Jazz and Blues

The Undead Music Festival, which lifted off last night, has grown every year. On Friday, it will outgrow New York City.

For arranger Gil Evans' centennial, we celebrate a concert from the 2011 Monterey Jazz Festival. Evans was born on May 13, 1912. In three collaborations in the late 1950s, two friends — Evans and Miles Davis — steered their projects into a new era for jazz.

Their first album was Miles Ahead. Named in its honor, this concert is "Still Ahead," with music from the pair's second and third records, Porgy and Bess and Sketches of Spain.

Singer Tierney Sutton’s band were in deep discussion five minutes before their live in-studio performance on KPLU last Wednesday, trying to decide which three songs to play for our audience. It was just one example of how interconnected each member of this quartet really is.

We learned more about each band member’s extra-musical skills were divided, how they’d go about sharing their surely impending Grammy Award (they've been nominated for five so far), and Tierney told us about walking the fine line as lyrical story teller and vocal improviser.

What better way to celebrate April's Jazz Month than the Tenth Annual Ballard Jazz Festival?  There were four nights featuring drums and guitars, a jazz walk among a dozen venues featuring some of Seattle's top jazz talent, and culminated in a concert which co-billed pianist Orrin Evans' Quartet and The Bobby Broom Trio.  The latter is featured in the first broadcast from this year's festival on Jazz Northwest, Sunday May 6 at 1 pm PDT on 88.5 KPLU and kplu.org.

His life reads like a blues song … 1920’s, a young preacher playing the blues, despite his church’s opposition. Kills a man in self-defense, 2 years in prison, and comes out to team up with the best-known blues man of the day, Charley Patton.

After limited commercial success of his own, he fades from view, working on farms and railroads. Thirtyfive years later, some dedicated blues fans track him down and he begins performing around the world, finally getting recognition as a blues master.

Jazz Northwest this week (4/29) features two outstanding young women originally from Portland who have new jazz CDs. They are  Esperanza Spalding and Hailey Niswanger, both in their twenties.  Esperanza Spalding sings and plays "City of Roses", a musical portrait of her hometown, There's also an unusual duo with Tom Varner, French horn, and Bill Anschell, piano from a recent concert, plus Chuck Deardorf, Chad McCullough and others. There's also updates about upcoming live jazz gigs around Seattle.

Otis Rush brought such passion and emotion to his singing and guitar playing that his music has been called “frighteningly intense”. Rush never achieved the commercial success that he might have, but along with Buddy Guy and Magic Sam, he is acknowledged to be one of the architects of the Chicago blues sound of the 1950’s and 1960’s.

Known as the "First Lady of Jazz" singer Ella Fitzgerald was born April 25, 1917, in Newport News, Virginia.

From rather humble beginnings Fitzgerald and her smooth, silky voice climbed to the top of the jazz world, reports Biography.com. During her long career she worked with greats from Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong to Dizzy Gillespie and Frank Sinatra. In all Ella recorded over 200 albums and around 2,000 songs in her lifetime. She died on June 15, 1996.

Here’s five videos celebrating the great singers career: