Ten-year-old trumpeter Geoff Gallante is playing a free concert of jazz standards on May 1, at 4 p.m., at the Heritage Presbyterian Church in Alexandria. Jean Baptiste will be playing piano, Michael Bowie will be playing bass, and Harold Summey will be on the drums at the show.
Since first picking up the trumpet at the [...]
Alas. Dutch piano prodigy Michiel Borstlap was scheduled for shows at Blues Alley tonight and tomorrow, a performance that was sure to be radiant. Now it will not be radiant or anything else, as the shows have been canceled due to poor ticket sales.
That's the bad news. The good news is that the club has [...]
Yeah, the snowfall wasn't exactly a catastrophe 'round these parts, though the New Yorkers are certainly having a time of it. Still, it's enough to have closed D.C. public schools—which means enough to close daycares, which means your humble jazz correspondent has had to stay home and wait for naptime today before getting to this [...]
Friday, July 2
Nathan and Noble Jolley Jr. are together one of the most powerful musical forces known to man. The twin sons of local legend Noble Jolly Sr., who passed away in 2003, play drums and keyboards, respectively, and swing each with such intensity and aggression that it can often seem like they're barely in [...]
Jazz N' Families Fun Day is one of the trademark events of the DC Jazz Festival, a weekend-long calendar of kid-friendly activities and music. This year, as last year, it takes place at the Phillips Collection, so the young ones can get a perspective on the relationship between visual and musical arts — and if [...]
As mentioned before, most of this first week's local-artist showcase for the DC Jazz Festival is par for the course in terms of the regular Washington club rotation. There are, however, some exceptions, and the Thad Wilson Quartet is one of them.
Wilson, a trumpeter with a busy schedule of teaching at GWU and raising a [...]
March 4
Jazz fusion is alive and kicking in the person of Dutch trumpeter Eric Vloeimans. Actually, Vloeimans is a relentlessly experimental musician by any standard, but he devotes special attention to a gleaming electric sound—as on his newest CD, Heavensabove!—that can rock hard or space out with equal ease. Vloiemans' band on the disc is [...]
The former East Coast Jazz Festival returns this weekend as the Mid-Atlantic Jazz Festival, under the stewardship of DC saxophonist, educator, and mentor Paul Carr. Held at the Hilton Rockville — the ECJF's longtime home base — the festival features a gallimaufry of performances, master classes, and live interviews, with a couple of film screenings [...]
After Paquito d'Rivera's phenomenal set at the Inter-American Developmental Bank, I hurried over to Blues Alley to catch Jamie Broumas' second show. It's hard to imagine a better home for Broumas than Blues Alley, and easy to imagine the scene in black and white—3 a.m. drunks slumped astride their chairs with their ties loosened [...]
