From NYTimes.com: MICHAËL ATTIAS AND RENKU +2 (Saturday) Mr. Attias, a saxophonist, develops compositional fragments into compact expeditions in Renku, a working trio with the bassist John Hébert and the drummer Satoshi Takeishi. Here he adds two alert interlopers, the trumpeter Kirk Knuffke and the pianist Russ Lossing. At 9 and 10:30 p.m., Cornelia Street Café,

Purchase College's Nir Naaman has been selected by the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC as one of the international artists under 30 who will participate in the 2010 Betty Carter Jazz Ahead Residency Program. He is a graduate student in the Purchase College School of the Arts Music Conservatory and is an alto saxophonist...

Saxophonist Sabir Mateen is one of those musicians who have been playing free jazz since the seventies, playing with all the icons of the genre such as Cecil Taylor, William Parker, Daniel Carter, Steve Swell and Frode Gjerstad, to name just a few. With the latter two he recorded a new album on Not Two, and a solo album on RogueArt. He is a frequent player in the free jazz mini big bands, lik...

Buried somewhere in the hour-long rubble of buzzed guitars, martial drums, shredded vocal cords, unsuspected string sections, skronking sax solos, and, uh, bagpipes that form NJ suburbanites Titus Andronicus’ second full-length record is a smart, smart album that’s sorta about how being smart doesn’t really count for shit. The Monitor, ostensibly named for the

From Wesleyan: Friday, April 23rd, 2O1O – 8 pm – FREE ANTHONY BRAXTON SMALL ENSEMBLE “Saxophonist, composer and professor Anthony Braxton, known for his ground-breaking jazz and experimental music, performs in an intimate, small-ensemble setting.” Thursday, April 29th, 2O1O – 8 pm – FREE ANTHONY BRAXTON LARGE ENSEMBLE Professor Braxton’s student ensemble p...

Sounds of Liberation New Horizons Porter Records 2010 In the years following saxophonist John Coltrane's death and the related dearth of opportunities to perform and record the New Music stateside, a significant body of musicians relocated to Europe, to ply their art in a more receptive atmosphere. Reedman Byard Lancaster was one of the second wave of American free jazz musicians to relocate ...

The vogue for Latin jazz began in the 1940s when Dizzy Gillespie hired Cuban percussionist Chano Pozo to play in his big band. At the time, most critics dismissed it as a passing fad. However, percussionist Ray Mantilla, part of a "goodwill ensemble" Gillespie took on a tour of Castro's Cuba in 1977, is today elder statesman of a still thriving genre. With Kansas City saxophonist Bobby Watson...

In April 1958, Coleman Hawkins recorded Meets the Big Sax Section for Savoy. The session lived up to its billing. Hawkins was teamed with Count Basie's Marshall Royal, Frank Wess, Frank Foster and Charlie Fowlkes. The result, as you can imagine, was heavenly, inserting Hawkins' big bossy tenor into Basie's refined saxes. I posted about this session here...

This amazing piece of musical scholarship must be one of the most sublime pieces of obsession ever committed to print. Edited by Rutgers University scholar and musician (and Coltrane biographer) Lewis Porter, it is the work of a team of scholars and fans to collate everything known about saxophonist and composer John Coltrane. The book is broken down into two lengthy sections, Part One: The Chrono...

Vortex, London The Indian-Americans Vijay Iyer and Rudresh Mahanthappa might only have crossed the radar of European jazz audiences in recent years, but the pianist and saxophonist have been bonding since the mid-90s. The empathy is so strong it is sometimes hard to tell their musical thoughts apart, or to identify compositions from improvisations. A crowded Vortex listened in silence then raised ...