Patrick Jarenwattananon

Like any music, jazz has its revolutions; its sudden incidents in infrastructure; its disruptive presences of unprecedented sound. Mostly it's slower than that, though, with years and generations of accretions before it seems to call for new vocabulary. That's one way to look at Winter Jazzfest, whose latest incarnation occupied ...

"Devolution burns inside me," sings Esperanza Spalding on "One," a track from her upcoming album, Emily's D+Evolution. She's playing with the idea of a "modern mind" being afflicted by a "primal urge," and more broadly about how, sometimes, great strides in our development are inspired by less-enlightened versions of ...

A tradition that dates back to the 1970s, NPR Music presents an all-night broadcast of live jazz performances every New Year's Eve.

In a sequence of high-energy concerts, performers counted down to midnight and rang in the new year across four time zones, with performances in Boston; Newport, R.I.; New ...

Concerts of holiday music have been some of Jazz at Lincoln Center's most popular programming for at least 25 years now. Given the talent of its in-house big band — the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis — it's no surprise that the results are consistently ...

When the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra returns to the newly renovated Rose Theater, it'll bring one of its most popular traditions: its annual concerts of holiday music. The Orchestra, led by Wynton Marsalis, will present new arrangements of favorite seasonal songs with guest vocalists Denzal Sinclaire and Audrey Shakir.

Hi Code Switch readers! I'm here from NPR Music, where I mostly cover jazz. I thought you might be interested two big performances we recently featured in which the artists took a moment to talk about police intimidation and violence against African-Americans.

When Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah — a bold, ...

In Chicago, one band holds down a midnight-to-5 a.m. gig on Saturday nights — or, technically, on Sunday mornings. It's a time slot which seems challenging enough to do once or twice. These guys have been doing it for 23 years.

Sabertooth is a quirky band, currently an organ quartet ...

About a year ago, trumpeter Marquis Hill, now 28, traveled to Los Angeles, played five tunes for a panel of judges, and won the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition. You can think of it as a sort of Heisman Trophy for young jazz artists, meaning that a lot ...

Jazz is taught at universities now, and artists like saxophonist Tim Warfield and trumpeter Terell Stafford teach at them. But they know that jazz is taught more through listening than reading; more on the bandstand than the classroom. And they learned those lessons from the organ giant Shirley Scott, who ...

Artists don't usually tell long, rambling stories at the Tiny Desk, and if they do, those stories don't usually make the final cut. But this one felt different. It was about the time Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah, a young black man, says he was stopped by New Orleans police ...

"Thelonious Monk is the most important musician, period," Jason Moran says. He laughs out loud. "In all the world. Period!"

Moran is in a dressing room deep within the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., where he's the artistic director for ...

There's no one person responsible for creating music festivals — or for making them such a huge part of how we witness live performances today. But starting in 1954, one person developed a recipe for their secret sauce.

George Wein still goes to his signature event every year, checking out ...

Alto saxophonist Phil Woods, a leading jazz performer since the 1950s, died Tuesday afternoon. The cause was related to emphysema, his longtime agent, Joel Chriss, confirmed. Woods was 83.

As a teenager, Woods would commute to New York City for lessons with pianist Lennie Tristano, then check out ...

New episodes of Jazz Night In America are released on Thursday mornings. Every week, a one-hour program is sent to public radio stations throughout the U.S. (and archived online). Every other week, a concert documentary video, a companion to that week's radio program, is released online. Check your local listings ...

Hi! We're back.

Today, we launch a new season of Jazz Night In America. We've spent our summer making a better version of the show, and we're excited to share it with you. In fact, our first episode, featuring Wayne Shorter with the Jazz at Lincoln ...

Wayne Shorter is a living legend — a saxophonist, composer and lifelong original thinker. He's never been afraid to be different, which is perhaps why he's accomplished so much. Among his accomplishments:

• Music director for Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers
• Member of the Miles ...

For years, the trumpeter Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah has been operating under a rubric he calls "stretch music": his own vision of a modern, genre-agnostic, hybrid jazz. Stretch Music is also what the New Orleans native calls his new album. The unrelenting intensity remains, but here it's fulfilled with a ...

It's 2015, and jazz singing is weird. Right? Its conventions seem almost antiquated: the smarmy stage presence thing, the scat improvisation thing, the singing 50-year-old songs from forgotten musicals thing. In an age when singing the blues has been so thoroughly subsumed and reconfigured within other American pop-music traditions, when ...

When he started to make the music that appears on his new album, trumpeter Terence Blanchard wasn't thinking of Eric Garner, Michael Brown or any of the other recent high-profile police killings of African-Americans. He was thinking of desired collaborators: Donald Ramsey, a bassist and high-school classmate; Oscar Seaton, ...