Phillip Lutz

To those who have followed saxophonist Melissa Aldana’s career, her victory as Rising Star Artist of the Year in the 70th Annual DownBeat Critics Poll is no surprise. The trajectory has been clear from her days as a teenage…

Flying on an early summer night in a season of tricky air travel, Charles Lloyd’s plane from Ottawa, Canada, touched down in New Jersey dangerously close to showtime. Catching a car from Newark Airport, he reached Sony Hall in Midtown…

Flying on an early summer night in a season of tricky air travel, Charles Lloyd’s plane from Ottawa, Canada, touched down in New Jersey dangerously close to showtime. Catching a car from Newark Airport, he reached Sony Hall in Midtown…

Horn player and rapper Marcus “Tennishu” Tenney is emphatic that the latest Butcher Brown album came up “from the mud.” His original version, recorded before their critically acclaimed 2020 album #KingButch, and before its…

In August of 1972, Nils Winther was an enterprising young man with a taste for jazz and a talent for taping that he deployed liberally at the local club, Jazzhus Montmarte, in Copenhagen, Denmark. When Jackie McLean scheduled a multi-night…

If, as Charles Lloyd likes to say, “creativity is going to burst at its seams,” then it’s no surprise that the irrepressibly creative artist breaches the two-dimensional confines of a video-conference screen and emerges as a…

In the aftermath of World War II, the deprivations felt throughout the United Kingdom were particularly acute in John McLaughlin’s native Kirk Sandall, a tiny village in the north of England where a munitions factory that had dominated…

Tonight, April 8, tenor saxophonist Javon Jackson will bring to the Village Vanguard a tribute to his late performing partner, poet Nikki Giovanni. For the Vanguard, it will recall a bygone era when the club, and many other spots…

One afternoon in mid-September, a touring Branford Marsalis had some time to kill in Oberlin, Ohio. Rather than see the local sights, he picked up his soprano saxophone and stepped into the woodshed, joined by a classical favorite of his,…

Resplendent in a shimmering gold jacket, his long gray locks kissed by the evening breeze, Gary Bartz was floating untethered in the Charlie Parker zone. Physically, he was at its ground zero: onstage at the Charlie Parker Jazz Festival, a…