Jake Baldwin and Ted Godbout stay busy enough playing as sidemen that I consider it a godsend when they find time to work as leaders. When trumpet player Jake Baldwin and pianist Ted Godbout realized they had a pile of originals they had never recorded, they decided to connect with some great players and read...Read More

Zacc Harris is a fixture in the Twin Cities jazz scene. More than just a celebrated guitar player, Harris is the head of Shifting Paradigm Records, a Minnesota-based record label that releases gems from all around the globe. For Harris’s latest release, Chasing Shadows, he left his students and his family in Minneapolis for a couple...Read More

As The Bad Plus round the corner on their second full length as a guitar/saxophone/bass/drums quartet as opposed to a piano trio I am getting more drawn into their new textures. The opening track on the new album, Complex Emotions, is a Reid Anderson penned tune called “Grid/Ocean.” This song stood out to me for...Read More

Vocalist Tommy Boynton has arrived with his first album tackling jazz standards. Boynton moved to the Twin Cities about two years ago and keeps busy as a member of the Four Freshmen, the celebrated long-running vocal quartet now based partially out of the Twin Cities. Boynton has a clean, earnest voice that packs a playful,...Read More

This has been a banner year for Minnesota jazz releases. We are bursting at the seams with new sounds from Kavyesh Kaviraj, Take That Back, Zacc Harris and more. Another release that deserves to be on the short list for best release of the year is L.A. Buckner and BiG HOMiE’s new outing Norfside. We have already...Read More

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

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