One of the central music tenets that distinguishes jazz music is the art of improvisation – though we must emphasize here that improvisation is not a practice exclusive to jazz music. And make no mistake about it, the ability to create, to “make up” cogent statements and variations on a theme on the spot can indeed be intimidating to some, mysterious to most. What of the student musician, how does he or she gain a comfort level with the art of improvising, of seemingly making coherent statements on the spot. And of course there’s the notion of some who may be new to jazz music, that skilled practitioners somehow manage to “make it up” on the spot, to seemingly seize lines of music out of thin air as they go about their craft. It does take a special mind and years of arduous work before a musician can evolve to being an exceptional improviser; then once that skill has been achieved to varying degrees, the improviser must acquire the confidence to figuratively throw away the preconceived rules and allow improvisation to flow naturally from their chosen instrument. Indeed this can be a source of great frustration, even downright intimidation for some.

Recently, via Jazzcorner.com (the parent or host of this site) we discovered the ongoing efforts of a young musician seeking to bring a new improvisation teaching tool to the music education marketplace. Scott Hughes says he has the Tonic. We recently sought out Mr. Hughes to learn more about he and his motivation to simplify the improviser’s education; clearly a few questions were in order.

Give Independent Ear readers some background on Scott Hughes
I’m a musician and entrepreneur based in Philadelphia, originally from Pittsburgh. All my life I’ve been interested in improvisation, but have had trouble finding teachers who could help me.

I started playing piano as soon as I was tall enough to reach the keys, and became obsessed with the blues and jazz from an early age. In college I studied music and while I loved the fact that I was able to spend so much time playing, I felt out of place. Music school was a competitive atmosphere, and while it drove me to work harder at times, it ultimately was an anxiety-inducing experience.

I often felt overwhelmed by the amount of information that I was taking in. Every teacher was talented and well-meaning, but everyone was telling me to practice something different. One might say I should be transcribing Charlie Parker solos, while another would suggest I transpose Real Book tunes into every key. And yet other teachers were trying to expose me to 20th century classical music

Talk your new project Tonic.
Tonic is a game that helps musicians practice improvisation. Using cards and dice, it’s a stress free way to experiment with improvisation. Each card has a clear but open-ended instruction that asks you to create a short piece of music on the spot.

It’s not a traditional game, since there is no score and the rules are relaxed. But Tonic will challenge you to rethink your approach and gently push you out of your comfort zone, which will help you grow as an artist and musician. The entire game is available for free at tonicgame.com, but I’m also running a Kickstarter campaign to produce a professional version with high-quality cards and dice.

Tonic is based on the idea that improvisation should not be a serious endeavor — that improv should be playful and fun. For many people, myself included, the idea of making up music on the spot is difficult. It can be a source of stress and anxiety: “What do I play? Does it sound good enough?” And so on.

But when you look at the most masterful improvisers of all time, you don’t see that. You see easy, unbridled expression and confidence.

My goal is to bridge that gap and bring an element of playfulness to a subject that can be intimidating to beginners and experienced players alike.

What disparities in jazz education, and the way people learn to play jazz, did you detect that inspired your development of Tonic?
When you think about it, all musicians are improvisers. All composed pieces of music in history — every song, symphony, or solo– began as in improvisation. They must have been; because when you’re creating something new, there is nothing written down!

Somewhere along the way, we got lost. We started teaching students that in order to play jazz, you need to learn scales and chords. You need to study the Real Book. You need to listen to Charlie Parker and John Coltrane.

These things are all important, but they are intimidating to the beginner. The learning curve is too steep. A beginning musician needs to focus on simpler ideas: How do I create a piece of music from beginning to end, no matter how simple? How do I express myself? How do I make it fun?

Tonic addresses these questions head-on.

What would you say are the most practical applications of Tonic, and who/what is your target constituency?
Tonic is for any musician who wants to become a more creative and confident player. It’s deliberately designed so that musicians of every background and instrument can play and challenge themselves as artists.

The original version is available now on Kickstarter, and can be downloaded for free as a file which you can print at www.tonicgame.com.

Musicians who are high-school aged or older will get the most out of it, because they have enough experience with music to understand some of the concepts and terminology. But I have made an effort to keep everything accessible to even complete beginners. There are detailed instructions and a glossary included.

Tonic is not intended as a comprehensive solution. If your goal is to learn to improvise at the organ or at a jazz club, you will most certainly need a more structured and detailed approach. But Tonic is something that can be used in conjunction with these methods to encourage a more carefree and unconventional approach that will help them retain the spirit of “play” as they work through a more rigorous training program.

Ultimately what do you envision as the evolution of Tonic?
I envision Tonic developing into a community of individuals and educators who recognize that improvisation is something that all musicians, even if they aren’t doing it in a performance setting. Improvisation cultivates a fearlessness and a boldness that cannot be attained any other way.

The rewards go far beyond the actual practice — even if you’re a classical player and you never once play a note that isn’t written on the page, you will grow as an artist and as a person if you feel comfortable with improvising and expressing yourself through structured improvisation.

The beauty of Kickstarter is that it allows a creator like me to get feedback and test a new idea and see how people in the real world are using it. I have already begun to develop extra add-ons for Tonic, and will continue to refine and develop new ways to help students and educators, in hopes that Tonic will encourage improvisation to play a larger part in music education everywhere.

Festival International de Jazz de Montreal may well be the most family-friendly of all major jazz festivals

Perhaps the world’s largest such event, Festival International de Jazz de Montreal, recently celebrated its 36th running June 26-July 5. The festival occupies approximately one square mile of the city’s prime downtown real estate. With the handsome arts venue/shopping mall/Musee D’Art Contemporary (the contemporary art museum)/Metro station complex on rue Ste-Catherine known as Place-des-Arts as its hub, the festival operates five huge outdoor satellite stages (designated as Scenes) on adjoining streets and the adjacent plaza that sits atop the mall plateau. At one end of Ste-Catherine, across the street from the Maison Du Festival (festival headquarters) building – which also houses a festival gallery/hall of fame, two club spaces which presented throughout the festival, and at street level Le Balmoral Bistro de Festival restaurant – next to one of two extensive festival merchandise boutiques (located at each end of the festival grounds) sits Jazz bars Heineken, a semi-open beer garden tent which hosted performances throughout the day. You get the drift, this is a massive event, with a kind of noon-to-midnight jazz-based street fair atmosphere. Adding to that street fair mentality are strolling brass bands, stilt walkers, and all manner of family-friendly diversions, including an extensive area on the plateau devoted to children’s pleasures. Consequently I cannot recall another festival that caters more directly to entire families, which turned out in abundance throughout the festival.

With the exception of the venues of Place-des-Arts, which include four modern, woody, acoustically superior concert halls, the vast majority of the action around the plaza, including the Scenes stages, is free. In addition to the Place-des-Arts halls, where the highest profile artists of the festival performed, the ticketed concert spaces also included a venue in the Hyatt Hotel across from Place-des-Arts, the two clubs in the festival headquarters building, and several indoor venues in easy walking access around the festival perimeter, including Club Soda, and two favorite venues, the lovely church Gesu, and Monument-National on the cross street Saint-Laurent. And that’s just a sketch of the festival geography; so if you get the sense of a jazz festival on a massive scale, you’ve got the picture. Drawing approximately 2 million celebrants over its 10-day run, Festival International de Jazz de Montreal has a $25M operating budget.

As is customary with large-scale jazz festivals, this event offers a fair share of presentations that are either beyond the broadly-defined borders of what we know as jazz, or what might otherwise be seen as musical offshoots or sisters of the jazz tradition. The name of that tune is one festival presenters and producers know all too well, but it is precisely that broad sense of the music which draws the kind of aggregate numbers Montreal can boast with civic pride. Certainly if that broad music menu is what enables this grand event to present among many others the jazz mastery of the Wayne Shorter Quartet, Dee Dee Bridgewater, a quartet led by John Scofield & Joe Lovano, Vijay Iyer Trio, Abdullah Ibrahim (for 3 separate evenings!), Kurt Rosenwinkel, Dave Douglas, The Bad Plus Joshua Redman, the emerging South African pianist Kyle Shepard, Marc Cary‘s Focus Trio, John Pizzarelli, Eliane Elias, Johnny O’Neal, Dave Douglas, John Medeski (solo), or the by equal turns elegant & burning new acoustic quartet known as Heads of State, and dozens of other variations on the jazz groove… then so be it!

On Friday arrival night, armed with a pace-yourself sense of the immense scope of this festival from prior experiences, we eased into Montreal mode with a stroll across the festival byways absorbing the sights & sounds (including the startling artistry of David Altmejd at Musee D’Art Contemporary). Eventually we settled in at the 9pm performance by the young trumpet ace Theo Croker (grandson of the great Doc Cheatham) at Le Club, the street level venue at Maison Du Festival. Breathing fire from the jump, with another of DC’s impressive coterie of young bassists Eric Wheeler on acoustic, Croker piloted a nice, tight unit that clearly enjoyed playing together. Croker, who plays eyes shut tight, boasts a nice middle register and growing fluency, which he displayed to good measure on a solid program of originals, and jazz familiars, including a second set opening foray on Joe Henderson‘s “A Shade of Jade,” the leader impressively delivering his hard bop bona fides. Elsewhere he lent a puckish smear to his theme statement on Stevie Wonder‘s “Visions,” and expressed new found love for Hugh Masakela, skillfully navigating the South African’s “Bone Masakela, a particular feature for Wheeler’s supple bass solo.

After a day of pleasant retail strolling, Saturday evening brought the Stanley Clarke Band to Theatre Maisonneuve, the leader largely on acoustic bass save for his bass guitar opener and encore. Clarke’s quartet (with the volatile young drummer Mike Mitchell) essayed material ranging from his late pal George Duke‘s “Brazilian Love Affair,” to a gorgeous reading of Joe Henderson’s “Black Narciussus,” which brought out the nuanced craft of the excitable Mitchell’s trapsmanship. All these years later, Stanley Clarke’s acoustic bass facility remains astounding.

As the Monday evening dinner hour approached and folks began jockeying for tables at the inviting sidewalk restaurants and cafes aligned on one side of rue Ste-Catherine with a view of much festival action, a robust crowd gathered a block away at Scene TD (TD Bank is a major festival sponsor) for Toronto-based saxophonist-flutist Jane Bunnett‘s latest Afro-Cuba immersion, the all-women ensemble Maqueque. The young sister at the piano elicited obvious shades of Chucho Valdes in her rippling facility, and throughout their set Jane’s sinewy soprano and attractive flute cut distinctive figures as focal point of Maqueque’s Afro-Cuban percussive exuberance. Their Justin Time album “Jane Bunnett and Maqueque” copped the prestigious Juno (Canada’s music awards) for Jazz Album of the Year. Here are a couple of video clips to give you some sense of this fierce assemblage:

That evening presented one of the week’s heartiest menus. Following Maqueque’s set, at 8pm it was on to Theatre Maisonneuve for the imposing John Scofield/Joe Lovano Quartet, with their locomotive integration of tenor and guitar, buoyed by the distinguished rhythm section of drummer Bill Stewart and bassist Larry Grenadier. Lovano rolled out his bristling tribute to recent ancestor Ornette Coleman “Ettenro”. The animation in Lovano’s performance was particularly vivid as his portable mic enabled him to do a deft soft shoe around his place on the stage in deeply concentrated reaction to the music.

At 10:30 we made our way around the corner on rue De Bleury to the lovely chapel Gesu for a new assemblage of masters known as Heads of State: Gary Bartz, Larry Willis, Buster Williams, and Al Foster (don’t sleep their new release on Smoke Sessions). Grace and deep swing defined this assemblage as they dipped into the book of McCoy Tyner for “Passion Dance” and “Search for Peace,” stopping along the way to honor Monk with Bartz “Uncle Bubba.” What a veritable sonic buffet, and all that in one evening!

Tuesday evening’s happy hour brought the charming Brazilian chanteuse Joyce Moreno (known largely on records as simply Joyce, in that typical one-name Brazil parlance) at Club Soda, seated comfortably at a stool, legs crossed to accommodate her accompanying guitar, with piano-bass-drums trio. Her sublime solo take on Jobim’s “Waters of March” (“Agua de Beber”) was worth the visit alone.

Eleven year old Joey Alexander opened the 8pm Wayne Shorter Quartet concert at Maison Symphonique with solo aplomb and a maturity belying his youth. Technically facile it will be intriguing to watch his development once he’s lived more of life’s vicissitudes. Shorter’s set, with the familiar Danilo Perez/John Patitucci/Brian Blade unit, unfolded like a mystery, befitting the Mysterious Traveler aspect of the master and reflecting his noted cinematic immersion. These days Wayne remains seated, shifting seamlessly between tenor and soprano as the feeling strikes him, playing in bursts, deftly reflecting the “we always solo, we never solo” credo that’s been his since Weather Report days. Shorter listens intently, particularly to Danilo who is the central nervous system of this band.

The next evening following a day of strolling among the city’s numerous delights and (an ethnic coincidence I assure you) lucking into a beautiful Indian meal after lack of reservations denied entry to another boîte, it was on to Monument National to climb the steps for the Vijay Iyer Trio, with Stephan Crump on bass and the eminently musical Tyshawn Sorey on drums. There’s an architectural quality to Vijay’s tune development, particularly evident on two potent covers he delivered – on Monk’s tricky “Work” (which appears on his current ECM release), a reading of Henry Threadgill‘s “Little Demons”, and the leader’s own “Our Lives.” In his outro to the first seamless medley of tunes, Vijay deftly likened the set to a DJ mix tape.

The next two evenings were spent in the agreeable, street level confines of Le Club. But first we stopped over at Gesu for the first of three evenings of Abdullah Ibrahim, one of the festival’s two special Invitation Series artists (the other was guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel). A true mark of distinction for this festival, the Invitation Series invites multi-faceted artists to perform in different contexts for a series of evenings. Ibrahim chose to open his 3-evening series solo, which was quite enchanting. He followed the next evening with a trio performance that never seemed to click, his trio mates on bass & cello, and drums seemed attached tightly to a veritable string and the interaction never meshed. There simply wasn’t much joy onstage that puzzling evening. The music seemed to amble from through-composed pieces to improvised forays. A familiar fragment would peak through now and then, but with tantalizingly disappointing briefness. Ibrahim’s final evening found him in the company of his Ekaya Septet, but alas that was travel day for us.

After Ibrahim’s solo set, Le Club presented the East African singer Somi, whose artistry seems to grow exponentially with each sighting, reflecting both her origins and her immersion in Nigeria. She quite effectively channeled Nina Simone, Miriam Makeba, and even Fela… though the end result was pure Somi and not the least bit imitative. And she has good taste in rhythm sections, with DC’s own Ben Williams on bass and Otis Brown lll on drums, ample evidence that this is one singer who is not the least bit intimidated by mixing it up with her equal turns crafty and complimentary band members.

Still puzzling over Ibrahim’s trio effort, ironically our last evening closed with another keyboard-bass-drums trio that thoroughly meshed, in the person of Marc Cary‘s Focus Trio. There was plenty of tension and modulation in the ebb and flow of Cary’s unit, with yet another young DC bassist, Rashsaan Carter, and drummer Sameer Gupta‘s distinctive groove, leavened with East Indian textures via his tabla set-up. Cary is a consistent carrier of the flame, from the moment he struck Harold Mabern‘s incendiary “The Beehive” Cary, no stranger to the groove factor on his Fender-Rhodes keyboard, which acted up a bit technically, offered a Gnawa groove inspired by his time in Essaouira, Morocco at the great Gnawa Festival. He even surprisingly served up Hermeto Pascoal‘s mini-gem “Little Church,” with a nice outro anecdote about a chance encounter with Pascoal on a trip to Brazil. With much of the music based on his latest Motema release “Rhodes Ahead Vol. 2”, Marc Cary beautifully capped off our Montreal experience.

Lots of inertia surrounding 2015 as the centennial year of the birth of American music immortal Billie Holiday. The tributes have included several recordings, most notably Cassandra Wilson and Jose James separate re-imaginings of Lady Day. From the literary perspective on Billie comes John Szwed’s very worthwhile new book Billie Holiday: The Musician and The Myth (Viking). John Szwed is a longtime professor (notably director of the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University, one of the more unique jazz studies programs, with its focus on the academic rather than the pedagogical side of jazz studies), jazz critic, and author of exceptional biographies of Sun Ra, Miles Davis, and the intrepid oral historian Alan Lomax.

Two recent prints bore wildly divergent viewpoints on Szwed’s treatment of Billie. In his monthly JazzTimes magazine column, The Gig, New York Times critic Nate Chinen (multiple JJA Awards winner for jazz journalism), after listing some of this centennial year’s recorded homages to Lady Day, writes this” “She was a fount of swinging ebullience and a doyenne of dirges: Our Lady of Sorrows. She was vulnerable and flinty, a tragic case with little use for your pity. “All those who have attempted to write about her have discovered that there are many Billie Holidays, ” John Szwed writes in the introduction to his slim but illuminating book Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth (Viking), the most rewarding bit of Billieana to surface in any form this year.”

Meanwhile in the May 22 edition of the Washington Post (Style section), Matt Schudel’s rather churlish review includes the following: “Holiday, who was often called “Lady Day,” would seem to be a natural subject for a first-rate biography, but for some reason that has not been the case. The best of a mediocre lot is perhaps Donald Clarke’s “Wishing on the Moon,” published in 1994.” So in one fell swoop Schudel dismisses at least two very worthy treatments of La Holiday, notably by two of Szwed’s Columbia colleagues: Robert O’Meally’s Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday (1991, Arcade), and Farah Jasmine Griffin’s If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday (2001, Simon & Schuster)! Or perhaps he slept those fine editions to the Holiday bibliography.


Schudel goes on to say: “In a sense, Holiday’s life was one long spiral toward tragedy, but Szwed seldom takes biographical advantage of the rich documentary material he finds.” One must assume by that passage that Mr. Schudel would have preferred heaps more lurid details, dirt, and a chronicle of Holiday’s long slide down the degradation tunnel of drug addiction, poor spousal choices, and new sexual affairs revelations. Later Schudel declares: “The most interesting sections of this diffuse and poorly conceived book are two chapters in which Szwed analyzes Holiday’s singing style.” Frankly, that level and depth of analysis is one of the real hallmarks of Szwed’s approach to Billie, and the author’s central purpose! One wonders if Schudel ever got far enough in Szwed’s treatment to read this end game Szwed declaration on p. 197 of his 219 page treatment: “I set out to write a book that cast new light on the extraordinary artist who was Billie Holiday. My intention was not to deny or gainsay the tribulations and tragedy of her life, but to shift the focus to her art. The consistency and taste she brought to nearly every performance, even those when her body was failing her, display a discipline, an artist’s complete devotion to her work, and a refusal to surrender to the demands of an insatiable world.” That pretty much says it all about John Szwed’s approach to his subject, particularly when one considers that the lurid details of her life are at this point so much ad nauseam, which is one reason this writer found Szwed’s take both refreshing and illuminating.

Instead of chapters on, perhaps the initial dabble with heroin spiraling into addiction, or her various affairs and assorted smarmy details, Szwed chose to write detailed chapters on a re-examination of the often dismissed William Dufty co-authored autobiography Lady Sings the Blues, in which Dufty himself is treated more kindly than previous examinations of the book that led to Berry Gordy’s entertaining but hack film of the same name. Holiday’s arc as a singer and a musician are explored, with very real delineations between those two sides of her artistry. Perhaps the most exhaustive Szwed chronicle of all is the songs Billie chose and why she chose those vehicles. Above all his is a sensitive, intelligent, and musicological detailing of this most unique of all singers, and as such is highly recommended.

For folks living in the Northeast Corridor, Cape May on the Jersey Shore offers many pleasures, including a pristine beachfront. Located 90 miles from the Philly area, those folks certainly know the numbers, as substantiated by a local who informed that about 90% of the resort town’s visitors come from the Philadelphia area. As for those from points south, like the DMV, you can slice the driving time significantly by traveling there via Lewes, Delaware and the Cape May/Lewes ferry, which is a particular bargain if you choose to leave your vehicle at the ferry boat lot in Lewes (free parking!). To enjoy Cape May one needn’t ever drive its relatively compact confines. And we all know how those beach towns make their capital from parking enforcement!

But if its jazz you’re after, why on earth go to Cape May? Producer Michael Kline has conjured up two separate reasons on the calendar for the journey: his eminently agreeable, bi-seasonal Exit Zero Jazz Festival. The Exit 0 Jazz Festival (which derives its name from the fact that Cape May is precisely at Exit 0 of the Garden State Parkway) represents a happy resurrection of the former Cape May Jazz Festival, celebrating two festival seasons – late-spring and mid-fall. Presenting a varied lineup with a significant young, emerging artist quotient, Exit 0 literally plays all over Cape May – from its beachfront Convention Center, with its inviting porch and beckoning rocking chairs overlooking the sea – to the outdoor happenings at the Estate (spring session), the new waterfront stage at the Lobster House, to clubs and bars along Beach Drive.

Cape May being a beach resort town there is no shortage of lodging options, from inviting B&Bs like Buttonwood Estate operated by my friends from the Akwaaba B&B in Brooklyn, to beachfront inns – but hold the chains, that’s not what Cape May is about. One of the beauties of the place is its total absence of big box retail and chain establishments of any kind. So if you need those hotel points or that fast food fix, better look to adjacent towns like Wildwood.

On this occasion we stayed at the Inn at Cape May, right on the heart of Beach Avenue across the street from the Convention Center. This is an Inn that epitomizes quaint, with many antique touches, including its 105 year old elevator, reputedly the oldest elevator in the Northeast. The place has an inviting porch with rockers and small tables suitable for those summer cocktail hours served by its busy bar. The Inn at Cape May is also home to Alethea’s, one of Exit 0’s prime festival venues. The place also boasts a trusty chef; order the Grouper, or the Thai Bowl, or perhaps the blackened mani-mahi sandwich; you’ll thank me later!

Alethea’s is where we caught some exceptional performances, starting with vibist Joe Locke‘s Love is a Pendulum project on Friday evening. With the indomitable powerhouse Jeff “Tain” Watts on drums the pots were guaranteed to be on boil. Locke’s 4-mallet mastery was augmented by the consistently sparkling piano artistry of Robert Rodriguez, with Ricardo Rodriguez (no relation) on bass. Locke is an ebullient artist who dances with the music and communicates fully with his audience, a thoroughly creative crowd-pleaser in that respect. The musical subject of the evening was Locke’s composerly recent recording for the Motema label, titled Love is a Pendulum, exploring several shades of love’s complications, joys and lessons, as the leader detailed it, in vivid poetic exposition.


Saturday afternoon was spent on the grounds of the Emlen Physick Estate, with crafts vendors and food merchants on hand for libations and retail speculations; certainly a great setting for a lineup ranging from tenorist Melissa Aldana‘s telepathic trio, to New Orleans brass band cum funk standard-bearers Rebirth Brass Band. The closing Saturday afternoon set debuted vocalist Charenee Wade‘s new Motema Records project Offering: The Music of Gil Scott-Heron & Brian Jackson. Bringing great wells of intensity to each of her solo turns was the kinetic alto saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin, another Motema Records artist who grows more powerful and assertive with each sighting. To her credit Ms. Wade was completely collegial in encouraging the inspiring Benjamin, who never failed to bring hoots of pleasure from the crowd at each solo turn. Of all the younger singers out here, Charenee Wade seems to have most substantially inherited the mantle of Betty Carter; you feel it in her delivery and you see it in her onstage mannerisms, in how she physically inhabits her songs. Due out June 23, Charenee’s re-imagining of Gil and Brian’s music brings new pleasures in its reinterpretations, further substantiating what an exceptional body of musical poetics those two Afrocentrics crafted in the late 70s and 80s. Added to Giacomo Gates‘ successful earlier exploration of the Scott-Heron/Jackson axis, clearly there is a wealth of material in that songbook that deserves re-examination and refreshment, as Charenee Wade surely has achieved.


A quick jaunt to the waterfront Lobster House – which also promised all manner of succulent fruits de mar – yielded French chanteuse Cyrille Aimee‘s agreeable 21st century Hot Club stylings. She, like Ms. Wade is another example of the wealth of jazz vocal talent currently in play. Blessed with an alluring voice not immune to playfulness, and a deeply complementary relationship with her French sidemen, Ms. Aimee promises to operate from a somewhat different vantage point than her vocal peers, one which owes much to the whole Django Reinhardt/Stephane Grappelli side of French jazz expression.

Rounding out our Saturday night was two infectious sets by trumpeter Sean Jones. There are few, if any, playing more horn these days than Sean Jones, as he proved throughout both sets. Buoyed by his longtime partner, the always resourceful Orrin Evans on piano, Ben Williams on bass, and his first engagement of young Mark Whitfield, Jr. on drums, Sean’s crew proved incendiary from the jump. Young Whitfield proved to be a definite powerhouse. One of the beauties of Jones’ playing is not only his big, roomy sound but the way he spins tales and craftily builds his solos. Having watched his evolution from high school player to first class professional, it is an increasing delight to experience Sean Jones’ ongoing development. And the connection he has with his bandmates is deeply infectious, particularly the brotherhood with the crafty energy source that is Orrin Evans.

One of the hallmarks of the annual DC Jazz Festival (DCJF) is our ongoing jazz education program engagement with the Jazzin’ At Sitar program, under the leadership of distinguished DC bassist Herman Burney. Jessica Boykin-Settles, herself an aspiring jazz vocalist, heads up the DCJF jazz education program and here’s a view inside that program.