Herbie Hancock

Jessy J has a gangbuster career already, scoring back-to-back hits, #1 Song of the Year and a #1 Billboard Album in 2011, five years after making her debut she’s back with her highly anticipated Self Produced album entitled Second Chances. Jessy J burst onto the contemporary jazz scene in 2008, …

Hear Roy Hargrove, Terence Blanchard, Poncho Sanchez, Wallace Roney, Gregory Porter and Kenny Barron talk about what it takes to make in the music business.

Jazz pianist, keyboardist, producer and composer Marc Cary holds tight to his roots in Washington, D.C.’s go-go music scene, but they represent only one more element to fuse with the many other musical forms he explores. Cary’s interests run from Indian classical to Malian music to hip-hop. He started his …

Grammy Award winning  jazz saxophonist Gary Bartz first came to New York In 1958 to attend the Julliard Conservatory of Music. Just 17 years old, Gary couldn’t wait to come to the city to play and learn. “It was a very good time for the music in New York, at …

Saxophonist and educator Victor Goines explains what jazz is, how jazz music helps shape the democrat process and the advantages New Orleans musicians have over the music. SAXOPHONIST • CLARINETIST • COMPOSER • ARRANGER • EDUCATOR 
Born: August 6, 1961, 
New Orleans, Louisiana

 “Laconic yet agile, serious yet playful, studied …

Though Paul Jackson Jr. never got to meet or work with Wes Montgomery, one of his chief guitar influences, he has forged professional relationships with all the others who touched his formative years, including Earl Klugh, George Benson, Ray Parker Jr., Al McKay and Lee Ritenour. Since breaking into the Los Angeles …

Dexter Gordon was one of the most definitive voices of the bebop movement.  Ranging from John Coltrane to Jackie McLean, Gordon sketched the stylistic framework for countless artists. As it often goes with jazz, he himself was a by-product of his musical predecessors—more specifically, Lester Young. Resulting from that exposure, …

The Jazz & Democracy Project® manifests a hypothesis that Wesley J. Watkins, IV, Ph.D. has been investigating since he was an undergraduate: a music-centered curriculum with genuine links to the other subject areas can increase student identification with school, impact academic engagement, and have a subsequent positive effect on overall academic …

When trumpeter Christian Scott was growing up in New Orleans in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, his grandfather gave him and his brother Kiel extra reading assignments each week as a supplement to their assigned schoolwork. If the young students failed to finish their books within the week, their …

Aruán Ortiz is a critically acclaimed Cuban pianist, an award-winning composer, and a solid producer and educator, not only on the New York City scene, but internationally as well.  Named “the latest Cuban wunderkind to arrive in the United States” by BET Jazz, this classically trained violist and pianist from …

Delfeayo Marsalis is one of the top trombonists, composers and producers in jazz today. Known for his “technical excellence, inventive mind and frequent touches of humor…” (Leonard Feather, Los Angeles Times), he is “…one of the best, most imaginative and musical of the trombonists of his generation.” (Philip Elwood, San Francisco Examiner.) In …

Icons Among Us: jazz in the present tense, a documentary series, looks at the Jazz music scene today. Through interviews, performance footage, and the voices of the musicians themselves, we will explore this music and the divergent influences that are shaping the world of Jazz at the beginning of the 21st …