although Deanna’s life experience is much different from Mary Lou’s, she feels a special kinship with Williams through their music and spiritual focus.
Jo Harrop
British jazz vocalist/songwriter Jo Harrop grew up with a jazz-loving father who introduced her to Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin and other iconic singers. She heard Tony Bennett in concert when she was a teenager, a life-changing experience that made her know she wanted to touch people with her singing in the same deep way that Bennett touched her.
After years as a session singer, Jo Harrop pursued a career singing jazz standards, and while she always wrote her own music, it wasn’t until the pandemic that she gathered the courage to record these originals, which she celebrates on her CD, The Heart Wants with Jason Robello, Christian McBride and Troy Miller.
Curtis Stigers Two
Singer/songwriter/saxophonist/guitarist, Curtis Stigers is a musician who’s impossible to categorize. He loves pop and jazz and has lived in both worlds, grabbing what appeals to him most from each style and creating music that continues to evolve. He recorded a track for one of the biggest-selling pop albums of all time and enjoyed success as a popular singer/songwriter, with his own concerts and as an opening act for Elton John, Prince, Eric Clapton, James Brown and other iconic artists. There was much to enjoy in that part of the music world, but Curtis eventually realized he is more suited to a jazz career, where the freedom to evolve and create without restraints is much more embraced.
We discuss Curtis’ latest CD, This Life, which showcases new arrangements of songs from his previous thirteen albums, which he’s played live in concert for years. Curtis celebrates his many influences and where these tunes have gone as they, and he, have gotten older.
Steve Million
Pianist/songwriter, Steve Million grew up in a small town in Missouri with the fetching name of Booneville. Looking back now, Steve appreciates the quiet of that environment and the opportunity for freedom, but in his younger years, he couldn’t wait to move on and pursue a life in jazz, a musical passion that started at the tender age of seven when his mother took him to a Count Basie concert.
Now based in Chicago, Steve Million keeps a busy performance and teaching schedule and celebrates one of his favorite musicians, Thelonious Monk, in a two-keyboard band with Jeremy Kahn called Double Monk. His latest collaboration is his CD, Jazz Words, with vocalist Sarah Marie Young for which Steve wrote the music and lyrics. I talked to Steve about it all from his home in Chicago.
Ludovic Beier
French accordionist Ludovic Beier is an enthusiastic cheerleader for his chosen instrument and the many different styles and traditions around it. With the band, the Django Allstars, he celebrates the gypsy jazz of guitarist Django Reinhardt from the ‘30s and ‘40s along with new compositions he and his bandmates have written in that style.
Ludovic’s stylistic influences are broad, and he delights in bringing it all to his playing and feels it’s essential to constantly evolve. I spoke with Ludovic from his home in Paris.
Roseanna Vitro
Vocalist Roseanna Vitro has enjoyed a long career collaborating with some of the icons of the jazz world, Kenny Barron, Fred Hersch, Clare Fischer and many others. Vitro grew up with a Sinatra-loving father who ran a Flamingo nightclub and a mother who sang country and gospel. While she has a deep love for those styles, she is a solid bebop fan and on her new CD, Sing a Song of Bird, she celebrates one of her favorite bebop musicians--Charlie Parker--with three of her favorite vocalists-- Marion Cowings, Sheila Jordan and Bob Dorough. Each has inspired, influenced, and formed who she is as a musician and person. Sing a Song of Bird, brings these three together in solo and duo performances featuring new compositions celebrating their mutual admiration for each other and for Charlie Parker.
Nick Finzer
Trombonist Nick Finzer’s new CD, Out of Focus, honors the composers and musicians who have inspired him throughout his life. Finzer found the pandemic lockdown creatively challenging but ultimately useful in giving him the time to focus differently, record with others remotely, and create fresh readings on the music of some of his favorites, J.J. Johnson, Duke Ellington, Hoagy Carmichael and others.
Rachael Sage
Singer/songwriter/poet, visual artist, Rachael Sage is inspired by multiple musical influences, everything from Broadway and pop to folk and jazz. She has a drama degree from Stanford and went on to a year with the Actors Studio. The NY Times describes her performances as alternately channeling her inner Fanny Brice and a Jewish Norah Jones.” I’m Judy Carmichael and this is Jazz Inspired.
Rachael’s latest release, Poetica, is a spoken word and music collaboration with some of her favorite musicians, made during the pandemic through an embrace of new technologies and a desire to create something meaningful despite forced isolation.
JOSHUA HENRY
Three-time Tony and Grammy-nominee, Joshua Henry is best known for his stage work in The Scottsboro Boys on Broadway and as Aaron Burr in the first touring company of Hamilton. Lin-Manuel’s directorial debut, Tick Tick Boom, in which Joshua appears alongside Andrew Garfield and Vanessa Hudgens, came to theaters and on Netflix in November 2021, the month after we recorded this conversation.
Joshua took advantage of his time away from the stage during the pandemic shutdown to focus solely on his first love—music--and recorded his debut CD, Grow, which brings together his love for jazz, soul, funk and pop. Joshua talked to me from his home in Los Angeles about his wide range of influences, including Nat King Cole, whom he was celebrating the week we spoke in a series of performances at the Huntington Library in San Marino, CA.
Jane Lynch
Actress Jane Lynch is a hilarious presence in the Christopher Guest films, Best In Show, A Mighty Wind and For Your Consideration. Although she was initially reluctant to dive into Guest’s improvisational approach to character development in these films, she loved the process and feels it pushed her forward as an actress.
Now, with her Emmy winning roles on Glee, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and numerous other programs expanding her audience even further, she is, among other projects, doing what she loves most: group singing, with her tours A Swinging’ Little Christmas with Tim Davis and Kate Flannery, and Two Lost Souls, her duo show with Kate.
Antonio Adolfo
Brazilian composer/pianist Antonio Adolfo honors the great Antonio Carlos Jobim on his latest CD, Jobim Forever. Jobim’s music launched the international bossa nova craze and won multiple Grammys in 1965 with the release of Getz/Gilberto, one of the best-selling jazz albums of all time. Antonio Aldolfo’s own compositions have been recorded by Sergio Mendes, Stevie Wonder, Dionne Warwick and many others, so focusing this CD on another composer, and one of his favorites, was a labor of love.
I talked with Adolfo from his home in Florida shortly after he returned from Rio de Janeiro, where he keeps a second home and heads a music school.
Georgia Mancio
In a time that celebrates the extreme, acrobatic singing of American Idle style contestants, British vocalist Georgia Mancio is unusual. Her poetic, subtle approach to delivering a song has garnered international fans and multiple awards, most recently Best Vocalist in the 2021 Parliamentary Jazz Awards.
Georgia pairs her singing and lyric writing talents with another soulful musician, multi-Grammy winning pianist/composer Alan Broadbent on their new CD, Quiet Is The Star. The songs from this CD and earlier work is collected in their recently published book, The Songs of Alan Broadbent and Georgia Mancio, featuring all of their 33 originals, co-written between 2014 and 2020. Georgia talked to me from her home in London in August 2021.
Edmar Castaneda
Colombian-born harpist Edmar Castaneda feels his unique musical talent is a gift from God, a gift with the purpose to worship God and bring his presence and unconditional love to everyone.
Edmar took up the harp as a teenager to play Columbian traditional music and later combined it with the jazz he discovered when he moved to NYC at fifteen. Since then, he has collaborated with an impressive variety of top musicians from his early mentor, Paquito D’Rivera to John Scofield, John Patitucci, Marcus Miller and Sting.
We discuss Edmar’s new CD Family which celebrates his deep spiritual life and the importance of family, his own and the world as a unified family, with both having added significance during the pandemic.
Maria Muldaur
Vocalist Maria Muldaur may be best known for her 1974 hit “Midnight at the Oasis” but it’s her long career and forty-three recordings that have continued to delight her fans with Maria’s unique approach to blues, roots and jug band music.
Maria’s mother pushed her toward classical music but when her grandmother played her some Western Swing, at the tender age of five, there was no looking back. Maria’s latest CD, Let’s Get Happy Together, is a collection of lesser-known musical gems recorded with the New Orleans band, Tuba Skinny. The liner notes include the source material for each song on the CD, which Maria hopes will entice her fans to explore the music further, a journey Maria is just as enthusiastic about today as she was when she heard that first Hank Williams record as a child.
Freda Payne
Vocalist Freda Payne is best known for her 1970s R&B hit, “Band of Gold,” but it’s her jazz roots she celebrates on her new CD “Let There Be Love, a collection of duets with Kurt Elling, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Johnny Mathis and Kenny Lattimore.
Payne studied acting, dancing and voice throughout her young life and started performing professionally as a teen, going on to work with Pearl Baily, Quincy Jones, Count Basie, Lionel Hampton and many other jazz greats.
Motown producer Barry Gordy came calling but Freda’s protective and business-savvy mother thought Freda’s career would be better served elsewhere, after questioning Gordy and realizing the control and money Freda would give up by signing with him.
Freda has toured with Broadway shows, done film and television and while she loves it all, it’s jazz that has the deepest place in her heart.
Glenn Close and Ted Nash
On the new CD Transformation: Personal Stories of Change, Acceptance and Evolution, Glenn Close joins forces with composer Ted Nash and members of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra on a series of pieces that integrate spoken word segments selected by Close, with compositions by Nash. This is the second collaboration for Glenn Close and Ted Nash, with this one being especially personal, as the spoken segments range from Ted Hughes’s Tales From Ovid,” one of Glenn’s favorites, to a letter in which Ted Nash’s son comes out as transgender. Each piece focuses on change being positive, an attitude Ted Nash and Glenn Close share and encourage others to embrace.