One of the newest, fastest-rising jazz personalities in D.C. is Lydia Lewis, a young drummer and educator with a crisp sound and startling grasp of tricky rhythmic signatures. Her profile has risen significantly this year as she's worked with tenor saxophonist Elijah Balbed at Bayou, played through the Washington Women in Jazz Festival this spring, [...]

In preparing this week's Jazz Setlist, I dropped a line to guitarist Rodney Richardson, the co-leader and co-mastermind (with trumpeter Joe Herrera) behind Sunday Jazz Lounge at Twins Jazz. Since March, the weekly program presented Herrera and Richarson's quartet along with a solo opener, who usually later joined the quartet onstage. "Who's the soloist this [...]

Jazz from the chilly Nordic countries often sounds different not because of the temperature, but because of education: Nordic musicians are so well-versed in the mechanics of jazz, the history of classical music, modern pop music trends, and experimental sounds that many incorporate it all into a distinctive sound that is [...]

Torontoan jazz drummer Harris Eisenstadt is a prolific leader and composer—but almost everything you hear from him is in a completely different musical context from what you heard last. Or at least that's the way it sounds at first. Whether he's doing free jazz, chamber music, or African folk, Eisenstadt says he consistently takes the [...]

Amy K. Bormet, a D.C.-based pianist, accordionist, and occasional singer, was working last year at the Kennedy Center's annual Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Festival and noticed something. "Half of the women in this festival, working in these orchestras and ensembles, were local D.C. people that I knew," she says. "I saw this and [...]

Last month, D.C. trumpeter Joe Herrera and guitarist Rodney Richardson announced their new Sunday Jazz Lounge program in March at Twins Jazz. Every Sunday night in March, Herrera and Richardson will head a quartet through two sets of originals and obscure covers. Each week will also kick off with a guest soloist, performing their own [...]

Update 1:14 PM:
Rodney Richardson clarifies the schedule a bit: "The Sunday Jazz Lounge will start in March. We will play every Sunday in March and hopefully continue from there." He and Herrera are still finalizing the soloist acts for those opening four weeks, and expect to have it completed by the end of the week.
Original [...]

Growing up in Shanghai, Le Zhang expected to be a Chinese pop singer; instead, she found herself traveling an international odyssey that found her intertwining her home country's folk canon with that of American jazz — the standard songbook as well as the avant-garde — as on her alluring self-released album When Will the Moon [...]

Atomic plays what I like to think of as free jazz for prog fans—relatively accessible avant-jazz that revels in stop/start dynamics, abrupt thematic shifts, bizarre time signatures, blazingly intense solos, and the juxtaposition of beautiful melody with raucous dissonance. Despite the near-destruction (twice!) of a borrowed upright bass, the quintet successfully ran through a [...]

D.C. has seen no shortage of interesting fringe music lately, but this week is a particular highlight reel of slightly out-there stuff (especially if you count Andrea Centazzo's solo performance in Baltimore last night). Here are four shows worth checking out to stimulate your ears and brain:
Tonight: Atomic at Twins Jazz. This Swedish/Norwegian [...]