Search results for

Jazz bandleader Kamasi Washington has released Fearless Movement, a new album inspired by dance.

Want a great conversation-starter with a fan of Latin jazz? Ask, "What's your favorite pairing of conga and timbales?" Many long-standing percussion duos display seemingly telepathic interplay — the intensity of a runaway train mixed with the kind of swing that makes hips move by themselves. Picking five was a chore, but here they are.

Take Five takes a detour with jazz's older cousin, the blues, as well as one of its most recognizable techniques: slide guitar. Gliding a bottleneck up and down the strings, the guitarist creates a world-weary sound. Muddy Waters sits at the center of this decades-spanning list.

This year, the 10 best blues albums feature many younger artists who play original music; their work is rooted in the blues but headed somewhere else. Some purists may be put off, but this is a fascinating moment, in which the music is evolving right in front of us. It's also a demonstration of how deeply blues has become embedded in our culture.

Over the course of his life, Nat King Cole became a jazz innovator and an icon of American popular music. Take Five celebrates Cole's birthday — he was born on March 17, 1919 — with a "five-tool" (that's baseball lingo, we'll explain) approach, highlighting the breadth of his work.

Famous for his collaborations with Miles Davis, Evans brought orchestral colors and textures to jazz, and was a pioneer of the "cool" sound.

New albums by Jon Batiste and Louis Cato arrive with high expectations. Both — as their experience leading led the band at Stephen Colbert's The Late Show has proved — are stellar live performers.

Read an excerpt from historian Bob Riesman's look at the great blues man's ever-evolving persona.

Two new volumes of work by the legendary music writer Ralph J. Gleason are out this spring. Though he grew up during the Jazz Age, Gleason loved acts like Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead too.

The jazz legend practiced his saxophone 10 to 15 hours a day before he got his big break, and while he wasn't the most reliable husband, when it came to music, he never wavered. Scholar Stanley Crouch's Kansas City Lightning is the first of a two-volume biography of Parker.