Minnesota mainstay Connie Evingson is preparing to release her new album, Hornucopia, and she was kind enough to share a couple tunes in advance with Jazz88. Evingson sent along two songs that feature the recently deceased jazz saxophone legend Benny Golson including “Whisper Not.” The Hornucopia album focuses on the great songs written by horn players and...Read More

Guitar phenom Cory Wong connected with the Metropole Orkest for his latest effort Starship Syncopation and the sound is rich, full and at times hypnotic. On the tune “305” Wong also tapped in saxophonist Chris Potter and the Miami mainstay quartet Electric Kif. The tune is six minutes full of groove with the band luxuriating in the...Read More

Jazz88 celebrates the birthday of Clare Fischer, born on October 22, 1928. Fischer was an innovative arranger and an accomplished keyboardist and composer. His tunes Pensativa and Morning have become jazz standards. He worked with the vocal group the Hi-Los,  trumpeter Donald Byrd, Dizzy Gillespie, and made several recordings of latin jazz and bossa nova under his own name as well. Herbie Hancock cited Fischer...Read More

Guitarist, Joel Shapira, is back at it with a quartet he last recorded with almost two decades ago. The new record is called Sleepless Montage and the band sounds really comfortable diving back into a new set of tunes penned by Shapira. I was first drawn to the title track at first cause of the...Read More

Music is the ultimate conjurer of emotions. The sounds of “Fireflies” off of L.A. Buckner and BiG HOMiE’s forthcoming record “Norfside” conjures a lifetime of triumph into three and a half minutes of music like the groove downed three espressos before the second measure and as the group navigates the various sections there is a...Read More

We are so lucky to have Zacc Harris in the Twin Cities. Harris is a top-flight guitarist, composer and educator. He also manages to run a premier record label that releases world-class music which represents our local scene and the larger international jazz scene. Through some scheduling miracle, Zacc Harris was able to connect with...Read More

I spent an inordinate amount of my teen years listening to a record by David Fiuczynski called Lunar Crush. It came out in 1994 and it featured John Medeski’s keyboard work all over it. Much of the joy of this record can be found in how wide the palette of sounds is. Multiple keyboards, percussion appearing...Read More

Saxophonist / composer/ arranger Benny Golson died Saturday. He was 95 years old. Inspired largely by the music of pianist Tadd Dameron, Golson composed several tunes now considered standards, including “Whisper Not,” “Along Came Betty,” and “I Remember Clifford.” With his dark, swooping sound and arpeggiated phrases, Golson’s tenor saxophone playing had a lot in...Read More

Jazz88 celebrates the birthday of pianist and composer Muhal Richard Abrams, who was born September 19th, 1930 in Chicago. Early on, Abrams worked with a wide variety of musicians from blues artists to saxophonist Dexter Gordon and trumpeter Woody Shaw. In 1965, Abrams was a founding member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians,...Read More

There are some great transcontinental collaborations happening in the Twin Cities Jazz scene! Technology has made it feasible for arrangers from all over the world to get their charts performed and recorded by a topflight big band without having to muster all the players individually. Adi Yeshaya, Ned Kantar and other arrangers in town have...Read More