Atlanta Jazz Festival

The daughter of African immigrants, jazz artist Somi is captivating audiences with her New African sound. A recipient of the TEDGlobal Scholarship, she began playing cello at a young age and allowed that instrument to shape her vocal skills. The soon to be legendary songstress Somi is releasing a brand …

French native Cyrille Aimee has been impressing American audiences with her amazing vocal talents for a few years. The sultry songstress has traveled the world captivating audiences with a unique blend of Dominican rhythms and French Gypsy Jazz. In this interview with iRockJazz, Cyrille opens up about her transition to …

Roberta Gambarini is a singer who started taking clarinet lessons after being caught by her father for playing his tenor saxophone in secret. After having trouble with classical voice lessons, Gambarini decided to trust her instincts and learned jazz improvisation from self-teaching and listening to the masters of recorded jazz …

clas·sic  /klasik/ adjective 1. judged over a period of time to be of the highest quality and outstanding of its kind. Synonym: Ahmad Jamal Playing the piano by the age of 3, composing at 10, and performing at Carnegie Hall with Duke Ellington at 22, Ahmad Jamal has proven that …

Few contemporary albums bare as particular a narrative as The Lagos Music Salon. The new album by the superb chanteuse Somi, finds her breaking new ground with a hybrid style of music that organically integrates the essence of jazz and soul with the musical depth of her African heritage. “It’s the first …

Born in Guayaquil, Ecuador, Willie Ziavino began writing songs at the tender age of 14. The essence of his songs captured the daily life out on the Ecuadorean streets and garnered him some national acclaim. After a serious car accident, Willie moved to Havana, Cuba where he fell in love …

What do you call a musical gumbo that recalls the ancestral strut and joie de vivre of the New Orleans’ Tremé, the drama and ecstasy of the church’s wailing floor, and the suited-up sophistication of jazz threaded with the party funk of Parliament? What do you name sounds that hail …

If one were attempting to design a prototype for the quintessential contemporary musician, trumpeter/fluegelhornist/composer Russell Gunn is the model. A certified member of the hip-hop generation, Russell’s early aspirations in the world of rap music took precedence over the trumpet that he began playing in fourth grade. When he reached …

An award-winning classical pianist before jazz intervened “in the form of a Tommy Flanagan solo,” Houston, TX, native Helen Sung went on to graduate from the prestigious Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Performance and win the Kennedy Center’s Mary Lou Williams Jazz Piano Competition. Since establishing herself in New York …

Talk to any Atlantan of a certain age and they inevitably wax nostalgic about the mid-to-late 1990s – with good reason.  The city was simmering with soulful possibilities, creative verve overflowed and iconoclasts seemed to dwell on every block.   Jason Orr tapped into this energy and created the preeminent showcase …

In the beginning there was jazz. A deviation from the conservative pathway of European musical tropes, jazz was America’s original counterculture. Largely defined by the ingenuity of its artist, it found structure in a lack thereof, improvisation its blueprint. With such an inherent flexibility, jazz engaged many a strange bedfellow, …

Born and raised in Israel, Uri Gurvich won the Jazz Player of the Year competition in Israel before relocating to Boston to attend the prestigious Berklee College of Music studying under Joe Lovano. He has played at prestigious jazz festivals and venues in Europe, Japan and the US, including Lincoln …