Bobby Hutcherson

Like Danilo Pérez, Brad Mehldau, and any number of jazz pianists, Canadian piano player and composer Renee Rosnes keeps challenging herself and pushing herself and her collaborators in new directions. As a young pianist in Vancouver, British Columbia, Rosnes took her musical cues and inspiration from the likes of Oscar Peterson, McCoy Tyner, and Horace Silver. She began playing classical piano at age three and was bitten by the jazz bug in high school, after a high-school music teacher recruited her for the jazz band. She attended the University of Toronto for two years to study classical performance, but left to go back home to Vancouver and begin playing jazz full-time, because she knew where her heart lay and what she wanted to do professionally…

As of 2002, Kenny Garrett had spent a decade recording for Warner Bros., with Happy People being his seventh release for the major label. That was a remarkable accomplishment in an era when, to succeed, it seemed that jazz musicians either had to adopt pop-oriented contemporary jazz as their style or, if they stayed in a traditional mode, be, uh, dead. Garrett remained very much alive, but Happy People demonstrated the strategies that the alto saxophonist had developed to maintain his precarious status. Basically, he took a little from both of those successful approaches. As on his previous album, Simply Said, he employed Marcus Miller on a selective basis as an electric bassist, also promoting Miller to co-producer. Miller, who knew his way around contemporary jazz, helped turn the opening track, "Song for DiFang," into the kind of number that potentially could be played on smooth jazz radio stations.

The notion that nothing spurs the creative process like a deadline fully matches the back story of David Gilmore’s second album for Criss Cross, on which the 54-year-old guitar master navigates eight never-recorded compositions of both recent and older vintage, and a pair of well-wrought covers.
“I had two months to write the music, so I was under the gun,” Gilmore says, before distinguishing From Here To Here with his label debut, Transitions (Criss 1393), for which he convened a crackling quintet to interpret repertoire by a cohort of recently deceased masters (Victor Bailey, Paul Bley, Bobby Hutcherson, Toots Thielemans, Woody Shaw, and iconic living elder Hermeto Pascoal). “I wanted to get a smaller working group in the studio to facilitate touring.

The first of 100 tunes in this collection is a 1937 recording of tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins and guitarist Django Reinhardt playing Out Of Nowhere. It was recorded two years before Blue Note Records was founded. The taping was done for EMI’s Capitol label’s French division. This is an ominous hint as to the content of the 10-disc “100 Best of Blue Note” box set, which at first glance appears to have all the trimmings of a slick 21st century collection.

Mellow grooves from the coolest Jazz cats set the perfect mood for your late night lounge. Whether the night time is wind-down time, or a chance for a romantic evening in, this double disc set of chilled-out Jazz sounds are the perfect backdrop with over two hours of late night Jazz music.
Billie Holiday, Cannonball Adderley, Sarah Vaughan, Milt Jackson, Al Cohn And Zoot Sims, Peggy Lee, Lee Morgan, Count Basie and others.

One of the many jazzmen who started out playing hard bop but went electric during the fusion era, Joe Sample was, in the late '50s, a founding member of the Jazz Crusaders along with trombonist Wayne Henderson, tenor saxman Wilton Felder, and drummer Stix Hooper. The Crusaders' debt to Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers wasn't hard to miss - except that the L.A.-based unit had no trumpeter, and became known for its unique tenor/trombone front line. Sample, a hard-swinging player who could handle chordal and modal/scalar improvisation equally well, stuck to the acoustic piano during The Crusaders' early years - but would place greater emphasis on electric keyboards when the band turned to jazz-funk in the early '70s and dropped "Jazz" from its name.

Leon "Ndugu" Chancler was an American pop, funk and jazz drummer. He was also a composer, producer, and university professor. Chancler began playing drums when he was thirteen years old. He would publicly reminisce about being asked to leave a classroom for continuously tapping on the desk, only to be later heard tapping on the poles in the hallway. His love for the drums took over while attending Gompers Junior High School and it became his lifelong ambition. He graduated from Locke High School having been heavily involved in playing there with Willie Bobo and the Harold Johnson Sextet. He graduated from California State University, Dominguez Hills with a degree in music education. By then he had already performed with the Gerald Wilson Big Band, Herbie Hancock, and recorded with Miles Davis, Freddie Hubbard, and Bobby Hutcherson.