The Twin Cities Jazz Festival: What Makes It Different
Free admission. 20,000 people. National headliners. Running every June in Minneapolis since 1999.
The Rooms That Came and Went: A Map of Twin Cities Jazz Venues
I've spent forty years watching Twin Cities jazz rooms close. Rossi's, Jazzmines, the Times—most are gone. What survived tells you what sustains a scene.
Wayne Shorter: Jazz's Most Elusive Composer
Wayne Shorter wrote 'Footprints,' 'Speak No Evil,' and 'Nefertiti.' He played with Miles and co-founded Weather Report. But the compositions are the legacy.
The Women Who Built Jazz
Mary Lou Williams, Melba Liston, Lil Hardin, and Alice Coltrane shaped jazz. The standard history barely mentions them.
The Artist's Quarter: Three Lives of St. Paul's Jazz Room
The Artist's Quarter ran 37 years across three locations. Kenny Horst ran it on no salary. DownBeat called it one of the 150 best jazz venues in the world.
Captain Jack McDuff's Minneapolis Years
Jack McDuff died in Minneapolis in 2001 at 74. He spent his last 11 years here in a career renaissance. He gave George Benson his first break.
The Dakota: Minneapolis's Last Major Jazz Club
The Dakota has been open on Nicollet Mall since 1985. It outlasted every other major jazz club in Minneapolis. DownBeat and USA Today have both recognized it.
Debbie Duncan: Minnesota's First Lady of Song
Debbie Duncan came to Minneapolis in 1984 for six weeks and stayed 36 years. Won Jazz Vocalist of the Year so often the MMA retired her from it. Died 2020.
The Emporium of Jazz: Mendota's 25-Year Jazz Miracle
The Emporium of Jazz ran in Mendota, MN from 1966 to 1991. The Minnesota Historical Society named it one of 150 things that made Minnesota.
How Did Minneapolis Pull This Off?
Minneapolis shouldn't have a jazz scene this deep. No touring route, brutal winters, mid-sized population. I was there. Here is why it happened.
Irv Williams: Mr. Smooth
Irv Williams arrived in Minneapolis in 1942, turned down three jazz legends to stay, and played here until his death at 100 in 2019. Mr. Smooth.
KBEM Jazz 88: The Station That Held the Twin Cities Scene Together
KBEM Jazz 88 broadcasts 24 hours of jazz from Minneapolis. Run by the public school system. No other station quite like it anywhere.
Leigh Kamman and The Jazz Image
Leigh Kamman hosted The Jazz Image on MPR from 1973 to 2007. Broadcasting since 1939. I produced his show for years.
Maria Schneider: From Windom to the World
Maria Schneider grew up in Windom, MN, studied with Gil Evans, and became one of jazz's most Grammy-decorated composers. Minnesota's best-kept secret.
The Peterson Family: Minnesota's Four Generations of Jazz
Minnesota's most productive musical dynasty. Five children went national. Prince, Bob Dylan, Stevie Nicks, and Fleetwood Mac all worked with Petersons.
The Bad Plus: Minnesota's Gift to Modern Jazz
The Bad Plus came from Minneapolis and became one of the most covered jazz groups of the 2000s. The New York Times wrote about them. Columbia signed them.
The Twin Cities Jazz Society and Jazz Notes
I served on the Jazz Society board in the 1980s and edited Jazz Notes, the weekly publication that held our scene together before the internet.
Chicago Jazz Clubs: The Rooms That Made the Sound
Chicago pulled jazz north during the Great Migration and made it harder, faster, and louder. These are the clubs where that sound still lives.
New Orleans Jazz Clubs: Where to Hear the Real Thing
New Orleans invented jazz and never stopped playing it. Here are the clubs and rooms where the music still sounds like it belongs.
New York Jazz Clubs: The Definitive Guide to the Village and Beyond
New York did not invent jazz, but it gave jazz a career. The Village Vanguard, Blue Note, and Smalls are still open. Here is how to navigate the scene.
Twin Cities Jazz: The Scene That Raised Me
Minneapolis and St. Paul sustain a full-time jazz radio station, a world-class club, and a free festival. I spent forty years inside it.
The 15 Best Jazz Guitar Albums Ever Recorded
The jazz guitar canon runs from Charlie Christian to Julian Lage. These fifteen albums trace the full arc.
Bill Evans: Sunday at the Village Vanguard
Bill Evans, Scott LaFaro, and Paul Motian played at the Village Vanguard on June 25, 1961. What they recorded redefined the piano trio. LaFaro died ten days...
Chick Corea: Forever Yours — The Farewell Performance
Chick Corea's last concerts were never meant to be farewells. They became the most tender document of a fifty-year career.
Chick Corea: Forever Yours (2026)
Chick Corea played two solo concerts in October 2020. Four months later he was gone. Forever Yours captures what he left in the room.
The Classic Quartet: Coltrane's Four Years
Between 1961 and 1965, the John Coltrane Quartet made the most intense and spiritually ambitious music in jazz. Then it dissolved. Here is how it happened.
Detroit Jazz and the Strata Corporation
In 1969, pianist Kenny Cox founded Strata Records in Detroit. The label lasted five years and produced some of the most uncompromising jazz of its era. Its...
Joel Ross: Gospel Music (2026)
Joel Ross has always drawn from Chicago's Black church. On Gospel Music, he stops drawing from it and walks directly inside.
Joel Ross: Faith, Service, and the Black Church in Jazz
Joel Ross structured Gospel Music around the biblical narrative — creation, fall, salvation. On Blue Note, that takes nerve.
Julian Lage: Writing Twenty-Minute Songs and Building a Band
Julian Lage was identified as a prodigy at eight. Three decades later, he built a quartet where the guitar is not the hero.
Julian Lage and the Case for Writing Fast
Julian Lage composed Scenes from Above in twenty-minute sprints. The method sounds reckless. The results sound inevitable. That tension is the point.
Julian Lage: Scenes From Above (2026)
Scenes From Above is not about Julian Lage proving anything. It's about four musicians in a room, deciding together what matters.
Thelonious Monk and the Logic of Wrong Notes
Monk's wrong notes were structurally correct. Understanding how requires listening to what his left hand was doing while everyone was distracted by his right.
Theo Croker and Sullivan Fortner: Just Play
Theo Croker and Sullivan Fortner threw out a covers album and recorded fourteen spontaneous duets. The result is the most honest jazz record of early 2026.
Tomeka Reid: dance! skip! hop! (2026)
Tomeka Reid's fourth quartet album is five compositions that make you want to move. The playing is as demanding as anything in free jazz. It just happens to...
What Is Bebop? The Revolution That Made Jazz an Art Form
Bebop was not a genre. It was a declaration of independence — from dance floors, from entertainment, from the idea that jazz was background music.
Sonny Rollins: Saxophone Colossus (1956)
Saxophone Colossus was recorded in a single afternoon in 1956. Rollins was twenty-five. The record has not been surpassed in the tenor saxophone tradition.
Shabaka Hutchings: After the Saxophone
Shabaka Hutchings dissolved three bands, gave away his saxophone, and restarted with a Japanese flute he could barely play. What followed is extraordinary.
Robin D.G. Kelley and the Labor History of Jazz
Robin D.G. Kelley wrote the definitive Monk biography. His approach — follow the labor, the politics, the money — changes how jazz history reads.
What to Listen to After Kind of Blue
Kind of Blue is the most recommended entry point in jazz and the most common place to stop. There is a great deal more on the other side of it.
New York Jazz in 2025: The Rooms That Still Matter
The Village Vanguard still exists. So does a Brooklyn scene that did not exist twenty years ago, and a generation of musicians who grew up in both.
Miles Davis: Tutu (1986)
Tutu is the most controversial Miles Davis record after On the Corner. It is also the most misunderstood record of his late career.
Miles Davis vs. Wynton Marsalis: The Argument That Defined an Era
Miles Davis thought Wynton Marsalis was playing old music in fancy clothes. Marsalis thought Miles had abandoned jazz. They were both partly right.
The Feeling Music: Melissa Aldana and the Cuban Tradition
Aldana came to record a ballads album. Rubalcaba had a better idea. What followed is one of the most surprising pivots in recent jazz history.
Sun Ra and the Arkestra: Music from Another Planet
Sun Ra built a myth, a band, and a philosophy. The myth was absurd. The band was serious. The philosophy is one of the most original produced by American music.
The Second Great Quintet: Miles Davis 1964–1968
Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, Tony Williams: four musicians who had never quite fit together. With Miles Davis, they changed jazz.
Matana Roberts and the Twelve-Chapter History of Everything
Matana Roberts has spent over a decade on Coin Coin — twelve chapters tracing Black American history through family and free jazz.
Miles Davis and the Musicians He Made
Miles Davis's bands were finishing schools. Coltrane, Hancock, Shorter, Chick Corea — every one left with something they could not have learned elsewhere.
Lee Morgan: The Sidewinder (1963)
The Sidewinder was a commercial hit in a genre that had stopped having them. It achieved that without compromising a single note.
How to Start Listening to Jazz: An Honest Guide
Most beginner's guides to jazz tell you what to listen to. This one tells you how to listen — which is the more useful and more neglected question.
Where to Start with Miles Davis: A Discography Map
Miles Davis made over sixty studio albums. The question of where to start is real. The answer depends entirely on what you want from the music.
How to Collect Jazz Records Without Losing Your Mind
Jazz record collecting is obsessive and expensive. Both reputations are warranted. The third — that it rewards obsessiveness — is most warranted of all.
The Room Where Everyone Showed Up: A Review of The Jazz Omnibus
Not a history of jazz, but something rarer: how serious people kept showing up to write about music that refused to stay still.
Jazz in Film: What the Movies Got Right and Got Wrong
Films about jazz tend to get the music wrong in the same way: they mistake suffering for authenticity, and technical mastery for artistic vision.
How Jazz Is Taught Now — And What That Means for the Music
The conservatories teach jazz as a discipline now. The question is whether what they teach produces musicians, or produces people who can pass the exam.
Jazz at Lincoln Center: What Wynton Marsalis Built
Wynton Marsalis spent thirty-five years building the largest jazz institution in the world. The debates it sparked define how we argue about jazz.
Jazz and Hip-Hop: A Lineage, Not a Collaboration
Sampling was not hip-hop producers taking from jazz. It was the same musical culture extending itself into a new technological environment.
How the 2010s Rebuilt Jazz: Kamasi, Kendrick, and the London Moment
In 2015, Kamasi Washington released The Epic, Kendrick Lamar released To Pimp a Butterfly, and jazz became the most urgent music in the world.
Jazz Beyond America: The Global Traditions That Grew Their Own Roots
Jazz is American music in origin. It has been something else for decades — a global practice with regional traditions as distinct as any national music.
The Night Ornette Coleman Walked Into the Five Spot
Miles Davis heard Ornette Coleman's quartet at the Five Spot and said, in his customarily blunt way: 'He just came and f***ed up everybody.' That was the point.
Horace Silver: Song for My Father (1965)
Song for My Father was a commercial hit at a time when jazz had no commercial hits. It earned that hit without compromising anything that matters.
Free Jazz in 2025: Who Is Still Playing and Why
The reports of free jazz's death were exaggerated in 1965 and remain exaggerated now. The question is who is making it and where to find them.
Francis Wolff: The Man Who Photographed Hard Bop
Francis Wolff photographed almost every Blue Note session from 1938 to 1971. He never considered himself a photographer. He was wrong.
Miles Ahead: The Restless Genius Who Remade Jazz Five Times Over
No figure in jazz occupies quite the same gravitational position as Miles Davis. He didn't just play music—he warped the field around him.
Don Was and the Art of Running Blue Note Records
Don Was came to Blue Note by accident. Fourteen years later, he has turned the label's founding philosophy into a modern operation.
Irreversible Entanglements: Soundscapes from the Edge of Now
There is no irony in Irreversible Entanglements. On Protect Your Light, the Philadelphia collective makes free jazz that insists on meaning it.
Coltrane's Ascension: What the Noise Is For
Ascension is not a noise record. It is a record about how many voices can speak simultaneously and still be heard. The answer, Coltrane found, is eleven.
The Room Where It Happens: Why the Jazz Club Is Irreplaceable
Streaming has given us everything except the one thing that matters most. You can hear every record ever made. What you cannot do is be in the room.
Esperanza Spalding and the Refusal to Be Categorized
Esperanza Spalding has won four Grammys, taught at Harvard, and built a career that refuses to sit still. What she does next is always the question.
Cécile McLorin Salvant and the Art of Not-Knowing
Cécile McLorin Salvant has won four Grammys for Best Jazz Vocal Album. What makes her remarkable is how suspicious she remains of her own fluency.
Don Was on the Tone Poet Series and the Blue Note Vaults
Don Was went into the Blue Note vaults and heard a master of Mode for Joe. He said it would bring tears to your eyes. The Tone Poet series is why.
The Blue Note Sessions: Building the Jazz Canon
They insisted on two things above all else: real takes, with the musicians warmed up and ready; and proper mastering time, with no corners cut.
The Blue Note 1500 Series: Forty Records That Defined an Era
The Blue Note 1500 series ran from 1955 to 1958. It produced forty records. Almost all of them are essential. No label has matched that ratio before or since.
The Berkshires Summer School That Changed Jazz History
Before Newport, before Lincoln Center, there was Lenox, Massachusetts — where Ornette Coleman found the audience that would send him to New York.
Arooj Aftab: Vulture Prince (2021)
Vulture Prince is dedicated to Arooj Aftab's late brother. It does not perform grief — it inhabits it, and finds something luminous there.
Archie Shepp: Fire Music (1965)
Archie Shepp's Fire Music is not difficult music. It is demanding music — demanding that you pay attention to what it is actually saying.
Ambrose Akinmusire: The Trumpet That Will Not Stand Still
Ambrose Akinmusire won the Monk Competition in 2007 and has spent the years since proving that discipline and restlessness are the same thing.
On the Corner: The Record Miles Davis Made for Young Black America
On the Corner was savaged on release. Critics later praised it for everything they had hated. The music did not change — the context did.
honey from a winter stone: Akinmusire's Album of Grief
Ambrose Akinmusire lost his mother while making this album. He didn't write around it. What came out is among the most honest jazz records in years.
10 Contemporary Albums That Prove Jazz Is Thriving
Jazz didn't stop evolving when the records you know were made. Ten albums from the past fifteen years that prove it.
The 10 Blue Note Albums Every Listener Should Know
Blue Note released hundreds of albums. Forty appear on every essential list. Here are ten of those — and what to listen for in each.
How Streaming Changed Jazz (and What It Didn't)
Streaming gave jazz wider distribution than it has ever had. Jazz's audience did not grow proportionally. Something more complicated happened instead.
Rudy Van Gelder's Studio: Where the Sound Was Made
Rudy Van Gelder recorded more of the jazz canon than any other engineer. He built his first studio in his parents' living room in Hackensack, New Jersey.
Reid Miles: The Designer Who Defined Jazz Cool
Reid Miles designed almost 500 Blue Note covers between 1956 and 1967. He was paid fifty dollars each. He reportedly preferred classical music.
Ornette Coleman: The Shape of Jazz to Come
Ornette Coleman's 1959 debut on Atlantic doesn't sound like what people say free jazz sounds like. That's the first thing worth knowing about it.
The First Great Quintet: Miles Davis 1955–1959
The rhythm section was almost an afterthought. The two horn players were the tension. And the tension was the whole point.
Mary Halvorson: Reinventing the Guitar
Mary Halvorson's guitar is immediately identifiable from the first note. No other guitarist in contemporary jazz sounds anything like her.
Makaya McCraven and the Collage Method
Makaya McCraven records live improvisation and edits it into something nobody in the room played. The result is called jazz. It is also something else.
The Language of Jazz: A Glossary for New Listeners
Jazz has a vocabulary that insiders use casually and newcomers find baffling. Here is what the words mean — and what to listen for.
Kind of Blue: The Album That Changed Everything
Miles Davis walked into Columbia's 30th Street Studio in March 1959 with no written arrangements and a set of scales. What came out never stopped selling.
Kamasi Washington and the Return of the Epic
Kamasi Washington's 2015 debut ran for three hours. Nobody asked him to shorten it. That fact tells you almost everything about what he was trying to do.
Duke Ellington's Sacred Concerts
Duke Ellington's Sacred Concerts represent a late-career pivot toward music explicitly intended for spiritual use — his most important work.
Jazz and the Civil Rights Movement
Jazz was always political. It was built by people whose humanity was being actively contested — and the music made that argument in public.
In a Silent Way: Miles Goes Electric
Recorded in February 1969, edited from hours of tape, released that summer. Nobody knew what to call it. Miles did not wait for a name.
How to Listen to Free Jazz
Free jazz has a reputation for being difficult. That reputation is wrong. The music isn't hard to hear — it's hard to hear the right way.
The Five Cities That Made Jazz
Jazz didn't come from one place. It came from five — each of which heard what the previous city had built and decided to do something else with it.
Bitches Brew and the Birth of Fusion
Miles Davis recorded Bitches Brew in August 1969 with no written parts. He invented a genre in three days. He did not ask for permission.
Alice Coltrane: The Spiritual Journey
Alice Coltrane lost her husband in 1967. Instead of stepping back, she stepped deeper into the music he was reaching for.
Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers: Blue Note's Proving Ground
Art Blakey ran the Jazz Messengers for thirty-five years. The roster of musicians who passed through reads like a who's who of jazz across five decades.
Albert Ayler and the Scream
Albert Ayler's saxophone was the most extreme thing jazz had heard. It was also rooted in gospel and folk melody. Both came from the same place.
A Love Supreme: Coltrane's Spiritual Peak
John Coltrane recorded A Love Supreme in a single session on December 9, 1964. He was thirty-eight years old. He never made another record quite like it.
Charlie Parker and the Bebop Revolution
In the 1940s, Charlie Parker took swing music and remade it. What emerged was something that sounded like the future.