Howard grad and D.C. native Akua Allrich has had a busy few years. In 2010, the soulful vocalist released her debut album, A Peace of Mine, and has been performing regularly since then. She's about to release her second album, a collection of classic jazz standards recorded at Bohemian Caverns and THEARC, and will celebrate it [...]
Friday, Feb. 1
Festival season is a long way off, but there are a few events that remind us of their imminence: the Mid Atlantic Jazz Festival, a traveling iteration of Monterey Jazz, stops tonight at the Kennedy Center. That event takes place every September in Monterey, Calif., but its organizers also like to assemble groups of [...]
Last year's Jazzies were created on a whim, searching for a way to sum up the year in D.C. jazz; to our surprise, it went viral within the local community, giving Washington City Paper little choice but to turn the cute one-off into an annual tradition. Thus, without further ado, here are the winners of [...]
Friday, June 15
The clear, soulful voice of Akua Allrich is the primary reason to go hear her, of course. She's a warm, powerful presence whose singing talents are too vast to be constrained to jazz. (I've suggested neo-soul was a major part of her repertoire in the past, but the global elements in her music [...]
The 2012 DC Jazz Festival landed amid a perfect storm. From the opening of The Hamilton—maybe the best thing ever to happen to the festival, but more on that later—and the reopening of the Howard Theatre to the increasing confidence and imagination of CapitalBop and the accession of Jazz at the Atlas to the proliferation of [...]
The goods at this year's DC Jazz Festival are fairly evenly distributed, so you won't have to fret the usual backload. (Well, there's still MegaFest, but we'll get to that later.) There's nothing slow about opening weekend, which offers a wealth of great music.
FRIDAY
It's a new take on an old idea: The two-week incarnations of [...]
Friday, October 7
We all know easy-listening trumpeter Chris Botti, right? He wasn't always such light, soft fare. He moved to New York City in 1985, the story goes, to establish himself as the baddest young bebop trumpeter on the scene. But something happened there to scare him away from that goal, sending him running into [...]
Remember how I said that September was when the magic would happen? Behold, this week, where I severely cherry-picked the week's offerings and am still having to do an extra-long column.
Friday, September 9
There are so many things about The Cookers that scream "All-Star Band." The truth, though, is that they are an All-Should-Have-Been-Stars Band. Organizers [...]
