It's easy to proclaim the inaugural season of jazz concerts at Atlas Performing Arts Center, which closed in December, a rousing creative success. Its commercial success seemed to be a little more mixed, but not unexpectedly so; Jazz at the Atlas is a new program in a still-developing area of the city, and by nature [...]
This is one of those weeks when I wish I could be in several places at once. Alas, dear reader, I cannot, and therefore can't recommend more than one at a time for you.
Friday, Dec. 9
Tim Warfield is one of the best Christmas gifts D.C. gives its jazz fans every year. He does an annual [...]
Ethan Iverson is the de facto front man for The Bad Plus. The piano trio doesn't really have a leader, but Iverson is the pianist, the one who talks between songs at their concerts, and the one who communicates most prolifically with the jazz audience via his blog Do The Math. Where The Bad Plus [...]
No list of today's major young jazz talents can exclude alto saxophonist Miguel Zenón. Born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Zenón embarked on his journey as a jazz musician at Boston's Berklee College of Music, moved on to the Manhattan School of Music, and took the jazz world by storm. Before long he [...]
While the Atlas Performing Arts Center is an anchor of the entertainment corridor along H Street NE, its artistic mission "to foster the artistic growth of professional and aspiring performing artists throughout the region" has only sporadically included jazz. That's about to change.
In September begins the new "Jazz at the Atlas" program, a twice-monthly concert [...]
Last month, Mayor Vince Gray and the head of D.C.’s Office of Motion Picture and Television Development, Crystal Palmer, visited Hollywood to woo studios and production companies to the nation’s capital. Competition between D.C.’s film office and neighboring states’ has been heating up in recent months, but whereas Maryland and Virginia are able to use tax [...]
Today is the start of the Intersections Festival at H Street’s Atlas Performing Arts Center, a multi-medium event that’s going to continue for the next three weekends. I have to say, it looks pretty damn impressive. According to the publicity materials, the festival includes 600 D.C. artists in 100 performances spread out over nine days. [...]
Although Jennifer L. Nelson’s 24, 7, 365 is a world-premiere work by a D.C.-based African-American woman dramatist, its woodsy locale, philosophical musings, and farcical plot turns evoke Shakespearean comedy at least as much as they do contemporary, satirical dissections of class or race-based conflict. That’s no bad thing.
Johnnie (a brittle Deidra LaWan Starnes) is a [...]
Winard Harper is the kind of drummer who can hold an audience rapt for five minutes with a two-stick high-hat solo. As you start applauding, or screaming, or whatever, you realize that this was just the intro, that the band is poised for a big entrance. Once the band is in, your [...]
