For my birthday weekend, I gave myself a present and an assignment – review the 2023 Newport Jazz Festival. Here’s the result, at DownBeat Magazine. The nation’s oldest jazz festival was never only about jazz. This year’s edition presented the full gamut of jazz and “jazz-adjacent” music, including big personalities like Samara Joy, Jon Batiste, and Herbie Hancock.
Filed under Bill Charlap, Bob Dorough, Branford Marsalis, Camille Thurman, Charles McPherson, Christian McBride, Derrick Hodge, Diana Krall, George Wein, Herbie Hancock, Jon Batiste, Kenny Washington, Kurt Elling, Larry Goldings, Lionel Loueke, Louis Armstrong, Marquis Hill, Newport Jazz Festival, Quincy Jones, Ray Charles
“In Canada once, a student asked me, ‘How do you reconcile what you want to play with what the audience wants to hear?’ And I said, ‘Man, as I get older, I really want to play music that people want to hear.’ I don’t even understand what the question is.”
From my interview with the delightful Delfeayo Marsalis in the March issue of DownBeat.
It was quite a night: Harry Connick, Jr., Jon Batiste, Catherine Russell, Sullivan Fortner, Wynton, Branford and Jason Marsalis, among others, in “The Birth of Jazz: From Bolden to Armstrong” at the annual Jazz at Lincoln Center gala on April 17. My review for DownBeat.com.
Kurt Elling has always been one of our most cerebral jazz singers, which is not to say he doesn’t swing like a mother. Over lunch and several glasses of Montepulciano at his favorite neighborhood pizzeria on the Upper West Side…
…we talked for nearly three hours about his new album, The Questions (Okeh), which he describes as both a reaction to the era of division and vitriol brought on by the Trump Administration, and an attempt to rise above it and consider more cosmic matters. To that end, the album features shattering, modern interpretations of Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and Paul Simon’s “American Tune;” it also includes lyrics he adapted from favorite poems by Wallace Stevens, Franz Wright, and Rumi, among others. The album, co-produced by Branford Marsalis, is one of my favorite discs of the year. Our discussion appears in the June issue of DownBeat, but you can read it here.
Filed under Branford Marsalis, Downbeat, Kurt Elling
Allen Morrison - Music Journalist, Jazz Pianist, Songwriter, Lecturer - Long Island, NY 
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