Wayne Shorter

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, …

Ashley Khan is a journalist, music historian, producer, and adjunct professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. In addition to contributions to the New York Times, Rolling Stone, Down Beat, Jazz Times, and Mojo, Khan has authored Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece …

Wallace Roney is a Philadelphia born trumpeter who is an in demand player who has had lots of ups and downs in his career. Although showing promise early on, his professional career didn’t really take off until he was almost 30-years old. Miles Davis has always been Wallace Roney’s most …

iRock Jazz provides music recommendations for Stylus, the first jazz discovery application for Spotify Stylus™, a music application specially designed for leading music streaming service Spotify, premiered  as a fun, easy and exciting way for listeners to explore and discover the best of classic and contemporary jazz from among an …

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 …

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 …

Winner of the Kennedy Center’s Mary Lou Williams Jazz Piano Competition and named by Wynton Marsalis as one of his 2011 “Who’s Got Next: Jazz Musicians to Watch,” pianist-composer Helen Sung is blazing her own path – as an Asian-American artist, she bridges diverse worlds with a singular vision and …

Jazz musicians are blessed with the desire and ability to play a genre that has a history as rich as its sound. All the greats, past and present know that it’s not enough to simply play the notes, one has to live the music and feel it with every breath. …

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 …

Born in the Greenwich Village in New York City and raised in Jamaica, Queens, Najee’s musical pursuits began in grade school. “As a kid I was into the R&B and Jazz music of my time,” he shares. “I familiarized myself with different kinds of music all the time. As I …